The Real Cost of the War on Drugs Workshop

There are seven Community Correction Facilities run by corporations or municipalities in Kern County, incarcerating an average of 500 state prisoners each. Kern County is also home to seven prisons with average populations of 5,000 people each. Delano, located in Kern County, has one CCF facility, two prisons and one prison - Delano II, scheduled to be in opened in April 2005, unless it can be stopped. Not included in these numbers are state camps, juvenile facilities and municipal jails.

It was in Delano that Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized Mexican-American grape pickers into the National Farm Workers Association in 1962.

This workshop is a political/economic analysis of the direct and indirect costs of the War on Drugs, including:

• Background and history
• Race/class/gender/locality and the war on drugs
• Mandatory minimums and other sentencing issues
• Consequences of targeting the poor and communities of color
• Sentences that never end: disenfranchisement, public housing, education
• Alternatives: harm reduction strategies, de-criminalization, sentencing reform, community-based organizing and others

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