Resolved: The illegal use of drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not of criminal
justice.
Aff
CJ Focus Bad
Criminal justice approach prevents public health from being effective
New York Times Editorial Board ’18 (If Addiction Is a Disease, Why Is Relapsing a Crime?, May 29,
2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/opinion/addiction-relapse-prosecutions.html)
The prosecution’s counterargument — that the disease model of addiction is far from settled science — is weak. The
National Institute
on Drug Abuse, the American Medical Association and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, which is the final authority on psychiatric conditions that qualify for insurance
reimbursement, all define addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disorder that, like diabetes and heart
disease, is caused by a combination of behavioral, environmental and biological forces. The prosecution’s
argument is also somewhat beside the point, because it is clear that relapses are common in people struggling to
overcome addiction, whether one considers it a disease or not; specialists say that most opioid addicts
relapse an average of five to six times before achieving full sobriety. It is fair to say, as prosecutors and several briefs
filed in the case do, that people who suffer from substance use disorders are not wholly unable to choose to abstain from drug use. Most
addicts do, after all, manage to refrain from using in any number of public places, in the course of any given day. But their
ability to
choose rationally and consistently is still impaired, by both brain changes caused by chronic substance
use and the sheer force of addiction itself. “It’s not that they don’t have free will,” says Mark Kleiman, a professor of public
policy at New York University. “It’s that they are exerting that will against such a colossal force.” It’s also true that
addicts can and do respond to incentives. But the balance of evidence suggests that carrots work far better than
sticks, and that in any case, the particular stick of jail time thwarts the treatment process. “Our patients are
far less likely to talk honestly about their relapses and their struggles with recovery if they think it’s
going to land them in jail,” says Sarah Coughlin, a social worker and addiction specialist in Charlestown, Mass. “It puts us in a tough
spot, because it breeds mistrust.” It also breeds fear: As The Boston Globe reported, one woman committed suicide in the bathroom of
a Lowell, Mass., drug court after she watched at least 23 of her 41 fellow probationers get sentenced to jail for relapses and other violations,
and after she became convinced that she would soon be sentenced as well. Of course, criminalizing
relapse isn’t the only
absurdity that exists at the intersection of drug addiction, criminal justice and public health. As a recent
Times article explained, states across the country are enacting laws that allow for homicide charges against
just about anyone connected to an overdose death, even if that person is also suffering from
addiction. The irony is both dark and profound: Only in death do drug users become victims. Until
then, they are criminals. In addition, a vast majority of American prisons deny opioid addicts access to
medication-assisted therapy, or MAT, which uses Food and Drug Administration-approved medications that can relieve opioid
cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Most addiction specialists say MAT is far and away the most effective treatment for opioid use disorder.
Anti-MAT policies have a number of unconscionable effects. They mean that incarceration
necessarily disrupts a promising
treatment before it has time to work. They also force addicts who are in treatment but faced with
incarceration to rapidly and dangerously taper off serious medications. And they increase the risk of postincarceration overdose deaths. “A lot of the overdoses that lead to homicide charges occur upon release from jail,” says Josiah Rich, a Rhode
Island doctor who treats addiction in the prison system. A study by Dr. Rich and his colleagues found that providing MAT to inmates suffering
from addiction could reduce such deaths by more than 60 percent. Policies
that punish relapse with jail time and keep
sufferers from proven treatments are part and parcel of a nearly 50-year war on drugs, predicated almost
entirely on criminalization, that no reasonable person would say is working. It costs about $33,000 a year to imprison
someone for a nonviolent drug offense and $6,000 to treat someone with MAT. A ruling in Ms. Eldred’s favor
would mark a positive step toward rethinking this strategy.
Criminal justice model bad-- $1 trillion costs, hasn’t curved demand, wrecking
communities
Neill 14 (Katharine A. Neill, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Public
Administration at Old Dominion University. “Tough on Drugs: Law and Order Dominance and the
Neglect of Public Health in U.S. Drug Policy,” World Medical and Health Policy 6(4): 375-394.)
The punitive approach towards drugs has had consequences. Some estimates put the cost of the War
on Drugs at approximately $1 trillion (Branson, 2012). Despite the resources directed towards pursuing drug offenders, the
drug war has done little to curb supply or demand of drugs (Meier, 1994; Tonry, 1994). The consequences for
minority populations have been particularly severe. While African Americans make up 14 percent of the
drug user population, they account for 37 percent of drug arrests and 56 percent of the state inmate
population convicted of a drug offense (Mauer & King, 2007b). The large number of imprisoned minorities
has damaged community structures. High rates of incarceration for black males have resulted in
greater concentration of disadvantage, as families are separated, divorce rates increase, and
employment and education become further out of reach (Gottschalk, 2008).
Criminal justice model bad—spills over internationally to produce violence
Neill 14 (Katharine A. Neill, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Public
Administration at Old Dominion University. “Tough on Drugs: Law and Order Dominance and the
Neglect of Public Health in U.S. Drug Policy,” World Medical and Health Policy 6(4): 375-394.)
U.S. drug policy also has international implications. The United States is the world’s largest consumer
of illegal drugs, most of which are produced outside the country. One mission of the drug war has been to reduce
supply from abroad. The pressure the United States has placed on other governments to pursue drug crime,
coupled with high demand for drugs in the United States, has resulted in extreme violence in
producing countries where rival groups compete in the lucrative black market in drugs (Harp, 2010). As
long as the United States maintains its current punitive approach to drugs, the violent consequences
in producing countries will continue . The theoretical discussion below is followed by a historical analysis of U.S. drug policy that
is placed in the context of the policy design framework. This focus is intended to provide greater understanding of current drug policy.
Empirics
Colombia proves—social framing is key to reduce harms—criminalization fails to curb
supply
Mahtab 18 (Moyukh Mahtab is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star, “Drug abuse must be
treated as a public health issue, not a war,” Oct 31, 2018
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/society/news/drug-abuse-must-be-treated-public-health-issuenot-war-1653889)
Another cue on what might be possible solutions comes from Colombia, home to the infamous drug lord Pablo
Escobar. Following the Philippine president's string of extra-judicial killings of drug dealers, a former president of Colombia
echoed similar misgivings from his experiences of dealing with the drug trade. Pointing to the easy lure of crowd
appeasement, César Gaviria, in an op-ed in the New York Times, wrote, “Taking a hard line against criminals is always
popular for politicians. I was also seduced into taking a tough stance on drugs during my time as president…I also discovered that the
human costs were enormous. We could not win the war on drugs through killing petty criminals and
addicts. We started making positive impacts only when we changed tack, designating drugs as a social
problem and not a military one,” (“President Duterte Is Repeating My Mistakes”, February 7, 2017). It seems certain that
without tackling the key social issues which fuel the demand for narcotics, no amount of effort to curb
supply will work. Policy decisions to treat addiction as a disease, helping users through rehabilitation,
and using targeted awareness towards groups most likely to be abusers are far more likely to
succeed. Criminalising possession only pushes users away from seeking help. Incarceration or deaths
of low-level dealers do little to dismantle the organised nature of the trade—and it is a lucrative trade
everywhere, accompanied by involvement of politicians and law enforcement officials who have their hands in the pie.
Netherlands—free distribution of heroin solved deaths (also Switzerland, Germany,
UK)
Glaser 18 (Plain Dealer Travel editor Susan Glaser visited Amsterdam in mid-May. During her time
there, she toured one of the city's heroin-assisted treatment clinics, talked with director Ellen van den
Hoogen and interviewed patient Frank Paauy, “Dutch cut overdose deaths by dispensing pure heroin,”
Jul 15, 2018
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/07/in_amsterdam_the_government_pr.html)
AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands - On a quiet alley in east Amsterdam, a security guard stands watch outside a brick office building, which 75 men
and women visit twice a day to smoke or shoot up government-funded heroin. Public-health
experts in the Netherlands say
free distribution is one reason that drug-related deaths are far less common than in the United States.
The program also has reduced crime and improved the quality of life for many users, according to Ellen van
den Hoogen, who runs the clinic. Is it an answer for the United States, where the opioid epidemic continues to claim more than
100 lives every day? Maybe it should be, said van den Hoogen. "It's been an enormous success. I think it would work elsewhere."
Indeed, it has worked elsewhere. The Netherlands program started in 1998, modeled after a similar, successful
effort in Switzerland. Several other European countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom, have adopted
the model as well. The concept is rooted in several key ideas: * Drug addiction, for some, should be
treated as a chronic disorder, not a condition that can be "cured," and may be best treated with supervised drug use in a clinical
setting. * The goal of treatment doesn't have to be the complete cessation of drug use: It can be the
reduction of criminal activity and the improvement of physical and mental health. * Public health
policies should be determined by pragmatism, not morality. Only the most hardened drug abusers qualify for the
program in the Netherlands: They must be at least 35 years old, regular heroin users for at least five years, and repeatedly unsuccessful in other
treatment efforts, including methadone-maintenance therapy. It's a last-resort option. "It's not a program that is meant to help you stop,"
acknowledged van den Hoogen. "It keeps you addicted."
Netherlands proves—free heroin leads to less addiction and better health
Glaser 18 (Plain Dealer Travel editor Susan Glaser visited Amsterdam in mid-May. During her time
there, she toured one of the city's heroin-assisted treatment clinics, talked with director Ellen van den
Hoogen and interviewed patient Frank Paauy, “Dutch cut overdose deaths by dispensing pure heroin,”
Jul 15, 2018
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/07/in_amsterdam_the_government_pr.html)
Walters is no fan of current U.S. drug policy, but he doesn't think that government-supplied heroin is the answer. Instead of giving people
heroin, he argued, "Do real treatment, do real outreach." Peter
Blanken, a senior researcher with the Parnassia
Addiction Research Centre in Rotterdam, believes that heroin-assisted treatment is "real treatment."
His research found that approximately 1 in 4 participants makes what the program considers a "complete
recovery," including better health and cessation of illegal drug use and excessive alcohol consumption.
Some participants, he added, do stop using heroin completely , although that is not the goal of the program and those
numbers are not tracked.
Netherland proves—drugs can still be illegal but a public health model decreases use
Glaser 18 (Plain Dealer Travel editor Susan Glaser visited Amsterdam in mid-May. During her time
there, she toured one of the city's heroin-assisted treatment clinics, talked with director Ellen van den
Hoogen and interviewed patient Frank Paauy, “Dutch cut overdose deaths by dispensing pure heroin,”
Jul 15, 2018
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/07/in_amsterdam_the_government_pr.html)
European heroin use decreasing Back in Amsterdam, Ellen van den Hoogen corrects a visitor who refers to heroin as "legal" in the Netherlands.
"It's not legal here," she said. There is still an illegal heroin market in the country, though it is much smaller than it used to be.
Critics who
feared that providing free heroin to people with addiction would encourage abuse have been proven
wrong, she said. In fact, heroin use is way down in the Netherlands. "That's like saying that giving people condoms
encourages sex," she said. "Or that people will use heroin because you give them a clean needle." According to Dutch researcher
Blanken, the number of people addicted to heroin in the Netherlands has declined significantly in the
past two decades, from as many as 29,000 in the late 1990s to as few as 14,000 today. Admittedly, the Netherlands' struggles with
heroin, which date back to the counterculture movement in the 1970s and '80s, is much different from the epidemic that has overtaken the
United States. The overuse of prescription pain medication has not been a problem in Europe the way it has in North America. In the
Netherlands, heroin addicts are almost all over age 50. Young people know it's dangerously addictive, and stay away, said van den Hoogen.
Amsterdam's heroin-assisted treatment program, housed at two municipal health clinics, is down to just 145 participants. "We have vacancies,"
she said. And she's fine with that.
Public health-driven policy reduces drug-related harm—Netherlands proves
Soda 13 (Christopher Soda is an intern with the Drug Policy Alliance, “America, Take Note: Three
Lessons the Netherlands Learned After Decades of Evolving Its Drug Policy,” Oct 6, 2013,
http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/america-take-note-three-lessons-holland-learned-after-decadesevolving-its-drug-policy)
Commitment to public health-driven drug policy contributes to reduction of drug-related harm. Much
is to be gained by retreating from the status quo. The Netherlands gained control of their hard drug problem in a
couple decades and now boast one of the lowest rates of hard drug use in the European Union because of
honest education and government information, and have the healthcare system to take care of the now aging addicts.
Also, the “Netherlands
consistently features low prevalence of HIV among drug users, reads the Introduction to
the OSF report, “cannabis use among young people on par with the European average and a citizenry that has generally been
spared the burden of criminal records for low-level, non-violent drug offenses.” The wheels of change have
been set in motion in the U.S. however there is a lot of inertia still to overcome. Doubts will persist and the same banal arguments will be
voiced from those urging we continue to do more of the same. Profits may not be an immediate benefit of a non-criminal, public health
approach to drugs, but we
have to ask ourselves what kind of value systems we stand by: violence, and
profiting at all costs, even if it’s from sick or incarcerated people or promoting compassion, peace and
safety, and the health and mental well-being of individuals?
AT: decrim increases use—no it doesn’t—Portugal and netherlands proves
Soda 13 (Christopher Soda is an intern with the Drug Policy Alliance, “America, Take Note: Three
Lessons the Netherlands Learned After Decades of Evolving Its Drug Policy,” Oct 6, 2013,
http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/america-take-note-three-lessons-holland-learned-after-decadesevolving-its-drug-policy)
These are three chief lessons the Netherlands learned after decades of evolving drug policy:
Decriminalization doesn’t increase drug use . Although a favored argument by those who hail the deterrent from
criminalization, decriminalization fueling an increase in drug usage isn’t consistent with the results of
countries that have actually decriminalized drugs. Based on a paper by Cato Institute on Portugal’s
decriminalization, it was found “In almost every category of drug, and for drug usage overall, the
lifetime prevalence rates in the pre-decriminalization era of the 1990s were higher than the postdecriminalization.” It should be underscored this includes a decrease in drug use among the two critical age
groups (13-15 and 16-18) of teens, an important statistic since these are the formative years for brain development and a primary
concern from those who claim tolerant drug laws will equate with increased usage among young people. It seems that more tolerant
laws coupled with honest education is proving to be the way to go. Studies regarding
decriminalization in the Netherlands have echoed Cato’s findings about usage not increasing.
Netherlands was a success
Moskos ’08 (Peter, former Baltimore City Police Officer, now associate professor in the Department of
Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is on
the faculty of the City University of New York's Doctoral Programs in Sociology and a Senior Fellow of
the Yale Urban Ethnography Project. Moskos graduated from Princeton (AB) and Harvard (PhD), So I was
battling the Drug Czar, https://www.copinthehood.com/2008/07/so-i-was-battling-drug-czar.html
Less use. Regulation can reduce drug use. In two generations, we've halved the number of cigarette smokers not
through prohibition but through education, regulated selling, and taxes. And we don't jail nicotine addicts . Drug
addiction won't go away, but tax revenue can help pay for treatment. The Netherlands provides a
helpful example. Drug addiction there is considered a health problem. Dutch policy aims to save lives
and reduce use. It succeeds: Three times as many heroin addicts overdose in Baltimore as in all of the
Netherlands . Sixteen percent of Ameri-cans try cocaine in their lifetime. In the Netherlands, the figure
is less than 2 percent. The Dutch have lower rates of addiction, overdose deaths, homicides, and
incarceration. Clearly, they're doing something right. Why not learn from success? The Netherlands decriminalized
marijuana in 1976. Any adult can walk into a legally licensed, heavily regulated "coffee shop" and buy or consume top-quality weed without fear of
arrest. Under this system, people in the Netherlands are half as likely as Americans to have ever smoked
marijuana.
Since it decriminalised all drugs in 2001, Portugal has seen dramatic drops in
overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime.
Ferreira ’17 (Susan, Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?,
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasntthe-world-copied-it)
In 2001, nearly two decades into Pereira’s accidental specialisation in addiction, Portugal became the first country to decriminalise the
possession and consumption of all illicit substances. Rather than being arrested, those caught with a personal supply might
be given a warning, a small fine, or told to appear before a local commission – a doctor, a lawyer and a social worker – about
treatment, harm reduction, and the support services that were available to them. The opioid crisis
soon stabilised, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis
infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates. HIV infection plummeted
from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015. The data
behind these changes has been studied and cited as evidence by harm-reduction movements around the globe. It’s misleading, however, to
credit these positive results entirely to a change in law.
America’s criminal justice approach to drugs has resulted in more deaths than died in
Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined.
Kristoff ’17 (Nicholas, NYT columnist, winner of two Pulitzers, How to Win a War on Drugs, Portugal
treats addiction as a disease, not a crime,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/sunday/portugal-drug-decriminalization.html)
LISBON — On a broken-down set of steps, a 37-year-old fisherman named Mario mixed heroin and cocaine and carefully prepared a
hypodermic needle. “It’s hard to find a vein,” he said, but he finally found one in his forearm and injected himself with the brown liquid. Blood
trickled from his arm and pooled on the step, but he was oblivious. “Are you O.K.?” Rita Lopes, a psychologist working for an outreach program
called Crescer, asked him. “You’re not taking too much?” Lopes monitors Portuguese heroin users like Mario, gently encourages them to try to
quit and gives them clean hypodermics to prevent the spread of AIDS. Decades
ago, the United States and Portugal both
struggled with illicit drugs and took decisive action — in diametrically opposite directions. The U.S.
cracked down vigorously, spending billions of dollars incarcerating drug users. In contrast, Portugal
undertook a monumental experiment: It decriminalized the use of all drugs in 2001, even heroin and cocaine, and unleashed a major
public health campaign to tackle addiction. Ever since in Portugal, drug addiction has been treated
more as a medical challenge than as a criminal justice issue. After more than 15 years, it’s clear which
approach worked better . The United States drug policy failed spectacularly, with about as many
Americans dying last year of overdoses — around 64,000 — as were killed in the Vietnam,
Afghanistan and Iraq Wars combined . In contrast, Portugal may be winning the war on drugs — by
ending it. Today, the Health Ministry estimates that only about 25,000 Portuguese use heroin, down from 100,000
when the policy began. The number of Portuguese dying from overdoses plunged more than 85 percent before rising a bit in the
aftermath of the European economic crisis of recent years. Even so, Portugal’s drug mortality rate is the lowest in
Western Europe — one-tenth the rate of Britain or Denmark — and about one-fiftieth the latest number for the U.S.
The criminal justice approach makes everything worse – people are scared to call 911
because of fears of an arrest—something a public health approach would avoid.
Kristoff ’17 (Nicholas, NYT columnist, winner of two Pulitzers, How to Win a War on Drugs, Portugal
treats addiction as a disease, not a crime,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/sunday/portugal-drug-decriminalization.html)
The public health approach arises from an increasingly common view worldwide that addiction
is a chronic disease, perhaps
comparable to diabetes, and thus requires medical care rather than punishment. After all, we don’t just
tell diabetics, Get over it.
My sense from observing the hearings and talking to users is that the Dissuasion Commission isn’t terribly
effective at dissuading. How successful could a 15-minute session be? Then again, criminal
sanctions also seem ineffective at
discouraging drug use: When scholars look at the impact of crackdowns, they find there’s typically
little impact. In the first year or so of decriminalization in Portugal, there did seem to be the increase in drug use that critics had predicted.
But although the Portuguese model is often described simply as decriminalization, perhaps the more important part is a public health initiative
to treat addiction and discourage narcotics use. My take is that decriminalization on its own might have led to a modest increase in the use of
hard drugs, but that this was swamped by public health efforts that led to an overall decline. Portugal
introduced targeted
messaging to particular groups — prostitutes, Ukrainians, high school dropouts, and so on. The Health Ministry
dispatched workers into the most drug-infested neighborhoods to pass out needles and urge users to
try methadone. At big concerts or similar gatherings, the Health Ministry sometimes authorizes the testing of users’ drugs to advise them
if they are safe, and then the return of the stash. Decriminalization makes all this easier, because people no longer fear arrest. So how
effective are the methadone vans and prevention campaigns? I thought I’d ask some real experts:
drug dealers. “There are fewer customers now,” complained one heroin dealer in the gritty Lumiar
neighborhood. Another, Joaquim Farinha, 55, was skeptical that methadone was costing him much business. “Business is still pretty good,” he
said, interrupting the interview to make a sale to a middle-aged woman. (Portugal’s drug market is relatively nonviolent and relaxed partly
balance, the evidence is that drug use stabilized or
declined since Portugal changed approaches, particularly for heroin. In polls, the proportion of 15- to
24-year-olds who say that they have used illicit drugs in the last month dropped by almost half since
decriminalization. Decriminalization also made it easier to fight infectious diseases and treat
overdoses. In the U.S., people are sometimes reluctant to call 911 after a friend overdoses for fear of
because of another factor: Handguns are tightly controlled.) On
an arrest; that’s not a risk in Portugal . In 1999, Portugal had the highest rate of drug-related AIDS in
the European Union; since then, H.I.V. diagnoses attributed to injections have fallen by more than 90
percent and Portugal is no longer at the high end in Europe.
criminal justice approach fails - Addiction
The criminal justice approach fails to understand the nuances of recovery and
addiction.
Lantigua-Williams ’16 (Juleyka, former staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covered criminal
justice, Declaring Addiction a Health Crisis Could Change Criminal Justice,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/addiction-health-crisis-criminal-justice/508409/)
For the first time ever, a sitting U.S. surgeon general has declared substance abuse a public-health crisis. “It’s
time to change how we view addiction,” Vivek Murthy said in a statement last week, which was accompanied by a lengthy report on the issue.
“Not as a moral failing, but as a chronic illness that must be treated with skill, urgency and compassion. The way we address this crisis is a test
for America.” Murthy’s statement is a major victory for those advocates who have long hoped addiction would be viewed through a physicaland mental-health lens. But this new approach—if it were to become widespread—could also profoundly impact the criminal-justice system,
where addicts often end up. Murthy’s report provides an update on drug and alcohol users in the country. According to its figures, in the last
year alone, about 48 million Americans used or abused illegal or prescription drugs and 28 million drove under the influence. It also details how
21 million Americans currently suffer from addiction—or as the medical community refers to it, substance-use disorder.
Currently, over 300,000 inmates sit in state and federal prisons for convictions related to drugs, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.* A
recent study estimates that of the nation’s more than 2 million inmates, 65 percent “meet the criteria for substance-abuse addiction.” These
numbers have severe ramifications in the criminal-justice system. Scores of
those Americans were among the 11 million
admissions to local and county jails last year. Tens of thousands lost their driving privileges due to strict state guidelines
against driving drunk. Millions served time, were put on probation, entered rehabilitation programs in exchange for reduced
sentences, or became further entrenched in the justice system due to repeated violations. Health professionals and recovery experts, including
social psychologist and University
of California, Irvine, criminologist Mona Lynch, agree that the criminal-
justice system is not the place to treat addiction. According to Lynch, the existing system cannot deliver adequate services
and that attempting to integrate health care into the criminal-justice system can lead to negative consequences. “We need to have the
investment in public health and treatment programs,” said Lynch, who wrote a book on how federal drug laws are used, among other things, to
coerce guilty pleas and secure long sentences. “The criminal-justice system is, of course, a really expensive way to deliver health care. The
punitive side of it can be counterproductive, particularly for addicts.” According to the surgeon general’s report, substance-use disorder costs
the country $442 billion annually in health-care and criminal-justice spending, as well as in lost productivity. Lynch told me that relying
on
criminal law to be “the stick” that keeps addicts in line is not “responsive to the public-health problem
or to the person’s health problems.” And when the criminal-justice system does offer treatment alternatives, they’re usually
organized so that failures are harshly penalized. If, for example, a treatment participant fails a drug test or misses a
court check-in, he or she could face jail time, suspension from the program, or the revocation of other
privileges. Lynch said such consequences are antithetical to treatment because they imply a straight line
toward recovery . Addressing addiction individually “is not one strike and you’re out,” she said. “There
are going to be failures, there are going to be setbacks. It’s a relatively long and arduous process to try
and address addiction.” Reformers view unnecessarily punitive federal sentencing guidelines as harmful legal responses to problems
that often require medical or therapeutic interventions. Unless those guidelines are altered, a new approach focusing on health would have
little practical application. Lynch said that separating the dealer, or “the criminal,” from “the user” during sentencing is essentially a distinction
without a difference that has resulted in “a system that recycles addicts through jails’ revolving doors.” That’s because designations
do
nothing to address the underlying issue of addiction: Labels don’t get people sober. Lynch said that parsing
between dealers and users has been detrimental to getting adequate medical, psychological, and
social services to those in need.
Treatment works
Treatment works – empirical examples
Kleiman ’10 (Mark, professor of public policy at New York University, in 2015, Kleiman became the
director of the Crime and Justice Program at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management, When Brute
Force Fails, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/211204.pdf)
Some drug treatment programs are demonstrably effective, and cost-effective, as crime-control measures, even
putting aside their benefits to the people treated and to the intimates of those people. In particular, the opiate maintenance, or
substitution therapies, (both the old stand-by methadone and the newer LAAM and buprenorphine) are
measurably successful at reducing heroin use and crime among heroin users, relatively
inexpensive, and always in demand. Increasing the public budgets that support methadone clinics,
loosening the unnecessarily burdensome regulations that limit their operations, and continuing
the process of making buprenorphine available outside the clinic system all have real promise
as crime control measures, though they are usually thought of as social services or health care. Of the estimated 1
million Americans with heroin problems, only about 100,000 are now in substitution treatment; that
number could easily be expanded greatly, and the benefits would be substantial. (Experiments in
Switzerland and The Netherlands have shown that some very refractory and socially expensive heroin
addicts can be managed successfully by allowing them to have as much heroin as they like in clinic
settings, on the condition that all the heroin be consumed on the spot (Van den Brink et al. 1999,
Rehm, et al.2001, Farrel and Hall 1998, Ali et al. 1999, Perneger et al. 1998). That is a costly approach – probably
too costly ever to be a significant part of the heroin treatment system – but probably worth it for the most problematic heroin users. Political
and administrative feasibility is a different, and in this country perhaps insurmountable, issue.)
