These two paragraphs lead me to believe that if the author had considered the rise of mandatory minimum sentences part of the war on drugs the headline of the paper might be different.
"The five means by which the War on Drugs can drive up incarceration
rates (or punishment more generally) considered in Part II are (1) the direct
incarceration of drug offenders, (2) the re-incarceration of all types of offenders
due to drug-related parole violations, (3) the impact of drug incarcerations
on prison admissions instead of prison populations, (4) the extent to
which prior drug offenses trigger repeat-offender enhancement, even for
non-drug crimes, and (5) the effects of large-scale drug arrests and incarcerations
on neighborhood social cohesion, and the connections between social
stability and incarceration. "
"The connection here between the War on Drugs, longer criminal
records, and increased prosecutorial aggressiveness is fairly straightforward.
Increased drug enforcement results in defendants with longer felony records
and prosecutors may be more aggressive against such defendants. They may
be less willing to plead down felonies to misdemeanor, or to drop cases
altogether; to divert to an alternative program, or to drop more serious
charges. They may also be more willing to select charges that carry
mandatory minimums even when there are viable alternate charges that carry
no minimum. Such harshness could reflect increasingly punitive attitudes on
the part of prosecutors, perhaps in response to rising crime rates from the
1960s to the 1990s, or to other political and social factors. Or it could be that
prosecutors have maintained a relatively constant approach toward charging
repeat offenders, but the number of arrestees with long records has grown,
thanks in part to drug-related convictions. Note, too, that prosecutors need
not be more aggressive just toward those with more convictions, but perhaps
also toward those only with more prior arrests, even if some of those arrests
never resulted in convictions."
Actually I think the article does address these points:
"For all the talk about drug incarcerations driving up prison populations, drug offenders comprise only 17% of state prison populations and explain only about 20% of prison growth since 1980."
"Perhaps drug incarcerations are relatively short but ultimately trigger much longer sentences for future non-drug crimes via repeat offender laws. The available data make it clear that prior drug incarcerations do not seem to play any important role in future non-drug incarcerations."
They also acknowledge that prior contact with the legal system owing to minor drug offenses might increase the probability that police will choose to arrest someone for a non-drug crime, etc. but that such effects are invisible to their approach (i.e. they may exist, but they can't tell from the data they have).
It does not seem to me that the authors have an agenda to excuse the "war on drugs" so much as fully understand the contribution of drug enforcement to our huge prison population.
Bear in mind that the 17-20% of prisoners who are in for drugs on their own would constitute the entire prison population based on incarceration rates before 1980.
If it's not (just) low level drug crimes, what is it? Is it the prison as poorhouse / cash cow model which has been exposed in Ferguson Missouri (and is common across the country?)
The first paragraph you quote was cut short in your summary. The rest of it is:
As noted above, despite the theoretical plausibility of all five, the data cautions against putting too much weight on any of them.
And then the author goes on debunking each of them:
While the first two theories — that drug incarcerations and drug-related parole violations drive growth — have received the most attention, they are also the easiest to debunk. and so it follow.
Note that the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (which imposed mandatory sentencing guidelines), and the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (which eliminated federal parole), came two years before legislation to increase punishments for drug-related crimes.
Similarly, it wasn't the drug war that led the way when states passed reforms limiting/eliminating parole or imposing life sentences for three strikes. In fact, most states don't include drug crimes within the scope of their three strikes laws.
For much of the 1980s, Michigan imposed a mandatory life sentence for possession of large amounts of hard drugs. Which isn't contrary to your point that the drug laws should be considered separately, but if the drug sentencing is independently harsh, it doesn't need the three strikes accelerator.
A famous comedian made a deal to avoid that sentence. One that promotes a family values image.
The prison population isn't a function of a bump in crime. The prison population shot up as the crime rate fell through the 90s. The paper concludes by asking a series of questions about why prosecutors got harsher even as the crime rate dropped.
At least one plausible explanation for this is that crime went down because the criminals were put in jail and this ended their criminal careers (either because they stayed in jail, or because jail scared them away from crime). Prosecutors and police saw this was successful and continued it, possibly (likely) past the point of optimality.
I don't know exactly how to prove/disprove this, or what data to look for, but it's at least a plausible narrative.
It also seems plausible to me that during a decades-long national freakout about crime, we overstaffed prosecutors offices, which then proceeded to find more work for themselves.
That is plausible. These two narratives are not even inconsistent with each other.
In fact, we might not even have (initially) overstaffed prosecutors offices; we might have had the right # to clean up the 80's, and simply maintained staffing levels when we should have reduced it. (Shrinking leviathon is hard.)
Though are you intending to suggest that crime wasn't as big a deal as it was perceived during our "decades-long national freakout"? I haven't investigated this and have no real opinion, I'm just curious.
Crime is definitely less of a big deal now than it was during the freakout. The money question is, were deliberate criminal justice intervention the reason why crime dropped, or were extrinsic factors (like lead toxicity or family planning services or improved education)? If it's the latter, we need to reevaluate the resources we allocate to the criminal justice system. Maybe: fewer prosecutors, more judges.
