The Jailor State and the Drug Warby
Joel Miller
If there’s one thing that conservatives are usually known for, besides loathing social programs and cheering tax cuts, it’s getting tough on crime. A new history of the conservative rise to power in America, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s The Right Nation, makes note of the hardnosed approach adopted by conservatives and its principle outcome: more prisoners. "Thanks to following an overtly conservative agenda on law and order, America has quadrupled its imprisonment rate in just thirty years," the authors write. "It now has 700 people in every 100,000 under lock and key, five times the proportion in Britain, the toughest sentencer in Western Europe." While the pair explain the unforgiving nature of mandatory minimum sentences – especially for drug offenses – they also note the twin defenses of this approach: it’s popular and it works. It certainly is popular. Fighting crime has been an election-winning gimmick since Nixon. But the latter defense, that it works, is less than sure. There is no doubt crime stats fell dramatically in the 1990s, even under a president many on the right regarded as soft on crime. But what is interesting is that in the one sector of crime where the crackdown approach was plied with the most vigor – the drug war – the success is not nearly so rosy. Gang crime – the type of crime most closely associated with the drug trade – is on the rise, spiking 50 percent between 1999 and 2002. Earlier this year, calling it "the emerging monster of crime in America," Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton blamed street gangs for more than half of L.A.’s annual homicides. Every trade has particular skills required for success. Thanks to its illegal status, in the drug trade that skill is the ability to intimidate, maim, or kill. It’s pretty simply, really: Because the illegality of the drug trade removes legal protection from its participants, the business is subject to brutality. The people who thrive are those with a "comparative advantage in violence," as the Cato Institute’s David Boaz has put it. Why? When Pfizer or Merck have a problem with a client or competitor, they call the lawyers. But for those dealing in an illegal trade, contracts become enforceable with guns, not lawsuits. Most gang fighting and gunfire is directly tied to drug-related turf disputes and punishing double-crossers and failures. Thus, as I explain in my new book, Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America, far from squashing gang crime, police crackdowns exacerbate the problem. First, the legal squeeze forces the more gentle participants out, leaving only the most brutal to prosper. Next, the legal squeeze pushes these brutal thugs onto each other’s turf. In the early 1990s, for instance, police in Tampa, Fla., worked diligently to bust up deals in the city but noticed that while drug activity dropped in one area, it mushroomed in others – dealers just migrated to different sectors of town. Sometimes the new dealing went on in previously untapped areas, but plenty of it went on in areas already controlled by other drug interests. So, by upsetting a market in which turf issues were already settled, the crackdowns actually encouraged more gang warfare and violence by driving dealers into each others’ territory. The result is not only dead gang members, but also dead bystanders – even the innocent. Naturally, politicians have jumped into the fray to save the day. Sen. Orrin Hatch’s Gang Prevention and Effective Deterrence Act of 2004, according remarks by the lawmaker, "creates new criminal gang prosecution offenses, enhances existing gang and violent crime penalties to deter and punish illegal street gangs, enacts violent crime reforms needed to prosecute effectively gang members, and implements a limited reform of the juvenile justice system to facilitate federal prosecution of 16 and 17 year old gang members who commit serious violent felonies." But this isn’t going to help. Going back to observations by Micklethwait and Woodridge, we already prosecute and imprison people out the wazoo. Such striking models of modern democracy as Belarus and Turkmenistan jail fewer of their citizens per capita than America. Numbers released by the Justice Department in summer 2003 tally more than 5.6 million living Americans either formerly incarcerated or currently imprisoned. And this is what we are doing now, at this very moment. Ergo, despite the gung-ho lockdown tactic, gang crime is still up. Those who think doing more of it will help are – for lack of better phrase – smoking something. When two dogs are fighting in the backyard, do you (a) start fighting with them, or (b) distract them from the fight by turning the garden hose on them?
The payoff will be less crime in our towns and cities and less money dumped into a prison system that is not keeping us a safe as we thought. June 17, 2004 Joel Miller [send him mail] is the author of Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America. Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com |