Enforcement fails
A criminal justice approach fails to prevent drug use – it increased the number of crack
dealers in America because the barrier to entry was so low, and enforcement became
too spread out
Kleiman ’10 (Mark, professor of public policy at New York University, in 2015, Kleiman became the
director of the Crime and Justice Program at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management, When Brute
Force Fails, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/211204.pdf)
“comparative statics,”) and applied to the drug markets in
a model called “risks and prices,” raising enforcement pressure on any given drug should tend to increase the
price of that drug, and falling enforcement pressure should tend to allow prices to decline
Therefore,
according to
this analysis (an approach economists call
[Reuter and Kleiman 1986). For these purposes, the relevant measure of enforcement pressure is not the total amount of
enforcement (measured, for example,by total person- years of incarceration imposed per year) but the ratio of that amount to the size of the
market, measured in the physical volume of drugs bought and sold. More years in prison per kilo should translate into higher prices, fewer
years in prison per kilo into lower prices. That
analysis has a clear, though surprising, implication : for any
given level of enforcement activity, rising volume in the market due to increased demand
should cause prices to fall , rather than to rise. (Economists call this phenomenon a “downward-sloping supply
curve,” and attribute it to “industry-wide economies of scale.” In this case, the process works through the enforcement mechanism:
the attention of the enforcement system is spread across dealers, and expanding the number of
dealers diminishes each dealer’s share of that (unwanted) attention .[Kleiman 1992). That makes
sense of the otherwise puzzling observation that cocaine prices fell sharply during the late 1970s
and early 1980s, even as the number of active cocaine users grew rapidly: the rising size of the market swamped the
enforcement effort, leaving each dealer or each gram of cocaine at smaller enforcement risk than
previously. In trying to move drug prices, enforcement faces an uphill battle . Because drug
dealing occurs in a market context, with dealers competing for customers, removing a drug dealer
from the trade, either by locking him up or scaring him off, cannot be expected to reduce by
one the number of dealers, as locking up or scaring off a burglar reduces the number of
active burglars. The natural result of removing one dealer from an active market is his
replacement by another dealer, either a new dealer entering the business or another existing dealer increasing
his volume of sales. As long as there are drug buyers looking for sellers, removing one dealer
simply creates a market niche for another dealer to fill. Since retail dealing demands no special
skill, the supply of potential dealers, especially in poor urban neighborhoods, seems to be
effectively unlimited. Thus, through the mechanism of replacement, the economic logic of the
drug markets tends to defeat both deterrence and incapacitation . By contrast, burglars do not compete
for houses to burglarize nearly as directly as crack dealers do for users to sell to, because houses to break into are not scarce compared
to the number of potential burglars.
Police enforcement led to lower wages for dealers which increased the amount of
cocaine
Kleiman ’10 (Mark, professor of public policy at New York University, in 2015, Kleiman became the
director of the Crime and Justice Program at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management, When Brute
Force Fails, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/211204.pdf)
Thus incarcerating or deterring one burglar does not create new opportunities that will lure other potential burglars into action. Thus
the expected effect of drug enforcement levels on the quantity of drugs sold is indirect, through the price mechanism. Higher
enforcement risks to dealers would be expected to cause higher prices,and higher prices to reduce the quantity purchased, to an
extent depending on the price-elasticity of demand for the drug. But, if
that simple economic theory were an accurate
representation of the actual situation, the enormous expansion in drug enforcement activity since
1985 should have led to a substantial increase in price , even in the face of the replacement problem.
The number of cocaine dealers in prison, for example, is about 3 times as high today as it was in 1995,
while the quantity of pure cocaine available is about three times as high, implying an expected price increase on
the order of fivefold. Yet in fact prices have moved in the opposite direction; adjusted for inflation, cocaine
costs about a fifth as much today as it did in 1982. (Heroin has behaved similarly.) [Walsh 2004, Sourcebook of Criminal
Justice Statistics 2004, United States Sentencing Commission 2002.] What happened? And what should we do now? The “what happened” part
is complicated. If the “risks and prices” model is wrong, as the evidence suggests it is, there is no alternative model of the determination of
prices and volumes in illicit markets, and how enforcement does or does not influence prices and volumes, to replace it, though some
suggestions have been made. (Kleiman 1989, Boyum 1992, Caulkins 1990). One explanation that does not require a complete abandonment of
the comparative-statics framework is that the market for illegal labor functions rather oddly. Despite
the great increase in the
risk of going to prison, retail crack dealers work today at much lower wages than they did fifteen
years ago. (Reuter 1990) That might in part reflect a perceptual lag, as young people enter the trade with unrealistic beliefs about its risks
and rewards based on earlier conditions. If so, that suggests that there should be more effort than there is to warn young people in drugimpacted neighborhoods about the risks of selling drugs, to parallel the national effort to make young people aware of the risks of using drugs
[Kleiman 1997a]. An alternative, or perhaps complementary, explanation would focus, not on the information available to retail dealers, but on
their alternatives to dealing. One consequence of the expansion in imprisonment rates during the 1980sand 1990s is that the flow of exprisoners back into the community has expanded, now running at a rate of about 2,000 persons per day. Ex-prisoners notoriously face very
poor prospects in the legitimate labor markets; those with experience of cocaine dealing may be “employable” as crack hustlers when no other
employer will have them, and thus be willing to work (as retail crack dealers reportedly now do) for less than the minimum wage. Moreover,
developing a personal crack habit is an occupational hazard of crack dealing; someone with such a habit may be willing to work for very low
wages in a job that also secures him access to wholesale-priced cocaine. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains: despite an unprecedented
level of law enforcement directed at the cocaine trade, prices have not only not risen but actually fallen. With
approximately a third
of a million people now behind bars for cocaine dealing, and police departments under budget
pressure and forced to divert resources to the homeland-security effort, it is hard to imagine much in
the way of further expansion of the cocaine enforcement effort. If the phenomenon of falling prices in the face of
rising enforcement were restricted to cocaine, it would be tempting to look for some explanation in the idiosyncrasies of that
market; but the pattern has been very similar in the heroin market. Perhaps it is time to confess that, under current U.S.
drug law enforcement has a very limited capacity to raise the prices and reduce the
availability of mass-market drugs, and thereby to reduce the extent of drug abuse. Demand-side options And
conditions,
yet drug abuse, the crime committed by drug addicts, and theviolence and disorder surrounding the illicit markets, are all big
problems. So what is to be done?
economy
A public health approach is much more cost effective
Kristoff ’17 (Nicholas, NYT columnist, winner of two Pulitzers, How to Win a War on Drugs, Portugal
treats addiction as a disease, not a crime,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/sunday/portugal-drug-decriminalization.html)
One attraction of the Portuguese approach is that it’s
incomparably cheaper to treat people than to jail them. The
Health Ministry spends less than $10 per citizen per year on its successful drug policy. Meanwhile, the
U.S. has spent some $10,000 per household (more than $1 trillion) over the decades on a failed drug
policy that results in more than 1,000 deaths each week. I’ve been apprehensive of decriminalizing hard drugs for fear of
increasing addiction. Portugal changed my mind, and its policy seems fundamentally humane and lifesaving. Yet let’s also be realistic about
what is possible: Portugal’s approach works better than America’s, but nothing succeeds as well as we might hope. The hilly Casal Ventoso
neighborhood of Lisbon was ground zero for heroin in Lisbon 15 years ago, “a wall of death,” remembered Paulo Brito, 55, who has been using
heroin since he was 15. Brito weaned himself off drugs with the help of health workers and remained “clean” for 10 years — but relapsed a
year ago, and I met him in today’s Casal Ventoso. There are fewer overdoses now, but it is still littered with hypodermic packages and other
detritus of narcotics, as well as a pall of sadness. “I’ve hit rock bottom,” Brito told me despairingly. “I’m losing the person I most love in the
world.” His girlfriend, Teresa, is begging him to give up heroin. He wants to choose her; he fervently wants to quit. But he doesn’t know if he
can, and he teared up as he said, “It’s like entering a boxing ring and facing Mike Tyson.” Yet for all his suffering, Brito lives, because he’s
Portuguese. The
lesson that Portugal offers the world is that while we can’t eradicate heroin, it’s possible
to save the lives of drug users — if we’re willing to treat them not as criminals but as sick, suffering
human beings who need helping hands, not handcuffs.
Addiction
Advances in neurology show the lack of true free will – locking people up for things
they had little control over is inhumane. We must see drug addicts as humans who
were dealt a bad hand, not people whose lives we should ruin in the name of
“deterrence.”
Sapolsky ’17 (Robert, American neuroendocrinologist and author. He is currently a professor of
biology, and professor of neurology and neurological sciences and, by courtesy, neurosurgery, at
Stanford University. In addition, he is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya, Behave:
The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, p. 610)
Which brings us to the huge practical challenge. The traditional rationales behind imprisonment are to protect the
public, to rehabilitate, to punish, and finally to use the threat of punishment to deter others. That last one
is the practical challenge, because such threats of punishment can indeed deter. How can that be done? The broadest type of
solution is incompatible with an open society—making the public believe that imprisonment involves
horrific punishments when, in reality, it doesn’t. Perhaps the loss of freedom that occurs when a dangerous person is
removed from society must be deterrence enough. Perhaps some conventional punishment will still be needed if it is sufficiently deterring. But
what must be abolished are the views that punishment can be deserved and that punishing can be virtuous. None of this will be easy. When
contemplating the challenge to do so, it is important to remember that some, many, maybe even most
of the people who were
prosecuting epileptics in the fifteenth century were no different from us—sincere, cautious, and
ethical, concerned about the serious problems threatening their society, hoping to bequeath their
children a safer world. Just operating with an unrecognizably different mind-set. The psychological distance from them to us is vast,
separated by the yawning chasm that was the discovery of “It’s not her, it’s her disease.” Having crossed that divide, the distance we now need
to go is far shorter—it merely consists of taking that same insight and being willing to see its valid extension in whatever directions science
takes us. The hope is that when
it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and
most damaging, words like “evil” and “soul” will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty
brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop. And crucially, the
analogy holds in a key way, extending to instances of dangerous people without anything obviously
wrong with their frontal cortex, genes, and so on. When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we
take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken
widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything
wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car; sure, the mechanic can speculate on the source of the problem—maybe it’s the blueprint
from which the car was built, maybe it was the building process, maybe the environment contains some unknown pollutant that somehow
impairs function, maybe someday we’ll have sufficiently powerful techniques in the auto shop to spot some key molecule in the engine that is
out of whack—but
in the meantime we’ll consider this car to be evil. Car free will also equals “internal
forces we do not understand yet.”*34 Many who are viscerally opposed to this view charge that it is
dehumanizing to frame damaged humans as broken machines. But as a final, crucial point, doing that
is a hell of a lot more humane than demonizing and sermonizing them as sinners. POSTSCRIPT: NOW FOR THE
HARD PART Well, so much for the criminal justice system. Now on to the really difficult part, which is what to do when someone compliments
your zygomatic arches. If
we deny free will when it comes to the worst of our behaviors, the same must also
apply to the best. To our talents, displays of willpower and focus, moments of bursting creativity,
decency, and compassion. Logically it should seem as ludicrous to take credit for those traits as to
respond to a compliment on the beauty of your cheekbones by thanking the person for implicitly having praised your
free will, instead of explaining how mechanical forces acted upon the zygomatic arches of your skull. It will be so difficult to act that way. I am
willing to admit that I have acted egregiously in this regard. My wife and I have brunch with a friend, who serves fruit salad. We proclaim,
“Wow, the pineapple is delicious.” “They’re out of season,” our host smugly responds, “but I lucked out and found a decent one.” My wife and I
express awestruck worship—“You really know how to pick fruit. You are a better person than we are.” We are praising the host for this
supposed display of free will, for the choice made at the fork in life’s road that is pineapple choosing. But we’re wrong. In reality, genes had
something to do with the olfactory receptors our host has that help detect ripeness. Maybe our host comes from a people whose deep and
ancient cultural values include learning how to feel up a pineapple to tell if it’s good. The sheer luck of the socioeconomic trajectory of our
host’s life has provided the resources to prowl an overpriced organic market playing Peruvian folk Muzak. Yet we praise our host. I can’t really
imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It
may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our
biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the
heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters—when we judge others harshly.
Treatment reform makes PH work
The problem with treatment now is that it comes too late and is only available to
certain populations
Lantigua-Williams ’16 (Juleyka, former staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covered criminal
justice, Declaring Addiction a Health Crisis Could Change Criminal Justice,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/addiction-health-crisis-criminal-justice/508409/)
Most troubling, the
criminal-justice system is often the first institution to “catch” those suffering from
substance-use disorders. As a result, many people only receive treatment once the situation is
critical—like after getting arrested and involved with the criminal-justice system, or after a medical crisis, such as
an overdose. Lynch takes a hard line on the system’s capacity to provide care: “I would like to see addiction not go through the criminal-justice system,” she said.
“You see that in higher economic strata of our society,” she said. “ People
whose children become addicts and they have
resources to mobilize all kinds of private interventions that don’t involve the criminal-justice system.”
People with means can intervene much earlier than others, including by paying for expensive privatetreatment facilities or by keeping a loved one safe at home and off the street to limit their potential
interactions with law enforcement. It “gets so raced and classed,” Lynch said, describing how users in certain
ethnic and economic groups have fewer treatment options and far more legal consequences. Yet even
if state and federal governments take cues from the surgeon general—and begin addressing addiction as a health
crisis first—any reforms to the existing criminal-justice system would have immediate, unintended economic effects via
institutional competition. “There’s now huge, monstrous criminal-justice institutions that have been
built over 30 or 40 years in our country at the state and federal level that are going to be resistant to
shrinking,” Lynch said. If treating addiction as a public-health problem gains more traction—and federal dollars are redirected to health-care programs—then
penal “institutions are going to compete to deal with it. They’re going to seek money to deal with addiction through the criminal-justice system,” she said.
Adding compulsion to a public health focus can solve a lot of concerns
Wilson ’90 (James Q Wilson, was appointed chairman of the National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse
Prevention, won the NDT twice in 1951 and 1952, chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the
American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1985–
1990), and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at
Harvard-MIT, Lifetime Achievement Award, American Political Science Association Presidential Medal of
Freedom Charles E. Merriam Award for Outstanding Public Policy Research (1977) James Madison
Award (1990) Bradley Prize (2007), Against the Legalization of Drugs,
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/against-the-legalization-of-drugs/)
One thing that can often make it more effective is compulsion. Douglas Anglin of UCLA, in common with many
other researchers, has found that the longer one stays in a treatment program, the better the chances of a
reduction in drug dependency. But he, again like most other researchers, has found that drop-out rates are high. He has also found,
however, that patients who enter treatment under legal compulsion stay in the program longer than
those not subject to such pressure. His research on the California civil commitment program, for
example, found that heroin users involved with its required drug-testing program had over the long
term a lower rate of heroin use than similar addicts who were free of such constraints. If for many addicts
compulsion is a useful component of treatment, it is not clear how compulsion could be achieved in a society in which
purchasing, possessing, and using the drug were legal. It could be managed, I suppose, but I would not want to have to answer the challenge
from the American Civil Liberties Union that it is wrong to compel a person to undergo treatment for consuming a legal commodity.
Solves Use/Harms
Chronic illness management approach reduces misuse and harms
Surgeon General’s Report 16 (The Surgeon General's Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US); Office of the Surgeon General (US).
Washington (DC): US Department of Health and Human Services; 2016 Nov., “Facing Addiction in
America,” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK424857/)
Substance misuse and substance use disorders directly affect millions of Americans every year, causing
motor vehicle crashes, crimes, injuries, reduced quality of life, impaired health, and far too many deaths. Throughout this Report, we have
summarized the research demonstrating that: The
problems caused by substance misuse are not limited to
substance use disorders, but include many other possible health and safety problems that can result from
substance misuse even in the absence of a disorder; Substance use has complex biological and social determinants,
and substance use disorders are medical conditions involving disruption of key brain circuits; Prevention
programs and policies that are based on sound evidence-based principles have been shown to reduce
substance misuse and related harms significantly; Evidence-based behavioral and medication-assisted
treatments (MAT) applied using a chronic-illness-management approach have been shown to facilitate
recovery from substance use disorders, prevent relapse, and improve other outcomes, such as reducing criminal
behavior and the spread of infectious diseases; A chronic-illness-management approach may be needed to treat the most
severe substance use disorders; and Access to recovery support services can help former substance users
achieve and sustain long-term wellness. Embedding prevention, treatment, and recovery services into the larger health care
system will increase access to care, improve quality of services, and produce improved outcomes for countless Americans.
Costs
Benefits the economy—substance misuse costs $442 billion/year, but public health
interventions bring in savings of $58 for every $1 spent
Surgeon General’s Report 16 (The Surgeon General's Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US); Office of the Surgeon General (US).
Washington (DC): US Department of Health and Human Services; 2016 Nov., “Facing Addiction in
America,” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK424857/)
The moral obligation to address substance misuse and substance use disorders effectively for all
Americans also aligns with a strong economic imperative. Substance misuse and substance use
disorders are estimated to cost society $442 billion each year in health care costs, lost productivity,
and criminal justice costs .12 However, numerous evidence-based prevention and treatment policies and programs can be
implemented to reduce these costs while improving health and wellness. More than 10 million full-time workers in our
nation have a substance use disorder—a leading cause of disability3—and studies have demonstrated that
prevention and treatment programs for employees with substance use disorders are cost effective in improving
worker productivity4,5 Prevention and treatment also reduce criminal justice-related costs, and they
are much less expensive than alternatives such as incarceration. Implementation of evidence-based
interventions (EBIs) can have a benefit of more than $58 for every dollar spent; and studies show that every
dollar spent on substance use disorder treatment saves $4 in health care costs and $7 in criminal
justice costs.6 Yet, effective prevention interventions are highly underused. For example, only 8 to 10 percent of school administrators
report using EBIs to prevent substance misuse,7,8 and only about 11 percent of youth (aged 12 to 17) report participating in a substance use
prevention program outside of school.9 Further, only 10.4 percent of individuals with a substance use disorder receive treatment,9 and only
about a third of those individuals receives treatment that meets minimal standards of care.10 The public health-based approach called for in
this Report aims to address the broad individual, environmental, and societal factors that influence substance misuse and its consequences, to
improve the health, safety, and well-being of the entire population. It aims to understand and address the wide range of interacting factors that
influence substance misuse and substance use disorders in different communities and coordinates efforts across diverse stakeholders to
achieve reductions in both.
Crime
Public Health framing reduces crime
Partnership 12 (PARTNERSHIP NEWS SERVICE STAFF, “Treating Drug Use as Public Health Issue Could
Lower Crime Rate: Report,” Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, May 17, 2012
https://drugfree.org/learn/drug-and-alcohol-news/treating-drug-use-as-public-health-issue-couldlower-crime-rate-report/)
A new government report suggests that treating drug use as a public health issue could lead to reduced crime
rates . The annual report by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy finds illegal drugs play a
central role in criminal acts. The report showed a decline in cocaine use since 2003, which indicates that law enforcement efforts
and public education campaigns may be having an effect, according to Reuters. Illegal drug use overall has decreased about
30 percent since 1979, the article notes. An average of 71 percent of men arrested in 10 U.S. metropolitan areas in 2011 tested positive
for an illegal substance when they were taken into custody, the study found. The rates ranged from 64 percent in Atlanta, to 81 percent in
Sacramento, California. These rates were higher for almost half of the collection sites since 2007. Gil Kerlikowske, Director of National Drug
Control Policy, said the findings support the White House strategy designed to break the cycle of drugs and crime by focusing on treatment for
substance abuse, instead of jail, for nonviolent offenders. “Tackling
the drug issue could go a long way in reducing our
crime issues,” he told Reuters. “These data confirm that we must address our drug problem as a public health issue, not just a criminal
justice issue.” About 23 percent of violent crimes and property crimes were committed by people who
tested positive for at least one of 10 illegal drugs. Marijuana was the most common drug found among those arrested,
followed by cocaine. Use of cocaine dropped by half in major cities such as Chicago and New York from 2000 to 2011.
Prisons
Status quo marijuana policies cause prison overpopulation
ACLU 1 (American Civil Liberties Union, “Marijuana Arrests & Punishments,”
https://www.aclu.org/drug-law-reform/marijuana-arrests-punishments)
Just under half of the million and a half annual arrests for non-violent drug violations are for marijuana.
Because the vast majority of drug arrests are for non-violent offenses, this means that marijuana use is responsible for close to one half of this
country's "drug problem." Source: "New Jim Crow." (Backed up by FBI Uniform Crime Report stats, at website above.) According to the FBI's
Uniform Crime Reports Division's Annual Report, "Crime in the United States," there were 695,201 marijuana arrests in 1997 (more than in any
previous year). 87.2% of these were for mere "possession." Only 12.8% were for "sale/manufacture," which includes manufacture for personal
use and possession of sufficient amounts of marijuana (usually over one ounce) that "intent
to deliver" is inferred, even
though the drugs may have been intended for personal use only. Click here to learn more. Source: FBI's Uniform
Crime Reports for 1997and Marijuana Policy Project (at above websites) The total number of arrests in 1997, as reported by the FBI, for all
violent crimes - murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault - combined was not much higher, at 717,720. Source: FBI's Uniform Crime
Reports for 1997(at above website) Because
police lack the resources to enforce drug laws against all 17 million
regular marijuana users, the prohibition of so commonplace an activity invites selective law enforcement. Similarly,
the vast number of marijuana arrests invites selective prosecution. Unfortunately, as statistics show, such discretion generally falls
along racially defined lines. Source: "New Jim Crow." Harsh mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug
offenses result in prisons overfilled with non-violent marijuana offenders serving long sentences , often
disproportionate to their crime. Take, for example, the case of Joe Pinson, convicted in 1993 of marijuana cultivation and possession - his first
offense - and sentenced to a mandatory five-year jail term, despite the fact that he grew the marijuana because it helped treat his debilitating
asthma symptoms.< Source: ACLU Spring Spotlight 98, above website. Under New York State law, the
penalty for possession of 16
ounces of marijuana is equivalent to that for illegally selling a firearm, or for possession an explosive
bomb or machine gun: a minimum jail sentence of one to three years (and a maximum of seven). The penalty for selling 16 ounces of
marijuana is equivalent to that for illegally selling 10 firearms: 3? to 15 years in jail. The absurd message: pot is as or more harmful than guns.
Source: "Drugs and Guns in New York State," compiled by Carl Bromley, from The Nation magazine, Sept. 20, 1999, "Beyond Legalization: New
Ideas for Ending the War on Drugs."
Overcrowding increases the risk of disease—multiple warrants
Singh 9 (Shanta, Lawyer, “Prison overcrowding: A penological perspective,” 2009, http://umkndsp01.unisa.ac.za/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10500/1291/02thesis.pdf?sequence=4)
Overcrowding results in the artificial control of the prison population through the unduly early release
of sentenced offenders. Overcrowding undermines internal social control, creates high potential for
conflict and can negatively influence the relationship between staff and inmates. This can very easily lead to
cases where lives are at risk through violent retaliation by frustrated inmates. There is a ripple effect due to overcrowding. It
leads to longer periods of imprisonment in cells and courtyards; less time for leisure activities and recreation; lower levels of participation in
programmes; and increased stress levels as a consequence of higher social and spatial density. Another major challenge facing the Department
of Correctional Services is the
control of communicable diseases and viruses, particularly HIV/AIDS and
facilitates the easy spread of communicable diseases among
inmates. South Africa’s prisons have become a breeding ground for HIV, and prisoners now represent one of
the hardest-hit segments of a country plagued by the disease. The number of HIV/AIDS related deaths is partly due to
Tuberculosis (TB). The problem of overcrowding
overcrowding of the prisoners, but is also a reflection of the pandemic outside prison postulates (Annual Report Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons
2002:19). The conditions
in the overcrowded prisons are not conducive to longevity of those that are HIV
positive. Various factors, for example, lack of fresh air, lack of exercise and high stress levels are relevant factors that
contribute to this. South African prisoners, crammed into cells, share mattresses, tattoo needles and dirty razors (Marquez 2002:1). Other
sexually transmitted diseases, which feed the spread of HIV, are rampant. Due
to prisoners’ weaker immune systems, they
are more contagious and less resistant to the virus.
Need to solve tuberculosis now—drug resistant TB
Christian 13
(Kira A., 7/3/13, Kashef Ijaz, Scott F. Dowell, Catherine C. Chow, Rohit A. Chitale, Joseph S. Bresee, Eric
Mintz, Mark A. Pallansch, Steven Wassilak, Eugene McCray, and Ray R. Arthur, US National Library of
Medicine National Institutes of Health, “What we are watching—five top global infectious disease
threats, 2012: a perspective from CDC’s Global Disease Detection Operations Center,”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3701798/, 6/25/14)
The global incidence of tuberculosis (TB) has been in a slow decline since the early 2000s. However, TB was responsible for 1.4
million deaths worldwide in 2011 (38). Additionally, the emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant
(MDR) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), first identified in Tugela Ferry, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in
2005, pose a rising threat to global TB control (39). Morbidity and mortality are consistently higher
among patients infected with MDR and XDR-TB, primarily because of the delays in diagnosis, limited or
no options for antimicrobial therapy, complicated patient management and increased treatment costs
(39). In 2009, it was reported that in the United States the cost of hospitalization for one XDR-TB patient was estimated to average $483,000
(40). According to WHO, by mid-2011, 84 countries had reported one or more cases of XDR-TB (38) and in the United States, 6 cases of XDR-TB
were reported (41). In impoverished areas and vulnerable populations, the presence and spread of a demonstrably efficient human pathogen
that in some situations has become almost untreatable with currently available agents warrants careful observation. In 2009 CDC responded to
cases of XDR-TB in Namibia in an effort to mitigate further spread of illness (Fig. 2). Surveillance for resistant TB among global migrants and
refugees is also imperative: in 2005, an outbreak of MDR-TB was identified in US-bound Hmong refugees from Thailand (42). Co-morbid
conditions put vulnerable populations at further risk. Drug-susceptibility testing for first- and second-line TB drugs is unavailable in most
settings with high incidence of TB, thereby creating the opportunity for emergence of XDR-TB when MDR-TB is inadequately assessed for drug
susceptibility, and, treated inadequately (39). We include XDR-TB on the short list of pathogens to be monitored closely because of its potential
for more widespread transmission. If XDR-TB became widespread, its
severity and the difficulty of case management and
infection control could cause considerable challenges for global public health.
