Prison Nation
From an interesting review of David Garland's The Culture of Control in The New York Review of Books:
Crime continues to decline, though the US incarceration rate continues to rise (by 2.6 percent last year, the largest increase since 1999). As a nation, we could eventually be more deeply injured socially by mass imprisonment than by moderate crime. For imprisonment amplifies the alienation that so often fuels crime, particularly when imprisonment is so racially imbalanced.
…Has imprisonment now become the covert but official method of dealing with "disorderly" blacks in America, with capital punishment its extreme expression? Is "indifference" to the huge imbalance of blacks in our prisons less an expression of "indifference" than of denial, of wanting to turn away from the problems of race in America?
I don't agree with the reviewer's conclusions (or Garland's, for that matter), but the question of why the US has become such a prison-happy country is important and yields no easy answers. The same goes for the possible long-term effects of incarceration policies that increasingly throw more people in the clink.
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“though blacks also have higher rates of violent crime too, I guess”
yeah… but that is largely a side effect of other crime. Most drug related killing are business (and localized to people in the business); not just some guy getting off on crack and deciding to shoot some people.
It’s interesting that the drug war has led to intensive policing, by militarized law enforcement, primarily among two ethnic groups: 1) inner city blacks; and 2) rural rednecks (i.e., meth labs).
Perhaps not coincidentally, these are probably the two ethnic groups least successfully socialized to respect the authority of the “authorities,” and to meekly take direction from some functionary behind a desk.
Any genuinely libertarian movement, if successful, will involve the kinds of activism (community technology and neighborhood government) associated with Karl Hess and the Adams-Morgan Organization. And inner city blacks will be an integral part of any such movement, if it is successful. The drug war, by criminalizing things that should not be criminal offenses, removes perhaps a third of that demographic group from the electoral franchise, and from the ability to organize at the grass-roots level without ongoing surveillance.
“does anyone doubt that most of the people being incarcerated would be committing or charged with other crimes?”
I think you would see a dramatic drop-off in violent crime; incentive would be gone.
“Unless somebody wishes to make the argument that it should be legal to sell cocaine to children”
You’re very much overstating the case. The problem is the amount of money involved… you don’t see violent crime associated with selling cigarettes or beer to minors because their is no money in it. Unless you are making the case for incarcerating people who sell cigarettes to minors… I don’t follow you here.
The great thing about crime statistics is that without additional data anybody can blame them on anything.
What caused the drop in crime? Gun control? Concealed carry laws? Welfare reform? More school spending? More incarceration? More “community-based policing”? Aging population?
As a libertarian, most people here would probably say I’m “supposed to” believe some explanations and not others. As a scientist, however, I maintain skepticism toward all explanations until I see more data. Those who want to call me a bleeding heart liberal or whatever can feel free to do so, but I thought Reason is about “free minds…”
Even the very plausible explanation of more incarceration needs to be tested. Although crime is declining nationwide, in some areas it’s declining more slowly than in others, and in some it’s even increasing. If the incarceration rate was higher in places with falling crime rates that would be suggestive. But even then, is the incarceration rate compared to the number of crimes reported or the number of people living there? When comparing two places, do you give more weight to the number of people living in each place?
And, how many crimes does the “typical” offender commit prior to receiving a long prison sentence that effectively takes him out of circulation? If places with falling crime rates took people out of circulation early on while places with higher crime rates took people out of circulation later that would be suggestive. But if the number of crimes prior to incarceration was the same in both places, then we’d have to look for other causes.
