Criminal Injustice -- Inside America's National Disgrace
In one particularly interesting column, "The Crime Rate Puzzle," Radley Balko (recently hired away from Reason by the Huffington Post) examines what academics think about the causes for the much-touted drop in crime of recent years. "Did incarceration reduce the crime rate, or did it get in the way?"
Sam Walker, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska and one of the top scholars of policing, tells Balko:
Conservatives say the crime drop was because of incarceration. Liberals say it was programs like community policing. I don't think there's much convincing evidence for either."
Academic consensus, according to Balko, exists for just two factors: the ebbing of the crack trade after its peak in the late 1980s, and the growth in the economy since 1992. In this understanding, part of the drop in crime is due to the previous rise having been an aberration -- the new drug crack, shorter acting and marketed in poor neighborhoods, brought in a larger number of transactions each day and new fighting over turf. When the trade restabilized and the use of crack diminished, violence went back down to more normal levels. And over the longer term, a big part of the drop in crime is the growth of the economy, leading to lower unemployment, more jobs in the licit economy, less desperation, etc. "[I]t seems that as we live better... we live better," writes Balko.
Balko's willingness to question whether imprisoning more people has really reduced crime is especially important in light of the willingness of some academics to oversimplify that very question. In a generally insightful column published last month, sociologist James Q. Wilson was willing to question how much of the drop in crime was accounted for by the increased in incarceration, and even whether some types of incarceration really do address violence, low-level drug dealers in particular. But overall it is as simple to Wilson as to say "when prisoners are kept off the street, they can attack only one another, not you or your family."
Of course it's not that simple. The prisoner kept off the street may have a younger brother who becomes embittered by his sibling's absence, and is driven to crime for that reason. The money spent to incarcerate that person might instead have funded an after-school program serving dozens of at-risk youths, possibly preventing a number of criminal careers from ever beginning. Ultimately such questions can only be answered by research. Wilson's willingness to entirely omit such questions from his discussion makes it less likely to shed light on that particular point, and it ignores research calling the assumption into question. As Balko cites:
In a series of studies published in 2009, the University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld and the SUNY-Albany sociologist Steven Messner found that during the last 15 years, states with lower incarceration rates saw bigger drops in crime, on average, than those with lock-'em-up policies. Moreover, the historic increase in the prison population began in the early 1980S, a decade after the crime rate began to rise and a decade before it started to fall. The incarceration rate increased by more than 100 percent in the 1980s, but violent crime still increased that decade, by 22 percent.
Also omitted by most authors, but not Balko, is the prohibition issue. "[W]ere it not for drug prohibition, we could well be living in the safest era in American history." A good reason not to be complacent about the state of crime and the criminal justice system in America today.
White House phone campaign
This is going viral spread the word!
It's time we demand an end to the failed, 40 year, trillion dollar incarceration machine known as the War on Drugs! No emails this time: Let's swamp the White House with phone calls on Friday June 17th - the 40th Anniversary of Nixon's War on Drugs: 202-456-1111
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/i0m4d/its_time_we_demand_an_...
Send an email, too:
Scott, hope you don't mind me posting this email from DPA:
I actually wrote this blog
I actually wrote this blog post, Moonrider, not Scott. :) Scott is our best blogger, though.
Guess I should have paid more attention
Sorry about that, David.
I take it as a compliment to
I take it as a compliment to be confused with Scott. :)
A Real Reason for Drug Laws.....
First let me state that many "so called laws" are in fact not laws at all. I wish with all my heart and soul that the illegal drug laws be permanently purged from ours and other countries law dockets.
Reason being is not just to "legalize drugs", which in itself is a good beginning towards freedom, but to also stop the beginnings of our embryonic police state / corporate prison slave state, which is growing towards full maturity before our very eyes.
Drug laws equal Power and Money period. 95% of Americans population will never benefit from drug laws.
It is the 5% at the top of the wealth pyramid that will benefit from drug laws and the perpetuation of those laws. Reason being is that when drug laws are written and enforced even with the consent of majority congress along with the full knowledge of these laws being unconstitutional because it circumvents and operates outside the framework of the constitution, as any law maker worth his or her salt knows full well.
The real reason for these laws is two fold. One is to enhance development of a global police state. Two is to give rise to a global corporate prison slave labor force.
The first is a given and simple inductive reasoning, which has been pounded into our heads for many decades now. However the second reason, which I will add here is a direct result of Richard (Tricky Dick) Nixon's love affaire with China and it's prison slave labor system which has given rise to the likes of GEO, formally known as Wackenhut the corporate for profit prison system, which sprang up around about the same time as old Tricky. One has to stand back and look at who profits from drug laws.
When you incarcerate 2.6 million people and work them involuntarily under sweatshop conditions at 13 cents and hour, well that reader, is slave labor! Labor to make whatever you as the prison owner can sell or are asked to make for another corporation.
Another unspoken side of this crooked coin is that once convicted of a so called "drug crime" many dissidents and other outspoken citizens can be easily dispatched once inside prison (think Malosavitch) who was poisoned in jail while awaiting trial in the Hague.
The war on drugs is really a war on you for money and power. A real shining example of Capitalism at its best.
Crime trends track the
Crime trends track the economy as it affects the disadvantaged. They track very closely, but only where the general welfare is concerned. Overlay the curves and except for a varying lag time they look nearly identical. Additionally, if the economy loses a certain percentage of it's gross value (again, that value varies, but maintains a steady range), the crime trends universally begin a rise. The era of the Great Depression is also the era of serial bank robberies, the gin runner and the big city gangster. There is no coincidence involved. The Eighties was the era of the Bush recession, as well as the crack "epidemic" and the street gang-banger. Here we are, Great Depression II, and the stage was set, the players took their place and the curtain went up.
Lesson? It's the money, honey.
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