12/7/14 Reading Blog Post #4
A little farther into Life on the Outside we learn about how and why Elaine ended up in prison. In order to provide for her family Elaine worked any job she could. She often found herself renting a chair at a local Barber and Beauty Shop without a license in hairdressing. However, she was still struggling to earn the money she needed to comfortably provide for her children and with Thanksgiving around the corner she needed extra money to prepare an expensive family dinner. A frequent visitor of the barbershop named Charlie knew that Elaine was desperate to make some extra cash, so he approached her with a hustle he was running. He offered Elaine $2,500 to deliver a package of cocaine to Albany from New York City. Well, Charlie turned out to actually be an informant for the police named George Deets. Elaine and her boyfriend Nathan were arrested under New York’s Rockefeller drug laws. Deets was able to shorten his sentence for cocaine use and dealing by being an informant for the police. He would deliberately go into the city and bring people to Albany to be framed.
The way Elaine was set up is bothersome to me. It’s a corrupt system when George Deets can get his sentence reduced by throwing others under the bus. Law Enforcement has a job, that job is to investigate and come to answers based on their evidence. An informant like Deets has been far more involved in the drug trade than Elaine, but he can just get off on a secretive deal made with the police? Furthermore, Elaine had completely good intentions. She was a hard worker who just wanted to provide for her family. That angers me. Our politicians have a real disconnect with the East Harlem and South Bronx neighborhoods amongst others, as to why the prevalence of drugs is so great. Obviously getting into the drug trade isn’t ideal, but for many it’s either that or not making ends meet, or not being able to provide for their loved ones. I mean put yourself in Elaine’s shoes. Meanwhile, our politicians are worried about the spread of crime rate that frankly doesn’t reach their neighborhoods in the Upper East Side. Maybe they should be more focused on the rehabilitation than the incarceration of drug addicts who later have no options. I look forward to seeing how Elaine is able to turn her life around after prison.
It seems pretty clear that our war on drugs has been a failure, that it's putting people in prison but not stopping the flow of drugs. We keep focusing on the supply rather than the demand, and as long as selling drugs is profitable, it will be close to impossible to shut off the flow. As you mention, for Elaine, what she did was a means to an end. It's a lucrative means. Were we to do something about the fact that she needs to turn to this means in order to feed her family, we would be making a real change. Somehow we have this idea that people WANT to be selling drugs, that they WANT to be putting their lives at risk in this way.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why.