My point is not to argue that incarceration doesn’t prevent crime. My point is that when you look at trends and compare numbers you have to be very, very careful before assigning causation to some factor. The thorny work of comparing all these numbers in all the different ways and doing the careful statistical analysis is the meat and potatoes of a (good) social scientist’s job. Anything less is just speculation.
it’s weird to see people glomming onto the conservative version of “advertising = brainwashing” but at least someone had the guts to blame hip hop. 🙂
to link file-sharing/copyright violations with civil disobedience (no matter how stupid the cause or the jerks doing it may be to us) and then go on to bring in complaints of racial profilling and the racial politics of the sharpton school of demagoguery is creative, to say the least. insane, perhaps, but creative.
file-sharing may encourage a lack of respect for the rights of owners of intangible property but to say this encourages lawlessness is silly.
without our nation’s rather rich tradition of civil disobedience an awful lot of publishing laws and other things we really enjoy would not be around. the jehova’s witnesses did quite a bit to help publishing laws out of the 19th century just by littering, really. and so on.
it’s weird to see people glomming onto the conservative version of “advertising = brainwashing” but at least someone had the guts to blame hip hop. 🙂
to link file-sharing/copyright violations with civil disobedience (no matter how stupid the cause or the jerks doing it may be to us) and then go on to bring in complaints of racial profilling and the racial politics of the sharpton school of demagoguery is creative, to say the least. insane, perhaps, but creative.
file-sharing may encourage a lack of respect for the rights of owners of intangible property but to say this encourages lawlessness is silly.
without our nation’s rather rich tradition of civil disobedience an awful lot of publishing laws and other things we really enjoy would not be around. the jehova’s witnesses did quite a bit to help publishing laws out of the 19th century just by littering, really. and so on.
sorry bout that double post – but the whole “hip hop encourages crime” load of nonsense (ozzy encouraged suicide, elvis encouraged bending at the waist, jazz encourages ebony and ivory mingling, etc) ignores that the largest body of buyers of hip hop are white kids.
Dhex wrote:
Actually it?s right on the money. The question was about social acceptance of crime and each of the examples I offered was about someone who committed a crime (trespassing in the name of protest, stealing intellectual property, breaking the law and crying ?racism?) and had others try to rationalize it away. Such as the following:
Yes how silly to equate a lack of respect for the rights of others with lawlessness.
Wow. An “entire segment of the music industry” is devoted to celebrating drug dealing as a career choice? That could be a threat to national security, or perhaps just the sanctity of our children.
Music or lyrics, regardless of the genre, are as complex and varied as the individuals that create it. Some musicians even employ irony, satire, or caricatures in their songs.
It doesn’t matter though, because the kids get it, they understand. But that’s been true since the blues overtook jazz as the most popular American form of music.
Once in a while I see a thread to which a certain physicist has not yet posted. At those times I often find myself thinking, “Where the hell is thoreau to make my point for me?!” 🙂
Good point, as (almost) always. To which I would add that it is insanely difficult (i.e., impossible) to control all other variables and just focus on the quantity or relationship being investigated. Good social scientists understand this as a severely limiting factor in their research. A lot of pundits, wonks and various and sundry other blowhards seize on this to say whatever they think the facts should say.
trainwreck,
How about this? An entire segment of the state (the drug war apparatus) is devoted to guaranteeing the viability of drug dealing as a lucrative occupation. I’d guess that a huge part of the campaigns of the most hard-core drug warriors, is laundered money from drug cartels whose worst nightmare is legalization and an end to black market prices.
but what you’re missing is you’re trying to equate this collection somehow with encouraging or contributing to rape, murder, robbery, drug sales, etc. creative, yes, but pointlessly broad. left-winger/liberal types point to our culture’s acceptance of “white collar crimes” and the lack of long sentences, harsh seizures, etc and use the same reasoning to explain why MBA’s in the white house leads to crimes against humanity. or the IRS bitching about tax cheaters (and avoiders, i.e. trying to keep your money from being taken) encouraging a lack of respect for the proper authorities.
re: file sharing – violating intangible property rights is not the same as violating tangible property rights for most people. legalistically it’s the same but taping songs off the radio didn’t encourage anyone to commit violence or even greater theft unless you buy into the “music is brainwashing” routine. i’m not saying that it’s not theft, but it’s not a green light for murder either.
or i could have summed it up as “does jaywalking lead to rape?” sorry.
