Panning around randomly I stumbled on this curious little area: http://i.imgur.com/42VLDN4.png
I thought whoa that's cool, a dense little community of minorities.
Turns out: https://www.google.ca/maps/@39.6908437,-86.4131159,15z
Damn it.
I thought whoa that's cool, a dense little community of minorities.
Turns out: https://www.google.ca/maps/@39.6908437,-86.4131159,15z
Damn it.
There is some sort of weird need for certain groups of people to ascribe all crime to the drug war. I assume its a result of their holding worldviews incompatible with the fact that the world has lots of bad, antisocial, people.
That doesn't mean that only 17% are there because of the drug war.
> There is some sort of weird need for certain groups of people to pretend that crime only happens because of the drug war.
Perhaps, but that's no more weird than the weird need for certain groups of people to minimize the impact of the drug war, e.g., by pretending that the only people who are imprison because of the drug war are those convicted of drug offenses. Prosecutions conducted as part of the war on drugs aren't all "drug offenses" any more than prosecutions conducted as part of Prohibition were all liquor offenses.
There's a ton of reasons why someone would be in jail for a reason related to the WoD without their crime being classified as a drug offense.
You can't blame addiction problems on the drug war any more than you can prevent them with a drug war. They're inevitable. But you can treat them as what they truly are, medical problems, rather than criminal acts. You need look no further than the two major legal drugs in our society to see how how few people are stealing or committing acts of violence to support their alcohol or tobacco addictions. But if you rewind 90ish years, you'll see the same violence you see now with illegal drugs surrounding the then-illegal alcohol. We can thank congress for giving us the 18th and 21st amendments because that period showed us the difference between a legal, regulated market for drugs and a black market.
People are going to use drugs whether they're illegal or not. And that means other people will sell them those drugs, no matter what laws we put in place. Faced with that eventuality, we need to structure society to minimize the damage that's caused by this. Criminalizing substances manifestly does not meet this goal. It's asinine to suggest that it hasn't multiplied our prison population many times over.
1. Violence over territory from drug dealers can lead to various violence-related charges.
2. Drug addicts may commit monetary crimes in order to pay for drugs.
3. The general mess that the black market drug trade makes of some neighborhoods creates an environment in which young people feel they have few legitimate options and turn to crime.
Which isn't of course to say that all crime is ascribable to the drug war. But certainly it's more crime than what you'd narrowly call "drug offenses" like possession, dealing, trafficking, or laundering the proceeds.
If someone is a target of law enforcement because of the drug war, but the crime they can make stick is something other than drug-related that they wouldn't have bothered to prosecute in otherwise similar circumstances were it not for the attention given that target in the drug war, they aren't always going to say "oh well, let's not prosecute until we can gather sufficient evidence of a drug offense."
The drug war isn't helping, of course, but its unlikely to be the root cause given the timing of things. More likely the root cause is the ghettoization of the cities due to white flight and wealth flight in the 1950's and 1960's, along with the continued effects of trade liberalization taking away low-skill jobs.
It would be naive to imagine that there is no "fundamental nature" element to people. That your genes or early childhood experiences or whatever do not make some people more prone to antisocial behavior, and indeed do not make some people guaranteed to be extremely antisocial. Some people who are now criminals connected with the drug trade would, in a counter-factual world of legalized drugs, find other outlets for their antisocial tendencies.
But it's just as naive, perhaps more so, to imagine that the circumstances that people find themselves in do not also affect their social/antisocial behavior. A hundred and sixty years ago, millions of people in the United States actively participated in a monstrous crime perpetrated against an entire race of people, the equivalent of what in the modern world would be multiple felonies per day across their lifetimes. It was certainly antisocial. Was that destiny? Were all those people just inherently bad? If so, what happened to them? Why doesn't modern Georgia have most whites being serial felons?
For instance, you attribute the grandparent's point of view to "biological essentialism." The grandparent said no such thing. He said: certain people are prone to crime. That is true. Those people are acting out their values and their ideas about the world and about how they can best survive and cope within it. I don't agree that everyone who is a drug criminal would necessarily find some other avenue of crime, but to suggest that they would is not a claim to biological essentialism.
> A hundred and sixty years ago, millions of people in the United States actively participated in a monstrous crime perpetrated against an entire race of people, the equivalent of what in the modern world would be multiple felonies per day across their lifetimes. It was certainly antisocial. Was that destiny? Were all those people just inherently bad? If so, what happened to them? Why doesn't modern Georgia have most whites being serial felons?
What happened is the spread of ideas about human rights from the Enlightenment. Slavery has been the norm for 99% of human history. The Southerners you talked about just didn't have the great newfangled idea of people having rights. That was a real intellectual achievement that took humans thousands of years.
Say you end the drug war, legalize everything so you can go into Wal-Mart for a hit of heroin. What happens? The gang members driving around shooting each other aren't going to go get jobs (there aren't any). Heck, you might dry up a lot of what little income flows into these communities.
[1] Very interesting set of graphs: http://www.newclarion.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/homicid...; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...; http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/images/11217607.0002.206-....
The first image is the number of homicides per capita. After hitting a minimum in the late 1950's, it starts increasing again in 1960. By the early 1970's, it's at historical highs (last seen in the 1930's). The second image is incarceration rate, which we can use as a proxy for the intensity of the drug war. Note how it's almost flat till about 1973-1974, and starts really increasing around 1975-1980. The third image is a comparison of America's murder rate to that of the U.K. Note how we have always been a dramatically more violent society throughout the entire 20th century.
