CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Holl, Emefa |
|---|---|
| Title | Towards a Gender-Responsive Restorative Justice in the Post-War on Drugs Era |
| Summary | On March 31, 2021, New York State Legislation signed into law, the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA), legalizing cannabis for adults 21+. Legislators debated over several years to reach an agreement on what the law would contain. Activists and academics lobbied hard to ensure that the bill would not only legalize marijuana, but that it would provide an avenue for the state to right past wrongs. Several initial drafts of the bill were pulled for not being comprehensive enough or providing enough recognition for the history of racially uneven arrests. The state claims that the bill is intended to stop treating marijuana usage and sales as a law enforcement issue, but rather as a public health issue by building a framework within which marijuana is safely tested and regulated; and as a means of restorative justice, by expunging the records of those with certain cannabis related arrests, providing people and communities directly affected by the consequences of the War on Drugs priority access to marijuana dispensary licenses in order to bolster economic growth, and promising 40% of the taxation revenue to a social equity fund for communities and people that have been directly impacted by the war on drugs and the general policies/legislation that sprung from it. In this work, I explore what the effects of the War on Drugs were, to understand why a restorative justice framework would be necessary to alleviate the issues that sprung forth from it. In this study, I investigate gender and the War on Drugs to understand the intersecting ways that women of color, an often-overlooked demographic, were disproportionately affected by antidrug, anti-crime, and neoliberal economic reforms. I look into gender-neutrality in War on Drugs policy, and the results of it in practice, to understand the mismatch between what is purported to occur, and the actual results. In doing so, I provide a framework for understanding what elements that MRTA could address or provide allowances for now or in the future in order to be a gender responsive-restorative justice policy. Keywords: gender and the war on drugs; gender-responsive restorative justice; intersectionality; race and crime |
| Supervisor | Krizsan, Andrea |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/holl_emefa.pdf |
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