Category Archives: Politics – General

The irrelevance of drug prohibition

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drug-warCheck out this interesting letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal yesterday from Robert Sharpe of Common Sense for Drug Policy:

What’s interesting about the drop in violence associated with crack cocaine is the irrelevance of drug enforcement. During the peak of the 1980s crack epidemic, New York City applied the zero-tolerance approach. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was actively smoking crack and the nation’s capital had the highest per capita murder rate in the country.

Despite very different leadership and law enforcement, crack use declined in both cities simultaneously. This parallel decline occurred when the younger generation saw firsthand what crack was doing to their older peers and decided for themselves that crack was bad news. Adding to what is already the highest incarceration rate in the world is not the answer to America’s drug problem. Diverting resources away from prisons into cost-effective, substance-abuse treatment would save both tax dollars and lives.

Too many laws, too many prisoners

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prison cellThe troubling overcriminalization of American life has been a frequent topic on this blog, so this excellent Economist article on the subject caught my eye.

After beginning with the example of the absurdly over-the-top local federal criminal case against local orchid importer George Norris, the article hammers home the stark statistics:

Justice is harsher in America than in any other rich country. Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult in 31 is under correctional supervision. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan. Overcrowding is the norm. Federal prisons house 60% more inmates than they were designed for. State lock-ups are only slightly less stuffed.

The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them.

In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100. Since then, the voters, alarmed at a surge in violent crime, have demanded fiercer sentences. Politicians have obliged. New laws have removed from judges much of their discretion to set a sentence that takes full account of the circumstances of the offence. Since no politician wants to be tarred as soft on crime, such laws, mandating minimum sentences, are seldom softened. On the contrary, they tend to get harder.

Of course, America’s dubious drug prohibition policy fuels a substantial part of the prison industrial complex. Check out how supposedly enlightened Massachusetts handles certain drugs:

Massachusetts is a liberal state, but its drug laws are anything but. It treats opium-derived painkillers such as Percocet like hard drugs, if illicitly sold. Possession of a tiny amount (14-28 grams, or ¬Ω-1 ounce) yields a minimum sentence of three years. For 200 grams, it is 15 years, more than the minimum for armed rape. And the weight of the other substances with which a dealer mixes his drugs is included in the total, so 10 grams of opiates mixed with 190 grams of flour gets you 15 years.

And don’t think for a moment that the ubiquitous law of unexpected consequences isn’t at play with regard to this mess:

Severe drug laws have unintended consequences. Less than half of American cancer patients receive adequate painkillers, according to the American Pain Foundation, another pressure-group. One reason is that doctors are terrified of being accused of drug-trafficking if they over-prescribe. In 2004 William Hurwitz, a doctor specialising in the control of pain, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for prescribing pills that a few patients then resold on the black market. Virginia’s board of medicine ruled that he had acted in good faith, but he still served nearly four years.

Here are previous posts dealing with the sad case of Dr. Hurwitz. And it gets worse:

There are over 4,000 federal crimes, and many times that number of regulations that carry criminal penalties. When analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offences on the books, they were forced to give up, exhausted. Rules concerning corporate governance or the environment are often impossible to understand, yet breaking them can land you in prison. In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (ie, he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased. [. . .]

“You’re (probably) a federal criminal,” declares Alex Kozinski, an appeals-court judge, in a provocative essay of that title. Making a false statement to a federal official is an offence. So is lying to someone who then repeats your lie to a federal official. Failing to prevent your employees from breaking regulations you have never heard of can be a crime. A boss got six months in prison because one of his workers accidentally broke a pipe, causing oil to spill into a river. “It didn’t matter that he had no reason to learn about the [Clean Water Act’s] labyrinth of regulations, since he was merely a railroad-construction supervisor,” laments Judge Kozinski.

One of the most encouraging moments in the most recent presidential campaign was then-candidate Obama’s willingness to address the overcriminalization problem by considering reform of America’s abhorrent drug prohibition policy.

One of the most disappointing aspects of Obama’s Presidency is his abandonment of that issue.

So it goes.

Why is Timothy Geithner still Treasury Secretary?