Well that's a nonsensical question to pose. First of all, harsh is subjective. Prosecutors don't dole out "harsh" sentences, they dole out longer or more restrictive sentences. To them, the sentence is not harsh because they're keeping innocent civilians safer by keeping criminals behind bars longer, or by making it easier to send potentially harmful people back to prison. Prison is no longer seen as a way to be penitent about one's actions: prison is now seen as a way to keep the bad away from the good.
The rate of crime may have dropped, but the kind of crime did not, and prison gangs certainly haven't diminished in size or scope. People seem to forget that going to prison is a way of life to many people. Keeping those people 'off the streets' is basically the prosecutor's primary role.
Huh? Harsh is not only objective but trivially easy to measure. As crime rates fell, the likelihood than an arrest would convert to a felony conviction rose. That's the opposite of the causality you'd want or expect: as the community gets safer, the criminal justice system should become less intrusive, not more.
Wouldn't a less intrusive justice system only involve itself where guilt is more severe and more certain, and thus see a higher rate of felony conviction per arrest (with a much lower arrest rate)?
There's an alternate explanation for that: that the harsher sentences made that population unable to commit further crimes by leaving them in prison. This could also be correlated with the rise in prison violence.
That would tend to make sense given that prison is not a deterrent, in the sense that studies have shown doesn't seem to make people less willing to commit crimes, whereas the state of being in prison certainly does restrict their ability to do so.
That would seem to make sense if the three strikes laws are as significant a factor in causing the increase in felony convictions as I've been lead to believe.
>Prosecutors don't dole out "harsh" sentences, they dole out longer or more restrictive sentences.
Prosecutors "don't dole" out sentences at all. Sentencing is one of the Judge's duties. The input prosecutors have in sentencing is less direct; aside from their actual performance in the trial, they also decide which and how many charges to file for indictment.
The problem it that theory is that the timing doesn't work out. Nixon first allocated money for the drug war in 1971 (as well as coining the term). The rise in crime started about a decade before that, and homicide rates had already doubled by 1970.
To figure out what caused the jump in crime you gotta look at what was happening in the 1950's and 1960's. Lots of things were. E.g. most U.S. cities saw their population peak in 1950, and saw an exodus of middle class people in the 1950's and 1960's.
Well sure, from a period starting just after WWII and culminating with the MLK riots, the whole country had been set up to both create and disenfranchise a new class of people: those connected to both the trade of illegal drugs and organized crime in general. Before, organized crime didn't necessarily involve the drug trade, but since then it has been synonymous. Drugs are the economic engine that powers the size and scope of the American prison population, and shapes the culture of people who are born to go to prison.
I don't think the timeline of that narrative makes sense. There were two major sets of milestones in the drug war: most drugs were heavily regulated or made illegal in the 1920's and 1930's. And modern drug law and the drug war was put into place in the 1970's. But crime started going up in 1960, decades after drugs were made illegal and a decade before the drug war. So how does "drugs" explain the rise in crime rates at that time?
Much has been written on the subject, but I don't think the drug war is a cause so much as it is a symptom of what happened. There was so much else happening that better fits the timeline. Steve Pinker, for example, blames rock & roll and young people: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--deciv....
The timeline is a well-understood series of events that developed pockets of economic depression, lack of education and above-average crime rates. Take Baltimore for example. Okay, it's probably far too extreme to be an average case, but it's the one I know the best.
After WWII, white southerners moved north in search of jobs, and were not happy to find a sizeable population of black people who were not normalized to the invisible and constant discrimination against black people in the south.
In the 1950s, desegregation and school integration was the final straw in a long discomfort with the growing black population in urban Baltimore, and white people began moving to the suburbs, speeding up their flight even more through the 1960s.
At the same time, heroin use in the city rose dramatically through the 1960s. A new class of violent drug dealers began to control the sale of drugs in the city. Burglaries rose tenfold and robberies rose thirtyfold from 1950 to 1970.
By 1968, the city was seriously deteriorating, with increase in crime and drug abuse, increased racial tension, and a total lack of support for the education or employment of the city's increasingly disadvantaged black citizens. When it was announced that MLK was assassinated, riots enveloped the city. Politicians blamed the people and not the conditions, white voters agreed, and a white exodus to the suburbs ensued. Over a period of 40 years the population in the city decreased by 200,000.
Drug use increased, jobs decreased, and the local economy basically tanked. Throughout this time, prison gangs were beginning to spring up and infiltrate vulnerable populations such as these. Kids grew up in predominately black, poor neighborhoods with high unemployment and high crime, and were stymied by a lack of easy access to a good education.
---
The drug war's primary negative effect on the population isn't that they're putting people in jail for drugs. It's that it effectively increased the price of drugs. This not only made competition more fierce, it developed a new class of criminal, and made it that much more necessary for addicts to commit crime in order to score drugs. Drug dealing was then able to supplant other low-income work (where it was available) as a more reliable source of income. Increased violence is a subsequent side-effect of all this, and thus the increase in incarceration.
