The very famous and very impressive James Q. Wilson has been blogging over at Volokh.com, here is one of his posts. Excerpt:
It is not hard to study deterring crime, but I
can’t imagine trying to teach someone in a blog how to do a regression
analysis. I wish I could do that, but it would take time, and blog
commenters seem not to have much time.Now for a few more facts, but I warn you that to believe my
assertions you will actually have to go out and read something.
Intensive Probation: This is a good idea, but so far the studies of it
have not suggested it lowers the crime rate. I wish it did, because it
is cheaper than prison. The chief study, done at RAND, compared
probationers under intensive supervision with similar ones not under
such control. There as no difference in their crime rates while under
supervision. There are two possible explanations for this: Either there
was no difference in crime rates, or those under intensive supervision
had more crimes noticed by their probation officers.
This earlier post was instructive:
Some readers have asked whether the population of American prisons is
large because we lock up so many drug users. It is true that the
proportion of inmates described as drug offenders has gone up
dramatically, but as Jonathan Caulkins and Mark Kleiman point in their
essay in Understanding America, very few are in prison because of drug
possession. Many are either major dealers or plead down to a drug
possession charge in order to avoid being convicted of a more serious
offense. There are more than one million arrests every year for drug
possession, but very of them result in prison or jail time. Cannabis
possession, when it is punished at all, is typically with a fine or
probation.
Claiming that these people in jail are “major drug dealers” deflects the point. If drugs were legal, then these people would not be in jail either.
Why oh why, Can’t he have a better blog template!
The dealer/possessor distinction is a legal fiction passed off as reality by politicians who want to tell a simple story of “evil dealers” and “addicted victims.”
Very simply, low-level dealers are often drug users or addicts. This shouldn’t be a surprise. As black-market commodities, drugs are very expensive and users and addicts (who tend to be poor) need to generate a steady and substantial cash flow. And what’s the one marketable skill most users and addicts have? Well, they really know the drug market.
And guess which sort of dealer makes up the bulk of dealer arrests? Yes, it’s the street corner peddlers.
Even at the higher levels of the drug hierarchies, there are fewer serious organized crime figures than most people think. One Canadian criminologist conducted extensive interviews with mid- and high-level dealers in Canadian penitentiaries and concluded that only one-quarter were the sort of violent career criminal we imagine when we think of serious dealers. The other three-quarters were people who were not otherwise involved in crime at all: they tended to be small businessmen whose work brought them into contact with somebody who knew somebody, etc., and were drawn into it by the promise of fast money.
I’d love someone to explain how mass arrests of addict/dealers and otherwise law abiding people tempted by the profits of the black market make society safer. While they’re at it, they might consider explaining this: Europe, which has more people, has fewer prisoners incarcerated for all crimes combined than the US has drug offenders. If drug prosecutions contribute to safety, why is the US not vastly safer than Europe?
Jason,
Usually I am right with you, but you make a lazy point here. Agreed simple comparisons aren’t relevant, but neither are simplistic crime definitions.
“drug sellers use violence to enforce contracts and expand marketshare. Drug users commit income-generating crimes to fund their addictions. Therefore, incarcerating both makes society safer by virtue of removing people whose black market activities tends to cause violence.”
This is just a poor argument. To assume that locking up of either at all alleviates the problem is not backed up by any information I’ve seen. If I had to guess it’s one of those chop the top of the weed off, but miss the roots situations.
When you hear somebody claim that the high rate of minorities in prison for drug possession proves the system is biased against them, just remember that Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion. LA Times reporter Sam Quinones wrote about one of the worst neighborhoods in LA:
“Finding a witness to testify is almost impossible, police said. So gang members are rarely charged with violent felonies. Without witnesses, police must rely on cases they can make themselves, usually for narcotics possession.”
Physical evidence can’t be intimidated, so a lot of the perpetrators of unsolved violent crimes are cooling their heels in prison on drug possession charges.
People,
I already know a) what the libertarian position on drug use and selling is and b) that there are many libertarians commenting on this blog. If one doesn’t have anything interesting to say, maybe one shouldn’t comment.
Hope this is interesting.
But for murders crime rate in the Usa are similar to France, Germany, and Spain and lower than UK and Ireland.Source UN and this blog more or less one year ago
The problem with the criminal approach to drugs is that ignores what Coase referred to in another context the reciprocal nature of the problem: the would be no sellers if there were no demand. I for one don’t know why people would voluntarily want to engage in such stupid and self-destructive behavior by taking drugs, but the fact is, as I heard Coase once say, “people are stupid” and enough people want to buy drugs to make selling drugs a worthwhile activity
Al Brown aks: “Now point to a single example where a legal drug does this. And all of the illegal drugs have been legal at one time or another in one place or another, so there is plenty of experience at which one could point.”
One possible answer might be the Opium War. Now I know that this was about the Chinese attempt to prohibit heroin, and the determination of the British Empire to bloody well keep it legal, and keep the enormous profits rolling in… But still it shows that legal addictive substances can support the extraction of vast profits from immeseriated people which are worth defending with violence.
This is not an argument for prohibition, but makes clear that we would have to be careful about the regulatory structure post-legalisation.
“Can you imagine what spending $30,000.00 annually to feed and educate 1 urban child would do to lift that child out of poverty?”
$30,000? Isn’t that close to what the terrible Washington, D.C. schools spend per year, per child? Yes, it is:
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9319
In theory, $30,000 could do a lot. In practice, I’ve no doubt that political patronage and public sector unions could suck up every bit of that $30K and leave students no better off than…the typical D.C. public school student.
Which isn’t to say I support spending $30K a year to lock up hordes of drug offenders. The war on drugs is a complete cluster-f**k from top to bottom. Costs a fortune, destroys lives, destroys civil liberties, destroys poor countries — it’s truly insane and evil.
Lemmus,
Okay, then it was interesting that you think you know what libertarians think and that you’ve figured out there are some here.
karl says “BTW Spain have 3 times as polices by person the number of the USA”
This statement is alos false. Spain has approx. 115,000 law enforcement employees or roughly 2.8 per 1,000. US has 970,000 law enforcement employees or roughly 3.2 per 1.00
Andrew,
you apparently missed the point of my first comment. As I don’t want to start a flaming contest on this blog, I’ll be out of here.
Does the “fact” that these inmates were dealers derive from their status as people who trafficked large amounts of drugs to many customers, or that they happened to be caught with a volume the law defines them as dealers for possessing? I shop at Costco, but I hardly consider myself a dealer of frozen cheeseburgers.
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