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First many of those crime cartels could not exist without the banning of drugs, prostitution and gambling. The same goes for violent crimes in general. Large numbers of violent crimes are done by people involved in drug dealing or consuming. If drugs were legal you would not put so many people in these situations.

Falling crime rates is happing all over the first world. Most countries have know-where near the policy infrastructure that the US has. So thats probably not a very good expiation.

Nobody says that their is no real crime. In all the speech by the state its sounds as if we are getting rolled over by a totally new wave of terror and crime while in reality its the exact opposite. What bother so many is that they underline all their arguments with this false impression.

Possible, but unlikely. According to a recent study, the majority of offenders are sentenced for violent offenses, and the majority of those sentenced for violent offenses have never been convicted of a drug crime.

Its tricky to say, seems to me that prior conviction is not a very good metric. However I don't know any better way to figure this out either.

You can take the analysis further and observe, as that study did, that the set of people incarcerated for violent offenses is almost entirely disjoint from the set of people incarcerated for drug offenses. There is very little overlap, not just in the current prison population but over time as well.

We should end the war on drugs, of course, but we more urgently need to end what Ta-Nahisi Coates calls "the carceral state", and that will require much stiffer medicine than drug legalization.

>According to a recent study

Please post the study.

It's not exactly "recent", but http://harvardjol.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/HLL104_crop... is what I presume 'tptacek is talking about (it was discussed on HN before).

> First many of those crime cartels could not exist without the banning of drugs, prostitution and gambling.

That doesn't mean that it's an "invented crime." It's undeniable that drugs, gambling, and prostitution have real social costs and harms. The people are entitled to regulate commerce in their society generally, but trade in harmful things especially. When people uses organized violence to circumvent that regulation, in the pursuit of profit, that is actual crime, not invented crime.

> Large numbers of violent crimes are done by people involved in drug dealing or consuming.

You're presupposing a direction of causation here. Your average street gang does not exist because of drug dealing or consumption (and indeed, violent street gangs long predate any restrictions on drugs or alcohol). They deal in drugs because it's easy money, but arise for other reasons.

> It's undeniable that drugs, gambling, and prostitution have real social costs and harms

So does banking and the police. Or firearms and alcohol. Both are regulated, but not outlawed.

Heck so does "pursuing happiness". Skiing accidents. Bankruptcy when your art studio goes under. Smoking. Pretty much anything fun.

As a country, the USA is actually constituted to allow these things. Because, individual freedoms. And inalienable rights. I hear somebody want to crack down on something, I think "There goes somebody who forgot what it means to be American"

Being pedantic: pursuit of happiness and inalienable rights are in the Declaration of Independence, not the constitution. The right to regulate interstate commerce (and thus put restrictions on a lot of the fun things) is enumerated.

Being pedantic right back: the US Supreme Court refers to the Declaration as source material for the Constitution, to illuminate its intent.

There is a ruling where they refer to it as providing intent and color, but not law. And cases can only be decided based on law.

I don't think you can make a decision based solely on the "pursuit of happiness" phrase from the Declaration of Independence, but you could use it as a supporting argument for your claim.

When the gov't attempted to prohibit drug use, it created the opportunity for a black market in prohibited drugs to thrive. If you can accept the following:

  * Some people are going to take drugs without regard to legality.
  * Some people are going to fill the market's need for drugs through smuggling or manufacturing.
  * The government is utterly incapable (by design, actually) of completely preventing the above.
  * Without criminalization of drugs manufacturing and sales, there would be very little or no reason for violence in the drugs trade.

Then it's fair to say that criminalizing drugs use is the cause of the violence, or at least that decriminalizing drugs use will result in a reduction in violence.

>violent street gangs long predate any restrictions on drugs or alcohol

Violent street gangs opportunistically traffic in contraband because prohibition creates a dearth of supply, driving prices high enough to support an illegal black market.

You can not expect me to support the weaking of encryption and critical infrastructure just to arrest criminals who would not exist if the state policy would not be stupid in the first place.

> It's undeniable that drugs, gambling, and prostitution have real social costs and harms.

Its also undeniable that enforcing these things has real social cost and harms. In this balance I am of the opinion that it would be far superior to have a different policy.

> You're presupposing a direction of causation here. Your average street gang does not exist because of drug dealing or consumption (and indeed, violent street gangs long predate any restrictions on drugs or alcohol). They deal in drugs because it's easy money, but arise for other reasons.

That does not mean that these gangs would be much weaker and therefore less important if they could not make easy money. These are mutually supportive, a tight group can do well in a illegal market, and because of that it can produce benefits for its members, increasing memberships and power.

Table 5 on page 17 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf of this report from BJS shows that half of federal prison inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses. I'd accept the notion that some of those drug offenders may have been violent, but not all of them. I suspect the violent crime statistic from ProCon rests on the habit of police and prosecutors of escalating charges for suspects where drugs are found for things that wouldn't ordinarily even be criminal (such has having a weapon in one's home).

Having a weapon during a drug deal is a sentencing enhancement, not a different crime. There are non-violent weapons crimes (e.g. felon in possession), but those fall under the "public order" category (see footnote c).

