President Ronald Reagan’s declaration of war on drugs has enabled the United States to carry out slavery like practices.

This is a research paper for a graduate capstone course in U.S. History. You must cite at least 10 primary sources, and 10 secondary sources.

The thesis for the paper is the following:

The thesis question is the following:

How has President Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs permitted contemporary slave like practices in the United States?

In the paper you must make the argument that the war on drugs has permitted contemporary slave like practices according to, The 1957 United Nations supplementary to slavery convention detailing the abolition of forced labor. Attached below are two links to the primary source you must make the argument from.

https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C105

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/SupplementaryConventionAbolitionOfSlavery.aspx

The general time frame this research paper should cover is 1982 to 1992. From the Reagan administration to the Bush administration. Do not use sources past the Bush administration other then the two links above explaining the 1957 United Nations supplementary to slavery convention detailing the abolition of forced labor.

The general summary for what the paper will outline is the following:

President Ronald Reagan declared a war on drugs in 1982 describing it in military terms, and no matter who has occupied the administration since 1982, the federal government has pursued the same overall policies throughout the drug war. The war on drugs has decimated the Fourth Amendment, an amendment intended to limit the power of law enforcement to search and arrest. Of all the constitutional depredations of the war on drugs, the disenfranchisement of former felons has enabled the United States which is the only democracy in the world to deprive its citizens of the right to vote after they have completed their sentences. The right to vote did not exists for slaves, even though each slave counted as 3/5 of a person for representational purposes. Today, 13 % of all African-American men are disenfranchised in the United States. The War on Drugs have allowed the erosion of a right that was so hard won, presaging a return to de facto racial subjugation, the “New Jim Crow Laws”.
The 1957 United Nations supplementary to slavery convention details the abolition of forced labor. Slaves were forced to work in inhuman conditions with no control over their situation and no remuneration. Public authorities today, intimidated by the rising costs of building and maintaining prisons, have introduced an innovative program as the panacea of incarceration: prison labor. The drug war has targeted minority communities with mass incarceration and disproportionate arrests leading to a cyclical cycle that has removed countless minorities from American society. Life in prison has systematically taken away countless minority identities and is the removal of that person-hood through slavery. Slaves were bound in plantations from which they could not escape; now it is prisons that deprive black men their freedom. The slave narrative’s common theme of confinement, a melancholic loss of space, is a thread that continues through the “New Jim Crow Laws”.