---
To understand how deeply drugs (and the war on them) intersects with violent crime, gangs, impoverished black communities and the prison system, I highly recommend reading The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. It was written in 1997 but I can tell you it is still completely relevant today. The Wire (especially season 3) is basically a meditation on how the drug war has completely destroyed black communities like those in Baltimore, and how it perpetuates the cycle of an eventual life in and out of prison for many (if not most) of the city's black males.
You want to talk violent crime? There's fewer places in this country more violent than Baltimore. You can't talk about the prison system or violent crime in Baltimore without talking about the drug trade. As recently as 2013, over half of the 650 officers of the Baltimore City Detention Center were found to be smuggling contraband for the Black Guerrilla Family, a prison gang founded in 1966 in California. Reports from gang members show that even by 1996, they had essentially total control over the facility. They, along with the Crips, used the illegal drug trade in order to achieve power and influence enough to control officers working at the facility.
Finally, there's the more recent evidence that really puts things into perspective. In 2013, the city's chief of police noted how for "everyday people", crime had dropped, even though the murder rate was at an all-time high. What did he mean by that? Approximately 80 to 85 percent of the victims of violent crime were african-american males involved in the drug trade.
And homicide rates have skyrocketed every month since the most recent riots in Baltimore. The reason? So many pharmacies got robbed during the riots that it flooded the market with prescription drugs at prices up to ten times lower than they used to be, and rival gangs are fighting a war to dominate this new market while there's still excess supply.
Without (hopefully) detracting from your excellent points, a couple of points on tv series: 1) The Corner is also worked into a tv mini series[1] by the author -- and in case people are not aware - he also wrote "The Wire" -- which is a more dramatic treatment of the same material.
Your point about WWI and WWII are interesting -- I'd come to a similar realization, partly jolted by the (entirely fictional, as far as I know -- more so than The Corner, and probably The Wire too) tv series "The Peaky Blinders"[2].
It does seem entirely reasonable that combining unemployment with a number of young men with great skills at war, coupled with severe PTSD and no treatment or well-fare to speak of is likely to lead to violent gangs forming. I can't imagine the situation is helped by ready access to firearms.
More than anything, over the long term, the crime rate correlates with the proportion of the population that is males between, IIRC, the ages of about 15 and 25. The "crime wave" of the 1960s through 1980s was just the demographic bulge of the Post-WWII Baby Boom moving through that age bracket.
If you plot the homicide rate among people aged 18-24 you see that it spikes up to twice the normal level from the late '80s through the mid '90s. It nearly triples for teenagers over that time period.
So, you're saying that baby boomers caused a disproportionate increase in the rate of crime that no other generation before or since has caused, for no reason at all.
> So, you're saying that baby boomers caused a disproportionate increase in the rate of crime that no other generation before or since has caused, for no reason at all.
No, I'm saying that historically, variations in the proportion of the male population in the 15-25 age range produce variations in the crime rate that are bigger than the changes in those proportions (essentially, the concentration of people in that age range appears to affect the propensity to criminality; its not just that that age range is itself more prone to crime -- which it also is. One explanation is that the bigger that demographics influence is on the overall society, the more criminality is produced; fairly similar trends, at least as regards violence, are seen across societies, not just in the US.)
(And its not unique among generations in producting a crime spike like that; the Post WWI baby boom hitting that age range also corresponds to a peak crime period, though the peak was sharper and shorter, even compared to the shorter WWI baby boom period, than that of the Post WWII Baby Boom.)
Actually, the theory that lead pipes were a measure instigator of the fall of Rome is generally considered discredited by most historians. The Romans were even aware of lead poisoning (cf., Vitruvius who specifically mentioned lead pipes as "unwholesome").
"The five means by which the War on Drugs can drive up incarceration rates (or punishment more generally) considered in Part II are (1) the direct incarceration of drug offenders, (2) the re-incarceration of all types of offenders due to drug-related parole violations, (3) the impact of drug incarcerations on prison admissions instead of prison populations, (4) the extent to which prior drug offenses trigger repeat-offender enhancement, even for non-drug crimes, and (5) the effects of large-scale drug arrests and incarcerations on neighborhood social cohesion, and the connections between social stability and incarceration. "
"The connection here between the War on Drugs, longer criminal records, and increased prosecutorial aggressiveness is fairly straightforward. Increased drug enforcement results in defendants with longer felony records and prosecutors may be more aggressive against such defendants. They may be less willing to plead down felonies to misdemeanor, or to drop cases altogether; to divert to an alternative program, or to drop more serious charges. They may also be more willing to select charges that carry mandatory minimums even when there are viable alternate charges that carry no minimum. Such harshness could reflect increasingly punitive attitudes on the part of prosecutors, perhaps in response to rising crime rates from the 1960s to the 1990s, or to other political and social factors. Or it could be that prosecutors have maintained a relatively constant approach toward charging repeat offenders, but the number of arrestees with long records has grown, thanks in part to drug-related convictions. Note, too, that prosecutors need not be more aggressive just toward those with more convictions, but perhaps also toward those only with more prior arrests, even if some of those arrests never resulted in convictions."