Criminal Justice – Page 26

We Never Learn….

Thanks to the magic of TIVO, Bob and I were able to watch the entire six hours of Ken Burns’ “Prohibition”–we just watched the last 2-hour episode last night. I defy anyone to watch this documentary without recognizing the parallels with our contemporary drug war; they practically jump out of the screen and punch the viewer.

Prohibition was one of those periodic efforts made by still-Puritan Americans to use the power of government to ensure the “good behavior” of their neighbors. (The Puritans, of course, get to define “good behavior.”) As we all know, it was a disaster, which is why it was the only Constitutional Amendment ever repealed. Crime and murder rates rose exponentially, corruption was rampant, enforcement was selective–and more people drank during prohibition than either before or after.

What is less often recognized is how significantly prohibition enabled the growth of the federal government’s infrastructure. Depending upon your point of view, that may be good or bad, but it’s ironic. As historians and political scientists have demonstrated, the “morality police” tend to be proponents of local control.

What is so discouraging about this exploration of our “great experiment” is that we have learned nothing. The only difference between alcohol and drug prohibition is that the former was constitutionalized. Otherwise, we are seeing precisely the same results. When a substance is forbidden, not only do people crave it, they are willing to spend more to obtain it, consistent with the risk involved. So we have more crime, more corruption, and (if experiments in countries like Portugal are any indication) more drug use.

At the end of the documentary, someone pointed to the obvious: when a substance is outlawed, anyone willing to break the law can get it. When it is legal, it can be regulated–the government can ensure that it isn’t adulterated with dangerous additives, that it is kept away from children, etc. As the noted libertarian Peter McWilliams once put it, “When was the last time you saw the owner of the local liquor store hanging around the schoolyard whispering “Hey, kid–just got in a new shipment of Stoli!”?

How many more billions of dollars must we waste, how many more lives must we ruin, how many more countries must we decimate before we re-learn prohibition’s lesson?/

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Doubting Evolution

I am a big believer in science, but I must admit that human behavior over the past couple of weeks has made me doubt evolution.

First, we had the appalling eruptions during GOP debates–first, audience applause when Brian Williams prefaced a question to Rick Perry by noting that executions in Texas during his tenure far exceeded those in any other state; and second, shouts of “yes, let them die” when Ron Paul was asked whether uninsured people should simply be allowed to die.

Now we have the repulsive right-wing reaction to the execution of Troy Davis.

Callers to conservative radio shows last night defended that execution by insisting that the family of the murder victim “deserved closure.” Presumably, closure can come only from the death of another human being. Now, I am not a supporter of the death penalty, for many reasons I won’t go into here, but even if one does support capital punishment, I cannot conceive of the “closure” that would come from proceeding with an execution where there is such substantial doubt of guilt. How can killing the wrong person provide justice or even retribution? How would executing a possibly innocent man be any different from the murder for which they are seeking vengeance?

Perhaps human evolution doesn’t always produce a capacity for compassion or empathy, but it should at least produce beings capable of a modicum of reason. These sickening displays of irrational blood-lust suggest that some among our human family not only haven’t evolved, they’ve regressed.

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Have I Got a Revenue Enhancement for You!

I’ve been pondering the arguments about how to reduce the national debt, and I have a proposal. Dump the drug war.

The fiscal consequences of our current policies are staggering. While other estimates have been as high as 88 billion, an economics professor at Harvard reported in 2005 that replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation similar to that used for alcohol would produce combined savings and tax revenues between $10 and $14 billion per year. Even that’s not chump change. (Estimates from a variety of sources are that marijuana prohibition costs U.S. taxpayers nearly $42 billion dollars a year in criminal justice costs and lost tax revenues alone. This is just from marijuana prohibition—not efforts to control harder drugs.) As of August 19th of this year, state and federal governments together had spent $25, 969,752,344 on an effort that has–as the AP recently reported–has failed to meet any of its goals. The federal government alone spends approximately 500 dollars a second on drug prohibition.

Then there are the opportunity costs. Indiana used to have a robust hemp industry. Hemp is an enormously versatile and useful product that cannot be smoked or used as a recreational drug, but our indiscriminate policies outlaw its growth. They also prohibit use of marijuana to alleviate the side effects of chemotherapy. And the drug war diverts desperately needed dollars from serious crime-control efforts and other government programs.Estimates are that the money spent annually on the drug war would pay for a million additional teachers.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition is an organization formed by law enforcement professionals–current and former police officers, sheriffs, prosecutors and judges. These are people who have seen the drug war up close and ugly, and their message is simple: it has been a costly disaster. Just as with America’s prior experiment with alcohol prohibition, the result has been policies that have created a set of perverse incentives that have made drug dealing so profitable that they outweigh the prospects of being caught. Last year the FBI reported that there is a drug arrest every 19 seconds in the US, and 82% of those were for simple possession. That isn’t surprising, since government estimates are that 47% of Americans over the age of 12 admit to using illegal drugs–mostly marijuana, which is no more harmful than those legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol.

There is a copious academic literature documenting the failure of American drug prohibition–and wide consensus on the magnitude of its social and human costs. There is also wide recognition that politicians of both parties are loathe to act on the basis of evidence when that evidence contradicts their ideology or (heaven forbid) threatens their electability by causing them to be seen as insufficiently concerned about law and order. On the other hand, the country’s current fiscal crisis may finally provide a rationale for doing what most students of the issue have long advocated: discard a policy that has never worked. Decriminalize, tax and regulate marijuana, and focus on treatment and prevention for those with genuine addictions. (Ironically, federal law does not distinguish between use and abuse: it simply declares that any use of a substance that has been declared illegal is a crime, no matter how sporadic or casual the use. This “zero tolerance policy” has cost us a fortune–on average, it costs $25,251 to incarcerate a federal prisoner for one year.) Surely, even the most rabidly anti-tax Republicans would not object to taxing another “sin.”