It’s easy to see why crime is down while incarceration is up. Follow the money.
The us deficit is up and crime down. To which agency does this strike fear. Go to the head of the class if you said “FBI.”
In order for FBI to counter crime reduction, the have spent $$millions on HATE CRIME promotion. So called HATE CRIME has longer incarceration the “regular” crime.
In Cleveland, FBI just sponcered its second annual Hate Crime. It was a three-day affair with 28 speakers not one of whom thinks hate is not a crime. Invited to seminar were folks who are guaranteed to pudh for more HATE legislation: social workers, bureaucrats, politicians, church ladies, ect. When I attempted to distribute literature spromting the fact that HATE is not a crime, Bozo-the-Cop showed me the egress.
All government agencies act to protect their secred territory and, the FBI protecting theirs, has caused the incarceration in this discussion to increase.
Kevin I don’t think anyone here will refute the notion that the War on Drugs is an insane giant snowball rolling nearly out of control over all aspects of our society. The notion that a drug cartel would finance the election of a hard core drug warrior probably isn’t necessary to explain the madness, though.
B. Baltic-
Good hypothesis. But it’s easy for anybody to point to crime statistics and say “it’s obviously because of…” Data is needed.
I thought of a few more questions to ask when trying to explain our incarceration statistics:
1) Did the incarceration boom precede or follow declining crime rates? If the incarceration boom preceded the declining crime rates, one could say “Well, it just took some time to get the thugs off the streets, but now they’re behind bars and crime is declining.” But if the boom lagged declining crime rates then we need alternative explanations.
2) Some crimes are easier for detectives and prosecutors to solve than others. If those categories of crime are booming while others are declining, we could have declining crime rates and growing prison populations.
Anyway, it’s easy to argue in favor of any explanation we want when confronted with statistics on crime and incarceration. But without data those arguments are useless. Sadly, life is complicated 🙁
Baltic’s got that right. “Justice” is an industry like any other. You gotta spike up that demand to grow the business.
Trainwreck-
I don’t know if drug cartels finance the election of drug dealers, but two anecdotes make the hypothesis worth exploring:
1) As Judge James Gray (formerly R-Orange County, now L-Orange County) pointed out in his book on the drug war, a few years prior to his writing a county in Nevada had a referendum on whether to repeal its “dry” laws. (Who’d’ve thunk Nevada would have “dry” counties?) Liquor stores in adjacent counties paid for ads denouncing the evils of alcohol. If the county went wet then residents would no longer drive to adjacent counties to purchase liquor. The referendum failed.
If legitimate businesses would fight to perpetrate local alcohol prohibition, I wouldn’t be shocked if a certain amount of money is funnelled from drug dealers to ardent drug warriors’ campaign funds.
2) Sixteen years ago I had the displeasure of meeting (via an unsavory relative) a person who claimed to be an FBI agent. He said that he might have to leave Miami (we were vacationing there) because people wanted him dead. I was just a kid and I was freaked out to be in his company when there was the very real chance that somebody could start shooting at him. I have no idea if he actually was an FBI agent, but I later found out that this man had paid his way through college and law school by selling drugs, and his first job after law school was as a prosecutor in Miami.
So I wouldn’t be shocked if drug cartels put their own people inside the gov’t for the purpose of protecting themselves and prosecuting their competitors.
Correction:
The first sentence of my previous post should have been
“I don’t know if drug cartels finance the election of drug warriors…”
not
“I don’t know if drug cartels finance the election of drug dealers…”
while it’s not unimaginable, i do wonder whether or not it would even be worth the time for the dealers to bother. sadly, most of the hardest of the hard seem to truly believe in their god-given position as arbiter of what shall and shall not be consumed.
faith scares me a whole lot more than bribery does.
