President Richard Nixon outlines a special message sent to the Congress, asking for an extra $155 million for a new program to combat the use of drugs. He labeled drug abuse “a national emergency.”
AP Photo / Harvey Georges
New York-based race and ethnicity reporter Aaron Morrison teamed up with data journalist Angel Kastanis and Raleigh, North Carolina-based multiformat journalist Allen Breed to explore the fallout of America’s war on drugs, launched 50 years ago this summer by President Richard Nixon.
Morrison set out to tell a story of the toll that harsh prison sentences and lifetime restrictions post-release have taken on Black and Latino Americans, their families and their communities.
To do so, the AP reviewed federal and state data, finding that the Black incarceration rate in America surged from about 600 per 100,000 people in 1970 to 1,808 in 2000, and the rate for the Latino population grew from 208 per 100,000 people to 615, while the white incarceration rate grew at a more modest rate, from 103 per 100,000 people to 242.
Alton Lucas sits on the porch of his home outside of Raleigh, N.C., June 18, 2021. As a teenager, Lucas believed basketball or music would pluck him out of North Carolina and take him around the world. In the late 1980s, he was already the right-hand man to his musically inclined best friend. But Lucas Lucas discovered drugs and the drug trade and faced decades in prison for a felony conviction at the height of the war on drugs.
AP Photo / Allen G. Breed
Alton Lucas, right, wraps firewood for sale as he and neighbor Ryan Isaac, a correctional officer, chat outside Lucas’ home outside of Raleigh, N.C., June 18, 2021. “I started the landscaping company, to be honest with you, because nobody would hire me because I have a felony,” said Lucas, whose business got off the ground with the help of Inmates to Entrepreneurs, a national nonprofit assisting people with criminal backgrounds by providing practical entrepreneurship education.
AP Photo / Allen G. Breed
Musician Youtha Anthony Fowler, known as DJ Nabs, left, listens to lifelong best friend Alton Lucas talk about his drug addiction in Nabs’ home studio outside of Raleigh, N.C., June 26, 2021. By their teenage years, Lucas and Fowler were deejaying for college parties at nearby Duke University. Together, “Luke Duke,” as Lucas was known, and “Nabisco Disco,” as Fowler was called, helped popularize hip-hop music among undergraduates.
AP Photo / Allen G. Breed
Musician Youtha Anthony Fowler, left, known as DJ Nabs, poses with Alton Lucas, his childhood friend, in North Carolina, in an early 1990s photo provided by Fowler.
Courtesy Youtha Anthony Fowler via AP
Alton Lucas jumps at a field at Durham High School in Durham, N.C., in a late 1980s photo provided by his childhood friend, Youtha Anthony Fowler, known as DJ Nabs.
Courtesy Youtha Anthony Fowler via AP
Alton Lucas’ wife, Bronwyn Lucas, and their children are shown in a photo on a desk at his home outside of Raleigh, N.C., June 18, 2021. His wife, whom he’d met at a fatherhood counseling conference, said his past had barred him from doing something as innocuous as chaperoning their children on school field trips.
AP Photo / Allen G. Breed
Alton Lucas drives home after dropping some firewood at a local convenience store outside of Raleigh, N.C., June 18, 2021.
AP Photo / Allen G. Breed
The radio in Alton Lucas’ pickup is set to his favorite religious station as he does errands around Raleigh, N.C., June 18, 2021. Lucas said he still wonders what would happen for him and his family if he no longer carried the weight of a drug-related conviction on his record. “So occasionally, I would go apply for a job just to make them do the background check. I’m making them come back and tell me what they found. And I want to see how they are going to respond to me. ... It’s almost like a life sentence.”
AP Photo / Allen G. Breed
But beyond the data, the AP trio put names and a face to those caught up in this grinding war with no clear winners but many losers. The story’s lead subject, Alton Lucas, could have had a life of touring nationally and internationally with his DJ friend, but instead discovered drugs and the drug trade at the height of the war on drugs. As a crack cocaine addict involved in trafficking, the North Carolina man faced decades in prison at a time when the drug abuse and violence plaguing Black communities were not seen as the public health issue that opioids are today.
The combination of Morrison’s deep reporting, Breed’s photos and video, and Kastanis’ data analysis, accompanied by graphics, resulted in a newsy, nuanced package, rich with historical context.