Over the past 30+ years, we have ignored the numerous books, scholarly studies and organizations advocating the repeal of drug prohibition. Perhaps the current focus on national financial issues can help us achieve both savings and sanity.

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Death and Taxes

These days, those of us who follow policy debates are suffering from overload: same-sex marriage, immigration policy, foreign policy—not to mention the re-emergence of pocketbook issues like collective bargaining rights—are generating lots of heat, if distressingly little light.

And then, of course, there are the perennial complaints about taxes.

Everyone, it seems, wants government to cost less–until someone suggests cuts to our particular sacred cows. In Washington, we see lawmakers eager to de-fund Planned Parenthood and NPR become livid when someone suggests cutting military spending. Here in Indiana, an eminently reasonable proposal by Governor Daniels and the Chief Justice to incarcerate fewer nonviolent offenders and save the billions of tax dollars that we would otherwise spend building additional prisons has been eviscerated by defenders of “law and order.”

In fact, the criminal justice system offers one of the best opportunities to save significant tax dollars, beginning with abolition of the death penalty.

People have different opinions about the morality of capital punishment, and I leave those arguments to ethicists and theologians. There are, however, some pretty compelling practical and fiscal arguments for abolition.

As a practical matter, years of scholarship have confirmed that capital punishment is not a deterrent. In 2009, states with the death penalty had murder rates of 5.2 per 100,000 residents; in states without, the rate was 3.9—a 35% difference. Police agree. In a recent poll, police chiefs ranked the death penalty last among ways to reduce violent crime; they also considered it the least efficient use of taxpayer money, and complained that it diverted money from more effective crime control measures.

Which brings us to the fiscal issues.

In 2010, Legislative Services analyzed capital punishment costs in Indiana, and determined that the average cost of a capital trial and direct appeal was 449,000–over ten times the 42,658 cost of a life-without-parole case. In California, taxpayers pay 114,000,000 more each year than it would cost to keep those same offenders imprisoned for life. In Kansas, capital cases are 70% more expensive than non-capital cases, even including the costs of lifelong incarceration. In Texas, a death penalty case costs three times what it would cost to imprison someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years.

Advocates of the death penalty often complain that the higher costs are a result of “interminable appeals,” but that isn’t actually true. Appeals do add costs, but a capital trial is very expensive. Cells on death row and extra staff cost more.

We could eliminate appeals and execute people immediately upon conviction. That would save money. Unfortunately, such a proposal raises another pesky problem we have with capital punishment—the fact that we convict innocent people. Since 1973, over 130 people have been released from death row because they were found to be innocent. These were not folks freed on a “technicality,” they were people wrongfully convicted.

One of those people will be in Indianapolis on April 14^th. Randy Steidl will speak at the IUPUI Campus Center at 7 p.m. about the 17 years he spent on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Randy comes from a law-abiding middle-class family; his brother is a retired State Trooper. His story is troubling, to say the least: there was evidence of the sort of police and prosecutorial misconduct that—more often than we might like to think—accompanies the rush to solve high-profile murders.

As Steidl says, “If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone.”

I guess that’s one of those “moral” arguments I said I wasn’t going to make.

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Pesky Evidence

I’ll admit to being one of the multitude of fans who have made shows like NCIS and CSI such hits. It isn’t that I don’t recognize how unrealistic they are—no publicly financed lab could afford such cutting-edge equipment even if someone invented it—but I love watching the search for hard evidence, and the characters’ willingness to abide by what that evidence shows even when the result is to exonerate some really unattractive suspect.

Wouldn’t it be nice if those we elect to make policy were similarly devoted to evidence-based decision-making?

In the real world, unlike the televised version, policymakers routinely disregard research that doesn’t match their ideological preferences. I’m not talking about a couple of studies where the results are ambiguous, or subject to conflicting interpretation. I’m talking about policies where the evidence is copious and expert consensus compelling. Global climate change is one such area; our incredibly expensive “drug war” is another.

Some years ago, I got a call from a teacher in northern Indiana who wanted to arrange a public forum on the pros and cons of our punitive drug policies. In private conversations, the Chief of Police, a local judge and the prosecutor had all told him that prohibition simply doesn’t work. Not one of them, however, would repeat those sentiments in public. My students who are police officers consistently tell me that alcohol—which is regulated but legal—is a much greater problem than marijuana, because people are more aggressive when they are boozed up than when they are zoned out.

The fiscal consequences of our current policies are staggering. In 2005, an economics professor at Harvard reported that replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation similar to that used for alcohol would produce combined savings and tax revenues between $10 and $14 billion per year. Estimates from a variety of sources are that marijuana prohibition costs U.S. taxpayers nearly $42 billion dollars a year in criminal justice costs and lost tax revenues. This is just from marijuana prohibition—not efforts to control harder drugs.

Estimates are that the money spent annually on the drug war would pay for a million additional teachers.

Other states have begun to rethink these policies. Fifteen states have legalized medical marijuana. Oakland, California has begun assessing a sales tax on marijuana sold in marijuana dispensaries.

I recently had a call from a group hoping to convince the Indiana legislature to revisit policies on medical marijuana. The caller asked what the evidence showed.

I told him that the evidence conclusively demonstrated two things: that the drug war is both costly and counterproductive, and that in politics—unlike television—evidence is irrelevant and ideology rules.

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