“In which case drug dealers who are peddling the stuff in primary and secondary schools would still be breaking the law and probably in jail. Unless somebody wishes to make the argument that it should be legal to sell cocaine to children, I frankly think that we wouldn’t see that much difference in incarceration.”
How many schoolyard beer & smokes dealers are sent to jail every year?
The War on Drugs is hideous on many layers, and it certainly adds to the crime rate. Yet the War on Drugs doesn’t “create” crime equaly in all communities; some communities (or sub-cultures) are more susceptible than others . . .
It wouldn’t help out black people to free the black prisoners. Where do you think the ex-cons will resettle, Beverly Hills? No. They will re-settle in black neighborhoods, of course.
I don’t like that blacks make a disproportionate share of prisoners. But that is a problem that the black community has to straighten out itself. I don’t know the numbers exactly, but let’s say 15% of the public is black, but 30% of the prison population is black. Do you think that the black inmates comprising that excess 15% were all framed? No, they did what they were accused of doing. Maybe blacks get caught at a rate higher than whites, but they’re not framed.
Abu Hamza out
Unfortunatly Thoreau, it’s not really a testable hypothesis.
I only said it’s not necessary to explain the behavior of the drug warriors…and you as a scientist know to favor the simple explanation over the complex. Imagine being a politician labeled “soft on drugs”…’nuff said.
By the way, the proximity of Utah to Nevada might explain the dry counties. And there’s no reason to beieve advertising, rather tha the religion of the residents or some other factor, affected the outcome of that particular election.
Even if the ads by liquor stores weren’t the deciding factor, the simple fact that liquor store owners would campaign for local prohibition says a lot about how drug dealers might be inclined to behave.
Granted, right now social norms are against legalization, so drug cartels don’t really need to get involved in elections. They can devote their efforts to bribing cops, prosecutors, judges, IRS auditors (money laundering), etc. But if legalization ever becomes a serious possibility I wouldn’t be shocked if prohibitionist candidates start receiving campaign contributions from drug cartels (via indirect channels to hide the fact that the money comes from drug cartels). Not to bribe the candidate (he already holds the position they favor) but to help him win.
Abu Hamza,
If what they’re “guilty” of is non-violent, non-coercive, voluntary drug transactions, who cares if they did it or not. Probably half the people in prison are in for stuff that shouldn’t be crimes. And if anything, people guilty of REAL crimes are being turned loose on the populace because of overcrowding resulting from the drug war.
And it helps to keep in mind that a great deal of the gang and other organized crime violence in the inner city involves fighting over control of black markets–black markets that wouldn’t exist, for the most part, without prohibition of consensual transactions.
At a hospital where I used to work, we had a patient who was out on parole after a few years in prison for murdering his wife. We joked that it was too bad he didn’t have a pot seed on him at the time, or he’d be in for life.
“Yet the War on Drugs doesn’t “create” crime equaly in all communities; some communities (or sub-cultures) are more susceptible than others . . .”
Yeah. Specifically, it creates violent crime in minority-heavy urban neighborhoods. See, that’s where the people from the suburbs who buy most of the drugs drive to when they want to score. Then they get lit and talk about their adventures in the hood.
I’m wondering why Nick disagrees with these conclusions, or which ones? The racial imbalance in prisons seems beyond dispute. That it’s mostly caused by “crimes” libertarians would legalize also seems obvious (though blacks also have higher rates of violent crime too, I guess). Things like the crack/powder disparity, or noticing cannabinoid receptors on all human brains, or just 9/11 made me keep thinking the drug war would die, but I was wrong. The racist, tax and spend war on some drugs is a religion, and failure doesn’t matter to its adherents. Of course, they get to teach this religion in public schools unquestioned…
JMR
Plenty of people would connect the two facts “crime is declining” and “incarceration rates are rising” with the word “because” rather than the word “though.” I don’t personally believe there’s a causation there, but we wouldn’t have to look far to find someone who does.