And remember, the vast majority of violent crimes do not fall within federal jurisdiction, so it's unsurprising that a disproportionate number of federal prisoners are in for drug crimes or other non-violent crimes (e.g. white collar crimes). But most prisoners are in state rather than federal prison.

The overwhelming majority of prisoners are in state prisons, where something like 17% of inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses. The majority of inmates are in fact incarcerated for violent crimes.

Yeah, I used the federal statistics because it's easier to find the data. Rayiner made a reasonable point about the difference in federal vs state inmates.

>where something like 17% of inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses.

I hope you don't mind if I use a single state, I know these thing will vary by state. The top drug crimes in Texas are different degrees of possession and manufacturing and distribution, and you're right, it's about 17%

>The majority of inmates are in fact incarcerated for violent crimes.

There are other crimes that aren't violent and aren't drug offenses, those appear to be about 43% (60% when you include drug offenses), and the violent ones about 40%, not a majority. Do you have a source for your "majority of inmates are in fact incarcerated for violent crimes" claim? The statistics I used are by offense, not by offender. I'm not sure how that will change if the statistics are broken down by offender.

https://www.texastribune.org/library/data/texas-prisons/crim...

In fairness, one could consider the "public order" "crimes" listed there to also be inventions of the state. Are legislative or prosecutorial inventiveness implicated in the increase of those from 1.9% to 13.8% of the total in less than 40 years? Over a period during which violent crime dropped precipitously, they had to do something to justify the constant construction of new prisons.

The public order category includes drunk driving and weapons offenses (mostly, felon-in-possession). Those are not inventions of the state. The public is entitled to control the possession and operation of dangerous instrumentalities that create risk of harm to others.

Harming people or property is criminal, and has been in most societies, even when automobiles or firearms are used to cause harm. OTOH "drunk driving" and "weapon possession" and indeed any "risk"-based "crime" are the epitome of invention. (The criminality of weapon possession has a long and sordid history, but not in those polities that civilized nations would care to emulate.) If all felons are so fucking dangerous, why aren't they in prison? Of course, the vast majority aren't actually dangerous, but it's still fun to deprive them of Constitutional rights! [EDIT:] The main reason why "convicts with guns" has been on the rise is probably that the number of convicts is on the rise, period.

One notes when examining the timeframe of the graph you linked that MADD was formed in 1980. That explains the legislative inventiveness; nothing drives policy like fat stacks of nonprofit cash! Take a trip to any courthouse anywhere, and you'll witness the racket that MADD, prosecutors, and municipalities have engineered to employ lawyers by depriving the poor of the mobility that would make their lives easier.

So thanks for the info; clearly the answer to my question is "yes".

It's a very narrow interpretation of democracy that doesn't give people the right to mitigate risky conduct and requires them to wait for actual harm in order to react. It's also one without a sensible limiting principle: can't require safety inspections for aircraft, gotta wait for a bunch of people to fall out of the sky first!

> nothing drives policy like fat stacks of nonprofit cash

Oh yes, that well funded concerned mother lobby. Fucking it up for sociopathic assholes since 1980.

You've happened upon one of the main criticisms of democracy, addressed notably in Zakaria's The Future of Freedom. But I don't say that it's invalid for the people's representatives to unjustly oppress the lawbreakers we're discussing here. I only say that they shouldn't! You can dress it up in irrelevant appeals to democracy, but we're still locking up more people than any other society that has ever existed in history, and that's wrong.

...can't require safety inspections for aircraft, gotta wait for a bunch of people to fall out of the sky first!

Don't tell any enterprising nonprofit interest-group enthusiasts, but we have "special" and "experimental" airworthiness certificates, which amount to basically that. Of course, those certificates don't cover aircraft which are naturally subject to the regulation of the state.

Oh yes, that well funded concerned mother lobby.

In fiscal year 2012-3, they spent $34,327,399, of which they spent 64.4% on actual programs. Nationally, 9 out of 10 charities spend a higher percentage. [0]

Fucking it up for sociopathic assholes since 1980.

As I have observed every one of the five or six days I've spent in various courthouses over the last five years (and as any practicing lawyer with a conscience surely has observed much more often), these laws do far more to harm the poor than they do to make the roads safe. Perhaps you've heard about protests in Ferguson, MO? Predatory policing and prosecution was one of the main focuses of that.

[0] http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...

> right to mitigate risky conduct and requires them to wait for actual harm in order to react.

Isn't that the way the judicial system typically works even when it is obviously broken? Isn't this the reason we have things like weird laws that are "unenforceable", because as a matter of policy we tend to wait for actual harm to occur before we expend effort to address it?

>can't require safety inspections for aircraft, gotta wait for a bunch of people to fall out of the sky first!

That's actually the way the FAA came into existence. The Wright brothers didn't have to send $5.00 to the FAA for a permit, or submit to safety inspections, or anything like that. Nor did anyone else, for a long time WRT the early aircraft industry in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administratio...

>Oh yes, that well funded concerned mother lobby. Fucking it up for sociopathic assholes since 1980.

There's the appeal to emotion common to arguments in favor of harsher sentencing for DUI offenders. It appears to be the case however that more and bigger sticks aren't really reducing the number of sociopathic assholes driving drunk.