Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with the "drug war causes violent crime" theory is the timeline. Here is a graph of U.S. violent crime rate from 1960: http://www.newgeography.com/files/cox-crime-3.png. Here is a graph of just homicide rate since 1900: http://madeinamericathebook.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/homi.... Violent crime was steady up to about 1960 then started spiking up in the 1960's until about 1995. The homicide rate at its peak in the 1990's was only about 25% higher than what it was in 1900, long before prohibition or the drug war.

The modern controlled substances act was passed in 1970, and drug war spending started ramping up through the 1970's, and didn't really get going until the second half of the 1980's: http://blurbrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/drugs-vs-spe....

So what does the data tell us? Crime started spiking up about 10 years before the drug war even started. The big jump in drug war spending in the 1980's happened after two decades of rising crime, when crime rates were already near their peak. So if anything, the federal drug war (or peoples' appetite to wage it) seems to be a reaction to rising crime, rather than a cause.

Now, you could also say rising crime was the result of prohibition itself, not just the drug war per se. But narcotics began to be heavily regulated and effectively banned in 1915: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cu8.h....

Now, compare crime rate to incarceration rate and the timeline of the drug war: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._inc.... The incarceration rate is basically flat until 1975. By that time violent crime had increased by over 2.5x. The mind-blowing thing is that our incarceration rate doesn't catch up to our crime rate until after 1995! I.e. even though our incarceration rate quadruples from 1950 to 1995, in that time violent crime more than quadruples.

It's only after the big drop in crime in the late 1990's that our incarceration rate started to become disproportionate to our violent crime rate.

The problem with the article is that the professor doesn't just argue the points you made, but suggests we shouldn't advocate for ending the drug war or reducing sentencing:

But according to John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, neither of those efforts will make a significant dent in the problem, because they are based on a false understanding of why the prison boom happened in the first place.

"The reason it’s important to get it right is that if we’re trying to reduce the prison population, we want to make sure we do it correctly—and if you focus on the wrong thing, you won’t solve the problem. So if you think it’s the war on drugs, you might think, ‘OK, if we just decriminalize drugs, that will solve the problem.’ And, you know, it’s true that if we shift away from punishment to treatment that could be a huge improvement. But just letting people out of prison—decarcerating drug offenders—will not reduce the prison population by as much as people think. If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. So we’d still be the world’s largest incarcerating country; we’d still have an enormous prison population.

And if we focused on cutting back sentence lengths, maybe that would weaken DAs’ bargaining power at plea bargaining, but since people aren’t serving the massively long sentences anyway, it probably won’t have that big an effect on prison population either."

This is a weird argument, because reducing the prison population by 17% is a significant dent ..

Every time this issue comes up, it seems to polarize itself: either you have to believe that ending the "drug war" will largely solve America's incarceration problem, or, for some reason, you have to support the drug war.

I don't understand the logic. It does not follow from "ending the drug war won't solve our prison problem" that "we should maintain the drug war".

There is virtually no vocal user of HN that supports the drug war. In every thread about drugs on HN, you can safely assume the entire community agrees that the "War on Drugs" is toxic.

I generally agree w/you .. I was referring to the professor who was interviewed, not HN users. I would say that the drug war component of mass-incarceration seems separable, and easier to solve than the violent crime component. It seems better strategy to me to go after the low hanging fruit, look at the results and then plan the next move.

I would worry that trying to solve the whole issue at once, like the professor seems to suggest, would be a non-starter politically.

The problem with using trends, IMHO, rather than actual recorded figures, is that you may miss out on what's going on beneath the pretty lines and curves.

I ain't saying you're wrong because I don't have the figures to rebut that. I'm not even saying that the WoD is the major cause of violent crime, definitively, because I don't have those figures either.

Literally all I'm trying to say is that the analysis in the article seems short-sighted and incomplete because it only takes into account convictions directly for drug offences.

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