There’s also a strong conflict-of-interest argument to be made. Because most convicted felons are deprived of the franchise, it is in the interests of any given politician to see people who might vote against him convicted of a felony. One can easily imagine a feedback loop between incarceration and politics of a rather vicious sort, eventually culminating in allowing politicians to choose the electorate rather than vice versa.
One could even argue that Republican support for the drug war is already based on this theory, although one would then have to explain away Democratic support for it.
–G
There is much in what people like Garland say, and their statistics are impressive. But it is very difficult to see where (satistically) many errors are being made in individual criminal arrests or convictions. Here “on the ground” (I am a criminal defense attorney) it looks like the increasing incarceration rate is due to a rachet effect. Every interest group wants its problem de jour addressed by increasing the criminal penalties for crimes which help to define that problem. If DUI is a problem, felonize DUI offenders. If domestic violence is a problem, felonize domestic violence, and make the test of a legislator’s worth his or her willingness to make the penalty for domestic violence harsher than for comparable feloneis. A related aspect of the rachet effect is the setting of very low thresholds for conviction an incarceration — possession of ten grams of methamphetamine gets you ten years, for example — and justifying them as a means of giving the police and prosecution a weapon to hold over the head of suspects and detainees. In these and similar ways, our system of increasing incarceration seems to be on automatic pilot. But it is hard to see how this effect hooks up with the larger society proclivities Garland wants to blame for the situation.
Don’t forget the corrosive effect “three strikes” and mandatory minimums have on an independent judiciary.
It all goes back to the New Deal and the Great Society. Welfare programs destroyed the black family (and rural poor whites) by providing hideous incentives. Huge numbers of children began to be raised without a stable family structure. Urban black and rural white culture deteriorated. Children (especially males) raised in this setting learned no value system beyond the need for “respect” (not earned).
These amoral children began to commit crimes. Crime rates skyrocketed. After several failed attempts at addressing the “root cause” of crime (all of which only increased the true root causes), we decided to try arresting and incarcerating the criminals. Crime rates fell.
Until we can address the cultural problems that lead to crime – fatherlessness, divorce, public schools, welfare, food stamps, etc – the only answer to crime is to lock up the criminals so they don’t bother the rest of us.
I would just point out, that the disparity between cocain and crack are not a racist disparity, but one made by the system as it is designed to work.
Cocain does have some limited medical usage, while crack has NO medican usage.
-Robert
Jim Ray:
I should have written “most of the conclusions.” Based on the review, Garland appears to implicate a shift from “monopoly capitalism” to “consumer capitalism,” and a subsequent shift in earnings distribution through the early ’70s as a major cause of a societial destabilization which plays into the creation of an underclass. I don’t buy that argument for many reasons (that I frankly don’t have time to explain or justify; suffice it to say that social and class mobility are as strong as they’ve ever been and in absolute terms, the material lives of the poor, like just about everyone else, are better now than they were 30 or 40 years ago). Also, while the racial dimension of imprisonment (and of the drug war that fuels mass incarceration of blacks) is important, it’s more complicated than the reviewer is suggesting. For instance, many of the harsh drug sentencing laws that arose out of the “crack epidemic” were either originated or backed by minority members of Congress, which complicates things considerably.
If welfare caused crime, as PLC suggests, murder rates would be highest in the grain belt, the cotton belt, and Alaska.
Age of the offender is the highest correlator to predicting criminal behavior. Probably the biggest factor in crime rates going down is our aging population. Imprisonment probably helped some, too, but at the expense of doing some permanent damage to many otherwise productive people.
“eventually culminating in allowing politicians to choose the electorate rather than vice versa.”
This is already the norm in congressional redistricting.
To address joe’s point… the financial incentives for crime are significantly less in those areas you mention; you are going to have a lot less profit as a dealer in the Cotton Belt. Violent crime happens over money and any type of crime benefits from the anonymity of big cities.