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Tim Geithner_3Iíve been asking that question for almost a year now (see also here).

Craig Pirrong is asking the same question after Geithnerís comments about American business to a group of reporters at breakfast this past week.

Meanwhile, Larry Ribstein reviews the politics of supposedly ìobjectiveî governmental regulation.

Frankly, given abysmal leadership provided by both the Bush and Obama Administrations, itís a testament to the resilience of American business that the economy hasnít tanked worse than it has.

Five myths about the death penalty

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Peculiar Institution2David Garland of New York University has a new book coming out later this year on a common topic on this blog, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Belknap 2010). He previews the book in this WaPo op-ed in which he addresses the following five myths of the death penalty:

1. The United States is a death-penalty nation.

2. The United States is out of step with Europe and the rest of the Western world.

3. This country has the death penalty because the public supports it.

4. The death penalty works.

5. The death penalty doesn’t work.

Check out the entire article.

And you thought the TSA was bad?

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intelligence agenciesThe silliness of the federal governmentís security theater policy has long been a common topic on this blog. But if you thought that the governmentís security theater jobs program is bad, check out this first installment of the Dana Priest-William Arkin/Washington Post series on the explosion in the hiring of government contractors and employees doing top-secret work for the governmentís intelligence agencies and programs:

After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.  .   .   . Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year ñ a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.  .  .  . Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

The first Post installment goes to detail the utter failure of the matrix of government intelligence resources to generate the quantity or quality of intelligence that would justify the billions of dollars being spent on them, while telling the all-too-familiar tale of Congress failing to require any meaningful accountability from the intelligence agencies.

All of which prompts one to wonder. We already know what happens when Wall Street crashes.

But with the explosive growth in the intelligence and security theater bureaucracies, as well as the growth in government that is just beginning in regard to Obamacare and the 2,000-plus page Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform legislation — and not to overlook the bloated bureaucracy that already exists to enforce the federal governmentís absurdly-complex tax laws ñ what happens when out-of-control government growth crashes?

The largest psychiatric hospital – America’s prisons

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An insightful Fault Lines segment examines how prison systems have become America’s largest psychiatric hospitals, with a substantial focus on the Harris County and Texas prison systems.

The Most Dangerous Man in America

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From First Run Features (H/T Rhetorics and Heretics).

The Politics of Ignorance

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beckolber_lgIf you tire of the seemingly endless demagogic blather that governmental officials and pundits often pass off as discussion of key societal issues, then be sure to read this insightful Will Wilkinson post on the politics of ignorance:

The problem [of ideologues elevating doctrine over wisdom] is heightened by the fact that the reading public generally enjoys ideologues more than three-handed scholars, and so the more ideological among ideologues find themselves with larger audiences and more numerous and remunerative opportunities to publicly opine.

What results is not so much an exercise in public reason as a smash-em-up reputation derby, where elites vie to increase their pull with the public and policymakers by disparaging ideological competitors. Moves in the reputation game take many forms, from sniffs of imperious condescension, to bald ìstupidest man aliveî name-calling, to self-congratulatory above-the-fray comments like this one. There is no reason to trust that this is a process through which truth unfolds.

In the absence of institutions that limit the scope of democratic authority over intractably complex policy questions, the best we can hope for is perhaps a tad more self-awareness among opinion elites about their tendencies toward dogmatism and for the rise of norms that do more to reward the honestly judicious and penalize highly-regarded doctrinaire assholes.

As noted earlier here and here, the instinct of most politicians and much of the mainstream media is to embrace simple ìvillain and victimî morality plays when attempting to explain a particular trouble.

Take, for example, investment loss. The more nuanced story about the financial decisions that underlie a failed investment strategy doesn’t garner sufficient votes or sell enough newspapers to generate much interest from the demagogues or muckrakers. That’s why we periodically endure witch hunts, such as the recent one demonizing speculators. Thatís also why it’s important that our leaders who are ignorant about the function of speculation in markets take a moment to understand its beneficial purpose.

Morality plays are comforting because they make it easy to identify and demonize the villains who are supposedly responsible for trouble. The truth is usually far more nuanced and complicated, but ultimately more rewarding to embrace.

