"Members of society
must obey the law
because they personally believe
that its commands
are justified."
JUDGE DAVID BAZELON Questioning Authority
"Petty laws breed great crimes."
OUIDA
1880
Dear Howard:
The area of Crime & Punishment that you seem to be keeping your eye on is the portion of it which is covered on the mainstream media.
Further research and independent thinking may yield understanding of the underlying sociocultural patterns being manipulated, by whom, and to what ends.
According to Mark Moore of Harvard University, as reported by the National Institute of Justice,
"Very large proportions of those arrested for street crimes such as robbery, burglary, and larceny are drug users. The addict's need for money to finance his habit and the mechanisms of addiction establish a link between drugs and crime. Insofar as drug use itself is illegal, society has linked drugs to crime directly. Any possession or use is, by definition, criminal conduct."
Declaring certain activities "criminal" has caused artificially inflated prices for the criminalized activities, thus guaranteeing real crime. If drugs were legalized and regulated, no drug user, even the most severely addicted, would have to spend more than $5 per day on drugs. As it is now, some people have $200, $300, $400 daily habits. To get $200 worth of drugs a day, one must be either (a) rich, (b) a doctor, (c) a thief, or (d) a drug dealer. Most end up, by default, at (c) and (d). In order to clear $200 a day, one must steal $2,000 a day in goods (fences pay about ten cents on the dollar) or directly rob enough people to accumulate $200 in cash.
The result: each addicted drug user becomes a one-person crime wave. It's not the drug that causes the crime; it's the prohibition of the drug. Having to come up with $200 per day might turn any of us into criminals. Five dollars a day: that's easy. A drug user could get that panhandling. He or she might even get a part-time job.
Some drug users make the money to pay the artificially inflated prices by selling drugs-in fairly large quantities. As I have pointed out before, these people are not too particular as to whom they sell: they can't afford to be. If children have the money, they sell to children. Because the drug underworld cannot depend on police protection or take disputes to civil courts, disagreements tend to be handled in an unpleasantly messy, highly criminal fashion.
http://www.pff.org/nationalreview/01july96/feature.html
ABOLISH THE DRUG LAWS?
EDITED BY WM. F. BUCKLEY JR.
THE issue of NATIONAL REVIEW dated February 12, 1996, gave the conclusion of the magazine that the time had come to revise our laws on drug trafficking. Seven writers contributed to the symposium. There were no differences among them on the primary findings. They were 1) that the famous drug war is not working; 2) that crime and suffering have greatly increased as a result of prohibition; 3) that we have seen, and are countenancing, a creeping attrition of authentic civil liberties; and 4) that the direction in which to head is legalization, whatever modifications in kind, speed, and variety commend themselves in study and practice.
MORE:
http://w3.ag.uiuc.edu:8001/Liberty/Tales/CrimeAndDrugWar.Html
http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/Issues/97-02 FEB/wardrugdis.html
http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/aint/208.htm
The largest criminals seem to be holding political office and/or bags and bags of money.
The media smoke 'n mirrors game over petty crime and the fear mongering and inaccurate statistics attendant to it are designed to hypnotically occupy the public consciousness .......
Dave. ~ Think for Yourself. Question Authority
~ Globalize Consciousness Localize Economies
Dave Hartley (808) 879-7997 personalpage: http://www.maui.net/~compudav interests:
Win.NT, Web Publishing, Homeopathy ~ Cranial/Sacral, Eckankar, Tao.
-----Original Message-----
From: Creating Educational Access [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, January 05, 1998 4:02 AM
To: SMTP@"[log in to unmask]".tdh.qntm.com
Cc: "[log in to unmask]"@SHRDNS.enet.qntm.com; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Law & Order
Jeff,
Crime & Punishment are one of those areas I keep an eye on as well and I've
listened to many versions of why what's happening is happening. Here's my
take. The reason crime is going down and prison populations are going up is
because we're finally putting the criminals into the jails. In Boston and NYC
the violent crime rates have gone way down due to cooperation between anti-gang
task forces, community support groups, the DA, and the Press. They started
cooperating when someone finally figured out that about 2% of the violent
criminals were responsible for about 80% of the crime. Good, bad, or
indifferent to various types of crime, Boston and NYC are now safer than they
were 5 years ago by a dramatic margin.
Bro Ho
P.S. in this highly emotional area I distrust any statistics that are not
overseen by people who tell us what they're counting, what they're not counting,
and what the ages of the populations they're counting are.
From: SMTP%"[log in to unmask]" 30-DEC-1997 07:36:42.13
Subj: Law & Order
Jeff reports (from Rachel's),
Crime rates have dropped each year for the past five years in the U.S.,
but the prison and jail populations have increased 7% each year since
1990, reaching a record-breaking total of 1.7 million in 1996.[6] The
cost of prisons and jails is $30 billion per year, or $17,650 per prisoner
per year.
[Jeff here: related figure, elsewhere in the same Rachel's: a previous
head of Coca-Cola retired with $1 billion in deferred stock options. That
$1 billion would've paid for 1500 jobs at $39,200/year for 17 years;
instead, the retired president lived another 17 years, comfortably, on
$58,800,000 per year.]
How can crimes go down and inmate populations rise? "The change in the
number of inmates tells us more about our feelings about crime and
criminals" and about changes in sentencing laws, than it does about crime
rates, says Franklin Zimrung, director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute
at University of California at
Berkeley.
For example, North and South Dakota are similar in their social, economic
and racial characteristics and they have similar crime rates. However,
North Dakota incarcerates 90 of every 100,000 citizens while South Dakota
imprisons 279 per 100,000.)
Federal crime statistics do not include drug offenses because there is
assumed to be no victim, and drug offenses are not expected to be reported
to the police. Nevertheless, drug
offenses are putting enormous numbers of people in prison --those arrested
for drugs jumped 27% between 1990 and 1995. More than half the increase
in inmates during the past 15 years is
accounted for by drug offenses. At least 25% of new inmates
today have never committed another crime besides a drug offense.
But not just anyone is going to jail. Users of crack cocaine make up the
bulk of those imprisoned for drug use. Crack is a poor person's drug;
powder cocaine is a recreation of the rich. Congress and 14 states have
passed laws making penalties for crack up to 100 times as great as
penalties for powder cocaine. As a result, African-Americans are much more
likely to go to
jail, and for longer periods, than whites. In 1993
African-Americans were seven times as likely to be incarcerated as whites.
An estimated 1471 African-Americans per 100,000
African-American citizens vs. 207 whites per 100,000 white
citizens were imprisoned at the end of 1993.[7]
California is setting the pace for the nation in imprisoning its citizens.
Like Florida, California now spends more, in total, on prisons than it
does on higher education. The California college system was once hailed
as the world's best public university system, but in the last 20 years,
California has built only one new college. Instead, it has built 21 new
prisons. The state now spends $6,000 per year for each college student,
but $34,000 per year for each prison inmate. In recent years, the
California college system has lost 10,000 employees, including many
faculty, while 10,000 new prison guards have been hired.[6]
===========
-- Jeff -- <[log in to unmask]>
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