A Frightening New Trend in America? by Nicolas Eyle
Nicolas Eyle is the founder and Executive Director of ReconsiDer, a non-profit organization that promotes alternatives to our current drug policy. You can find out more about ReconsiDer by going to http://www.reconsider.org/. This essay is included in the book THE NEW PROHIBITION, edited by Sheriff Bill Masters, published by Accurate Press in 2004.
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When an assistant district attorney recently told me that she doesn’t handle any of the county’s drug cases, I was taken aback. With drug cases filling our courts, how could she not handle them? “Let me clarify that,” she said, ” I don’t handle drug cases per se. I handle the homicides, assaults, robberies and child abuse cases, probably seventy-five percent of which are related to drug prohibition.”
Her point was clear: The drug war doesn’t reduce crime and violence. It breeds them. And the public is angry — but at the wrong people.
Shouldn’t we be angry at prohibition and those who create this forbidden fruit? At those who throw so many of our children in jail? Who take away their chance for financial aid for college? Who make our children grow up in a culture of violence created largely by the illegality of the drug trade? Who saddle them with felony convictions that will remain with them for their entire lives, long after they’ve stopped committing their “youthful indiscretions”? Who waste billions of our tax dollars each year on a policy that increases, instead of decreases, the harms caused by drug use amongst our children?
None of these punitive measures helps us. Yet, recent news stories make me think that this miss-directed anger is only growing stronger in America. Like young children lacking the communication and problem-solving skills necessary to resolving conflict, we lash out in anger when we think others are misbehaving.
A newspaper recently reported that when Ramon Eduardo Arellano-Felix, a Mexican drug lord, was arrested, law enforcement worried that the break up of this gang would result in a large-scale war, with drug cartels fighting over who will replace Felix in the drug smuggling business. They worried because they know this will happen. They know that whenever a drug dealer is taken off the street another takes his place. If police arrest a burglar there is one less burglar and burglaries go down for a while. If they arrest a drug dealer they simply create a job opening - and a turf battle ensues. Rival factions fight over control of the market and often innocent people get hurt in the resulting battle. What scares me is the realization that police know that the result of their drug busts will be loss of life — and no difference in the availability of drugs on the street, yet they continue to support prohibition.
Police officers have actually told me that after a major drug bust, they wait and see if it is followed by a series of murders. If it is, they consider this proof that they have indeed arrested the top dealers in that market and the smaller fish were fighting over who was to take over the business. So, while gun battles were raging in the streets, there was back-slapping and congratulations at the precinct house. The carnage among dealers proved they were doing their job!
As for the users - they don’t stop using when their source is killed. They find another source. The new source’s product is often different, perhaps a bit purer, or cut with something different. With no way to judge the strength or purity of their new supply there are frequently deaths from overdose. This, too, is predictable and, again, law enforcement knows this will probably happen.In other words, instead of preventing crime, they are knowingly fostering it.
Another recent news story indicates that this trend of focusing on punishment rather than prevention has spread to other areas of law enforcement.
Newspapers recently reported that two upstate New York towns are changing the look of the cars they used for traffic enforcement by painting them black and removing the roof lights. Why? So they could give more tickets. The cars wouldn’t be so noticeable and so police would have a better chance of catching speeders.
Why would these communities choose this approach, when the deterrent effect of a marked police car is well known? For years, police departments have parked empty police cars alongside roadways and seen traffic slow down immediately as drivers see the vehicle. Everyone was happy with the results; traffic slowed, drivers drove more cautiously, and streets were safer.
But, today, the goal isn’t to slow traffic. It’s to catch and punish speeders. A driver coming into town from the highway would slow down on his way through town if he saw a police car alongside the road. Now he speeds through town, and is chased and ticketed a mile or two down the road.
Which scenario is safer for the kids crossing the street?
Yet another news report indicated to me that punishment, not prevention, is our main goal. This story involved a teacher who saw a student drop a bag of marijuana on the floor at school. The teacher picked it up, returned it to the student, and reported the student to the principal. The result? The teacher was arrested for criminal sale of marijuana. Even though no money changed hands the act of giving the student the marijuana technically constitutes “sale”. What is the point here? To me, it’s clear that the local sheriff was determined to arrest somebody, even if there was clearly no intent to commit a crime.
These stories are reinforcing my belief that law-enforcement is creating dangers for the very people it’s supposed to “serve and protect”. Perhaps they’ve lost site of these goals in their rush to punish lawbreakers. But police are charged with providing for the public safety. That should be their primary concern.
Americans imprison more of their countrymen than any other country on the planet. We have about three-quarters of the world’s prisoners but only about one-fifth of the world’s population. We also lock them up for extraordinarily long periods of time. No other western country routinely hands out the 10 and 20 year sentences that are commonplace here. Mandatory- minimum sentences are common. New York State’s famous Rockefeller Drug Laws, for instance, call for a fifteen-year to life sentence for certain drug charges…with no parole.
The Eighth Amendment states that “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” It would seem obvious , based on the text of the amendment, that when fines are out of proportion to a crime, when they are “excessive,” they violate the Constitution yet these days the Supreme Court has upheld all sorts of extraordinarily punitive sentences as constitutional. Recently they threw out the appeals when it threw out the appeals of two men sentenced under California’s “three strikes and you’re out” law. One of the men received 25 years without parole for stealing golf clubs, and the other 50 years for stealing children’s videotapes. Two members of the majority in that decision, Scalia and Thomas, stated that they believe the Eighth Amendment prohibits “only extreme sentences that are ‘grossly disproportionate’ to the crime.” 25 years for shoplifting is apparently not considered grossly disproportionate to these judges.