Huge risk of HIV pandemic—drug resistant strains
Cooper 14 (Charlie, 5/22/14, The Independent, “Drug-resistant HIV pandemic is a 'real possibility',
expert claims,” http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/healthnews/drugresistant-hiv-pandemic-is-a-real-possibility-expert-claims-9420833.html)
A new HIV pandemic is “a real possibility”, one of the world’s leading authorities on infectious disease has said, warning that a
rise of drug resistant strains of the virus could “reverse progress made since the 1980s” in combating
the disease.¶ Professor Jeremy Farrar said that “the spectre of drug-resistant HIV” threatened to have “a huge
impact” in the next 20 years, if drugs which have made vast improvements to the life expectancy of patients since 1990s become
less effective.¶ His warning came as a coalition of scientists said that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – the process by which bacteria
and other microbes, including viruses, evolve to be immune to the drugs we use to combat them – should rank
alongside climate change as one of the greatest threats facing humanity.¶ Professor Farrar, director of the leading research foundation the
Wellcome Trust, said that it
was “inevitable” that resistance to HIV would increase because it was a virus
which could easily mutate.¶ Antiretroviral drugs currently used to treat HIV have been so successful that people living with the virus
can expect to live healthy, active lives if they have access to the drugs and adhere to their regime.¶ While hailing the “incredible” progress
made since the 1980s in treating HIV, Professor Farrar said that resistance to first resort drugs, and also some second and third resort, drugs
had already occurred and that drug options for the virus were not “limitless”.¶ “It is not unreasonable that a HIV pandemic could return.” he
said. “The possibility of a resistantly-driven HIV pandemic is quite real.”¶ He said it would be essential to use existing treatments “efficiently and
effectively” to avoid further resistance developing.¶ “We [also] need
to ensure we continue to develop new compounds
rather than become complacent about the existing drugs we have,” he added. “A vaccine is also crucial to ensure we
do not have to rely on our current prevention and treatment options. But an HIV vaccine will be incredibly difficult.Ӧ In an article for the
journal Nature published today, Professor Farrar and another leading figure, Professor Mark Woolhouse, have called for the establishment of a
“powerful global organisation” similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to coordinate the worldwide response to the
threat of anti-microbial resistance.¶ Scientists have warned for years that the rise of AMR risks undoing a century of medical progress with
routine operations and cancer treatments becoming deadly because of the risk of infection.¶ Resistant strains
of tuberculosis, malaria,
MRSA and HIV
have already spread around the world, they write. The focus of concerns has been antibiotic resistance, which
relates to bacterial infections, but viral infections such as HIV and malaria are now also showing signs of resistance.¶ In Europe, there are
estimated to be 25,000 deaths every year from drug-resistant infections – roughly the same as those killed in road
accidents.¶
Overpopulation massively increases the risk of HIV and TB infections—also increases
spread to the rest of society
Singh 9 (Shanta, Lawyer, “Prison overcrowding: A penological perspective,” 2009, http://umkndsp01.unisa.ac.za/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10500/1291/02thesis.pdf?sequence=4)
Prisoners are often exposed to hygienic conditions of the most basic kind and suffer from inadequate
fresh air, space and opportunities for exercise. May of the people who are incarcerated in prisons are abzready in
poor health, and the majority will come into contact with other unhealthy prisoners in overcrowded conditions
(World Health Organisation 2001:1). According to Morodi (2003:6) the prison population throughout the world has been
exposed to dreadful diseases of incurable nature such as HIV/AIDS and other related illnesses like tuberculosis,
commonly known as TB, for a number of reasons such as deprivation of conjugal rights and as a result of overcrowding in prison
cells predominately male. The prison conditions render an opportunity for prisoners to practice sodomy towards their fellow inmates who
have resumed the roles of ‘wives’ in return for protection against other inmates posing a serious threat to them. People who are
among the most likely to contract HIV are the same people who are most likely to go to prison: young,
unemployed, un-or undereducated, black men. This is due to the fact that many of the socio-economic factors, which result in high-risk
behaviours for contracting HIV, are the same factors, which lead to criminal activity and incarceration (Goyer 2003:5). Goyer further states that
high behaviours for the transmission of HIV include homosexual activity, intravenous (IV) drug use, and the use of contaminated cutting
instruments. Conditions
of overcrowding, stress and malnutrition (factors discussed above), compromise health
and safety and have the effect of worsening the overall health of all prisoners, especially those living with HIV or
AIDS. The victimisation of the younger, weaker prisoners is a direct result of the power of gangs, facilitated by corruption within the
Department. Gang activity also increases the incidence of tattooing and violence between prisoners, creating the hazard of HIV
transmission.According to Judge Fagan (2002:1) about 6000 of the 10000 prisoners released monthly from South African jails are HIV-positive.
Conditions in overcrowded prisons are not conducive to the longevity of those who are HIVpositive. In addition to the number of prisoners who
are HIV positive before they arrive in prison, there is also an as yet undetermined portion of inmates who will contract HIV while incarcerated.
The prison environment creates many situations of high-risk behaviour for HIV transmission. The incidence of forced, coerced, and consensual
sodomy is a reality of prison life, and is considerably increased by overcrowding and gang activity (ISS Monograph No 64 2001:5). It is further
postulated that this type of sexual intercourse carries the highest risk of HIV infection, particularly in cases of rape. Forced anal intercourse is
more likely to result in rectal tearing, which increases the likelihood of HIV transmission as the virus has a greater probability of entering the
bloodstream.Harvey (2002:3) contends that any form of sexual violence results in much trauma and suffering on the part of the victim. Being a
prisoner does not change the traumatic effects of sexual violence on a victim. Male rape in prison is a complex issue, which takes various forms
and can be attributed to a number of causes. Any form of sexual contact with another person that involves coercion or lacks mutual consent is
abuse, even though the degree of physical force applied may vary.Harvey (2002:4) is also of the opinion that ongoing sexual abuse occurs in a
variety of ways: “Some prisoners form ‘protective’ sexual partnerships to avoid victimization. To escape being abused by many, they ‘choose’ to
have one partner who might protect them from abuse from others most of the time. The motivation to exchange sex for protection often
includes fear and stems from coercion, and as such constitutes a traumatic experience. Many prison staff dismiss claims of sexual violence
arising from these protective pairings.” Rape is not an isolated event in prison; it is part of a larger phenomenon, the ranking of prisoners in a
hierarchy by their fighting ability and manliness. It is unavoidable then that a youth in an adult penitentiary at some point will have to attack or
kill, or else he most certainly will become a punk. If he cannot protect himself, someone else will (Kupers in Harvey 2002:3). By the same token
the Rape Crisis workers who explored the dynamics of rape in prisons, found that the magnitude of this ‘silent epidemic’ of rape and other
forms of sexual violence in prison has emerged.Harvey (2002:2) confirmed that the Rape Crisis intervention at Pollsmoor Prison revealed the
following: § Rape and other forms of sexual violence are part of the prison culture in South Africa; § Survivors of rape and other forms of sexual
violence in prison require trauma counselling; § Efforts must be made to break the culture of rape in prison; § Rape in prison impacts directly on
sexual violence outside the prison; the cycle of victim-perpetrator violence ensues from untreated rape of male prisoners; and § The sexual
needs of prisoners must be dealt with realistically and humanely by the Department of Correctional Services, especially given the current
HIV/AIDS pandemic. HIV transmission is also increased by the presence of untreated sexually transmitted infections (STI’s). Some STI’s, such as
herpes and syphilis, result in genital sores. Breaks in the skin in the genital region also increase the likelihood of HIV transmission. The prisoner
population has a higher incidence of STI’s and is less likely to have access to treatment facilities. Thus, prisoners are more likely to have
untreated STI’s than the general population and therefore are also at greater risk for transmitting and contracting HIV (ISS Monograph No 64
September 2001:5). The
conditions in prison cause HIV infection to progress more rapidly, which means that
prisoners will have a higher probability of infecting others when they are reintegrated back into the
community (ISS Monograph 64 September 2001:5). By the same token even if prisoners do not contract HIV while in prison, there is a
substantial number of HIV positive prisoners released into the community each year. Prisoners usually come from communities that suffer a
great deal from poverty, unemployment, and crime. These are also the communities that are hardest hit by HIV/AIDS. This means that areas,
which already have a higher proportion of HIV positive people, also have a higher proportion of people who have been sent to prison. When
people are released from prison and return to these struggling areas, the effect will be an even greater increase in HIV infection. Conditions in
prison are such that HIV easily takes advantage of its victims. Although, in theory, prisoners have access to medical care, in reality
there is a
massive shortage of medical staff because of the overpopulation problem. Prisons are also said to be
a breeding ground for opportunistic diseases, which tend to shorten the progression from initial HIV
infection to full-blown AIDS (Hlela 2002:2). AIDS is the leading cause of death in prison, not only in South Africa
but in countries such as the United States as well (ISS Monograph No 66 2001:6). The number of deaths in prison has
increased more than five fold since 1995, and continues to escalate. The Judicial Inspectorate has projected that in the year 2010;
nearly 45000 prisoners will die while incarcerated. The table below shows the actual and projected infection rate for black men aged 20 to 34 in
South Africa. With the data listed below, it can be estimated that the current HIV infection rate in South African prisons is at least 30%.
The next global pandemic threatens extinction
Vince 13 (Gala, degree in Chemistry with Physics, science broadcaster for BBC, 7/11/13, BBC, “Global
transformers: What if a pandemic strikes?,” http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130711-what-if-apandemic-strikes, 6/27/14)
Epidemics are certainly not new or unpredictable. A new strain of influenza virus occurs every 1-2 years, for example. But the sudden
global explosion of an epidemic that infects a large number of the population – a pandemic – is harder
to predict. We know a pandemic has occurred every 10-50 years for the past few centuries, and the
last one was in 1968, so we're overdue one. Epidemiologists do not talk of whether there will be a
new pandemic, but of when it will occur.¶ Pandemics, which kill a significant proportion of the population have acute and
lasting effects on society. The Black Death, a bubonic plague during the Middle Ages caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed 30%-60% of
Europeans (80% of people in the south of France and Spain) and reduced global population from 450 million to around 350 million. In a single
province of China, more than 4 million people died (90% of the population) in 1334 alone. Such a toll was socially transformative. Entire cities
were depopulated, world trade declined, but so did wars. In some countries witch hunts rooting out the unknown cause of the plague resulted
in minority groups being massacred, including lepers and Jews.¶ For plague survivors life generally improved, especially for those at the bottom
of the ladder. Peasants benefited from the scarcity of labour to gain better wages (often through revolt), and their crops and cattle spread into
unoccupied land giving most people a richer diet. The Black Death also had an environmental impact – loss of agricultural activity allowed
forests to regrow, and their photosynthetic activity sucked so much carbon from the air it contributed to the regional cooling event known as
the Little Ice Age.¶ Economic slump¶ More recently, the Spanish Flu of 1918 killed one in five of those infected, some 40-50 million people
worldwide, which was more than the guns of World War I. The impacts of this pandemic should have been especially severe because unusually,
more than half of those who died were young working-age adults, aged 20-40 (most flu outbreaks kill the very old and young first). However,
the global economic slump that resulted from incapacitation or deaths among the workforce melded into the dramatic effects of the war. The
HIV/Aids epidemic, which also disproportionately effects young, working age men and women, can
give some idea of economic impact – in hard-hit sub-Saharan African countries the economies were
estimated to be on average 22% smaller in 2010, due to the virus's effects.¶ So what would be the
result of a global pandemic in the 21st Century? The world’s population in the Middle Ages was just a few hundred million;
in 1918, it was 1.8 billion – now it is more than 7 billion. The numbers of people infected and killed could run into
the hundreds of millions. Industry, food production, and the trappings of our modern world economy
would all suffer, but this could be to the benefit of the environment. Poverty in HIV-hit southern Africa means it has the lowest per capita
greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. During the global financial crisis that began in 2008, annual emissions from the energy sector fell from
29.3GT to 29GT.¶ Fewer people would mean less production of everything from food to plastics. That could mean fewer industrial emissions,
agricultural and residential land reverting back to forest perhaps, few polluting journeys, and less freshwater extractions. ¶ But what if the
pandemic was really severe – killing 80%-90% of our species? Aside from a few people with immunity, densely populated cities would be worst
hit – small remote islands may be spared through quarantine. It
could mean an end to our advanced human civilization
for a time, at least. Our species impact on the planet would diminish substantially as a result of our few numbers and global capability.¶
Decriminalizing marijuana solves overcrowding
Carter 12 (Susan, Executive Director of the Foundation for Inmate Advocacy, “TOO MANY PRISONERS,”
2012, http://americansinchainsdotcom.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/too-many-prisoners/)
There are all these problems resulting from prison overcrowding , but what is causing this major problem? Most people
think that putting all offenders in jail is the best solution, but this is not necessarily the case. Politicians have this idea of locking up prisoners
and throwing away the key to improve their ratings. They know that this isn’t a good idea and contributes to overcrowded prisons, but it makes
people vote for them because society thinks that putting all offenders in prison is the best thing to do. Also, mandatory
minimum
sentences play a major role in the cause of prison overpopulation. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws were
enacted in 1986 and they are fixed sentences to individuals convicted of a crime, regardless of culpability or other mitigating factors. The
mandatory minimums were set up with the intent of capturing kingpins in drug distribution networks. Although this would be a good idea if it
worked, in fact, more than 80 percent of federal drug defendants are low-level sellers and drug mules. According to the Drug Policy Alliance,
more than 80 percent of the increase in the federal prison population from 1985 to 1995 was because of drug convictions. Prison
overcrowding is directly a result of those convicted of drug offenses. Room has to be constantly made
for these non-violent criminals, and many violent felons have to be released on parole as a result. There
is another law that plays a major role in the overcrowding of prisons too, which is the three strikes law. The three strikes law was designed to
control recidivism rates. Basically, the law states that after the third felony, an offender is eligible for 25 years to life in prison. Many of the
defendants sent to jail under three-strikes laws are non-violent repeat offenders. The original intent of the law was to stop violent criminals,
but the result has been that criminals with a history of minor offenses, such as minor theft or drug dealing, are being sent away for longer terms
than criminals who commit violent acts.
The prison population has grown so much that most are already filled
beyond capacity and many more prisons need to be built. Three-strike laws are not effective crime prevention measures,
they are unnecessarily harsh sentencing guidelines that punish harmless non-violent criminals and overcrowd our prisons. Best Ways to Keep
Jails From Overcrowding Alternative Solutions There
are alternative solutions to the issue of prison overcrowding.
We need to find a way to keep people out of jails in the first place and once they’re in, find a way to get
them out in a reasonable time. Victimless crimes do not always need to be punished by putting people
in jail. This will keep a lot of people out of prisons. Decriminalizing certain laws will reduce the
population in jails.
Almost 80-90 percent of the short term prisoners in the nations jails are there for acts which do not result in
harming other people in society such as noncommercial gambling, prostitution, deviant sexual acts in private between consenting adults, public
intoxication, possession, sale and distribution of illegal drugs, blue laws against doing business on Sundays, loitering, disorderly conduct and
vagrancy. The
process of decriminalization means simply to wipe certain laws off the books, eliminating
criminal sanctions by the stroke of legislations. The crimes most frequently considered for
decriminalization are those that are victimless. They are defined as offenses that do not result in
anyone’s feeling that they have been injured so as to impel them to bring the offense to the attention
of the authorities. Or in other words, behavior not injurious to others but made criminal by statutes based
on moral standards, which disapprove of certain forms of behavior while ignoring others that are
comparable. The essential factor is that there is no victim to bring complaint. Three categories emerge within
this definition: moral statutes, illness statutes and nuisance statutes. Victimless crimes may be irritating, annoying, or
troublesome in general, but they are not really injurious to anyone in particular. They are crimes
because the law says they are crimes. Marijuana The legalization or decriminalization of marijuana,
especially, will greatly reduce the prison populations. About 85 percent of marijuana-related arrests
are possession arrests. Every day, law enforcement officials waste their time and our tax dollars by
arresting people merely for possessing the drug. Additionally, U.S. prisons are full with marijuana
offenders, people who have never done anything to harm anyone else. If marijuana was
decriminalized and these “offenders” set free, there would be more space in our prisons for
dangerous, violent criminals like rapists, child molesters, murderers, and such, who pose an actual threat to society. The public
may never know why the federal government is so insistent about keeping marijuana illegal, why it
insists upon wasting its scarce prison space on creatures as harmless as marijuana smokers or why it
refuses to acknowledge the plant’s potential benefits.
TB major health threat—CDC lists as one of top 5 health threats
Bernhard, Health Reporter for St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 14
(Blythe, 1/11/14, The Tampa Tribune, “CDC names top 5 health threats in 2014,”
http://tbo.com/cdcnames-top-5-health-threats-in-2014-20140111/, 6/25/14, SM)
Some bacteria have become resistant to several types of antibiotics, making it harder to fight
infectious diseases. Drug-resistant infections are particularly dangerous for people with a compromised immune system, including those
with cancer, kidney failure or organ transplants. In some cases, doctors and nurses have had to resort to less effective and more toxic
antibiotics when the first-line defenses fail. Patients with antibiotic resistant infections incur longer hospital stays, long-term side effects and
death. More than 2 million Americans contract antibiotic-resistant infections each year, and 23,000 die, according to the CDC.¶ Several
drug-resistant bacteria, including forms of gonorrhea, tuberculosis, salmonella and strep are considered urgent or
serious threats to public health because doctors are running out of drugs to treat these infections. The
overuse of antibiotics is the main pathway for drug-resistant infections. About half of antibiotic prescriptions are
considered to be unnecessary. Antibiotics given to farm animals before slaughter are another main source of resistance. The CDC is working
with the FDA to reduce the use of antibiotics in the food chain.¶ “One of my key principles in using antibiotics properly is to make sure the
patient receives the correct amount of a medication that only treats the bacteria or germs involved in the infection,” said infectious disease
pharmacist Ryan Moenster, associate professor at St. Louis College of Pharmacy. “If the doctor diagnoses you or a family member with a viral
infection, don’t demand medication like amoxicillin because antibiotics do nothing for viral infection.”
Huge risk of HIV pandemic—drug resistant strains
Cooper 14 (Charlie, 5/22/14, The Independent, “Drug-resistant HIV pandemic is a 'real possibility',
expert claims,” http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/healthnews/drugresistant-hiv-pandemic-is-a-real-possibility-expert-claims-9420833.html, JS)
A new HIV pandemic is “a real possibility”, one of the world’s leading authorities on infectious disease has said, warning that a
rise of drug resistant strains of the virus could “reverse progress made since the 1980s” in combating
the disease.¶ Professor Jeremy Farrar said that “the spectre of drug-resistant HIV” threatened to have “a huge
impact” in the next 20 years, if drugs which have made vast improvements to the life expectancy of patients since 1990s become
less effective.¶ His warning came as a coalition of scientists said that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – the process by which bacteria
and other microbes, including viruses, evolve to be immune to the drugs we use to combat them – should rank
alongside climate change as one of the greatest threats facing humanity.¶ Professor Farrar, director of the leading research foundation the
Wellcome Trust, said that it
was “inevitable” that resistance to HIV would increase because it was a virus
which could easily mutate.¶ Antiretroviral drugs currently used to treat HIV have been so successful that people living with the virus
can expect to live healthy, active lives if they have access to the drugs and adhere to their regime.¶ While hailing the “incredible” progress
made since the 1980s in treating HIV, Professor Farrar said that resistance to first resort drugs, and also some second and third resort, drugs
had already occurred and that drug options for the virus were not “limitless”.¶ “It is not unreasonable that a HIV pandemic could return.” he
said. “The possibility of a resistantly-driven HIV pandemic is quite real.”¶ He said it would be essential to use existing treatments “efficiently and
effectively” to avoid further resistance developing.¶ “We [also] need
to ensure we continue to develop new compounds
rather than become complacent about the existing drugs we have,” he added. “A vaccine is also crucial to ensure we
do not have to rely on our current prevention and treatment options. But an HIV vaccine will be incredibly difficult.Ӧ In an article for the
journal Nature published today, Professor Farrar and another leading figure, Professor Mark Woolhouse, have called for the establishment of a
“powerful global organisation” similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to coordinate the worldwide response to the
threat of anti-microbial resistance.¶ Scientists have warned for years that the rise of AMR risks undoing a century of medical progress with
routine operations and cancer treatments becoming deadly because of the risk of infection.¶ Resistant strains
of tuberculosis, malaria,
MRSA and HIV
have already spread around the world, they write. The focus of concerns has been antibiotic resistance, which
relates to bacterial infections, but viral infections such as HIV and malaria are now also showing signs of resistance.¶ In Europe, there are
estimated to be 25,000 deaths every year from drug-resistant infections – roughly the same as those killed in road
accidents.¶
Disease outweighs nuclear war
Alastair Dalton 10/17/1
(Journalist, “Deadly Virus Will Destroy Life on Earth,” THE SCOTSMAN, LN)
HUMANS will have to move to other planets to survive a biological catastrophe that will hit the Earth within the next 1,000 years, Professor
Stephen Hawking warned yesterday. The
world's most famous physicist said he was more worried about a virus
than nuclear weapons destroying life and said future generations would have to face living in space. Prof Hawking said he
was optimistic life would continue, but warned the danger of extinction remained because of man's aggressive nature. Other
leading scientists agreed that humans would have to take action to avoid being wiped out like previous
dominant Earth species, such as the dinosaurs, but said there was no need for any immediate panic.
AT: Gottschalk
even if the war on drugs isn’t the main cause of incaraceration, a public health model
would include things like federal Medicaid funding that she concedes is the greatest
internal link to reducing recidivism
Gottschalk and Kilpatrick 15 (Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. ABOUT
THE INTERVIEWER Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin, “It’s Not Just the Drug War: An
Interview with Marie Gottschalk,” Jacobin, 3/5/15, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/massincarceration-war-on-drugs)
CK I’m guessing you’re very pessimistic about these recent bipartisan moves — both among classic Republicans and libertarian intellectuals —
to roll back the carceral state. MG
I might start believing that people like Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, and other leaders on
the Right are truly ready to make significant dents in the carceral state the day they begin supporting
Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. If you care about reentry and about keeping
people out of prison in the first place, there’s no public policy that you should support more strongly
now than Medicaid expansion . Medicaid expansion gives states huge infusions of federal money to
expand mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and medical care for many of the people
who are most likely to end up in prison. It also allows states and localities to shift a significant portion of their correctional
health care costs to the federal tab. Texas and other states have gone chasing after federal Second Chance and
justice reinvestment dollars, which are a relative pittance. Meanwhile they have been eschewing the
billions of dollars in Medicaid funding that could provide real second chances to people released from
prison, many of whom, truth be told, never had a first chance. In fiscal 2012, Congress allocated just $63 million for
the Second Chance Act — which works out to less than $100 for each person released from prison and jail that year. Compare that to the
estimated $100 billion Texas will forfeit in federal dollars over the next decade because of its decision to opt out of Medicaid expansion.
Today’s left/right kumbaya moment on criminal justice reform rests partly on what I call the pathologies of deficit politics. Hitching the
movement against mass incarceration to the purported fiscal burden of the carceral state helps reinforce the premise that eliminating
government deficits and government debt should be the top national priority.
Racism
A racist war is being systematically waged on black and brown populations in the form
of militarized policing, mass incarceration, poverty, and demonization. Communities
of color have deliberately been made war zones by drug laws that construct difference
as the enemy.
Kenneth B. Nunn Fall 2
(University of Florida Levin College of Law; “Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: or Why the
'War on Drugs' Was a 'War on Blacks',”
http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1178&context=facultypub)
In this section, I consider the impact of the War on Drugs specifically on the African American community. a. Mass Incarceration and
Disproportionate Arrests As
a result of the War on Drugs, African American communities suffer from a
incarceration.' Not only are large numbers of African Americans incarcerated,
African Americans are incarcerated at percentages that exceed any legitimate law enforcement
interest and which negatively impact the African American community. While African Americans only
comprise twelve percent of the U.S. population, they are forty-six percent of those incarcerated in
state and federal prisons. At the end of 1999, over half a million African American men and women were held in state and federal
prisons. A disparity this great appears inexcusable on its face. However, the inequity is even worse
phenomenon I call 'mass
when one considers the rate of incarceration and the proportion of the African American population
that is incarcerated.
The rate of incarceration measures the likelihood that any African American male will be sentenced to prison. In
2000, the rate of incarceration for African American males nationwide was 3457 per 100,000. In comparison, the rate of incarceration for white
males was 449 per 100,000. This means, on average, African American males were 7.7 times more likely to be incarcerated than white males.
For some age groups, the racial disparities are even worse. For young men between the ages of 25 and 29, African Americans are 8.7 times
more likely to be incarcerated than whites. For 18 and 19 year olds, African American men are 8.8 times more likely to be incarcerated than
whites. Another way to measure the extent of mass incarceration is to examine the proportion of the African American population that is
serving time in prison. In some jurisdictions,
as many as one third of the adult African American male population
may be incarcerated at any given time. Nationwide, 1.6 % of the African American population is in
prison. However, nearly 10% of African American males ages 25-29 are in prison. Nearly 8% of African
American males between the ages of 18 and 39 are in prison. The mass incarceration of African
Americans is a direct consequence of the War on Drugs. As one commentator states, 'Drug arrests are a
principal reason that the proportions of [B]lacks in prison and more generally under criminal justice
system control have risen rapidly in recent years.' Since the declaration of the War on Drugs in 1982,
prison populations have more than tripled. The rapid growth in prison populations is particularly clear
in federal institutions. Although the overall federal prison population was only 24,000 in 1980, by 1996, it had reached 106,000. The
federal prison population continued to grow in the 1990s. In 2000, the federal prison population exceeded 145,000. Fifty-seven percent of the
federal prisoners in 2000 were incarcerated for drug offenses. In 1982 there were approximately 400,000 incarcerated persons. By 1992, that
number had more than doubled to 850,000. In 2000, there were over 1.3 million persons in prison. From 1979 to 1989, the percentage of
African Americans arrested for drug offenses almost doubled from 22% to 42% of the total. During that same period, the total number of
African American arrests for drug abuse violations skyrocketed from 112,748 to 452,574, an increase of over 300 %. Jerome
Miller
analyzed arrest statistics from several American cities to determine the impact of the War on Drugs on
policing. He found striking racial disparities in how drug arrests were made. In many jurisdictions,
African American men account for over eighty percent of total drug arrests. In Baltimore, for example, African
American men were eighty-six percent of those arrested for drug offenses in 1991. The fact that African Americans are incarcerated in such
large percentages and are arrested and incarcerated at such disproportionate rates is shocking. It is obscene in the absence of a strong showing
that African Americans are responsible for a comparable percentage of crime in the United States. The
claim that African
Americans violate the drug laws at a greater rate, and that this justifies the great disparities in rates of
arrest and incarceration, seems unlikely. Most drug arrests are made for the crime of possession.