Rational Optimism

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The%20Rational%20Optimist.jpgMatt Ridley supplies a dose of good end-of-the-week vibes with this article based on his new book, The Rational Optimist (Harper 2010):

When I set out to write a book about the material progress of the human race, now published at The Rational Optimist, I was only dimly aware of how much better my life is now than it would have been if I had been born 50 years before. I knew that I have novel technologies at my disposal from synthetic fleeces and discount airlines to Facebook and satellite navigation. I knew that I could rely on advances in vaccines, transplants and sleeping pills. I knew that I could experience cleaner air and cleaner water at least in my own country. I knew that for Chinese and Japanese people life had grown much more wealthy. But I did not know the numbers.

Do you know the numbers? In 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer. All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.

We invent new technologies that decrease the amount of time that it takes to supply each otherís needs. The great theme of human history is that we increasingly work for each other. We exchange our own specialised and highly efficient fragments of production for everybody elseís. The ëdivision of labourí Adam Smith called it, and it is still spreading. When a self-sufficient peasant moves to town and gets a job, supplying his own needs by buying them from others with the wages from his job, he can raise his standard of living and those he supplies with what he produces. [.  .  .]

So ask yourself this: with so much improvement behind us, why are we to expect only deterioration before us? I am quoting from an essay by Thomas Macaulay written in 1830, when pessimists were already promising doom:

ìThey were wrong then, and I think they are wrong now.î

Visiting a prison cell

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jail The troubling U.S. incarceration rate and the dubious governmental policy of overcriminalization have been frequent topics on this blog. The toll of the overcriminalization policy on citizens and their families is incalculable.

Part of the problem in modifying this destructive policy is that the constituency of current and former prisoners and their families is not powerful politically. But another aspect of the problem is that most well-meaning citizens who could make a difference on this issue politically have never experienced the hell that is most prisons in the United States. Itís human nature to avoid addressing even an important issue that one has never had to confront personally.

Thatís why this A Public Defender post is important ñ it provides penetrating insight into the destructive nature of our governmentís overcriminalization policy:

I sat in a prison cell yesterday.  .   .   .

There was a bed ñ a small bed ñ that was the length of the room. At the foot of the bed a metal toilet, with no cover. Just beyond that the heavy metal door, with a slit for a window. The door was maybe 3 feet wide, if that. At the head of the bed, if you were laying on your right side, youíd be about half a foot away from an ugly metal desk with holes that pretended to be drawers. This could not have been more than a foot long. The bed was flush with one wall. The desk with the opposite.

The bed looked hard, cold and dirty. And thatís it. This particular cell happened to have a window at the head of the bed. A window looking out onto nothing. Any future inhabitant of this particular cell would have it good. It was a single. Across the narrow passageway from this cell was another, identical in every respect except two: it was a double cell and there was no window. (Hereís a post I wrote a while ago about a different take on prisons in a foreign country.) [.  .  .]

I willed myself to stand there, though, for a minute. To look around at the bare walls, the bare desk, the dirty toilet and imagine someone ìlivingî there.

I even briefly closed my eyes and tried to picture myself there, day in and day out, for months, which turned into years, which turned into decades.

Would I survive? How does anyone? Would I give up and stop bathing, shaving, eating? Would I maintain my sanity or would I quickly decompensate? How long would it be before Iíd want to kill myself? [.  .  .]

People in cells are lucky, though. The next portion of the tour took me to the dorm-style housing. Which is nothing like any dorm youíve ever lived in. Imagine instead the makeshift MASH hospitals, or perhaps the busiest train station in your neighborhood at rush hour, except instead of standing, people are milling about a hundred bunk beds on that tiny platform.

There is no privacy, there is no solitude, there is no being left alone. You are part of a large crowd. You are in someoneís face and they are in yours. You are a collective. Day in and day out. You share your bedroom with 125 other people.

Leaving the prison, I asked my colleague: cell or dorm? Thereís no debate. Cell. Iíd rather lose my sanity by myself.

A truly civilized society would find a better way.