ABSTRACT
Families suffer the collateral damage in America’s drug wars. Since the war on drugs began almost twenty years ago, imprisonment has exploded. The U.S. incarceration rate rose almost 300 percent between 1980 and 1998, eclipsing both South Africa and Russia’s all-time international imprisonment record.2 We can’t build prisons fast enough to hold this war’s cargo of dark-skinned prisoners. Like ghostly slave ships, prisons float in prairies and valleys, tree-ringed rural settings hours from the urban catchment areas.