Possession is a crime that every drug user must commit and, in the United States, most drug users are
white. The U.S. Public Health Service Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported in 1992 that 76% of drug users in
the United States were white, 14% were African American, and 8% were Hispanic. Cocaine users were estimated to be 66% white, 17.6% Black,
and 15.9% Hispanic. Rather
than demonstrating patterns of use that approach arrest disparities, African
Americans 'are less likely to . . . [use] drugs than whites are, for all major drugs of abuse except
heroin.' There also seems to be insufficient evidence to conclude that African Americans are more
likely to deal drugs, and thus more likely to be arrested. Most drug users purchase drugs from persons
of the same race and socio-economic background. So, the large numbers of white users would suggest
an equally large number of white dealers, as well. On the other hand, there are logical reasons to conclude that the number
of African American dealers may be disproportionately large. Still, it is unlikely that drug use and offense are so out of
balance that Blacks constitute the vast majority of drug offenders given that they are such a small
minority of drug users. Disproportionate enforcement is a more likely cause of racial disparities in the
criminal justice system than is disproportionate offending. Differences in the way that Black dealers and white dealers
market drugs may encourage law enforcement officers to concentrate efforts against African Americans. Michael
Tonry argues that it is easier for police to make arrests in 'socially disorganized neighborhoods' because
drug dealing is more likely to occur on the streets and transient drug buyers are less likely to draw
attention to themselves. In addition, disproportionate arrests may simply be a function of discriminatory
exercise of discretion by police officers. Police officers may decide to arrest African Americans under
circumstances when they would not arrest white suspects, and they may be in a position to do so
more frequently than with whites because they are more likely to stop and detain African Americans
Specifically, the illegality of marijuana is used as a tool of population management
Alexander 10 (Michelle, civil rights advocate and litigator, “The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in
the age of colorblindness,” New York: The New Press, 2010)
Although the NYPD frequently attempts to justify stop-and-frisk operations in poor communities of color on the grounds that such tactics are
necessary to get guns off the streets, less than 1 percent of stops (0.15 percent) resulted in guns being found, and guns and other contraband
were seized less often in stops of African Americans and Latinos than of whites.112 As Darius Charney, a lawyer for the Center for
Constitutional Rights, observed, these studies
"confirm what we have been saying for the last 10 or 11 years,
which is that with stop-and-frisk patterns—it is really race, not crime, that is driving this."113 Ultimately, these stopand-frisk operations amount to much more than humiliating, demeaning rituals for young men of color, who must raise their arms and spread
their legs, always careful not to make a sudden move or gesture that could provide an excuse for brutal— even lethal—force. Like the days
when black men were expected to step off the sidewalk and cast their eyes downward when a white woman passed, young black men know
the drill when they see the police crossing the street toward them; it is a ritual of dominance and submission played out hundreds of thousands
of times each year. But it is more than that. These routine encounters often serve as the gateway into the criminal justice system. The
NYPD
made 50,300 marijuana arrests in 2010 alone, mostly of young men of color. As one report noted, these
marijuana arrests offer "training opportunities" for rookie police who can practice on ghetto kids
while earning overtime.114 These arrests serve another purpose as well: they "are the most effective
way for the NYPD to collect fingerprints, photographs and other information on young people not yet
entered into the criminal databases."115 A simple arrest for marijuana possession can show up on
criminal databases as "a drug arrest" without specifying the substance or the charge, and without
clarifying even whether the person was convicted. These databases are then used by police and prosecutors, as
well as by employers and housing officials—an electronic record that will
haunt many for life. More than 353,000 people
were arrested and jailed by the NYPD between 1997 and 2006 for simple possession of small amounts
of marijuana, with blacks five times more likely to be arrested than whites In Los Angeles, mass stops of young
African American men and boys resulted in the creation of a database containing the names, addresses, and other
biographical information of the overwhelming majority of young black men in the entire city. The LAPD
justified its database as a tool for tracking gang or "gang-related" activity. However, the criterion for inclusion in the database is notoriously
vague and discriminatory. Having a relative or friend in a gang and wearing baggy jeans is enough to put youth on what the ACLU calls a Black
List. In Denver, displaying any two of a list of attributes—including slang, "clothing of a particular color," pagers, hairstyles, or jewelry—earns
youth a spot in the Denver Police's gang database. In 1992, citizen activism led to an investigation, which revealed that eight out of every ten
people of color in the entire city were on the list of suspected criminals.
Our analysis does not isolate marijuana from the broader War on Drugs as a vehicle
for state-sponsored racism—only centering these interconnections in the analysis of
policy can alter the cycle of perpetual marginality.
Alexander 10 (Michelle, civil rights advocate and litigator, “The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in
the age of colorblindness,” New York: The New Press, 2010)
Precisely how the system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage can best be understood by viewing
the system as a whole. In earlier chapters, we considered various wires of the cage in isolation; here, we put the pieces together, step back, and
view the cage in its entirety. Only
when we view the cage from a distance can we disengage from the maze of
rationalizations that are offered for each wire and see how the entire apparatus operates to keep
African Americans perpetually trapped. This, in brief, is how the system works: The War on Drugs is the vehicle
through which extraordinary numbers of black men are forced into the cage. The entrapment occurs in three
distinct phases, each of which has been explored earlier, but a brief review is useful here. The first stage is the roundup. Vast
numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug
operations primarily in poor communities of color. They are rewarded in cash—through drug forfeiture laws and
federal grant programs—for rounding up as many people as possible, and they operate unconstrained by
constitutional rules of procedure that once were considered inviolate. Police can stop, interrogate,
and search anyone they choose for drug investigations, provided they get "consent." Because there is no
meaningful check on the exercise of police discretion, racial biases are granted free rein. In fact, police are allowed to
rely on race as a factor in selecting whom to stop and search (even though people of color are no more likely to be
guilty of drug crimes than whites)—effectively guaranteeing that those who are swept into the system are
primarily black and brown. The conviction marks the beginning of the second phase: the period of formal control. Once arrested,
defendants are generally denied meaningful legal representation and pressured to plead guilty whether they
are or not. Prosecutors are free to "load up" defendants with extra charges, and their decisions cannot be challenged for racial bias. Once
convicted, due
to the drug war's harsh sentencing laws, drug offenders in the United States spend more
time under the criminal justice system's formal control—in jail or prison, on probation or parole—than drug
offenders anywhere else in the world. While under formal control, virtually every aspect of one's life is regulated
and monitored by the system, and any form of resistance or disobedience is subject to swift sanction. This period
of control may last a lifetime, even for those convicted of extremely minor, nonviolent offenses, but the vast majority of those swept into the
system are eventually released. They are transferred from their prison cells to a much larger, invisible cage. The final stage has been dubbed by
some advocates as the period of invisible punishment.13 This term, first coined by Jeremy Travis, is meant to describe the
unique set of
criminal sanctions that are imposed on individuals after they step outside the prison gates, a form of
punishment that operates largely outside of public view and takes effect outside the traditional
sentencing framework. These sanctions are imposed by operation of law rather than decisions of a sentencing judge, yet they often
have a greater impact on one's life course than the months or years one actually spends behind bars. These laws operate collectively to ensure
that the vast majority of convicted offenders will never integrate into mainstream, white society. They
will be discriminated
against, legally, for the rest of their lives—denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Unable to
surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit
of perpetual marginality.
The process of invisible violence inherent in the prison-industrial complex is the
proximate cause of all violence – creates psychological priming that structures
escalation and the military-industrial complex.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois 4
(*Prof of Anthropology at California Berkely; **Prof of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania;
“Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace,” pg. 19-22)
This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized,
and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African
Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class
hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence
is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and
racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39).
Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e.
Absolutely central to our approach is a
blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to
the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our
attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic
preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34).
tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual
pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence
continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the
normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons,
detention centers, and public morgues. The
violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are
capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are
flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with
respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing
and alternative view that, to the contrary, it
is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in
purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume:
Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of
everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an
even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize
ourselves, in misrecognizing proto-genocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative
behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as
economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal
industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the U nited S tates
(Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the
“small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to
African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC,
and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden
from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are
those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and
unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative
everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal
work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links
between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes
suggests the
possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied
systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime
and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens”
versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday
forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes,
many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind
of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a
scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally,
the phenomenal growth in the United States
of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broadbased opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based
primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the
undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States
are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the
“normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch
2002). In the end it
is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise
good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic,
permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts
and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under
the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion,
dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious
behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant
hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a
chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving
Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the
symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes,
and other “total institutions.” Making
that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to
see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians
of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is
no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common
sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often
fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of
course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to
“pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide
and one that is carefully honed during the unremark-able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass
violence.
Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide.
But so are
formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil
(Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry
babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no
Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of
violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996)
food to hungry families.
means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is
similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in
war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely
places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of
culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it
invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy,
independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point
(Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern
theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less
efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with
violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is
more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as
encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our
task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on
genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer
the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass
violence is part of a
continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators,
bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass
killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor
the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that
push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support
and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the
militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including
the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
Punitive imprisonment creates a false “peace” by silencing voices of dissent – our
analysis deconstructs the prison regime to expose the systems of violence created by
the white supremacist state.
Rodriguez 2010 (Dylan Rodriguez, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC
Riverside, “Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position”, Radical Teacher,
Number 88, Summer 2010)
A working conception of the “prison regime” offers a useful tool of critical social analysis as well as a
theoretical framework for contextualizing critical, radical, and perhaps abolitionist pedagogies . In subtle
distinction from the criminological, social scientific, and common sense under- standings of “criminal justice,” “prisons/ jails,” and the
“correctional system,” the notion of a prison regime focuses on three interrelated technologies and
processes that are dynamically produced at the site of imprisonment: first, the prison regime encompasses the
material arrangements of institutional power that create infor- mal (and often nominally illegal) routines and protocols of militarized
physiological domination over human beings held captive by the state. This
domination privileges a historical anti-black
state violence that is particularly traceable to the latter stages of continental racial chattel slavery and
its immediate epochal aftermath in “post-emancipation” white supremacy and juridical racial
segregation/apartheid—a privileging that is directly reflected in the actual demography of the
imprisoned population, composed of a Black majority. The institutional elaborations of this white
supremacist and anti-black carceral state create an overarching system of physiological domination
that subsumes differ- ently racialized subjects (including whites) into institutional routines (strip
search- ing and regular bodily invasion, legally sanctioned torture, ad hoc assassination, routinized
medical neglect) that revise The global U.S. prison regime has no precedent or peer and has become a
primary condition of schooling, education, and pedagogy in every possible site. Aside from its sheer
accumulation of captive bodies (more than 2.5 million, if one includes children, military captives, undocumented migrants, and the mentally
ill/disordered),1 the
prison has become central to the (re)production and (re)invention of a robust and
historically dynamic white supremacist state: at its farthest institutional reaches, the prison has
developed a capacity to organize and disrupt the most taken-for-granted features of everyday social
life, including “family,” “community,” “school,” and individual social identities. Students, teachers,
and administrators of all kinds have come to conceptualize “freedom,” “safety,” and “peace” as a
relatively direct outcome of state-conducted domestic war (wars on crime, drugs, gangs, immigrants, ter- ror, etc.),
legitimated police violence, and large-scale, punitive imprisonment. In what follows, I attempt to offer
the outlines of a critical analysis and sche- matic social theory that might be useful to two
overlapping, urgent tasks of the radi- cal teacher: 1) to better understand how while sustaining the
everyday practices of genocidal racial slavery. While there are multiple variations on this regime of
physiological dominance—including (Latino/a, Muslim, and Arab) immigrant detention, extra-territorial military
prisons, and asylums—it is crucial to recognize that the genealogy of the prison’s systemic violence is
anchored in the nor- malized Black genocide of U.S. and New World nation-building.2 Second, the
concept of the prison regime understands the place of state-ordained human capture as a modality of
social (dis)organization that produces numerous forms of interpersonal and systemic (race, class,
gender, sexual) violence within and beyond the physical sites of imprison- ment. Here, the multiple and
vast social effects of imprisonment (from affective disruptions of community and extended familial ties to long-term
economic/geo- graphic displacement) are understood as fundamental and systemic dimensions of the policing
and imprisonment apparatus, rather than secondary or unintended con- sequences of it.3
No cost-benefit analysis justifies the prison industrial complex. The neg’s logic is
exactly what enables over-criminalization and renders groups disposable.
Henry A. Giroux 9/2/9
(PhD, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University; “Living in a
Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle,” http://www.truth-out.org/090209R?n)
Increasingly, many
individuals and groups now find themselves living in a society that measures the worth
of human life in terms of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer about
working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, who are considered marginal
because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the
American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not
longer considers them of any value. How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the
transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform's
public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behavior of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often
defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behavior in need of
compassionate good will and public assistance? Or, for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in
the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice
system? Within
these politics, largely fueled by market fundamentalism - one that substitutes the power of the social state with the
is a ruthless and hidden dimension of
cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are increasingly determined by punishing
apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system for poor people of color and/or market forces that
increasingly decide who may live and who may die.
power of the corporate state and only values wealth, money and consumers - there
Our focus on policy isn’t reformism—policy change that challenges dominant
assumptions can create productive solutions
Alexander 10 (Michelle, civil rights advocate and litigator, “The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in
the age of colorblindness,” New York: The New Press, 2010, JS)
The misunderstanding is not surprising. As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking
images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the
schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many
wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids,
gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation. Many whites who
supported Jim Crow justified it on paternalist grounds, actually believing they were doing blacks a
favor or believing the time was not yet "right" for equality. The disturbing images from the Jim Crow era also make it
easy to forget that many African Americans were complicit in the Jim Crow system, profiting from it directly or indirectly or keeping their
objections quiet out of fear of the repercussions. Our
understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme
expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and
sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system. The unfortunate
reality we must face is that racism manifests itself not only in individual attitudes and stereotypes, but also in the basic
structure of society. Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred
to as structural racism, yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young, relying on a famous "birdcage" metaphor,
explains it this way: If one thinks about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of disadvantage, it is difficult to understand
how and why the bird is trapped. Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to one another, serve to enclose the
bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11 What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of the cage may or may not be
specifically developed for the purpose of trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with the other wires) to restrict its freedom. By the
same token, not every aspect of a racial caste system needs to be developed for the specific purpose of controlling black people in order for it
to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy.
In the system of
mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices—ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing
policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination—trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal)
cage. Fortunately, as Marilyn Frye has noted, every birdcage has a door, and every birdcage can be broken and
can corrode.12 What is most concerning about the new racial caste system, however, is that it may prove to be more durable than its
predecessors. Because this new system is not explicitly based on race, it is easier to defend on seemingly
neutral grounds. And while all previous methods of control have blamed the victim in one way or another, the current system invites
observers to imagine that those who are trapped in the system were free to avoid second-class status or permanent banishment from society
simply by choosing not to commit crimes. It is
far more convenient to imagine that a majority of young African
American men in urban areas freely chose a life of crime than to accept the real possibility that their
lives were structured in a way that virtually guaranteed their early admission into a system from
which they can never escape. Most people are willing to acknowledge the existence of the cage but
insist that a door has been left open.
We need to focus on reforming the prison system by problematizing its racial
foundations
Johnson 2011 ["Mass Incarceration: A Contemporary Mechanism of Racialization in the United
States." Gonz. L. Rev. 47 (2011): 301.//Ksharif]
The prison system has symbolic, cultural effects that extend beyond the physical boundaries of the
complex organization of procedures, processes, and material institutions that comprise the criminal justice system.
Incarceration containerizes, legitimizes, and grounds perceptions associating race with criminality .
Because of its connection to other systems of stratification--such as labor markets--the stigmatizing, exclusionary, and
stratifying effects of mass incarceration are reproduced throughout society to create structured racial
disadvantage. Mass incarceration thus acts as a contemporary mechanism of racialization by
providing a structure for overlapping systems, processes, and agents of racial stratification that compound racial
disadvantage. Recent calls for reforming the current carceral system have focused on alternatives to incarceration as a means of alleviating the
tremendous financial burdens involved in constructing and maintaining prison and jail facilities at the state and federal levels. Reducing
the imprisonment of non-violent offenders by one-half, for example, could lower correction expenditures
by as much as $16.9 billion per year. State and local levels would be the biggest beneficiaries of this economic relief, thereby
freeing more funds for education, employment support, drug treatment, and other efforts to improve
disadvantaged communities that produce high numbers of offenders. Reform efforts have also focused on the
human rights consequences of prison overcrowding. In a recent case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the United States Supreme
Court ruled that California must reduce its prison population by 137.5% in order to adequately meet the physical and mental health needs of
inmates. Still, prison reforms should also consider the cultural implications of mass incarceration for civil rights. We must take seriously the fact
that nearly one of every three African American men experience residential segregation and social control through incarceration, which serves
only to magnify existing economic and social disparities. Further, we ought to consider what such facts mean for justice and democracy in a
We must take actions to create systems of deterrence that
promote structures of racial justice and opportunity, rather than increased racial disparity.
post-civil rights context of contemporary America.
Marijuana is used as a justification for racist drug control policies—elites control the
status quo
Chomsky 98 (Noam, “The Drug War Industrial Complex,” High Times 1998,
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199804--.htm, JS)
CHOMSKY: Just by looking at the trend lines for marijuana. Marijuana use was peaking in the late '70's, but there was not much criminalization.
You didn't go to jail for having marijuana then because the people using it were nice folks like us, the
children of the rich. You don't throw them into jail any more than you throw corporate executives into jail -- even though corporate
crime is more costly and dangerous than street crime. But then in the '80's the use of various "unhealthy" substances
started to decline among more educated sectors: marijuana and tobacco smoking, alcohol, red meat, coffee,
this whole category of stuff. On the other hand, usage remained steady among poorer sectors of the population. In
the United States, poor and black correlation -- they're not identical, but there's a correlation -- and in poor, black and hispanic sectors of the
population the use of such substances remained steady. So take a look at those trends.
When you call for a War on Drugs,
you know exactly who you're going to pick up: poor black people. You're not going to pick up rich
white people: you don't go after them anyway. In the upper-middle class suburb where I live, if somebody goes home and sniffs cocaine,
police don't break into their house. So there are many factors making the Drug War a war against the poor,
largely poor people of color. And those are the people they have to get rid of. During the period these
economic policies were being instituted, the incarceration rate was shooting up, but crime wasn't, it
was steady or declining. But imprisonment went way up. By the late '80's, in terms of imprisoning our population, we were way ahead of the
rest of the world, way ahead of any other industrial society. HT: Who
benefits from incarcerating young black males?
CHOMSKY: A lot of people. Poor people are basically superfluous for wealth production, and therefore the
wealthy want to get rid of them. The rich also frighten everyone else, because if you're afraid of these
people, then you submit to state authority. But beyond that, it's a state industry. Since the 1930's, every businessman
has understood that a private capitalist economy must have massive state subsidies; the only question is
what form that state subsidy will take? In the United States the main form has been through the military system. The most dynamic aspects of
the economy -- computers, the Internet, the aeronautical industry, pharmaceuticals -- have fed off the military system. But the
crimecontrol industry, as it's called by criminologists, is becoming the fastest-growing industry in America. And it's
state industry, publicly funded. It's the construction industry, the real estate industry, and also high tech firms. It's gotten to a
sufficient scale that high-technology and military contractors are looking to it as a market for
techniques of high-tech control and surveillance, so you can monitor what people do in their private
activities with complicated electronic devices and supercomputers: monitoring their telephone calls and urinalyses
and so forth. In fact, the time will probably come when this superfluous population can be locked up in private apartments, not jails, and just
monitored to track when they do something wrong, say the wrong thing, go the wrong direction.
Moving beyond a criminal justice view of drugs is key to effective reforms
Stevenson 11 (Bryan, Executive Director of Equal Justice Initiative, “DRUG POLICY, CRIMINAL JUSTICE
AND MASS IMPRISONMENT,” Working Paper Prepared for the First Meeting of the Commission Geneva,
24-25 January 2011, http://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/wpcontent/themes/gcdp_v1/pdf/Global_Com_Bryan_Stevenson.pdf, JS)
In the United States, considerable evidence demonstrates that
enforcement of drug policy has proved to be racially
discriminatory and very biased against the poor. America’s criminal justice system is very wealth
sensitive which makes it difficult for low-income residents to obtain equally favorable outcomes as
more wealthy residents when they are charged with drug crimes. Targeting communities of color for
enforcement of drug laws has added to the problems of racial bias in American society and generated
some of the fiercest debates about the continuing legacy of racial discrimination. Illegal use of drugs is
not unique to communities of color and rates of offending are not higher in these communities than they are in nonminority
communities. African Americans comprise 14% of regular drug users in the United States, yet are 37% of those arrested for drug offenses and
56% of those incarcerated for drug crimes.15 Black people in the United States serve almost as much time in federal prison for a drug offense
(58.7 months) as whites serve for a violent crime (61.7 months), primarily as a result of the racially disparate sentencing laws such as the 100-1
crack powder cocaine disparity.16 For years, the sentences for illegal possession or use of crack cocaine, which is more prevalent in
communities of color, were 100 times greater than possession or use of equivalent amounts of powder cocaine, leading to dramatically longer
prison sentences for African Americans. In 2010, Congress amended this law and reduced the disparity from 100-1 to 12-1. However, the failure
to make the law retroactive has left the costly and troubling racial disparities uncorrected. Hispanic
people are also
disproportionately at much greater risk of arrest and prosecution for drug crimes than are whites in
the United States. Discriminatory enforcement of drug laws against communities of color has seriously
undermined the integrity of drug policy initiatives and frequently these policies are perceived as unfair, unjust and targeted
at racial minorities. Enforcement of drug laws tends to be directed at low-income communities or residential
and social centers where residents have less political power to resist aggressive policing and
engagement. Even some reforms aimed at shielding low-level drug offenders from incarceration have
been skewed against the poor and people of color. Some data show that people of color are more likely to be redirected
back to the criminal courts if drug cout personnel have discretion. Similarly, many community-based programs that permit
drug offenders to avoid jail or prison have significant admission fees and costs that many poor people
simply cannot afford. Discriminatory enforcement of drug policy has undermined its effectiveness and
legitimacy and contributed to continuing dysfunction in the administration of criminal justice.
The war on drugs disproportionately affects black males—need to switch away from
criminal justice model
Alexander 10 (Michelle, civil rights advocate and litigator, “The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in
the age of colorblindness,” New York: The New Press, 2010, JS)
The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S penal population exploded
from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the
increase.7 The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly
every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison
for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.8 The racial dimension of
mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No
other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic
minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa
did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation's capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young
black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.9 Similar rates of
incarceration can be found in black communities across America. These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates
of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.10 If there are significant
differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage
in drug crime than people of color.11 That is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation's prisons and jails,
which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates
twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men.12 And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African
American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.13 These young
men
are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society. It may be surprising to some that
drug crime was declining, not rising, when a drug war was declared. From a historical perspective, however, the lack of
correlation between crime and punishment is nothing new. Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use
punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often
unrelated to actual crime patterns. Michael Tonry explains in Thinking About Crime: "Governments decide how much punishment
they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates."14 This fact, he points out, can be seen most clearly by putting
crime and punishment in comparative perspective. Although crime rates in the United States have not been markedly higher than those of
other Western countries, the rate of incarceration has soared in the United States while it has remained stable or declined in other countries.
Between 1960 and 1990, for example, official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S.
incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period. 15 Despite similar crime rates,
each government chose to impose different levels of punishment. Today, due to recent declines, U.S. crime rates have dipped below the
international norm. Nevertheless, the
United States now boasts an incarceration rate that is six to ten times greater
than that of other industrialized nations16— a development directly traceable to the drug war. The only
country in the world that even comes close to the American rate of incarceration is Russia, and no other country in the world incarcerates such
an astonishing percentage of its racial or ethnic minorities. The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime
trends, the
American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world
history. And while the size of the system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the primary targets of
its control can be defined largely by race. This is an astonishing development, especially given that as recently as the mid1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime
significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless
of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future. The growing consensus among
experts was perhaps best reflected by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, which issued a
recommendation in 1973 that "no new institutions for adults should be built and existing ^institutions for juveniles should be closed."17 This
recommendation was based on their finding that "the prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure.
There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it."18 These days, activists who advocate "a world
without prisons" are often dismissed as quacks, but only a few decades ago, the notion that our society would be much better off without
prisons—and that the end of prisons was more or less inevitable—not only dominated mainstream academic discourse in the field of
criminology but also inspired a national campaign by reformers demanding a moratorium on prison construction. Marc Mauer, the executive
director of the Sentencing Project, notes that what is most remarkable about the moratorium campaign in retrospect is the context of
imprisonment at the time. In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2
million people today. The rate of incarceration in 1972 was at a level so low that it no longer seems in the realm of possibility, but for
moratorium supporters, that magnitude of imprisonment was egregiously high. "Supporters of the moratorium effort can be forgiven for being
so naive," Mauer suggests, "since the prison expansion that was about to take place was unprecedented in human history."19 No
one
imagined that the prison population would more than quintuple in their lifetime. It seemed far more likely that
prisons would fade away.
AT: Decrim CP
Perm do both- public health framing leads to decriminalization (Portugal and Czech
republic)
Hirschler 16 (Ben Hirschler, Reuters, “Doctors around the world are calling the War on Drugs a publichealth failure,” Mar 25, 2016 https://www.businessinsider.com/r-war-on-drugs-has-failed-public-healthmedics-say-2016-3)
LONDON (Reuters) — Governments around the world should decriminalize minor drug offences because the
standard strategy of prohibition is harming public health, leading medics said on Thursday. A report by the
medical journal the Lancet and Johns Hopkins University said countries such as Portugal and the Czech
Republic had shown that decriminalizing non-violent offences such as possession and petty sale
produced compelling health benefits. The policy adopted by these countries also led to cost savings
and did not increase problem drug use, the report added. The U.N. General Assembly holds a special session on drugs next
month at which it will reconsider the global approach to illicit drugs for the first time since 1998. The decades-long strategy of
outlawing drugs and jailing users, while battling cartels that control the trade, has come under increasing fire from
critics in recent years. The report's authors called instead for an evidence-based approach, focused on
reducing harm by minimizing both the violence associated with drugs and the health risks, such as the transmission of HIV and hepatitis
through shared needles.