Most criminologists will tell you that it is not the severity of punishment that deters crime, but the certainty of it. Yet we persist in pretending the opposite. Ask yourself, “If the fine for speeding increased from $100 to $200, would I stop speeding?” My guess is, you’d still speed. Why? Because you would be reasonably sure that you won’t get caught. If, however, a system existed whereby speeders were caught 99% of the time, you’d be far more likely to obey the law even, if the fine was only $50.
Try as they might, law enforcement has never caught more than a tiny fraction of drug dealers and users.
Thanks to advances in technology today’s law-enforcement officers can catch and punish drug users even when that user is not in possession of any illegal drugs. Drug testing detects the presence of marijuana in the body weeks after it’s use. The rise of the drug testing industry from being almost non-existent twenty years ago, to a multi-million dollar industry today is further evidence of America’s passion to punish.
Not content with charging law enforcement with punishing people for possession or sale of controlled substances, today American civilians can partake in this punishment frenzy. School administrators, factory managers, and store owners can, through the increasingly common practice of drug testing, detect those who have used marijuana in the past, and punish them as well. This is accepted because it hides under the mantle of “workplace safety”. Of course whether or not someone used marijuana , say, two weeks before the drug test, has nothing to do with safety… (the effects of the drug have long since worn off), still, we are able to intrude into a person’s personal life under the guise of workplace safety. Were we serious about safety we would insist on some form of impairment testing that showed whether or not the worker was fit for duty before he started work, not whether or not he may have consumed an illegal drug at some time in the past. Such testing devices exist and have proven to be effective tools at detecting not only illegal drug use, but a host of other causes of workplace accidents such as lack of sleep or alcohol impairment.
Ostensibly the rational for drug testing is to find the drug user and help him but the reality is quite different. Testing positive for drugs, regardless of one’s performance on the job or in school, typically results in some form of punishment. A schoolchild testing positive will usually be forced to cease all extra-curricular activities after school ( giving him more time to hang around the street with his drug using friends). The theory is that the punishment will deter him from using drugs. Pre-employment drug screening ensures a job applicant won’t be hired if the test comes back positive. Now, even the occasional, recreational user of marijuana is forced to become an unemployed, poor, drug user who can’t get work and may have to turn to robbery and even violent crime to survive. How this is supposed to help ensure the public’s safety is not clear to me. What is clear that this fits into the punishment trend.
Catching someone in the commission of a crime is not enough either. Police still entrap citizens daily. Female officers dress in provocative clothes and walk the streets waiting for some unsuspecting male to proposition them so they can arrest them. Undercover officers talk people into selling them drugs so they can arrest them later. Sometimes these set-ups are so outrageous that they are thrown out in court, but this is the exception to the rule. A recent case involved officers not only urging someone to buy drugs for them, but even providing him with money to do so. He agreed, used the officer’s money to make the buy, and was promptly arrested. In another case in New York City, when an innocent man pushed away and undercover officer who accosted him on the street and was badgering him to buy drugs, he was shot and killed. Remember, these people are only guilty of committing consensual crimes. There is no complainant. Still we find the need to go to these extraordinary lengths to catch and punish people.
Perhaps this alarming trend toward punishment at all costs is sparked by our inability to eliminate or vastly reduce drug sales and use. Perhaps this frustration causes us to strike out in anger. We seem to get some sort of satisfaction in knowing that, even though the behavior has not ceased, some of the perpetrators are suffering.
But our war on drugs is destroying far more lives than the drugs themselves do. Families are destroyed as a result of parents being sent to prison for drug possession. Almost two million American children have one or both parents in prison. Parents doing prison time for drug possession don’t generally make good parents. They’re not there. Kids grow up in broken homes, look for easy money, get into trouble with the law. Children grow up neglected at home and roaming desolate neighborhoods only to resort to crime to survive.
Houses are destroyed in the course of drug raids. Countless inner-city homes now sit, abandoned, because of the damage caused by narcotics officers and SWAT teams as they carried out a drug raid. These houses often drop off the tax roles and become host to squatters and addicts until they burn down or are torn down by the city. Entire neighborhoods, even entire cities are destroyed by this breaking up of families and houses. All this destruction and the drugs are still there, cheaper, purer, and more available then ever. Needless to say, these neighborhoods become breeding grounds for criminals.
Perhaps we see these problems as insoluble. Perhaps, after generations of our nation’s leaders telling us to do what they say and we’ll win the war on drugs, we’re resigned to it. “Nothing has worked,” we’re told, “We need to get tougher.” But we’ve have only tried this one approach - prohibition — and that, as we should have learned when we prohibited alcohol, only brings violence. Alcohol prohibition was not repealed because Americans suddenly decided they wanted to drink. It was repealed because of the dramatic increases in crime and violence so obviously tied to it. With its repeal, repealed crime dropped steadily until the start of our current drug war, when it began rising rapidly.
To change our course will be difficult. It involves admitting we made a mistake, something that’s very hard for human beings to do. It’s easier to continue doing what we’ve always done. To point fingers at others, and say that “THEY” are causing the problem. That “THEY” cause all the crime. That “THEY use drugs. And so “THEY” must be punished.
There is a blood-lust in America today. A desire to punish those who offend, no matter what the cost. Punishment, not safety, seems to be our goal. But do traffic police sneaking around in unmarked cars really make our streets safer? Do police scanning houses from the air with heat sensors to detect marijuana growers really make our neighborhoods safer?
Over 170 years ago, Sir Robert Peel, the founder of modern policing, said “the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.”
Peel’s lesson is lost on us today, as police departments, district attorneys and politicians brag about soaring arrest statistics and conviction rates, and foster a climate of violence.
A nice, visible police force deters crime. A marked police car parked under a streetlight slows traffic. A friendly uniformed cop walking the beat ensures orderly streets. Isn’t that what we really want?
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