I don’t think you are going to resolve the issue of inner city crime without tackling the financial motivation for it. (such as by flooding the market with cheap, high-quality alternatives.) The money dries up and the societal acceptance of crime dies. Alientation does not fuel crime; the appeal of a glamorous and lucrative lifestyle does.
what’s the “societal acceptance of crime?”
C wrote:
Although I think that the aging of the population may be partially responsible for the drop in crime, the growing intolerance of the electorate (which the reviewer seems to lament) for putting up with murder, rape, theft, vandalism, and lesser crimes coupled with the response by the elected officials to incarcerate criminals for longer sentences is probably more of a cause. Moreover, I think it?s probably a good thing on the whole even if some of the laws may be a bad idea in which case then those who those particular laws need to make the case for why X should not be a criminal offense rather than making intellectually dishonest charges that the system is ?racist.?
“…the appeal of a glamorous and lucrative lifestyle does.”
People from the burb where I grew up are just as attracted to glamour and lucre as people from any urban neighborhood. We, however, had other credible options for achieving them.
The most important chronological correlation is between rising crime and the flight of jobs from the big cities, resulting from deindustrialization and suburbanization. The latter was exacerbated by suburban snob zoning, which prevented working class and poor people from following the jobs that left their neighborhoods and downtowns. It is worth noting that the drop in crime figures since the early 90s corresponds to the slowing and reversal of America’s urban decline during the same period.
Hmm. Come to think of it, the electorate has aged, too.
Stay out of my yard!
Also, the draft during the late fifties to early 70’s would have some effect on any “anti-authoritarian” attitude.
“Until we can address the cultural problems that lead to crime – fatherlessness, divorce, public schools, welfare, food stamps, etc – the only answer to crime is to lock up the criminals so they don’t bother the rest of us.”
I have to agree with this. It is the welfare state that is the root cause of crime. This can be clearly seen in the upswing in the black crime rate during the last 60’s, as the Great Society took effect. It is going to take a few decades for crime to drop after we get rid of these vile programs, however.
“People from the burb where I grew up are just as attracted to glamour and lucre as people from any urban neighborhood. We, however, had other credible options for achieving them.”
Other more socially acceptable options perhaps. Being a drug dealer probably wouldn’t have gotten you viewed in a positive light. You also are from a culture that still had some sort of stigma attached to being imprisoned.
If being a drug dealer was the equivilant of the being the fry guy at mcDonald’s; you wouldn’t have an entire segment of the music industry glamorizing it as a career choice.
“That it’s mostly caused by “crimes” libertarians would legalize also seems obvious (though blacks also have higher rates of violent crime too, I guess). ”
Back in the early 90s, there was a time when blacks committed about 49% of homicides–remarkable for 13% of the population. The black violent crime rate is substantually greater than that of whites, something that wasn’t true in the 50s.
“what’s the “societal acceptance of crime?”
How about calling the LA riots a “revolution” or “uprising”?
Don wrote:
Good point (although I?m not sure about the numbers). Even if we were to stop the WoSD (which seems to be the focal point among so many libertarians for any discussion about crime) does anyone doubt that most of the people being incarcerated would be committing or charged with other crimes?
Also, most people who support drug relegalization or decriminalization seem to agree with a rather commonsensical view that there ought to be an age requirement for drugs just as there is for alcohol and tobacco. In which case drug dealers who are peddling the stuff in primary and secondary schools would still be breaking the law and probably in jail. Unless somebody wishes to make the argument that it should be legal to sell cocaine to children, I frankly think that we wouldn?t see that much difference in incarceration.
“Yeah. Specifically, it creates violent crime in minority-heavy urban neighborhoods. See, that’s where the people from the suburbs who buy most of the drugs drive to when they want to score. Then they get lit and talk about their adventures in the hood.”
And that violent crime is the fault of the criminals in those urban neighborhoods. It is not the fault of the people in the ‘berbs, whether they use drugs or not, whether the drugs passed through the urban neighborhood or not.