AT: frame as both
Funding trades off, makes the problem worse
Neill 14 (Katharine A. Neill, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Public
Administration at Old Dominion University. “Tough on Drugs: Law and Order Dominance and the
Neglect of Public Health in U.S. Drug Policy,” World Medical and Health Policy 6(4): 375-394.)
The heavy investment of resources in arrest and incarceration came at the expense of medical
treatment for drug use. In the 1980s the federal government decreased funding for treatment while
continuing to increase law enforcement budgets. Many states acted similarly, reducing treatment
program options for prison inmates and people on probation and parole. Because drug offenders have
been treated as criminals, it has been relatively easy to overlook their health needs. This can be seen as shortsighted because addiction contributes to social problems including crime, homelessness, domestic abuse, job safety risks, driving accidents, and
rising health-care costs. Neglect
of drug users’ treatment needs also exacerbates the “drug problem” because it
does not address the demand for drugs. The one-sided focus on punishment means treatment needs are unmet.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (2012) states, “In 2012, an estimated 23.1 million Americans (8.9 percent) needed treatment for a
problem related to drugs or alcohol, but only about 2.5 million people (1 percent) received treatment at a specialty facility.” The rise in opiate
addiction, including heroin and prescription painkillers, has been especially troubling. The proportion of drug overdose deaths caused by
opioids has increased in the last decade, from nearly 24 percent (4,030) of overdose deaths in 1999 to 43 percent (16,849) of overdose deaths
in 2010. Overdose deaths represent a small portion of opioid users—over 12 million people reported recreational opioid use in 2010—but the
trends still indicate an increase in use and abuse of these drugs (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013).
A2 drug courts CP
Drug courts fail – restrictive eligibility criteria, can only help a small number of people,
and are too labor intensive.
Pollack ’16 (Harold, Helen Ross Professor at the School of Social Service Administration. He is also an
Affiliate Professor in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division and the Department of Public Health
Sciences, Dealing More Effectively with Problematic Substance Use and Crime, Crime and Justice 46
(2017): 159-200, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/688459)
Problem users might be more effectively helped and monitored through problem-solving courts that act independently or alongside treatment
interventions. Unfortunately, such courts now play only a small role. Drug
courts have the capacity to serve only a small
minority of drug- and alcohol-involved offenders. Moreover, drug courts typically impose restrictive
eligibility criteria—for example, no prior history of violent offenses—which render them irrelevant for the
majority of incarcerated offenders who experience substance use disorders. Drug courts are also labor
intensive, requiring extensive efforts by judges and other personnel. These practical burdens pose
significant challenges as policy makers seek to scale such interventions to reach broader populations .
Drug courts fail—multiple reasons
Kleiman ’10 (Mark, professor of public policy at New York University, in 2015, Kleiman became the
director of the Crime and Justice Program at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management, When Brute
Force Fails, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/211204.pdf)
Alternatively, judges sometimes make acceptance of drug treatment a condition of imposing a probationary sentence in lieu of a sentence
ofconfinement. Such arrangements have been formalized as “drug diversion” programs, of which California’s Proposition 36 is an
example,and as “drug
courts.” The institutional arrangements vary, but the basic structures are the same: an offender is
required to attend treatment in order to stay out of prison or jail. But the coercion in such “coerced
treatment” is no stronger than the capacity of the supervising authority to enforce it, and that
capacity has proven to be limited, especially when the supervising authority is a probation
agency. Both in the classical diversion programs organized under the TASC rubric and in Proposition 36, a third or more of
those subject to “coerced treatment” never show up even for a first treatment visit, and most of the
rest drop out of treatment before completing its prescribed term. In most cases, such defaults either never
come to the attention of probation authorities at all – because the treatment providers, which are
after all not law enforcement agencies, do not usually regard reporting their clients to the authorities
as part of their professional role, and the probation offices lack direct access to the data– or are never
acted on by them. (One advantage claimed for the “drug court” approach is that judicial supervision
will increase compliance; the truth of that claim remains unresolved.) In addition, diversion programs, including
Proposition 36, and drug courts provide coercion only for those drug-involved offenders who volunteer for
it. Those who choose to take their chances with ordinary criminal-justice processing, and those
ineligible for treatment-in-lieu-of-incarceration programs, face only routine probation-department
scrutiny, which leaves them pretty much at liberty to continue their drug use. With the arrestee
population accounting for approximately 40 percent of the total consumption of cocaine (Kleiman 1997b),
and probably a comparable percentage of the consumption of heroin and methamphetamine, leaving
most of that population untreated for its substance abuse disorders looks like an expensive mistake to
make. One alternative would be to tighten up on the existing forms of coerced treatment, by expanding the size of the population mandated
to treatment, or by increasing the pressure to attend, comply with, and persist in treatment, or both. But monitoring treatment
attendance and compliance, across the gulf between the criminal justice system and the world of the
treatment provider, is always going to be difficult. Moreover, at some point the (induced) demand for
treatment will begin to outstrip the supply; there are substantially more heavily drug-involved
offenders under criminal justice supervision than there are total publicly-paid treatment slots, let
alone vacant publicly-paid treatment slots, and adding treatment capacity of decent quality levels
costs real money, on the order of one to several thousands of dollars per client per year. And though
treatment is virtually always useful in reducing drug consumption by those attending it, treatment
attendance is not the real endpoint to be aimed at: treatment is a means, and not the only means, to
the end of reduced drug use and criminal behavior. Most people with substance abuse disorders recover, and most of
those who recover never receive formal treatment. And some people who are arrested for drug-related crimes – in
particular, for simple possession – do not in fact suffer from any substance abuse disorder at all, according
to the diagnostic standards in that field.
Neg
CJ Works – Heroin NYC
Interviews show that a criminal justice approach deters people from use of heroin.
Treatment was not the explanation for the drop in heroin in New York City
Wilson ’90 (James Q Wilson, was appointed chairman of the National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse
Prevention, won the NDT twice in 1951 and 1952, chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the
American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1985–
1990), and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at
Harvard-MIT, Lifetime Achievement Award, American Political Science Association Presidential Medal of
Freedom Charles E. Merriam Award for Outstanding Public Policy Research (1977) James Madison
Award (1990) Bradley Prize (2007), Against the Legalization of Drugs,
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/against-the-legalization-of-drugs/)
Why did heroin lose its appeal for young people? When the young blacks in Harlem were asked why
they stopped, more than half mentioned “trouble with the law” or “high cost” (and high cost is, of course,
directly the result of law enforcement ). Two-thirds said that heroin hurt their health; nearly all said they had had a bad
experience with it. We need not rely, however, simply on what they said. In New York City in 1973-75, the street price of
heroin rose dramatically and its purity sharply declined, probably as a result of the heroin shortage
caused by the success of the Turkish government in reducing the supply of opium base and of the
French government in closing down heroin-processing laboratories located in and around Marseilles. These were
short-lived gains for, just as Friedman predicted, alternative sources of supply—mostly in Mexico—quickly emerged. But the three-year heroin
shortage interrupted the easy recruitment of new users. Health and related problems were no doubt part of the reason for the reduced flow of
recruits. Over the preceding years, Harlem youth had watched as more and more heroin users died of overdoses, were poisoned by adulterated
doses, or acquired hepatitis from dirty needles. The word got around: heroin can kill you. By 1974 new hepatitis cases and drug-overdose
deaths had dropped to a fraction of what they had been in 1970. Alas,
treatment did not seem to explain much of the
cessation in drug use. Treatment programs can and do help heroin addicts, but treatment did not
explain the drop in the number of new users (who by definition had never been in treatment) nor even much of the
reduction in the number of experienced users .
CJ Works – Vietnam Veterans
Studies of Vietnam veterans show that it was criminal penalties that prevented
veterans from continuing use.
Wilson ’90 (James Q Wilson, was appointed chairman of the National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse
Prevention, won the NDT twice in 1951 and 1952, chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the
American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1985–
1990), and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at
Harvard-MIT, Lifetime Achievement Award, American Political Science Association Presidential Medal of
Freedom Charles E. Merriam Award for Outstanding Public Policy Research (1977) James Madison
Award (1990) Bradley Prize (2007), Against the Legalization of Drugs,
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/against-the-legalization-of-drugs/)
No one knows how much of the decline to attribute to personal observation as opposed to high prices or reduced supply. But other evidence
suggests strongly that price
and supply played a large role. In 1972 the National Advisory Council was especially
worried by the prospect that U.S. servicemen returning to this country from Vietnam would bring their
heroin habits with them. Fortunately, a brilliant study by Lee Robins of Washington University in St. Louis put
that fear to rest. She measured drug use of Vietnam veterans shortly after they had returned home. Though many had
used heroin regularly while in Southeast Asia, most gave up the habit when back in the United States.
The reason: here, heroin was less available and sanctions on its use were more pronounced . Of course, if
a veteran had been willing to pay enough—which might have meant traveling to another city and would certainly have meant making an illegal
contact with a disreputable dealer in a threatening neighborhood in order to acquire a (possibly) dangerous dose—he could have sustained his
drug habit. Most veterans were unwilling to pay this price, and so their drug use declined or disappeared.
Neg CP - HOPE
CP: The illegal use of drugs ought to be treated with the Hawaii Opportunity
Probation with Enforcement strategy
It solves – modifying penalties fixes the fatal flaws in the criminal justice approach.
The HOPE program had great success in Hawaii
Hawken & Kleiman ’09 (Angela, Ph.D. School of Public Policy Pepperdine University, Mark Kleiman,
School of Public Affairs University of California, Los Angeles at time of publication, submitted to the
National Institute of Justice, Managing Drug Involved Probationers with Swift and Certain Sanctions:
Evaluating Hawaii’s HOPE, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/229023.pdf)
The rates of successful completion of probation and parole have remained stable—at levels that few consider satisfactory (roughly onethird for parole, roughly three-fifths for felony probation)—in spite of many local, state, and federal initiatives to improve
offender outcomes, including treatment-diversion programs. The robustness of these failure rates suggests a need for an offender-
This report
describes an evaluation of a community supervision strategy called HOPE (Hawaii Opportunity
Probation with Enforcement) for substance-abusing probationers. HOPE began as a pilot program in October 2004
and has expanded to more than 1500 participants, about one out of six felony probationers on Oahu. HOPE relies on a mandate to
abstain from illicit drugs, backed by swift and certain sanctions and preceded by a clear and direct
warning. Unlike most diversion programs and drug courts, it does not attempt to impose drug treatment on every
management and service-delivery approach that goes beyond the status quo—particularly for drug-involved offenders.
participant. Under HOPE, probationers are sentenced to drug treatment only if they continue to test positive for drug use, or if they request a
treatment referral. HOPE is distinct from drug courts in economizing on treatment and court resources (probationers appear before a judge
only when a violation is detected). HOPE’s
stated goals are reductions in drug use, new crimes, and
incarceration. Those goals have been achieved, both in the initial pilot program among high-risk
probationers and in the randomized controlled trial among general-population probationers where
probationers assigned to HOPE were compared to probationers assigned to probation-as-usual.
Probationers assigned to HOPE had large reductions in positive drug tests and missed appointments,
and were significantly less likely to be arrested during follow-up at 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months. They averaged approximately the same
number of days in jail for probation violations, serving more but shorter terms. They
spent about one-third as many days in
prison on revocations or new convictions. 4 Our process evaluation demonstrates that HOPE was implemented largely as
intended. Sanctions were delivered swiftly and with certainty; there was variation across judges in the sanction “dose,”
(defined as the length of the jail sentence) but that variation diminished after the judges learned that subsequent violation rates proved dose
independent. The original inconsistency among judges occasioned some discontent among probation officers and probationers, but overall
they, and defense lawyers, were enthusiastic about the program. Prosecutors and court employees were less pleased, with court
staff reporting increased workloads.
HOPE Works – Extension
The HOPE program in Hawaii shows that the problem with the criminal justice
approach now is that punishments aren’t swift. In high crime neighborhoods, the lines
in the courts are too long and due process means there is too much of a gap between
the crime and the punishment. And punishments are applied too randomly.
Kleiman draws on Thomas Schelling to argue that short and immediate punishments
with high probabilities have worked. Every time someone violates their parole or
probation, they spend a night or two in jail. Shorter punishments keep people out of
prisons while being a very effective deterrent.
We agree that severity is worthless. The problem is that severity is the enemy of
swiftness and certainty. In Hawaii, people on parole were told that for EVERY
violation, they would spend the night in jail.
Swift and certain punishments work better than a public health approach
Caulkins & Reuter ’17 (Jonathan Caulkins, drug policy researcher and the H. Guyford Stever
Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, Peter
Reuter, Professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of
Maryland "Dealing More Effectively and Humanely with Illegal Drugs," Crime and Justice 46 (2017): 95158.)
Until recently, little effort was made to take advantage of this finding. Supervised offenders were drug-tested occasionally, but even repeated
positive tests were often ignored until one final violation suddenly led to revocation of probation or parole and, hence, extended incarceration.
This was psychologically flawed and institutionally foolish; showing that rules can be broken with impunity encourages more rule-breaking. The
prisons were overcrowded with parolees being returned to prison for the remainder of their sentences. Mark Kleiman
has long argued
for “mandated desistance,” that is, a regime of swift, certain, and fair graduated punishments for
violations (e.g., Kleiman 1997a, 2009). For example, a parolee who has tested positive for an illegal drug at arrest
might initially be required to take a drug test twice a week, at randomly chosen times. A failed or
missed test would automatically result in spending an afternoon in court watching others being tried
and sentenced; a second failure would lead to a two-night stay in jail , and so forth. An experimental
evaluation of such a regime in Hawaii (Hawken and Kleiman 2009) found that among parolees, the
experimental group had a recidivism rate that was less than half that of the control group. This population
included a high percentage who admitted to using methamphetamine, a particularly dangerous drug. A similar rationale has driven
the development of “24/7 Sobriety,” a program started in South Dakota to reduce recidivism among
repeat DUI offenders by twice-a-day testing and short-term punishments; a recent experimental
evaluation found it to be highly effective and not expensive (Kilmer et al. 2013). The program was so
successful that it was extended well beyond DUI to include arrestees for all sorts of offenses and from
monitoring only alcohol to also testing for other substances . North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming have now also
implemented variants of the program, and it has been piloted in Alaska, Nebraska, and Washington. Note that
these interventions
change the behavior of large numbers of people with substance abuse problems without requiring
entry into a treatment program . They thus
challenge the conventional wisdom that
everyone with a substance use disorder “needs” treatment
but are consistent with
other ways of understanding addiction (e.g., Heyman 2009) and long-standing evidence concerning the
success of behavioral approaches that use rewards, vouchers, and monetary tokens to improve rates
of desistance with and without concurrent treatment (e.g., Higgins et al. 1993). They also thus differ fundamentally in
rationale from drug courts. Drug courts are defined by 10 key components, the very first of which is that they integrate alcohol and other drug
treatment services into justice system case processing (National Association of Drug Court Professionals 1997, 2013). Mandated
desistance and 24/7 show that changes in incentives are enough for many abusers to induce
desistance. Yet these programs do not so much threaten treatment as complement it. As Hawken (2010) notes, mandated
abstinence can serve as a form of “behavioral triage” in which the majority of abusers’ use is
controlled without treatment, thereby allowing scarce and expensive treatment resources to be
concentrated on the residual minority of users. These programs suggest that the criminal justice system
can make a major contribution to reducing drug demand through specific deterrence of
heavy users who have already been arrested, not through general deterrence of initiation . A
large share of consumption is concentrated among a relatively small number of very heavy users,
many of whom are regularly under correctional supervision. If a smarter supervision regime is enough
to reduce their drug taking, that can make a dent not only in drug-related criminality of those
individuals but also in the market more generally (e.g., not only of economic-compulsive but also of systemic drug-related
crime).
It sends a good message about personal responsibility and its consistency means it
effectively modifies behavior.
Hawken & Kleiman ’09 (Angela, Ph.D. School of Public Policy Pepperdine University, Mark Kleiman,
School of Public Affairs University of California, Los Angeles at time of publication, submitted to the
National Institute of Justice, Managing Drug Involved Probationers with Swift and Certain Sanctions:
Evaluating Hawaii’s HOPE, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/229023.pdf)
The HOPE program has a strong theoretical basis. That swiftness and certainty outperform severity in the management of offending
is a concept that dates back to Beccaria (1764).
The design and implementation of HOPE sends a consistent
message to probationers about personal responsibility and accountability and includes a
consistently applied and timely mechanism for dealing with probationer noncompliance. The
basic tenets of the HOPE program (the use of clearly articulated sanctions applied in a manner that
is certain, swift, consistent, and parsimonious) are well supported by prior research . A
clearly defined behavioral contract has been shown to enhance perceptions of the certainty of
punishment, which deters future deviance (Grasmack and Bryjak, 1980; Paternoster, 1989; Nichols and Ross, 1990; Taxman,
1999). Under HOPE, probationers are given clear instructions on the content and implications of the
Motion to Modify their term of probation and the sentencing judge clearly explains the rules of the
probation program. A swift response to infractions improves the perception that the sanction is fair
(Rhine, 1993). The immediacy, or celerity, of a sanction is also vital for shaping behavior (Farabee, 2005).
As James Q. Wilson has noted, when we discipline our children, we do not say, “Because
[you’ve misbehaved], you have a 50-50 chance nine months from now of being grounded”
(Wilson, 1997).
arrested
Under HOPE, offenders who violate the terms of probation are immediately
and are brought before a judge. Th e
consistent application of a behavioral contract improves
compliance (Paternoster et al., 1997). Under HOPE every positive drug test and every missed probation
appointment is met with a sanction. Parsimonious use of punishment enhances the legitimacy of the sanction package and
reduces the potential negative impacts of tougher sentences, such as long prison stays (Tonry, 1996). Under HOPE, offenders
are sentenced to very-brief jail stays (typically only a few days in jail) for each violation of the terms of their
probation, but the program is progressive in that continued violations result in lengthier sentences. The drug-testing-and-sanctions
component of HOPE has been proposed before (Wish, DuPont, Kaplan, and Kleiman 1997), and has been implemented in various
places, with degrees of success seemingly correlated with fidelity of implementation (Kleiman, 2001; Harrell et al., 2001; Harrell and
Cavanagh, 1999). The voluminous drug-court literature (reviewed, e.g., in Belenko, 2001) reflects the value of active judicial
supervision in dealing with drug-involved offenders. But HOPE is distinct from drug courts in economizing on treatment and court
HOPE does not mandate formal treatment for every probationer, and does not require
regularly scheduled meetings with a judge; probationers appear before a judge only when they have violated a rule.
resources.
Contingency management using small-but-consistent rewards has shown promise as an adjunct to drug treatment (Higgins et al.,
1991, 1993, 1994) and as a standalone therapy (Shoptaw et al. 2006).
This literature underscores the potential
efficacy of incentive-based programs.
By contrast, the literature on routine probation supervision, even with enhanced
resources and reduced caseloads, paints a uniformly discouraging picture (Petersilia 1995), and the need for drastic reforms is widely
recognized (Horn 2001, Reinventing Probation Council 1999).
It draws on the psychology of an “internal locus of control” which the current criminal
justice lens fails to do.
Hawken & Kleiman ’09 (Angela, Ph.D. School of Public Policy Pepperdine University, Mark Kleiman,
School of Public Affairs University of California, Los Angeles at time of publication, submitted to the
National Institute of Justice, Managing Drug Involved Probationers with Swift and Certain Sanctions:
Evaluating Hawaii’s HOPE, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/229023.pdf)
those who attempt to bring about behavioral changes of all kinds that clients with
what psychologists call “internal locus of control” are more likely to succeed. That is, people vary in the extent to which
they attribute events in their lives to their own actions and choices rather than to the actions of others and to chance. Those who
believe that their choices matter are more likely to actually change their habits; internal locus of
control is related to “self-efficacy,” the belief in one’s ability to change one’s life, another strong
predictor of success. The HOPE process helps move the psychological locus of control from
external to internal by making outcomes strongly predictable results of the client’s actions. That
is, by shifting the locus of control in reality from the probationer officer and the judge to the
probationer, HOPE helps the probationer shift his perception of the locus of control. And the judge’s speech
It is well known among
at the HOPE warning hearing emphasizes the importance of the probationer’s taking charge of his own life and accepting accountability for his
own actions. That speech also explicitly identifies the probationer as a morally responsible agent—an adult—rather than the helpless subject of
decisions by others in an unpredictable criminal-justice system. The warning hearing also creates a perception of fairness on the part of the
probationer. Because
the consequences are clearly laid out in advance, there is no sense that the
sanctions, when administered, are arbitrary or the result of animus. The strong assertion by the judge of goodwill
toward the probationer, and of the desire of everyone in the process that the probationer succeed, may also be important. Empirically, the
results were striking. In open-ended interviews, probationers consistently identified the process as
fair. (As one put it, “strict, friendly, and fair.”) This was true even among those interviewed while actually
spending time in jail as a result of a HOPE sanction. To an open-ended question asking for “any additional comments or
ideas for improvement,” one probationer in jail responded “Keep up the good work!” Another said, “I’m trying to make
my first mistake my last,” and a third added, “Don’t give up on us! It’s a matter of time before it will sink in.” In that group, when asked to agree
or disagree with the statement, “HOPE rules are too strict,” the “disagrees” outnumbered the “agrees” by 3:2. Almost
90 percent
agreed that HOPE was helpful in reducing drug use and improved their lives in other ways (e.g., family
relationships). The biggest complaint from the group in jail was the perceived unfairness that resulted from judge-to-judge variation in
sanctions severity, which they discovered by comparing notes. Some of those who had been sanctioned more heavily were quick to attribute
the difference to racial bias, when in fact the variation we observed was more at the judge level than at the offender level. That
response,
combined with the finding that success rates were independent of severity, provides a very strong
argument for making sanctions formulaic and moderate. Indeed, in our surveys, lack of uniformity in sanctioning was the
primary complaint about the HOPE process from every group: probationers, probation officers, assistant DAs, assistant PDs, and even the
judges themselves.
Criminal justice may fail now but there are strategic changes that could be made that
would reduce crime. Specifically, short and quick punishments work.
Frank ’09 (Robert, economist at Cornell University, is also co-director of the Paduano Seminar in
business ethics at the Stern School of Business at New York University,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/business/economy/04view.html)
Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, says there is a better way. In a new book, “When
Brute Force Fails,” he argues
that instead of making punishments more severe, the authorities should
increase the odds that lawbreakers will be apprehended and punished quickly. First, a few background points:
Most crimes in the United States are committed by long-term repeat offenders, a majority of whom are
eventually caught. One of every 100 adults in the United States is now behind bars; many are serving lengthy sentences. The crimes they
committed clearly did not “pay” in any objective sense of the term. Why, then, did they commit them? The short answer is that most
criminals are not the dispassionate rational actors who populate standard economic models. They are
more like impulsive children, blinded by the temptation of immediate reward and largely untroubled
by the possibility of delayed or uncertain punishment. The evidence suggests that when hardened
criminals are reasonably sure that they will be caught and punished swiftly, even mild sanctions deter
them. But not even the prospect of severe punishment is effective if offenders think they can get away
with their crimes. One way to make apprehension and punishment more likely is to spend substantially more money on law
enforcement. In a time of chronic budget shortfalls, however, that won’t happen. But Mr. Kleiman suggests that smarter enforcement
strategies can make existing budgets go further. The important step, he says, is to view enforcement as a dynamic game in which strategically
chosen deterrence policies become self-reinforcing. If
offense rates fall enough, a tipping point is reached. And once
that happens, even modest enforcement resources can hold offenders in check. Consider violent
crimes committed by drug gangs. In many cities, such gangs are too numerous for police to watch
them all closely. Knowing that they are unlikely to be caught and punished, members can violate the
law with impunity. In such situations, Mr. Kleiman argues, the police can gain considerable leverage just by
publicizing an enforcement priority list. It is an ingenious idea that borrows from game theory and the economics of signaling
behavior. To see how it works, suppose that all drug violence in a city is committed by members of one of six hypothetical gangs — the Reds,
Whites, Blues, Browns, Blacks and Greens — and that the authorities have enough staffing to arrest and prosecute offenders in only one gang
at any one time. Mr. Kleiman proposes that the police publicly announce that their first priority henceforth will be offenders in one specific
gang — say, the Reds (perhaps because its members committed the most serious crimes in the past). This simple step quickly persuades
members of that gang that further offenses will result in swift and sure punishment. And that is enough to deter them. With the Reds out of
action, the police can shift their focus to the Whites. They, too, quickly learn that violent offenses result in swift and certain punishment. So
they quiet down as well, freeing the police to focus on the Blues, and so on. But why don’t the Reds, seeing that the police have moved on, start
committing violent offenses again? The reason is that they always remain atop the enforcement priority list. If they start offending again, police
attention will again quickly focus entirely on them. After a few rounds, Mr. Kleiman argues, the Reds will get the point. In like manner, one gang
after another is pacified, even though the police have no more resources than before. Considerable
evidence supports Mr.
Kleiman’s emphasis on the efficacy of immediate sanctions. Experimenters have found, for example, that even longterm alcoholics become much less likely to drink when they are required to receive a mild electric
shock before drinking. Many of these same people were not deterred by their drinking’s devastating, but delayed, consequences for
their careers and marriages. Several notable law enforcement successes, like a crackdown on gang homicide in
Boston and strategic drug market disruptions in High Point, N.C., and Hempstead, N.Y., provide
further testimony to the effectiveness of focused deterrence.
Empirics – High Point
In High Point, North Carolina, violent users and dealers were arrested and non-violent
dealers were threatened with arrest if they didn’t stop. The drug market disappeared.
Local law enforcement worked up cases and threatened drug dealers with them.
