Mandatory crack sentencing exploded the Black prison population by the 1980s.

Evidence

By the 1980s the jobs disappeared, the most progressive African nations were as unstable as ever, and the Black prison population was growing by leaps and bounds thanks to mandatory sentencing policies for possession of crack cocaine. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 28

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects directly to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and mass incarceration literature, a key driver of the tradition’s decline.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the reader’s interest in the downfall of the Black radical tradition, with mass incarceration as a structural mechanism.

Related

• Mandatory crack sentencing drove explosive growth in the Black prison population (similarity 0.97)
• Fear of black lawlessness drove the US prison-state expansion (similarity 0.84)
• Mandatory crack-cocaine sentencing drove Black prison growth in the 1980s (similarity 0.81)
• Mass incarceration’s tools derived from slavery-era controls on blacks (similarity 0.79)
• The material conditions driving Black radicalism worsened through the end of the twentieth century (similarity 0.78)