“sorry bout that double post – but the whole “hip hop encourages crime” load of nonsense (ozzy encouraged suicide, elvis encouraged bending at the waist, jazz encourages ebony and ivory mingling, etc) ignores that the largest body of buyers of hip hop are white kids.”
hmmm… I personally do think that Jazz music was a huge step forward for racial intermingling; both as a reflection of something that was happening in the culture, but primarily as a way to communicate that widely. I think you are really doing the musicians a disservice here, overlooking the contribution their art had on society.
Art makes a difference. Artists change our perception of the world, and in doing so, change the world. Art is important; art is not “a load of nonsense.”
Censorship is always an issue because it is relevant. (Fortunately, its also becoming much less enforceable, so practicality as a solution is pretty low.) Its truly unfortunate that most of the population is incapable of understanding the point that because something has negative effects on the population, and that you disapprove of it personally, doesn’t mean that banning it is the solution.
on the other hand, that does not imply that permitting it is entirely without problems either; they just happen to be the better set of problems.
Kevin Carson:
I totally agree that it is wrong to lock up a nonviolent drug offender, non-coercive, voluntary crime. But how many of these offenders are there in the prisons? You said: “Probably half the people in prison are in for stuff that shouldn’t be crimes” My guess is it’s nowhere near half. Seriously, what percentage of prisoners in america, in both state and federal prisons, meets your criteria? I bet it is a small percentage. It is a damned injustice that they are in prison, but there aren’t too many of those ideal nonviolent, noncoercive, victimless offenders in prisons. And, to pre-empt what I know you’re going to say, I do regard it as a huge injustice that these nonviolent, hurt-nobody drug users and sellers are punished if they get caught even if it’s not prison. They face fines, they have to pay their lawyers, if they’re on probation then probation is tough to not violate, maybe they have to go to one of these ridiculous court-mandated drug treatment programs. But I don’t think too high a percentage of the prison population is there for those types of drug offenses. For everyone that is in prison for a nonviolent drug offense, I say “I am sorry for this injustice,” and, as 311 sang: “here’s to good people doin’ time y’all”.
You’ll find no bigger advocate for reforming our drug laws than me. I’m on your side of the drug prohibition issue. But when our side makes claims that are not accurate, it hurts our credibility and makes victory less likely. It is not credible to suggest that half of all prisoners are nonviolent drug users/sellers. It is not credible to argue that “And if anything, people guilty of REAL crimes are being turned loose on the populace because of overcrowding resulting from the drug war.”
Abu is out
The dichotomy between “violent drug offender” and the non-violent ones is not so easy to describe. If you decided to deal drugs, if you had a dispute with another actor in the “informal sector,” how could you settle it? You can’t sue, and you can’t call the police. If you are connected to organized crime, you might appeal up the “chain of command” to get some relief. What you may have to do is go armed or hire bodyguards, to intimidate those you deal with into playing straight. If someone tried to rip you off, and you and/or your crew resorted to violence or threat of same to get the upper hand, that is essentially self-defense, and no crime. State and Federal authorities have declared that should you harm or kill someone while committing a drug felony, both you and your attacker have committed further felonies.
When knocking over a drug dealer is the legal equivalent of a liquor store heist, then we will be able to distinguish between crimes fueled by drug abuse, those just looking for a target of opportunity, and those with multiple factors.
Kevin
Don,
On the question of who should be held responsible for any given violent act, of course you are corrent. However, on the question of crime reduction policies for urban neighborhoods, structural causes are a legitimate consideration.
“On the question of who should be held responsible for any given violent act, of course you are corrent. However, on the question of crime reduction policies for urban neighborhoods, structural causes are a legitimate consideration.”
I agree. We need to reduce welfare (so that black families can begin to rebuild) and we should end the drug war (to dry up the cash gangs rake in). And we have to wait while the black subculture builds itself into something more responsible.
And to think, he came up with that while watching “Good Times.”