The final thing to note is that the peak murder rates of the 1980's are similar to those of the 1930's. In other words, homicides went down dramatically in the 1940's and 1950's, but returned to their previous levels by the 1960's and 1970's. Don't be quick to ascribe the first peak to Prohibition, either. Prohibition lasted from 1920-1933. You can see it caused an increase in homicide rates, but the rate from 1900-1920 was already very high, and Prohibition didn't increase it that much relative to how much it went up from 1960 to 1980.
So what causes this pattern? Is it Prohibition or the Drug War? Or are those just relatively small effects on top of much larger phenomena? The social upheaval of the 1900's-1930's and of the 1960's to 1980's?
But: if they don't have an income to support their lives of crime, and if their leaders don't in fact have quite a nice income that the more common criminals can aspire to, there's going to be much less incentive for people who are deciding what they want to be to choose a life of crime.
And furthermore: committed, full time violent criminals are not the only people we care about here. People whose lives are impacted by the black market nature of the drug trade include many criminals who may in fact have a job, and do some crime on the side. It also includes people who are drug consumers, not dealers, who would materially benefit from a safer and hopefully cheaper drug habit.
And it also includes people whose boyfriends and fathers would not be in jail now, and if a large number of those boyfriends and fathers would not be material help to their girlfriends and children, some number of them would be.
Is this it? Is it the only policy that we would need to vanquish poverty and crime in the US? Of course not. But there's a reasonable argument that you can't meaningfully address poverty and crime without addressing the drug war -- that it blocks any other attempt to improve conditions in poor, crime-stricken communities.
I'm not. The vast majority of the gang members driving around shooting each other up are not "committed fully to lives of violent crime." But they are still "bad, antisocial" people. The 19 year old who mugs someone in a gang initiation ritual is still a bad person even if you can explain his behavior in socioeconomic terms.
> Is it the only policy that we would need to vanquish poverty and crime in the US? Of course not.
Obviously the drug war contributes to poverty and crime in the U.S., I'm not denying that. But the comment I originally replied to stated: "Interesting to see an effect of the drug war manifested on a map." As if that state penitentiary wouldn't need to exist without the drug war.
People dramatically overstate how much the drug war contributes to violence in the U.S., because their world views (usually individualist ones), don't grapple well with a world where a meaningful percentage of the population is bad and antisocial. If only the government didn't prosecute this drug war, they say, we wouldn't need these prisons! People would get along! But the data just doesn't support that narrative. Look at this chart of spending on drug control: http://cdn6.theweedblog.com/wp-content/uploads//us-drug-addi..., and cross reference that against the homicide rate chart I referred to earlier. You can clearly see that most of the dramatic increase in homicides between the minimum in the late 1950's and the maximum in the 1980's and 1990's happened by the early 1970's, while drug war spending didn't really start until 1973 and didn't really ramp up by the 1980's.
We're not seeing the product of communities ravaged by the drug war. What we're seeing is that the drug war has become the focal point for communities that were already disintegrating before the drug war even started.
Yes, but how did they get that way? They got that way because they were drawn into that life by older gang members. They see older gang members living a life of relative privilege and they're willing to accept the violence that goes along with it. If you take away the money, those older gang members become much less attractive role models.
> As if that state penitentiary wouldn't need to exist without the drug war.
From Wikipedia: "In the twenty-five years since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the United States penal population rose from around 300,000 to more than two million."
In that same time period, when the prison population increased over 600%, the US population increased roughly 30%. Unless you've got some other theory for drastically increased incarceration rates, that prison and many others used to house the over 1.5m extra prisoners we have today because of the WoD literally would not exist.
The bottom line is that the increase in incarceration rates is the result of a dramatic spike in crime rates starting in 1960, peaking in the early 1990's, and the public response in the form of harsh sentencing laws in the 1990's (three strikes, mandatory minimums). It's a simple explanation: there are more people in prison because there is more crime, and because the spike in crime caused people to vote (by overwhelming margins, I might add) for harsher sentencing laws.
Compare incarceration rates with violent crime rates: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._inca..., http://www.volokh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vcrime500.j.... You can see that incarceration rates are clearly a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. Violent crime peaked in 1993, at 4.3x the 1960 baseline. Incarceration peaked in 2005, at 4.8x the 1960 baseline. It's not until the late 1990's that incarceration rates catch up with violent crime rates.
The popular counterargument is that the increase in crime is itself a result of the social effects of the Drug War, e.g. the impact on kids of fathers being sent to prison for decades on drug charges. But the Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed in 1986, and the spike in violent crime rates started in 1960. The slope of the crime increase between 1966 and 1972 is as high as at any time after the drug war really got going in the 1980's, and 80% of the total increase in crime between the 1960 trough and the 1993 peak happened by 1980. It is simply inconsistent with the data to say that the increase in crime since 1960 were anything more than moderately impacted by the Drug War, which didn't really get going until long after crime had already skyrocketed.
Faced with such torture, people might do things they might not otherwise do.
Later
Nope; significant domestic violence, but mostly property crimes. Lots of drugs, too; Indiana breaks out meth (a scourge in the midwest), and meth seems to be the dominant component of drug incarcerations.
Number 1 might be due to the drug war, but they aren't exactly innocent victims of it.
Number 3 assumes there would be options for them otherwise. I don't see how stopping the drug war would do that.
There a few high density housing areas near Atlanta that are all one race or another, like the old ethnic neighborhoods of big Northern cities.