Violent dealers were arrested and non-violent dealers were told that they would be
arrested if they continued
Kennedy ’09 (David, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control and a professor of
anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. From 1993 to 2004, he
was a senior researcher and adjunct professor with the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University. His work focuses on strategies for assisting troubled communities. Kennedy has
written and consulted extensively in the areas of community and problem-solving policing, deterrence
theory, drug and firearms markets, and neighborhood revitalization. He has performed fieldwork in
police departments and communities in many American cities and internationally, Drugs, Race and
Common Ground: Reflections on the High Point Intervention, https://nij.gov/journals/262/pages/highpoint-intervention.aspx)
When Chief James Fealy
arrived in High Point, N.C., in 2003, he found parts of the city awash in drugs and
dealers. But rather than relying on traditional suppression and interdiction approaches to fight the problem, Fealy —
who had worked narcotics for more than a quarter of a century in the Austin (Texas) Police Department — spearheaded a new,
potentially transformative strategy. Its roots were in the now-familiar "focused deterrence" approach, which
addresses particular problems — in this case drug markets — by putting identified offenders on notice that their
community wants them to stop, that help is available and that particular criminal actions will bring
heightened law enforcement attention. The High Point initiative, however, added the unprecedented — and initially terrifying
— element of truthtelling about racial conflict. The result of these conversations in High Point was twofold: a plan for doing strategic
interventions to close drug markets and the beginning of a reconciliation process between law enforcement and the community. Here is how
the High Point Intervention works: A particular drug market is identified; violent dealers are arrested;
and nonviolent dealers are brought to a "call-in" where they face a roomful of law enforcement
officers, social service providers, community figures, ex-offenders and "influentials" — parents, relatives and others with close, important
relationships with particular dealers. The drug dealers are told that (1) they are valuable to the community, and
(2) the dealing must stop. They are offered social services. They are informed that local law enforcement has
worked up cases on them, but that these cases will be "banked"(temporarily suspended). Then they
are given an ultimatum: If you continue to deal, the banked cases against you will be activated. This
strategy is being replicated in other cities by the Bureau of Justice Assistance through the Drug Market Intervention Initiative. See "How It All
Began: The Evolution of the High Point Model." In
High Point and in other cities, the drug markets have closed and there
have been large reductions in violent and drug-related crime, with no sign of displacement. A fundamentally new
understanding between law enforcement and the community may be the most important outcome. See "Editor's Note: Evaluating the High
Point Intervention." When the conversations between law enforcement and the community began, many people said, "You can't do anything
about drugs. You can't do anything about growing or trafficking or dealing or addiction." To move forward, however, both
law
enforcement and the community needed to be convinced that this was not about drugs; this was
about a certain form of drug market. That is, a community can handle a lot of drug use and survive. But
it cannot handle drug dealers taking over public space, attracting drive-through buyers and prostitutes, and shooting the
place up. Therefore, our primary goal was to close what we came to call the "overt markets."
The threat worked – and so did following through with the threats. We moved illegal
drug dealing and using out of at-risk neighborhoods and out of the streets.
Kennedy ’09 (David, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control and a professor of
anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. From 1993 to 2004, he
was a senior researcher and adjunct professor with the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University. His work focuses on strategies for assisting troubled communities. Kennedy has
written and consulted extensively in the areas of community and problem-solving policing, deterrence
theory, drug and firearms markets, and neighborhood revitalization. He has performed fieldwork in
police departments and communities in many American cities and internationally, Drugs, Race and
Common Ground: Reflections on the High Point Intervention, https://nij.gov/journals/262/pages/highpoint-intervention.aspx)
On the law enforcement side, the signal moment occurs when officers tell all the dealers in the room,
"We want to take a chance on you. We have done the investigation, and we have cases against you
ready to go. You could be in jail today, but we do not want to ruin your life. We have listened to the community.
We do not want to lock you up, but we are not asking. This is not a negotiation. If you start dealing again, we will sign the
warrant, and you will go to jail." This strategy does several things: It puts the dealers in a position where
they know that the next time they deal drugs, there will be formal consequences . It proves to the
community that the police are not part of a conspiracy to fill the prisons with their children. And it frees
the community to take a stand — an amazing thing to see. Promising Results The first of these conversations occurred more
than four years ago in High Point. Since then, the approach has been replicated in at least 25 other
U.S. cities. In each case, the drug market evaporated at the time of the meeting; most of them have
not come back. This success has been fairly easy to maintain. Most of the weight is carried by the
community, which simply will not let the market come back. If they cannot deal with the situation, they have a new
relationship with law enforcement, which will step in. Overall, we are seeing sustained 40 to 50 percent reductions in
violent and drug-related crime, and we have found little or no displacement. We are also seeing a
diffusion of benefits — that is, surrounding areas also get better. See "Editor's Note: Evaluating the High Point
Intervention." The difference in these communities is palpable and amazing. The larger lessons are just beginning to be
clear to us: We have profoundly misunderstood each other; our current behavior has pushed us to places that none of us liked; and we have all
been doing inadvertent but severe harm. We have also learned that community standards can and will do much of the work we currently try to
do through law enforcement, that even serious offenders can be reached, and that we can find critical common ground.
Using law enforcement to get it out of certain areas helps businesses and decreases
robberies
The Economist ’12 (Cleaning up the ’hood, https://www.economist.com/unitedstates/2012/03/03/cleaning-up-the-hood)
POLICE watched seven people sell drugs in Marshall Courts and Seven Oaks, two districts in south-eastern Newport News, in
Virginia. They built strong cases against them. They shared that information with prosecutors. But then the police did something unusual: they
sent the seven letters inviting them to police headquarters for a talk, promising that if they came they would not be arrested. Three came, and
when they did they met not only police and prosecutors, but also family members, people from their communities, pastors from local churches
and representatives from social-service agencies. Their neighbours and relatives told them that dealing drugs was hurting their families and
communities. The police showed
them the information they had gathered, and they offered the seven a
choice: deal again, and we will prosecute you. Stop, and these people will help you turn your lives
around. This approach is known as drug-market intervention (DMI). It was first used in High Point, North
Carolina, in 2004 and since then has been tried in more than 30 cities and counties. It is the brainchild of David Kennedy, a criminologist at
John Jay College in New York, who thinks that “the most troubled communities can survive the public-health and family issues that come with
even the highest levels of addiction. They can't survive the community impact that comes with overt
drug markets”—by which he
not just drug use
and sales, but open prostitution, muggings, robberies, declining property values, and the loss of
businesses and safe public spaces. Traditional drugs policing targets both users and dealers. This poses three main
problems. First, low-level dealers are eminently replaceable: arrest two and another two will quickly take their places,
with little if any interruption to sales. Second, it tends to promote antagonism between the police and the mostly
poor communities where drug markets are found. Arrests can seem random: only one in every 15,000 cocaine transactions, for instance,
means markets that draw outsiders to the neighbourhood. Once these are entrenched, a range of problems follow:
results in prison time, but those other 14,999 sales are just as illegal as that one. In some neighbourhoods, prison is the norm, or at least
common, for young men. Police come to be seen as people who take sons, brothers and fathers away while the neighbourhood remains
unchanged. Third, prison as a deterrent does not work. If it did, America would be the safest country on earth. Shutting
down
markets, on the other hand, removes the conditions that let crime flourish. Drug sales may still occur
in poor neighbourhoods, just as they do in wealthy ones, but they do so behind closed doors , and they do
not have the same bad effect on community life. And restoring community life is DMI's main objective. After the first call-in,
police maintain a visible presence in the targeted neighbourhood. Recalcitrant dealers are arrested and swiftly
prosecuted (two of the four no-shows in Newport News have been arrested; the other two are fugitives). Complaints by citizens are dealt
with speedily, to let locals see that the police respond and want to keep the area safe. That, in turn, makes locals more likely to call the police
with complaints. James Fox, chief of police in Newport News, says that without locals “acting as our eyes and ears”, DMI would not work. It is
still too early to forecast success, but on a recent weekday afternoon Marshall Courts and Seven Oaks were quiet and peaceful. Children played
outside and people sat out on their porches. High
Point's market was shut down eight years ago. It has still not
reopened.
People were deterred by the threat of maximum possible sentences
Schoofs ’06 (Mark Schoofs, American journalist and head of the investigative reporting division at
BuzzFeed. He was formerly senior editor at ProPublica from 2011 to 2013, and an investigative reporter
at The Wall Street Journal for over a decade, Novel Police Tactic Puts Drug Markets Out of Business,
Novel Police Tactic Puts Drug Markets Out of Business, Confronted by the Evidence, Dealers in High
Point, N.C., Succumb to Pressure)
HIGH POINT, N.C. -- For over three months, police
investigated more than 20 dealers operating in this city's West
End neighborhood, where crack cocaine was openly sold on the street and in houses. Police made dozens of
undercover buys and videotaped many other drug purchases. They also did something unusual: they determined the
"influentials" in the dealers' lives -- mothers, grandmothers, mentors -- and cultivated relationships with them.
When police felt they had amassed ironclad legal cases, they did something even more striking: they refrained from arresting most of the
suspected dealers. In a counterintuitive approach, police
here are trying to shut down entire drug markets, in part by
giving nonviolent suspected drug dealers a second chance. Their strategy combines the "soft"
pressure from families and community with the "hard" threat of aggressive, ready-to-go criminal
cases. While critics say the strategy is too lenient, it has met with early success and is being tried by other communities afflicted with overt
drug markets and the violence they breed. Overt drug markets -- street-corner dealing, drug houses, and the like -- constitute one of the worst
scourges of poor communities. Such
markets foment violent clashes between dealers, as well as robbery by
addicts desperate for drug money. Property values suffer. Businesses and families move out -- or
avoid moving in. Many residents who remain feel under siege. Police often rely on sweeps -- mass
arrests of street-level dealers -- to eradicate drug-related crime. But those rarely provide more than short-term relief.
In High Point, police believe that the combination of extensive investigation of the entire market and community involvement has helped solve
the problem. Novel Police Tactic Puts Drug Markets Out of Business In May 2004, after accumulating evidence in the West End, police chief
James Fealy invited 12 suspected dealers to a meeting at the police station, with a promise that they wouldn't be arrested that night.
Encouraged by their "influentials," nine showed up. In one room, they met with about 30 clergy, social workers and other community members
who confronted them with the harm they were doing, implored them to stop dealing, and offered them help. The suspects, however, "were
slouching in their seats and one guy even seemed to be dozing off," recalls Don Stevenson, pastor of a local congregation, the First Reformed
United Church of Christ. "Their attitude was, 'This is just another program and it will blow over.'" Then the alleged dealers moved to a second
room where they encountered a phalanx of law-enforcement officials: police, a district attorney, an assistant U.S. attorney, and representatives
of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and others. Around the room hung postersize photos of crack houses that had been the dealers' headquarters. In front of each alleged dealer was a binder, laying out the evidence
against him or her. There were even arrest warrants, lacking only the signature of a judge. The
law-enforcement officials made
an ultimatum: stop dealing or go to jail. Several suspected dealers with violent records had already
been arrested and were facing maximum charges. The same fate, officials emphasized, awaited
anyone in the room who returned to dealing drugs. The district attorney promised to seek the
maximum possible sentences , and the assistant U.S. attorney threatened to bring federal charges ,
which, he stressed , don't allow for parole . Police from surrounding areas warned them against trying to relocate operations,
noting that their names were flagged on statewide law-enforcement computers. Rev. Stevenson recalls that the alleged dealers "seemed to be
paying a lot more attention." The West End street drug market closed "overnight" and hasn't reopened in more than two years, says Chief
Fealy, who was "shocked" at the success. High Point police say they have since shut down the city's two other major street drug markets, using
the same strategy. Police in neighboring Winston-Salem, N.C., as well as Newburgh, N.Y., have deployed the strategy with success, and word is
spreading. Encouraged by the National Urban League, which wants to see the approach replicated nationwide, police departments in Tucson,
Ariz., Providence, R.I., Kansas City, Mo., and elsewhere are gearing up to try it. CHANGING FACE OF HIGH POINT See maps showing the changing
crime rates in High Point, N.C.'s West End neighborhood. "It's the hottest thing in drug enforcement," says Mark A. R. Kleiman, a University of
California, Los Angeles professor who specializes in illicit drug issues and isn't involved in the project. Some police and prosecutors object to the
approach. "Why not slam 'em from the beginning and forget this foolishness?" says Karen Richards, county prosecutor in the Fort Wayne, Ind.,
area. The Urban League tried to convince her and the Fort Wayne police to try the strategy, but Ms. Richards didn't support it. She draws a
distinction between addicts, who she believes should get social support, and dealers, who she believes deserve incarceration. "Drug dealers are
drug dealers," she says. "They won't have an epiphany and end up as model citizens." In Winston-Salem, many officers at first dubbed the
initiative "hug-a-thug," though few do so now that they've seen it in practice. In High Point, the West End neighborhood had been a major drug
market for almost 15 years, with 16 known crack houses operating at the start of the initiative. A traffic jam began almost every afternoon, as
buyers, many destined for homes in the suburbs, converged on the area seeking crack, according to residents and police. Charlie Simpson, who
owns and operates a radiator-repair shop in the West End, says he frequently saw drug dealers "on all four corners, selling drugs out of their
pockets." The dealing drove away business "because women were afraid to come, men didn't want to bring their wives, plus they didn't want to
leave their car overnight." The neighborhood of modest clapboard bungalows became the city's crime capital. Lucille Dennis, 89, who has lived
in the West End for half a century, says that before the initiative, she suffered three break-ins within a year and a half, and she stopped sitting
on her porch for fear of getting robbed. After
the West End initiative, violent crime -- defined as murder, rape,
robbery, aggravated assault, prostitution, sex offenses, and weapons violations -- dropped. More than
two years later, violent crime remains more than 25% lower in the area, according to police statistics. Since the
initiative, there hasn't been a single murder or rape reported in the West End. "I don't know exactly how to phrase it," Mrs. Dennis says, "but
you just don't see as many people riding around doing nothing."
Prescription Fraud
A criminal justice angle is essential to stopping prescription fraud – public health
framing can’t stop it
National Governors Association ’12 (Six Strategies for Reducing Prescription Drug Abuse,
http://www.nga.org/cms/home/nga-center-for-best-practices/center-publications/page-hspspublications/six-strategies-for-reducing-pres.html)
Enhance enforcement by coordinating operations, providing specialized training, and strengthening existing laws. States
can improve
their law enforcement and regulatory oversight activities by ensuring a coordinated approach to
investigating and prosecuting cases. States can launch multijurisdictional task forces that target specific
geographic areas or corridors where prescription drug abuse may be more prevalent. Governors can
encourage collaboration and promote key partnerships, for example, between the state attorney general’s office, the U.S. attorneys’ offices,
and local law enforcement. Health professional boards can also contribute significantly by helping law enforcement to identify potentially illicit
activity among prescribers and pharmacists. By collaborating with one another, law enforcement and regulatory authorities can share
information and resources, avoid duplication of effort, and develop a coordinated strategy so that actions are targeted. Although law
enforcement personnel may have extensive experience in illegal drug interdiction, they may not have the same expertise in investigating and
prosecuting prescription drug cases. Providing
training for them on pharmaceutical crime investigation and
prosecution can be an important step toward improving law enforcement’s response to prescription
drug abuse. Likewise, licensing boards may benefit from additional education and training on how to recognize potentially illegal or
inappropriate activity. Through their licensing authority, professional bodies can exercise more initiative in stopping illicit
access to prescription drugs, for example, by revoking the licenses of physicians acting outside the limits of
accepted medical practice or adopting regulations and policies that require increased disclosure and
transparency standards for any website that delivers, distributes, dispenses, or facilitates the sale of
prescription drugs. According to the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, 96 percent of entities
selling drugs online are illegitimate and operating in violation of U.S. law.11 These illegal online drug
sellers provide easy access to opioid pain relievers. Finally, opportunities may exist for states to strengthen enforcement of
existing laws or enact new ones that more effectively target the abuse of prescription drugs. For example, to prevent prescription
fraud, states can consider passing a law requiring pharmacists to request identification from persons
seeking to obtain controlled substances. As of 2010, 18 states required or permitted pharmacists to
request identification.12 In 2011, Florida passed a law targeting pill mills, a key provision of which
prohibited doctors from dispensing opioid pain relievers directly to consumers. The new law,
supported by regional strike forces, has been credited with helping to reduce the number of pain
clinics in the state from 800 to 508.13 In 2010, before the law was passed, Florida was home to 90 of
the nation’s top oxycodone purchasing doctors; by March 2011, only 13 were in the top 100.14
Smuggling
A criminal justice approach also is key to stop smuggling
Caulkins & Reuter ’17 (Jonathan Caulkins, drug policy researcher and the H. Guyford Stever
Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, Peter
Reuter, Professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of
Maryland "Dealing More Effectively and Humanely with Illegal Drugs," Crime and Justice 46 (2017): 95158.)
There are several sensible reasons why the
federal government should play a larger role in drug enforcement
than in enforcement of laws against burglary. For one, all of the heroin and cocaine/crack, and the
majority of methamphetamine, consumed in the United States are produced abroad and smuggled
into the United States , and the federal government has particular responsibilities for border control.
Furthermore, interdiction does not flow primarily from lucky searches at the border, but rather from
intelligence developed in partnership with the military and law enforcement in source and
transshipment countries; so interdiction inevitably intersects with international relations. A second reason is that even within
US borders, the supply chain for large areas of the country can concentrate in a smaller area,
potentially swamping the resources of that community. A prominent early example of this was when Miami was
overwhelmed with cocaine trafficking and trafficking-related violence in the early 1980s, before the primary
smuggling routes shifted to pass through Mexico rather than the Caribbean. Since it was demand from around the country, not just residents of
Miami, that was supporting that trade, it made
sense to draw on federal law enforcement resources that were
financed by the national tax base, not just residents of Miami-Dade County or Florida. A third reason is that sometimes drug law
enforcement requires specialized skills or equipment, such as when dismantling a toxic
methamphetamine lab , that not all local police departments have. Finally, the interstate nature of domestic trafficking makes it
appropriately a target for federal enforcement. However, it is not clear that the federal role has been limited to instances in which those or
similar arguments were paramount. Notably, federal prisons house a significant number of relatively low-level crack sellers. Sometimes the
primary specialized resource that led to federal involvement was simply that federal sentencing laws were harsher, but other times it may be
prosecutorial resources. Thus the federal crack cases, which are all low level because the drug is manufactured well down in the distribution
system, are found mostly in states with many small local prosecutors’ offices.29 This may be an efficient allocation of responsibilities given
current competencies, but it exposes crack sellers in specific states to the tougher justice of federal sentencing, an issue of distributional justice;
a state might want to exert its own authority by developing a state-level competence at making these cases. There have also been concerns
that the federal policy of sharing seized assets with local law enforcement agency partners may corrupt or skew enforcement priorities
(Benson, Rasmussen, and Sollars 1995; Worrall 2001). Attorney General Holder in 2015 ended that policy precisely for that reason (O’Harrow,
Horwitz, and Rich 2015). Another natural role for the federal government is in supporting data collection and research. Left to their own
devices, states would underinvest in such measures because many of the benefits would accrue to other states. The federal government
performs this function energetically with respect to treatment, prevention, and epidemiology. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
funds considerable research on drug abuse and addiction,30 and the household and high school senior surveys (formally, the NSDUH and
Monitoring the Future) are world-class. The federal government fails badly to support research and data collection adequately with respect to
drug enforcement and market monitoring. Funding to evaluate the efficacy of supply-side programs is perhaps 1 percent of what is invested in
research on demand-side interventions (Reuter 2001). The single most valuable data system for monitoring heavy drug users, ADAM, was
recently axed to save a few million dollars a year, a small fraction of what is spent on the NSDUH. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
owns the world’s best data on drug market transactions, with its System to Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence (STRIDE). Although its
sharing of those data has led to many valuable research contributions (e.g., Dobkin and Nicosia 2009), it tends to share STRIDE data grudgingly
and with inadequate documentation. There are also coordination issues between local and state governments. The most important is that
when local police and prosecutors cause a drug offender to be sentenced to prison, the cost of that prison sentence is usually paid by taxpayers
throughout the state, even though the majority of the benefits accrue locally. This creates a “tragedy of the commons” that can incentivize
over-incarceration. Taken together, these five principles lead to the following general rule: For
any given dependence-inducing
intoxicant that will harm an important number of those who use it, try first to preempt creation of a
substantial market for that substance. No society will ever be “drug-free” overall, but in various places and times certain
substances have been so rare as to be effectively unavailable to much of the population. For example, at
present
methamphetamine is largely absent from New England, even though it is common in other parts of
the country. When achieved, as with PCP, DMT, GHB, methcathinone, and various other substances, we do not think much about them
precisely because their prevalence is so low; we can declare success and leave the prohibition intact. Society gets the benefit from prevented
abuse of that substance and at minimal cost. Arguably this
was the situation in most of the United States for all illegal
drugs between World War II and the 1960s. Use was low, and enforcing prohibition was not costly. In
1950 the FBI’s Crime in the United States reports that among 205 cities with populations over 25,000, just 2,608 people were charged with drug
law violations, compared with 105,464 for burglary.31 So in 1950 there was one drug arrest for every 40 burglary arrests, whereas in 2013
there were six drug arrests for every burglary arrest—a change in relative frequency of 240. For
provided the preventive benefits of low availability at very low cost.
many decades drug prohibition
Penalties work in narrow instances
A criminal justice approach is especially necessary for new drugs or in areas that don’t
yet have an established market.
Caulkins & Reuter ’17 (Jonathan Caulkins, drug policy researcher and the H. Guyford Stever
Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, Peter
Reuter, Professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of
Maryland "Dealing More Effectively and Humanely with Illegal Drugs," Crime and Justice 46 (2017): 95158.)
So a
relatively tough enforcement regime can be sustainable for a drug that has a minimal established
market or user base. One reason alcohol prohibition failed was that it was an attempt to retroactively
impose a prohibition on a substance that already had a very large user base. Another situation is a market that is
small but growing rapidly. Drug use can diffuse by word of mouth in a manner that is aptly described as contagious (Ferrence 2001), even
though there is not literal contagion. When new users recruit other initiates, use can spread exponentially, and sometimes supply cannot keep
up. During such periods, supply can be the constrained factor, as suggested by above-equilibrium prices such as those for cocaine in 1980.
Attacking supply when supply is the constrained factor is more valuable than when it is not
constrained or can easily be replaced. So deploying tough enforcement against a market that is small
but might become large may be sensible, even if it ceases to be so later, once markets are established and use has
become endemic (Caulkins 2005).
Driving under the influence of illegal drugs could be treated but should probably be
penalized at the criminal justice level
Fleming ’08 (lawyer, is the chairman of the Los Angeles County Business Federation and immediate
past chairman of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. James P. Gray is a judge of the Orange
County Superior Court, This is the US On Drugs, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/05/opinion/oefleming5)
The mission of the criminal justice system should always be to protect us from one another and not
from ourselves. That means that drug users who drive a motor vehicle or commit other crimes while
under the influence of these drugs would continue to be held criminally responsible for their actions,
with strict penalties. But that said, the system should not be used to protect us from ourselves.
Penalties k2 S Violence
Criminal penalties key to change behavior – we can make the illegal drug trade less
violent and protect the safety of local communities.
Caulkins & Reuter ’17 (Jonathan Caulkins, drug policy researcher and the H. Guyford Stever
Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, Peter
Reuter, Professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of
Maryland "Dealing More Effectively and Humanely with Illegal Drugs," Crime and Justice 46 (2017): 95158.)
If promulgating terror, violence, and corruption will make dealers more money, they will do so. But conversely,
it should be possible
to induce sellers to change their tactics in ways that reduce the collateral damage they create if doing
so will reduce their costs even modestly. Sellers are primarily motivated to making money, not to
thwarting harm reduction. Caulkins and Reuter (2009) offer the example of a flagrant street market that
creates harms for a nearby sensitive facility (school, treatment center, playground, etc.). If a law enforcement
intervention displaced that market to a nearby abandoned industrial area, there might be no
noticeable change in drug use, with the same dealers selling to the same users. But that selling might expose fewer
children, recovering addicts, and others to the disorder and violence, thereby reducing the harm
drugs —particularly the drug markets—do to society.24 Furthermore, law enforcement is the only organization that
can deliver that service. When a crack house opens up next door, residents cannot expect to obtain
immediate relief by demanding greater funding for treatment or changes in the local school’s drug
prevention curriculum. We use the term “harm” here intentionally to be provocative. In much of the developed world “harm
reduction” is recognized as one of the four pillars of drug control, alongside enforcement, treatment, and prevention. It is understood to refer
to programs to aid dependent drug users without attempting to curtail their use (e.g., providing supervised injection facilities) and adopting a
human rights–based approach to drug policy, with emphasis on the rights of users (as opposed to their families, crime victims, or others). In the
United States “harm reduction” became a toxic term, seen within law enforcement circles as a Trojan horse for legalization;25 the national drug
strategy statements use the phrase “drug-related consequences,” not “drug-related harms.” Focusing on harms caused by drug markets falls
through the cracks of the culture war rhetoric surrounding drugs. Progressives focus on harms suffered by drug users, not harms created by
drug markets. Conservatives want to blame drugs and drug users, not the black markets created by their prohibition. Yet markets are central to
what troubles the general public about illegal drugs. Arguably the
greatest problem associated with illegal drugs other than
marijuana is crime and violence. Goldstein (1985) offered the classic tripartite division of crimes that are proximally caused by drugs: •
Psychopharmacological crimes are those caused by drug intoxication or withdrawal. • Economic-compulsive crimes are those committed by
users to obtain money to buy drugs. • Systemic crimes are those committed by drug dealers in the course of their trade, including not only “turf
wars” but also use of violence to intimidate witnesses, collect debts, and enforce discipline within a dealing organization. Only the first is driven
directly by drug use, and it is likely the smallest of the three. It is extraordinarily hard to quantify the frequency of each type. The definitions are
neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive, and police data are not designed to inform these distinctions. So if
law
enforcement could somehow defang drug dealers, inducing them to supply drugs in ways that never
involve weapons or violence, that would make an extraordinary contribution to public safety, even if
it had no effect whatever on drug use and, hence, psychopharmacological crime. The counterfactual is indeed hard to specify;
less violent drug markets might draw in more users. Such a transformation is not beyond imagination. When internetbased drug distribution systems such as the old Silk Road website ship drugs directly to users, they
bypass the domestic drug distribution system, leaving few opportunities or incentives for the exercise
of violence.26 While volumes sold on such dark sites appear not to have achieved large market share, they might in the future, and other
technological innovations may already have made an impact.27 In the 1980s most cocaine and heroin were sold in placebased street marketplaces that engendered enormous amounts of disorder and violence. By the late
1990s, much of that activity had been replaced by arranged meetings. It is not clear how much of the credit for that
transformation goes to focused police enforcement that suppressed street markets and how much to the advent of pagers and cellphones, but
likely both played a role. The key insight implicit in this discussion is that rates
of violence can vary dramatically from one
type of drug distribution to another. There is no universal physical constant guaranteeing that there
must be so-and-so many homicides per metric ton of cocaine delivered to users. Indeed, the European
cocaine market is now very roughly as large as the US market, in value at least and perhaps also by
weight, and yet it is thought to be far less violent.28 The fundamental principle is to encourage law
enforcement to seize on opportunities to mold markets into less destructive forms , even if that does
not reduce the quantity of drugs consumed. That is the essence of harm reduction, even though most reviews of harm
reduction do not even consider interventions by police or targeting markets to be within their scope (e.g., Ritter and Cameron 2005).
