Regarding the criminalization of race in the United States and its effects on ghettoization and the growth of the prison population. In a 1994 interview, John Ehrlichman, advisor to Richard Nixon's presidential campaign and co-conspirator in the Watergate scandal, admitted that the so-called war on drugs was a way of neutralizing the left and imprisoning black citizens:

The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make illegal to be either against the war or to be black, but by getting the public to associating the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.¹

These brazen and sadistic acts of legal and media hounding against dissidents and racial minorities resulted not only in a dramatic increase in the U.S. prison population—which currently houses 25% of the world's prison population—but stigmatized these minorities and polarized the general population on the methods with which the drug problem should be dealt with, setting the tone on the criminalization of drug use and giving a problem that could be treated from a public health point of view an insufficient solution that would engender a vicious circle of repression, crime and punishment.

That violence begets violence, say Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, is a saying as old as the Bible:

The violence of the state—brute force, internal colonies from which the poor can rarely scape, and massive incarceration—is countered with the street violence of the enraged. These internal colonies funnel the dispossessed into prisons and out again in a circular system that ensures they never escape from the visible and invisible walls that hem them in like sheep. Brutalized on the streets, sometimes brutalized at home and brutalized in prison, they strike out with a self-destructive fury. Since most lack education and a huge proportion are branded by the state as convicted felons, there is not place for them to go other than where they came from.²

These “internal colonies” with visible or invisible walls—veritable ghettoes—are nothing but a hunting ground of the poor and dispossessed. 

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1. Tim Walker “Richard Nixon used America’s ‘war on drugs’ as excuse to target ‘anti-war left and black people,’ claims former aide” independent.co.uk, March 23, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/richard-nixon-used-america-s-war-on-drugs-as-excuse-to-target-antiwar-left-and-black-people-claims-former-aide-a6948521.html ↩︎
2. Hedges y Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, , 64. ↩︎