Brazil’s racist wave of mass incarceration

It wasn’t supposed to be like that. The Anti-Drug Act, enacted by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a center-left president, was intended to be more tolerant and less punitive by eliminating prison sentences for drug use and hardening them only for drug traffickers. However, in the absence of clear criteria to differentiate users from traffickers, the law allowed this distinction to be made, in practice, by police officers on the streets. And true to racist traditions, they began adopting race and class criteria: White people from wealthy neighborhoods caught with drugs were classified as users and released; Black people from poor communities were considered traffickers and therefore detained.