A criminal justice approach to drugs would be effective if the focus shifts to violent
users and dealers
Kleiman ’10 (Mark, professor of public policy at New York University, in 2015, Kleiman became the
director of the Crime and Justice Program at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management, When Brute
Force Fails, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/211204.pdf)
One answer is to concentrate on drugs that do not yet have established mass markets, or on
places yet unreached by drugs with established markets elsewhere. The arrest of one crack
dealer out of thousands in a big city is largely futile, but the heavily publicized arrest of the first crack
dealer to appear in a rural town, without an existing base of heavy users, might be extremely
useful . Similarly, a drug whose marketing machinery and user base are still in the process of being
established may be much more vulnerable to enforcement pressure than a drug whose market is
mature. That the current enforcement effort against cocaine does not seem to be gaining on the
problem does not imply that an effort of that magnitude mounted in 1979 or even 1982 might not have
greatly reduced the ultimate size of the cocaine problem, both because its impact would have been
greater on a smaller market and because the epidemic pattern of the spread of drug abuse can be
quite sensitive to forces that slow it down during its exponential-growth phase (Naik et. al 1996). Of course,
drug epidemics are easier to spot in retrospect than in prospect, which makes the approach Churchill called “strangling the baby in its cradle”
harder to apply in practice than it is to discuss in theory. Targeting market side-effects But just as drug abuse is not the only bad result of the
illicit drug markets, reducing
the extent of drug abuse should not be the only goal of drug law enforcement.
Not every drug transaction, every dealer, every organization, every transaction process, or every
market location makes the same contribution to violence and disorder. Enforcement has the capacity
to reduce the side effects of drug market activities by singling out the most noxious individuals,
organizations, and activities for special enforcement attention, thus exerting both Darwinian and
economic pressure to push drug-market activities in less harmful directions. In choosing targets for
enforcement action, and in setting the sentences for convicted drug offenders, the current system
focuses on the kind of drug involved and the quantity of the transaction (or the volume handled by the target
organization). Sentences can indeed be enhanced for using violence, or employing or selling to juveniles ,
but the basis is always drug and quantity, and enforcement agents and agencies frequently use sentence length as a measure of the importance
of the case and the quality of their handling of it. Under those circumstances, acquiring
a reputation for violence, especially
against informants, may actually reduce the vulnerability of a dealer or dealing organization to
enforcement action, which is about as perverse an incentive effect as could be imagined. There is a
strong case to be made for turning the system around and focusing instead on violence (especially the
intimidation of witnesses) and on the use of juveniles, rather than on drug volumes. That would have the dual
effect of getting the most dangerous dealers off the street and encouraging dealers considering
alternative styles of dealing to choose the less violent styles. Since much drug-market violence is
against other market participants, identifying the most violent dealers in a given city should
require no more than interviews with informants and with currently imprisoned dealers, asking
the simple question, “Who in this town scares you the most?”
A criminal justice approach is key to eliminating violent markets even if it doesn’t
reduce drug use
Kleiman ’10 (Mark, professor of public policy at New York University, in 2015, Kleiman became the
director of the Crime and Justice Program at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management, When Brute
Force Fails, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/211204.pdf)
Another targeting rule should be to focus on the most flagrant dealing processes. Drug
transactions vary on the dimension of flagrancy vs. (relative) discretion. Some proclaim themselves, as
when a dealer does business openly on a busy street corner or in a public park, with runners to
approach the drivers of passing vehicles to ask what they might be looking for, or when a house or storefront is
converted into a dedicate drug-selling location. Others hide themselves, as when a customer pages a dealer and the dealer arranges for a
delivery to the customer’s home. Flagrant
dealing is a disaster for the neighborhood in which it occurs. An open
street market, or a proliferation of drug houses, is about the strongest evidence possible that the
forces of order are not in control, something sure to frighten the law-abiding and likely to embolden the criminally-minded with
the thought that where drug dealing goes largely unpunished it might be possible to get away with other crimes as well. Equally
worrisome is the effect of visible open markets on public perceptions of the police: residents who see
open drug transactions and cannot understand why the police do not stop such flagrant lawbreaking
may perceive the police as incompetent, indifferent, or even corrupt. But the public order threat from open drug
markets only starts there. Property crime and prostitution are two major sources of money for hard-drug
purchases, so drug-market neighborhoods are likely to face more than their share of robbery,
burglary, and streetwalking. Worse yet, drug buyers and sellers carrying cash and valuable drugs, and
reluctant to call the police to complain if they are victimized, provide highly tempting robbery targets.
Consequently, the dealers in particular have strong reasons to go armed. In addition to violence directly related to
drug-market activities – disputes over territory or debt, retribution against dishonest employees, and
intimidation of potential witnesses – the ubiquity of firearms will tend to convert some ordinary
interpersonal disputes into incidents of deadly violence. A quarrel initiated by a slight,an insult, or courtship competition,
of the sort that in a different neighborhood might lead to a fistfight, may lead to gunplay instead. This gives the police both operational and
community-relations reasons to “do something” about street drug markets. As a result, police departments across the country continue to
make large numbers of low-level drug-dealing arrests, in most cases with little hope that anything substantial will change as a result.Low-arrest
crackdowns on focal-point marketsDrug dealers and drug buyers cluster, for two reasons: to find transactions partners, and to avoid police.
Buyers will be able to “score” more quickly and reliably where there are many sellers, and sellers will be able to dispose of their inventory more
quickly where there are many buyers, who in turn are likely to be attracted by the concentration of sellers. (Thus drug dealers who
appear to be rivals may actually be beneficial to one another; only when a single drug dealing organization isbig enough to maintain
enough of its own sellers in a given location to make it attractive to buyers will it attempt to keep competitors out.)
Treatment fails
Treatment fails for a lot of illegal drugs
Kleiman ’10 (Mark, professor of public policy at New York University, in 2015, Kleiman became the
director of the Crime and Justice Program at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management, When Brute
Force Fails, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/211204.pdf)
However,
it seems no more likely that we can treat our way out of our current drug problems than that
we can arrest and imprison our way out of them. Problems with stimulants, including cocaine
and methamphetamine, do not respond to maintenance therapies , and the efficacy of nonmaintenance drug therapies is, in general, lamentably small. Almost any treatment works well
enough while the sufferer is attending treatment to justify its cost (Rydell and Everingham 1994), but few
have the capacity to keep their clients engaged for the long haul, and the evidence of reduced drug
use after treatment ceases is generally not very impressive (Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs 2001).
Increasing treatment supply is feasible, but the paucity of treatment demand is another, and
in many cases the more important, limiting factor.
Public health framing fails – no demand for it
Wilson ’90 (James Q Wilson, was appointed chairman of the National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse
Prevention, won the NDT twice in 1951 and 1952, chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the
American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1985–
1990), and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at
Harvard-MIT, Lifetime Achievement Award, American Political Science Association Presidential Medal of
Freedom Charles E. Merriam Award for Outstanding Public Policy Research (1977) James Madison
Award (1990) Bradley Prize (2007), Against the Legalization of Drugs,
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/against-the-legalization-of-drugs/)
First, treatment. All
the talk about providing “treatment on demand” implies that there is a demand for
treatment. That is not quite right. There are some drug-dependent people who genuinely want
treatment and will remain in it if offered; they should receive it. But there are far more who want only short-term
help after a bad crash; once stabilized and bathed, they are back on the street again, hustling. And even
many of the addicts who enroll in a program honestly wanting help drop out after a short while when
they discover that help takes time and commitment. Drug-dependent people have very short time
horizons and a weak capacity for commitment. These two groups—those looking for a quick fix and
those unable to stick with a long-term fix—are not easily helped. Even if we increase the number of treatment slots—
as we should—we would have to do something to make treatment more effective.
A2: Portugal
The Portugal example is too small to base policy off of
Kleiman ’11 (Mark, professor of public policy at New York University, in 2015, Kleiman became the
director of the Crime and Justice Program at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management,
http://www.samefacts.com/2011/01/drug-policy/non-sequitur-portuguese-decriminalization-and-thedrug-wars/)
As Colombo would have said, there’s just one little thing: decriminalization of possession isn’t the same as legalization, and there’s no reason to
think that the effects of one give any strong indication about the effects of the other. (Note that what’s called “decriminalization” when applied
to cannabis – a policy of punishing dealers but letting users alone – was called “Prohibition” when applied to alcohol: the 18th Amendment and
the Volstead Act banned production, transportation, and sale, but not possession or use.) Simple
drug use rarely leads to
incarceration. There’s not much evidence that the threat of arrest does much to discourage potential
users. “Decrim” laws are generally passed in places where there already wasn’t much anti-user
enforcement. According to the Cato analysis by Glenn Greenwald purporting to show that Portugal’s
policy change was a success, Portuguese police made between 1500 and 2500 drug-possession arrests
per year in the period before decriminalization. That’s out of a population of 10 million. The reported
rate of illicit drug use is something over 3%, suggesting that the annual risk of arrest for Portuguese
illicit-drug users was something under 1%. Neither the Greenwald report, nor the study by Hughes and
Stevens published in the British Journal of Criminology gives any figures on criminal penalties for
users, but Greenwald reports that the annual number of administrative proceedings against users
after the new law has been more than twice as great as the number of possession arrests before the
law. Has the overall deterrent against drug use gone up, or down? It’s hard to say. Overwhelmingly, drug
enforcement is directed at dealers, not users. Decrim doesn’t change anti-dealer enforcement at all. It
therefore doesn’t make drugs cheaper or easier to get. So it doesn’t provide much of a test of the effect of legalization on
consumption. By the same token, it doesn’t reduce the arrest and incarceration of dealers, crime incident to the
markets, or crime by users to get money for drugs. (Insofar as consumption goes up, all those things tend to get worse, not
better.) So what we learn from Portugal is that a relatively poor, small, homogeneous, culturally
conservative country with a small illicit-drug problem will still have a small illicit-drug problem after it
stops threatening users with criminal penalties and starts threatening them with administrative
proceedings instead. Yawn.
Police in some U.S. cities – notably New York – use drug-possession arrests – especially cannabis-
possession arrests – as a means of harassing people they’re suspicious of, or mad at, for other reasons. Getting rid of that tactic would be a fine
idea. So I’m for decriminalization, not just of cannabis, but of other drugs as well. And I’m for legalization of cannabis, on a non-commercial
basis. (I’d still enforce a rule against using drugs it’s illegal to sell for people on probation, parole, or bail.) Whether
to legalize other
drugs depends on (1) how much problem consumption would increase and (2) how you weigh the costs
of drug abuse against the costs of crime and enforcement. The Portuguese experience gives us roughly
zero information on those two points.
Portuguese success wouldn’t apply in other situations.
Baum ’16 (Dan, Legalize It All, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1)
Portuguese-style decriminalization also wouldn’t work in the United States because Portugal is a small
country with national laws and a national police force, whereas the United States is a patchwork of
jurisdictions — thousands of overlapping law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors at the local,
county, state, and federal levels. Philadelphia’s city council, for example, voted to decriminalize
possession of up to an ounce of marijuana in June 2014, and within a month state police had arrested 140
people for exactly that offense. “State law trumps city ordinances,” Police Commissioner Charles
Ramsey told the Philadelphia Inquirer. And while marijuana may be legal in four states and D.C., under
federal law it is still as illegal as heroin or LSD — and even more tightly controlled than cocaine or
pharmaceutical opioids. The Obama Administration has decided, for the moment, not to interfere with the states that have legalized
marijuana, but times change and so do administrations. We cannot begin to enjoy the benefits of managing drugs as a
matter of health and safety, instead of as a matter of law enforcement , until the drugs are legalized
at every level of American jurisprudence, just as alcohol was re-legalized when the United States
repealed the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933.
The Portugal experiment didn’t change as much as the media said.
Lopez ’15 (German, Senior correspondent at Vox, focuses on criminal justice, guns, and drugs.
Previously, I worked at CityBeat, a local newspaper in Cincinnati, covering politics and policy at the local
and state level, Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001. Barely anything changed,
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/19/8812263/portugal-drug-decriminalization)
But while
it's true that decriminalization didn't cause a spike in drug use (or deaths) in Portugal, that could
be because decriminalization just didn't change much, if anything, in the country's legal system. In a
2014 paper, UC Berkeley's Hannah Laqueur found that even before Portugal passed its
decriminalization law, it was already loosely enforcing its anti-drug laws. On any given year, a handful
to a few dozen people could be in prison for drug possession. So the law was really only codifying an
existing practice. "When you actually look at the practice on the ground, the change was even smaller," Laqueur said.
"Even though drug possession was criminal before the passage, if you look at the actual number of people who were in
prison for drug possession, it was tiny — 10, 20, maybe 30 people in any given year in the entire
country. That's less than 1 percent of the prison population. So in many ways, the law in Portugal was
just implementing what was de facto criminal justice practice." It's possible that people could have changed their
behaviors in reaction to Portugal merely passing its decriminalization law. The Cato paper reported, for instance, that some people felt safer
getting anti-drug treatment because they no longer feared getting arrested. But as Laqueur's paper points out, the
research shows
that people don't react just to laws on the books — they react to laws on the books that are enforced
with enough certainty and swiftness that doing something illegal would almost definitely result in
punishment. And if people in Portugal were already being by and large left alone for their drug use,
it's unlikely they really changed their behaviors simply because the government altered some words
in its legal code. This is a problem in policy analysis in general Laqueur's research shows one of the tricky aspects of analyzing the effects
of policy: it's not always as simple as looking at what happened before and after a law passed. This is a
problem with, for example, evaluating whether the death penalty affects crime rates. In 2013, Maryland lawmakers abolished capital
punishment. But no one had been executed in the state since 2005. Yet if there had been a crime spike in 2014, an analyst could try to link the
increase to the abolition of the death penalty. But that would be a mistake, since the death penalty wasn't really active in the state for eight
years before it was abolished — meaning it very likely wasn't acting as a deterrent to crime anyway. There's a similar issue with evaluating the
effects of marijuana legalization. One of the big criticisms of legalization is that it will lead to skyrocketing pot use, so everyone is looking to
Colorado's drug surveys to see the effect of legalization before and after the state began selling pot in 2014. The problem is that Colorado pot
users could already legally buy their pot from vendors in a medical system that was so relaxed that experts like Mark Kleiman, of New York
University's Marron Institute, have dubbed it "de facto legalization." So if actual legalization doesn't cause pot use to rise, it could just be that
everyone who was using marijuana in the state could already get it from a medical dispensary. This doesn't mean that analyzing the effects of
certain laws is impossible; it just means it's more difficult than looking at the circumstances before and after the law was passed. Without
the extra caution, people could end up praising a decriminalization law in Portugal that really didn't
have much effect on its legal system.
Portugal worked partly because their economy dramatically improved at the same
time as the decriminalization experiment.
Kristoff ’17 (Nicholas, NYT columnist, winner of two Pulitzers, How to Win a War on Drugs, Portugal
treats addiction as a disease, not a crime,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/sunday/portugal-drug-decriminalization.html)
Another factor that has benefited Portugal: The economy has grown and there is a robust social fabric
and safety net, so fewer people self-medicate with drugs. Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton
University have chronicled the rise of “deaths of despair” and argue that opioid use in America in part
reflects a long-term decline in well-paying jobs for those with a high school education or less.
A2: Mass incarceration advantage
violent offenders who make up a plurality of the prison population
Forman ’12 (James, Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School, RACIAL CRITIQUES OF MASS
INCARCERATION: BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW, Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 3599,
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4599&context=fss_papers)
But violent crime is a different matter. While
rates of drug offenses are roughly the same throughout the
population, blacks are overrepresented among the population for violent offenses. For example, the African
American arrest rate for murder is seven to eight times higher than the white arrest rate; the black arrest rate for robbery is ten times higher
than the white arrest rate.94 Murder and robbery are the two offenses for which the arrest data are considered most reliable as an indicator of
offending.95 In making this point,
I do not mean to suggest that discrimination in the criminal justice system is
no longer a concern. There is overwhelming evidence that discriminatory practices in drug law enforcement contribute to racial
disparities in arrests and prosecutions, and even for violent offenses there remain unexplained disparities between arrest rates and
incarceration rates.96 Instead, I make the point to highlight the problem with framing mass incarceration as a new form of Jim
Crow.
leads proponents to search for disparities in the criminal justice system that
resemble those of the Old Jim Crow, they confine their attention to cases where blacks are like whites
in all relevant respects, yet are treated worse by law. Such a search usefully exposes the abuses associated with racial
Because the analogy
profiling and the drug war. But it does not lead to a comprehensive understanding of mass incarceration. Does it matter that the Jim Crow
analogy diverts our attention from violent crime and the state’s response to it, if it gives us tools needed to criticize the War on Drugs? I think it
does, because contrary to the impression left by many of mass incarceration’s critics, the
majority of America’s prisoners are
not locked up for drug offenses. Some facts worth considering: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2006 there were 1.3
million prisoners in state prisons, 760,000 in local jails, and 190,000 in federal prisons.97 Among the state
prisoners, 50% were serving time for violent offenses, 21% for property offenses, 20% for drug
offenses, and 8% for public order offenses.98 In jails, the split among the various categories was more equal, with roughly 25% of inmates
being held for each of the four main crime categories (violent, drug, property, and public order).99 Federal prisons are the only
type of facility in which drug offenders constitute a majority (52%) of prisoners, but federal prisons
hold many fewer people overall.100 Considering all forms of penal institutions together,
more prisoners are locked up for violent offenses than for any other type, and just
under 25% (550,000) of our nation’s 2.3 million prisoners are drug offenders .101 This is still
an extraordinary and appalling number. But even
if every single one of these drug offenders were released
tomorrow, the United States would still have the world’s largest prison system.102 Moreover, our prison
system has grown so large in part because we have changed our sentencing policies for all offenders,
not just drug offenders. We divert fewer offenders than we once did, send more of them to prison, and keep them in prison for much
longer.103 An exclusive focus on the drug war misses this larger point about sentencing choices . This is why it
is not enough to dismiss talk of violent offenders by saying that “violent crime is not responsible for the prison boom.”104 It is true that the
prison population in this country continued to grow even after violent crime began to decline dramatically. However, the state’s response to
violent crime—less diversion and longer sentences—has been a major cause of mass incarceration. Thus, changing
how
governments respond to all crime, not just drug crime, is critical to reducing the size of prison
populations.105 I am sympathetic to the impulse to avoid discussing violent crime. Like other progressives, the New Jim Crow writers are
frustrated by decades of losing the crime debate to those who condemn violence while refusing to acknowledge or ameliorate the conditions
that give rise to it.106 “As a society,” Alexander writes, “our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system
designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.”107 Since it is especially difficult to
suspend moral judgment when the discussion turns to violent crime, progressives tend to avoid or change the subject.108 To see how reticent
mass incarceration’s critics can be regarding the subject of violence, consider how Alexander
describes Jarvious Cotton,
whose story opens The New Jim Crow: Cotton’s great-great grandfather could not vote as a slave. His greatgrandfather was
beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was
barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious
Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black
men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.109 Cotton is like his ancestors in
that he cannot vote. But there is one salient difference between Cotton and his ancestors. They couldn’t
vote because they were black; Cotton lost his right to vote when he was
convicted of
murder.110 But Alexander nowhere mentions Cotton’s crime, and her passive construction—Cotton
“has been labeled a felon”—suggests that he had no choice in the matter. Now, I agree with Alexander that even
though Cotton was convicted of murder, his status as a felon should not carry with it a lifetime of disenfranchisement. But Alexander does not
strengthen her case, or help us understand the problem of mass incarceration in all of its dimensions, by declining to acknowledge his violent
offense. Avoiding the topic of violence in this manner is a mistake, not least because it disserves the very people on whose behalf the New Jim
Crow writers advocate.111 After all, the
same low-income young people of color who disproportionately enter
prisons are disproportionately victimized by crime.112 And the two phenomena are mutually reinforcing.
A2: Addiction
Addiction is not all encompassing – humans have agency in overcoming it.
Morse ’18 (Stephen, J.D., Ph.D. is Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law and Professor of
Psychology and Law in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, The Criminal Responsibility of Opioid
Addicts, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/11/06/the-criminal-responsibility-of-opioidaddicts/)
There is no doubt that other addicted defendants will attempt to use the current science of addiction to
justify a claim that addicts are not responsible for the actions of possessing and using the substances
to which they are addicted. Have Federal and state courts, Congress, and the state legislatures been as unfeeling and harsh as the
New York Times editorial quoted above suggests? Is the legal treatment of addiction fair and optimum social policy? Should future addicted
defendants prevail or is the present policy reasonable? To answer these questions, the
first issue to be addressed is the
meaning of addiction. The American Psychiatric Association’s influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, DSM-5, does not use the term, but instead lists individual “substance use disorders” depending on
the problematic substance involved. Nonetheless, most addiction researchers define the term to mean something
like persistent drug seeking and using, especially “compulsively” or with craving, in the face of
negative consequences (without being clear whether these consequences are subjectively recognized
or simply objectively exist). There are no validated biological criteria for addiction. The conclusion that
addicts can’t help using, that they are compelled to use, underlies the claim that they are not
responsible and should be excused. How can it be fair to blame and punish people for conduct they
cannot control? But what if the conclusion about loss of control (or any of the synonyms, such as
having “no choice”) is highly contestable? Then perhaps legal policy would not look so objectionable. The meaning of
compulsion is unclear and is often based on a common-sense inference. The addict’s persistent seeking and using is accompanied by craving
(but not always), negative interpersonal, medical, occupational, and legal consequences (but not always), subjective feelings of wanting but not
liking the substance (but not always), and the addict’s claim that he wants to quit but cannot. After all, why would he continue to use under
these dreadful circumstances? It must be true, it is concluded, that the use “must be” “compelled” and the addict is therefore unable to quit
using. Observe, first, that the the
primary, utterly necessary criteria for addiction are intentional actions—
persistent seeking and using of substances. These are not pure mechanisms, like spiking a fever in
response to an infection or metastases of a primary tumor. Injecting or inhaling a controlled
substance, for example, is not a muscular spasm. They are intentional human actions and human action
can always be evaluated morally, unlike a pure mechanism, which is not subject to potential moral
evaluation. We don’t blame a hurricane for the destruction it wreaks or the infected person for
showing a fever, but we do blame people who commit arson. Why can’t we blame and punish addicts
for using substances because, unlike mechanisms, they are people who have choices or control over
their actions? It may be fearsomely difficult for addicts to control their use, much as it is difficult to break many bad, strong habits, but
don’t we expect people to exert control even over difficult choices when they have good reason to do so.
To eschew a criminal justice approach is to refuse the strong evidence for willpower.
Morse ’18 (Stephen, J.D., Ph.D. is Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law and Professor of
Psychology and Law in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, The Criminal Responsibility of Opioid
Addicts, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/11/06/the-criminal-responsibility-of-opioidaddicts/)
At this point, proponents
of excusing addicts for at least possessing and using make the following major counterargument. The gist, already alluded to above, is that addiction is a disease—indeed, a chronic and relapsing brain disease—and
using is an “involuntary” sign of it. I believe that various parts of this argument are essentially contestable
and sometimes flat out wrong. Even if addiction can be usefully considered a disease, and many dispute this, it
is not a disease like any other. Further, it assumes the conclusion to be proved to say that actions that
are a sign of addiction “must be” involuntary just because they are a sign of a disease. Although intentional
human action can contribute to both the cause and cure of many diseases, most diseases cannot be “cured” by a simple
decision to stop the disease process because most signs and symptoms of diseases are not actions;
they are mechanisms. In contrast, if the addict decides to stop using and acts on that decision for a
non-trivial time period, the person is no longer diagnosable as an addict. My intentional action of
taking an antibiotic may cure an infection, but I didn’t cure the infection directly by my action. The
addict directly cures the addiction by intentionally not using. Addiction may be a disease, but it does
not mean that addicts have no or little choice over the action of using. Lack of choice or control must be proven
independently and not simply by assertion. Even if addiction is a disease and use is a sign of it, perhaps addicts do have substantial
choice about whether to use, even if it’s a hard choice to give up using. If persistent use of substances changes the
brain, doesn’t this mean that addiction is a brain disease, after all, and that addicts should therefore be excused? Of course, persistent
drug use changes the brain, but every experience changes our brains. Reading this article or learning a
new language changes your brain. If brain changes were indicative of disease states and lack of
control, all human behavior would be the symptom of a disease and no one would be responsible for
any behavior. This argument proves too much. But what if the changes are of a specific nature that makes stopping difficult, say, by
usurping the usual reward systems that make activities necessary for survival like eating and procreation pleasurable and recruiting these
systems for drug use? We know that it is not easy for addicts to stop using and it would be entirely unsurprising if some of the difficulty
stemmed from altered neural anatomy or physiology. When
addicts don’t quit using, is it because they cannot stop or
simply will not stop? The empirical evidence on this question strongly suggests that most and
perhaps all addicts have substantial choice about whether to use. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to quit
using, most addicts quit permanently without addiction treatment, although they may be assisted by family and friends
and by organizations such as AA. Although the evidence for why they finally quit is anecdotal, it all points to them discovering a
good enough reason for them to give up using, such as shame, the inability to look after family, the
desire to live a better life, and similar good reasons. The high rates of spontaneous ceasing to use
coupled with the reasons for doing so are very inconvenient facts for the chronic and relapsing brain
disease model. Virtually all the studies that have been done that show high rates of relapse involved addicts in treatment
for addiction, but these are not a random sample of addicts. Addicts in treatment disproportionately have
another psychiatric diagnosis and it is impossible to know whether addiction alone accounts for the
relapse. The same subjects are also the data base for the studies that show differences between the brains of those with and without
addiction, so once again we don’t know if addiction alone accounts for the brain changes.
Incentives matter when it comes to addiction – public health approach doesn’t make
things better.
Morse ’18 (Stephen, J.D., Ph.D. is Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law and Professor of
Psychology and Law in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, The Criminal Responsibility of Opioid
Addicts, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/11/06/the-criminal-responsibility-of-opioidaddicts/)
Addicts also respond to incentives . Imagine that I give a heroin addict really good stuff and the means to
inject, such as a clean needle, but I credibly threaten to kill the addict immediately if he uses. The addict won’t
use (unless he also desires to die). Try stopping the unfortunate Parkinson’s disease sufferer from shaking by
the threat that he’ll be killed if he does shake. The usual response to such arguments is to concede
that of course addicts have “some” control, but that the amount of such control is effectively trivial.
