Status Updates From Trash: A Poor White Journey

Drugs are not just a health crisis, although they are that. Drugs now form a harsh and brutal economic system that has filled in the gaps of the crash of industry in Poor Town USA. While drugs numb the brutality and pain of poverty, they also provide brutal employment for hordes of young people with no other option and no job waiting for them out of high school.

Since 1968, the number of sentenced inmates in US state and federal prison of all races has grown exponentially: from 187,914 in 1968 to 1,458,000 in 2016. In practice, this means that young people in poor communities are forced into an illegal, underground market economy to survive because there are no jobs. Then they are fed into a prison system where they provide a nearly free labor force to corporate