Again, the evidence does not support this assertion. Some treatment programs, such as those for addicted
physicians and airline pilots, as well as probation and parole programs and drug courts, all use the threat of sanctions to deter
addicts from relapsing, and most do; the sanction gives them a good enough reason to quit. Addicts are not automatons.
They are acting human agents who can respond to reason despite their addiction. Finally, even if there are
some addicts who are otherwise responsible but cannot control their substance use, we cannot reliably identify this sub-category. Leroy Powell
himself furnishes an excellent concluding example. On the morning of his trial, Powell had been given a drink, presumably by his counsel to help
him avoid the shakes. Powell’s expert psychiatrist had testified that although he had some control over taking a first drink, once he had that
drink he was powerless to stop drinking. Powell’s cross-examination at trial, which was quoted by Justice Marshall in his opinion, disclosed,
however, that Powell was not drunk at his trial. When asked why not, Powell responded that he didn’t keep drinking because he knew he had
to come to court and that he would have been unable to do so if he kept drinking. There are attractive theories suggesting that at the time of
possessing and using, when addicts are in states of peak desire for the substance, many may not be responsible for their conduct. But these
theories run afoul of the following consideration. When
not in states of peak desire, when quiescent, addicts are
fully responsible agents who know that if they don’t seek help or take other measures to deal with
their addiction, they will use and get into trouble again. It is their duty at that point to take such steps, or they deserve to
be held responsible if they use later in a state of non-responsibility. A person suffering from epilepsy who knows that his seizures are not wellcontrolled by medication should not get behind the wheel of a car. If he seizes while driving and causes a fatal accident, he will be held
responsible even if he was “blacked out” at the time. Now, some addicts may be so completely mentally disabled by their lives of addiction and
consequent deprivation that they are simply not responsible most of the time and should not be held responsible for use (or most anything else
that they do), but most addicts are not like that. Most
addicts can fairly be held responsible when they possess and
use because they had the capacity to avoid doing so by potential earlier behavior. In short, the available
evidence does not support the oft-repeated claim that addicts cannot control use, and it would be
unfair to blame and punish them for it. Perhaps future discoveries of the various disciplines that investigate addiction will
challenge this conclusion, but for now Justice Marshall’s dictum in Powell still applies to the claim by addicts like Joyce Eldred that they must be
excused for using. They are asking for too much based on too little evidence. In the current state of understanding, courts should not limit
legislatures by imposing a one-size-fits-all, constitutional excuse for addicts. As the legislatures struggle to respond to addiction, including the
opioid epidemic, using criminal blame and punishment is one potential tool. Furthermore, imposing the defense might well have
unintended negative consequences. For example, it would be difficult to limit the defense simply to use by those on probation and parole or to
defendants charged with possession or use alone. Recall that sympathetic judges in the past have thought the logic of the excuse should apply
to any criminal behavior that is a compulsion symptomatic of an individual defendant’s addiction. The effects on the plea-bargaining process,
which adjudicates roughly 98 percent of Federal criminal cases and 94 percent of state cases, would be immense and uncertain. Addicted
defendants might be treated even more harshly.
No Solvency - Federalism
No solvency—can’t make drugs a public health issue because of federalism concerns in
the US
Baum ’16 (Dan, Legalize It All, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1)
Portuguese-style decriminalization also wouldn’t work in the United States because Portugal is a small
country with national laws and a national police force, whereas the United States is a patchwork of
jurisdictions — thousands of overlapping law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors at the local,
county, state, and federal levels. Philadelphia’s city council, for example, voted to decriminalize
possession of up to an ounce of marijuana in June 2014, and within a month state police had arrested 140
people for exactly that offense. “State law trumps city ordinances,” Police Commissioner Charles
Ramsey told the Philadelphia Inquirer. And while marijuana may be legal in four states and D.C., under
federal law it is still as illegal as heroin or LSD — and even more tightly controlled than cocaine or
pharmaceutical opioids. The Obama Administration has decided, for the moment, not to interfere with the states that have legalized
marijuana, but times change and so do administrations. We cannot begin to enjoy the benefits of managing drugs as a
matter of health and safety, instead of as a matter of law enforcement , until the drugs are legalized
at every level of American jurisprudence, just as alcohol was re-legalized when the United States
repealed the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933.
A2: Prisons
Turn-- switching from a criminal justice perspective results in higher racial inequalities
in prison
Gottschalk and Kilpatrick 15 (Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. ABOUT
THE INTERVIEWER Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin, “It’s Not Just the Drug War: An
Interview with Marie Gottschalk,” Jacobin, 3/5/15, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/massincarceration-war-on-drugs)
CK You mention the uncomfortable fact that states that are less punitive are more likely to have greater racial
disparities in their inmate populations . MG This is a controversial and tough issue that has to be faced. Many people,
including many progressives, have set reducing the racial disparities in prison as a major goal. The aim
is to send blacks and whites to prison at more comparable rates. How might that come about? Let’s look at the South.
The South actually has some of the nation’s lowest racial disparities when it comes to black-white
imprisonment — much lower than a state like Minnesota. Blacks in Minnesota are about eleven times
more likely to be incarcerated than whites, giving Minnesota the country’s highest black-white disparity in imprisonment. But
Minnesota also has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country. So overall, African Americans
are less likely to be sent to prison in Minnesota than in the South, which is a more equal opportunity
incarcerator. If we reserve prisons for people who’ve committed the most serious crimes that pose
major threats to public safety, we’re probably going to have fewer African Americans overall in prison but higher
racial disparities in the prison population . Why? Because, even though the rate of violent crime has been falling for AfricanAmericans while rising for whites, African Americans still disproportionately commit more serious crimes like
homicide, robbery, and aggravated assault. The reasons why have to do more with class than race,
including structural factors like poverty, joblessness, decaying urban neighborhoods, poor housing
stock, and extensive segregation by class and race, which are often difficult to disentangle.
War on Drugs isn’t the cause of prison overpopulation
Gottschalk and Kilpatrick 15 (Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. ABOUT
THE INTERVIEWER Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin, “It’s Not Just the Drug War: An
Interview with Marie Gottschalk,” Jacobin, 3/5/15, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/massincarceration-war-on-drugs)
When it comes to uniquely American nightmares, it’s hard to beat our carceral state. Living in a country with 5 percent of the
world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, many are aware of the human rights
catastrophe taking place around them. But when it comes to what’s actually driving this, the
explanatory power of standard progressive narratives falls short. The growing unpopularity of the
War on Drugs and the number of bipartisan moves to, supposedly, roll back mass incarceration have led some leftists to believe
that, finally, the prison-state is about to be cut down to size. Yet a new book by University of
Pennsylvania political scientist Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, makes
it clear that the problem is far worse than commonly suspected, and that the reforms on the table are unlikely to even
make a dent in the forces that keep millions behind bars. Contrary to what many progressives believe, Gottschalk argues it’s not
primarily the War on Drugs that’s driving this beast . Instead, it’s an all-out assault that “extends a
brute egalitarianism across the board.” Jacobin editor Connor Kilpatrick recently got a chance to interview Gottschalk.. CK One of
the most shocking stats in your book is that simply rolling back punishments for violent offenses to their 1984
levels in 2004 would have done more to lower the incarceration rate — a cut in state prison rates of
30 percent — than simply ending the drug war. MG The intense focus in criminal justice reform today
on the non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual offenders — the so-called non, non, nons — is troubling . Many contend
that we should lighten up on the sanctions for the non, non, nons so that we can throw the book at the really bad guys. But the fact is that
we’ve been throwing the book at the really bad guys for a really long time. Legislators are making
troubling compromises in which they are decreasing penalties in one area — such as drug crimes — in
order to increase them in another area — such as expanding the use of life sentences. In doing so, they’re also fostering the
mistaken idea that it is easy to distinguish the non, non, nons from the really bad guys. But as anyone who has watched The Wire knows, such
categories can be very fluid and potentially misleading. Furthermore, some people who’ve done really bad things are no
longer major threats to public safety after spending many years in prison and as they age out of the most crime-prone demographic groups.
War on drugs is just one proximate cause of incarceration—alt causes mandatory
minimums, sex offender measures, and life sentences are all to blame
Gottschalk and Kilpatrick 15 (Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. ABOUT
THE INTERVIEWER Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin, “It’s Not Just the Drug War: An
Interview with Marie Gottschalk,” Jacobin, 3/5/15, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/massincarceration-war-on-drugs)
. CK Another of your points of disagreement with many progressives and liberals writing on the buildup of our carceral state is their suggestion that the drug war is the primary driver of this nightmare.
You’re very critical of that view. MG We are at a promising political moment to think seriously about criminal justice reform.
Unfortunately , the issue is getting framed in a way that’s too narrowly focused on the War on Drugs. In fact,
if we released everyone now serving time in state prisons whose primary charge is a drug offense, we
would reduce the state prison population by only 20 percent . The overwhelming majority of people
in prison are not there because of a drug offense . And even many of the people who are serving time
primarily for a drug charge have other kinds of offenses on their records. We have created the
mistaken idea that prisons are chock-full of people serving time for petty drug possession. That’s not
to minimize the cost of the War on Drugs, especially for African Americans, and the need to end this unjust war. Ending the
War on Drugs would have an uneven effect on certain demographic groups. It would likely reduce dramatically
the incarceration rates for African-American women, many of whom are in prison or jail primarily for a drug offense. CK So, if it’s not the drug
There are proximate causes , and then there are the deeper underlying causes. I am not saying
the War on Drugs was insignificant. It was an important proximate cause of the explosion in the prison
population. Another important factor was how, beginning in the 1970s, police, prosecutors, judges,
and parole boards read the political tea leaves and started to exert their enormous discretion in a more
punitive way. In the 1980s and 1990s, legislators began piling on tougher sanctions across the board.
These included not only stiffer punishments for drug offenses but also the proliferation of mandatory
minimums, three-strikes laws, truth-in-sentencing legislation, draconian sex offender measures,
mandatory sentencing guidelines, and life sentences. The United States did not just toughen up drug
penalties. It toughened up all kinds of penalties for all kinds of offenses and made sure that more
people served most of their sentence before being released or paroled.
war, then what’s driving this? MG
No one factor can solve prisons—
Gottschalk and Kilpatrick 15 (Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. ABOUT
THE INTERVIEWER Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin, “It’s Not Just the Drug War: An
Interview with Marie Gottschalk,” Jacobin, 3/5/15, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/massincarceration-war-on-drugs)
CK How about the underlying causes? MG The underlying drivers of the carceral state are more complex. The United
States has politicized and racialized issues of crime and punishment in ways that other countries have not. Why? No single factor is to
blame . Several factors came together to create the perfect storm. The enormous social and political unrest of
the 1960s took shape amidst a crime shock as the national homicide rate doubled between the mid-1960s and
early 1970s. At the same time, violence became far more geographically concentrated in poor urban areas with
high concentrations of African Americans. The lack of a consensus on what caused the alarming
increase in violent crime opened up enormous space to redefine the “law-and-order” problem and its solutions.
Foes of civil rights increasingly sought to associate concerns about crime with anxieties about racial
disorder, the transformation of the racial status quo, and wider political turmoil, including the wave of urban unrest and riots and the huge
demonstrations against the Vietnam War that gripped the country in the 1960s and 1970s. The construction of the carceral state
was deeply bipartisan from early on and not merely a case of New Democrats like Bill Clinton belatedly following in the punitive
footsteps laid down decades earlier by Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and other leading Republicans. Since the
1940s, race liberals had been consistently promoting greater investments in law enforcement and
neutral procedures as the best way to resolve the law-and-order problem, as Naomi Murakawa explains in The
First Civil Right, her wonderful new book. Race liberals remained confident that the establishment of a modernized, rationalized, and uniform
sentencing structure was the best insurance against fostering a criminal justice system that was excessively punitive and excessively biased
against minorities. In seeking the support of archly conservative Southern Democrats, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and many other race
liberals ran roughshod over deep concerns expressed by other liberals and some experts on crime and
punishment that the quest for more proceduralism untethered to substantive goals in criminal justice
would yield a more punitive criminal justice system.
Alt cause—deindustrialization and gutting public sector work opportunities created
the conditions for a racialized war on drugs and the carceral state—aff can’t solve
Gottschalk and Kilpatrick 15 (Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. ABOUT
THE INTERVIEWER Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin, “It’s Not Just the Drug War: An
Interview with Marie Gottschalk,” Jacobin, 3/5/15, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/massincarceration-war-on-drugs)
CK How much do changes in the US political economy dating back to the 1970s help to explain the
growth of the carceral state? MG There’s a common argument that deindustrialization built the carceral state. That argument
cuts one of two ways. The first is that as people, especially African Americans, lost out in
deindustrialization, they turned to crime. The other is that the unemployed and dispossessed were
not actually committing more crime. But with deindustrialization, public fears of a lumpen underclass
threatening the majority escalated, partly because politicians stoked these fears for electoral reasons.
This fueled the tough-on-crime stance — which became tough on African Americans in particular, thanks to the longstanding
history of the racialization of crime in the United States for political purposes. What I argue in Caught is that we had a failure to
incorporate African Americans into cities in a meaningful way that pre-dates the rise of mass
incarceration. African-American men were migrating to Northern urban areas at a moment when Jim
Crow was still quite entrenched in the North and the South, and deindustrialization was already under
way. So this idea that African Americans moved North, got good factory jobs, had middle-class lives, and then faced
deindustrialization gets the timing a bit wrong. It also obfuscates the fact that one of the most
important things that helped to incorporate African Americans during this period was the expansion
of the public sector, which created many jobs for them. If we truly want to help people who are coming out of
prison or to keep people from going to prison, then we need a public-sector expansion with real jobs that
pay a living wage, not the contingent kind that pay a minimum wage.
Alt cause—sex offenders make up the most rapidly increasing prison population
Gottschalk and Kilpatrick 15 (Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. ABOUT
THE INTERVIEWER Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin, “It’s Not Just the Drug War: An
Interview with Marie Gottschalk,” Jacobin, 3/5/15, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/massincarceration-war-on-drugs)
CK You mention another big engine of the carceral state build-up is the war on sex offenders. In Caught, you note that from 1996 to
2010 the number of people serving time at the federal level for drug convictions went up 80 percent,
but those serving time for sexually explicit materials went up sixtyfold . MG People charged with sex
offenses are the most rapidly increasing segment of the US prison population. Politicians and the
general public talk about sex offenders as deviant pathological beasts. They don’t realize that “sex
offenses” is a very capacious category, including everything from urinating in public to consensual
underage sex to flashing to child pornography to raping and murdering a child. According to the latest statistics on federal
prosecutions, we are meting out longer sentences on average to people who view child pornography than
to people who actually sexually abuse children. CK How do other countries address this? MG Other Western
countries have not established extensive civil commitment systems that continue to lock up people convicted of sex offenses long after they
have completed their sentences — in some cases for life. They do not impose onerous residential, registration, and
community notification requirements. They do not require people convicted of sex offenses to be
listed in public databases accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. The evidence is thin or nonexistent that
such measures seriously reduce the incidence of sex offenses. These measures actually may be
backfiring by pushing people convicted of sex offenses to the margins of society and thus increasing the likelihood that they will recidivate.
AT: Alexander—shouldn’t view prisons as a racial caste system but instead need a
nuanced view of how incarceration as such is a crisis
Gottschalk and Kilpatrick 15 (Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. ABOUT
THE INTERVIEWER Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin, “It’s Not Just the Drug War: An
Interview with Marie Gottschalk,” Jacobin, 3/5/15, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/massincarceration-war-on-drugs)
You have a lot of praise for Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, but you’re critical about how it frames the
carceral state as a “racial caste system.” And yet there are an extraordinary number of incarcerated African Americans in this
country, and an extraordinarily high incarceration rate compared to whites. MG The African-American incarceration rate of
about 2,300 per 100,000 people is clearly off the charts and a shocking figure. The black-white incarceration rate in the
United States is about 6 to 1. Focusing so intently on these racial disparities often obscures the fact that the
incarceration rates for other groups in the United States, including whites and Latinos, is also
comparatively very high, just not astronomically high as in the case of blacks. The white incarceration rate in the
United States is about 400 per 100,000. This is about 2 to 2.5 times the total incarceration rates of the most
punitive countries in Western Europe and about 5 to 6 times the rate of the least punitive ones. Even
if you released every African American from US prisons and jails today, we’d still have a mass
incarceration crisis in this country. I do not mean to minimize the enormity of the problem of the
carceral state for African Americans but rather to make a larger point about how we need to think
about racial disparities and criminal justice in a more nuanced way and in a wider context.
Squo’s improving – prison numbers declining
Erica Goode 7/25/13
(New York Times, "U.S. Prison Populations Decline, Reflecting New Approach to Crime,"
www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/us/us-prison-populations-decline-reflecting-new-approach-tocrime.html?ref=global-home&_r=0)
The prison population in the U nited S tates dropped in 2012 for the third consecutive year , according to
federal statistics released on Thursday, in what criminal justice experts said was the biggest decline in the
nation’s recent history, signaling a shift away from a n almost four-decade policy of mass imprisonment. ¶
The number of inmates in state and federal prisons decreased by 1.7 percent, to an estimated 1,571,013 in 2012
from 1,598,783 in 2011, according to figures released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the Justice Department. Although the
percentage decline appeared small, the fact that it followed decreases in 2011 and 2010 offers
persuasive evidence of what some experts say is a “sea change” in America’s approach to criminal
punishment. ¶ “This is the beginning of the end of mass incarceration,” said Natasha Frost, associate
dean of Northeastern University ’s school of criminology and criminal justice.¶ About half the 2012 decline —
15,035 prisoners — occurred in California, which has decreased its prison population in response to a Supreme Court order to relieve prison
overcrowding. But eight other states, including New York, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, showed substantial decreases, of more than
1,000 inmates, and more than half the states reported some drop in the number of prisoners. (Figures for three states were estimated because
they had not submitted data in time for the report.) The population of federal prisons increased slightly, but at a slower rate than in previous
years, the report found.¶ Imprisonment rates in the United States have been on an upward march since the early 1970s. From 1978, when
there were 307,276 inmates in state and federal prisons, the population increased annually, reaching a peak of 1,615,487 inmates in 2009.¶ But
in recent years, tightened state budgets, plummeting crime rates, changes in sentencing laws and
shifts in public opinion have combined to reverse the trend. Experts on prison policy said that the continuing decline
appears to be more than a random fluctuation.¶ “A year or even two years is a blip and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but three years
starts to look like a trend ,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit research group based in
Washington. But he said that the rate of inmates incarcerated in the United States continued to be “dramatically higher” than in other
countries and that the changes so far were “relatively modest compared to the scale of the problem.”¶ Most observers agree that the recession
has played a role in shrinking prison populations. In 2011 and 2012, at least 17 states closed or were considering closing prisons partly for
budgetary reasons, representing a reduction of 28,525 beds, according to a report by the Sentencing Project published last year.¶ But Adam
Gelb, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ public safety performance project, said that while fiscal concerns might have led to the turnaround
in some states, the need to cut budgets had not been the deciding factor.¶ “They’re not simply pinching pennies,” Mr. Gelb said. “Policy makers
are not holding their noses and saying we have to scale back prisons to save money. The states that
are showing drops are
states that are thinking about how they can apply research-based alternatives that work better and
cost less.Ӧ Changes in state and federal sentencing laws for lower-level offenses like those involving drugs have played a central role in the
shift, he and others said, with many states setting up diversion programs for offenders as an alternative to
prison. And some states have softened their policies on parole, no longer automatically sending people
back to prison for parole violations.¶ But changing public attitudes are also a major driver behind the
declining prison numbers. Dropping crime rates over the last 20 years have reduced public fears and
diminished the interest of politicians in running tough-on-crime campaigns. And public polls consistently show that Americans are now more
interested in spending money on education and health care than on building more prisons.¶ “People
don’t care so much about
crime, and it’s less of a political focus,” said Professor Frost, who is a co-author of a forthcoming book, “The Punishment
Imperative.”¶ The result has been an unusual bipartisan effort to reduce the nation’s reliance on prisons ,
with groups like Right on Crime, devoted to what it calls the “conservative case for reform,” pushing for lower-cost and less punitive solutions
than incarceration for nonviolent offenders.¶ Marc Levin, senior policy adviser for Right on Crime, described the change in conservatives’
position on parole violators: It used to be “Trail ’em, nail ’em and jail ’em,” he said, “but there’s been a move to say, ‘Yes, there’s a surveillance
function, but we also want them to succeed.’ ”¶ Some of the
most substantial prison reductions have taken place in
conservative states like Texas, which reduced the number of inmates in its prisons by more than 5,000 in 2012. In 2007, when the
state faced a lack of 17,000 beds for inmates, the State Legislature decided to change its approach to parole violations and provide drug
treatment for nonviolent offenders instead of building more prisons.¶ In Arkansas, which reduced its prison population by just over 1,400
inmates in 2012, legislators in 2011 also passed a package of laws softening sentencing guidelines for low-level offenders and steering them to
diversion programs.¶ “It’s
a great example of a state that made some deliberate policy choices to say we can
actually reduce recidivism and cut our prison group at the same time,” Mr. Gelb said.¶ Joan Petersilia, a law
professor at Stanford and a co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, said in an interview last year that she thought Americans
had “gotten the message that locking up a lot of people doesn’t necessarily bring public safety.”
California’s example, she said, has also spurred other states to consider downsizing for fear of facing similar litigation.¶ But Professor Petersilia
added that though
the trend may have begun out of a need for belt-tightening, it had grown into a
national effort to rethink who should go to prison and for how long. ¶ “I don’t think in modern history
we’ve seen anything like this,” she said.
90% of drug-related arrests aren’t marijuana.
Mark A.R. Kleiman 10/3/12
(Professor of Public Policy, UCLA; “LEGAL MARIJUANA? NEW DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL
INITIATIVES CHALLENGE THE STATUS QUO,”
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2012/10/03%20legal%20marijuana/20121003_legal_mariju
ana.pdf)
In some ways, it would constitute a massive change in drug policy. A good share of the 30 million Americans who break the
law every year by using cannabis use no other illicit drug and commit no predatory crime. That’s a large number of people to be moving back on to the right side of
the law. And the 800,000 arrests a year for simple possession of marijuana outnumber all other drug law arrests combined. For some of these people -- we actually
don’t know how many -- that possession arrest is their first arrest, their first experience of handcuffs and a jail cell. The cannabis market at approximately $15 billion
a year isn’t as large as the cocaine market, but it’s larger than the heroin market or the methamphetamine market. That’s a lot of money to be able to take away
from criminals simply by moving something from the illegal to the legal side of the ledger. In
other ways legalization of marijuana would
be a smaller change than legalization of other drugs. Cannabis plays a small role in predatory crime by
users, a small role in violence against and among dealers, and a small role in drug-related
incarceration. If marijuana had always been legal, 90 percent of the people behind American bars for
drug law violations would still be there because they’re being punished for some other drug.
Policing tactics are all completely independent of marijuana legalization.
Susan F. Mandiberg Jan 12
(Jeffrey Bain Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School; “Marijuana Prohibition and
the Shrinking of the Fourth Amendment,” McGeorge Law Review Vol. 43 Issue 1)
The Court’s marijuana-related search-and-seizure cases cover a wide range of doctrines, virtually all of
which are applicable to searches for items other than marijuana. Some address predicate or
overarching issues such as the lack of reasonable expectation of privacy in “open fields”;55 affirmation
that the use of drug-sniffing dogs is not a Fourth Amendment “search”;56 the use of hearsay
information from unnamed or anonymous informants;57 the “totality of circumstances” approach to determining
probable cause and reasonable suspicion;58 and the modern approach to “standing.”59 Other marijuana-related cases address
issues regarding the issuance or execution of warrants: the “neutral and detached magistrate” requirement;60 the
particularity requirement;61 and knock and announce.62 In a third category, marijuana-related cases address
broadly applicable “reasonableness clause” doctrines such as warrantless entry to prevent destruction
of evidence;63 the “mobile vehicle” exception;64 the rules about opening closed containers in mobile vehicles;65
searches incident to arrest;66 consent to search;67 customs and border searches;68 “frisks” of automobile
passenger compartments for weapons;69 the irrelevance of an individual officer’s subjective mental
state;70 inventory searches of impounded vehicles;71 investigative stops;72 roving border patrols;73 roving, suspicionless
spot-checks for license and vehicle-safety violations;74 warrantless searches by school officials;75
suspicionless drug tests;76 and the detention of a building’s occupants while awaiting a search
warrant.77 The remaining cases involve doctrines regarding use of the exclusionary rule: the independent source aspect of the “fruit of the
poisonous tree” doctrine78 and the good faith exception.79
The cases listed above have one thing in common: the fact that marijuana was involved in the search
or seizure was incidental to the substance of the rules the Court adopted. Although most of these doctrines
represent a restrictive approach to Fourth Amendment rights,80 the Court could have established (or did establish) them
in the context of other types of evidence. It is logical, therefore, to conclude that the criminalization of marijuana
had no influence on content, and thus no direct effect on the shrinking of the Fourth Amendment.
No impact to AIDS
Blumenthal 14 (Dr. Susan, US Assistant Surgeon General, " The Power of HIV/AIDS Prevention: Using
a 21st Century Toolkit to Reverse the Epidemic", 6/27/14, www.huffingtonpost.com/susanblumenthal/hivaids-prevention_b_5537199.html)
In response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, the White House released the National
HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) in July 2010, the country's first comprehensive roadmap to reverse the impact of the
disease with clear outcomes to be achieved by 2015. The three main NHAS goals are to: 1) reduce new HIV
infections, 2) increase access to care as well as improve health outcomes for people living with HIV, and 3) decrease HIVrelated health disparities. A key NHAS priority is to intensify HIV prevention in the communities where HIV is most heavily
concentrated, expanding targeted use of effective combinations of evidence-based HIV prevention approaches, and educating all Americans
about HIV and how to prevent it.¶ To advance these prevention goals and enhance
the effectiveness of current HIV
prevention strategies, the CDC has adopted a High-Impact Prevention (HIP) approach. The strategy combines
the most effective, scientifically proven, cost effective and scalable prevention tools targeted to high-risk populations in the most affected
regions of the country with the goal of significantly reducing new HIV infections. Methods employed by HIP include better geographic targeting
of resources to locations with the highest burden of disease, expanding HIV testing, and identifying the combination of approaches with the
greatest impact. These efforts have resulted in nearly 2.8 million HIV tests being administered over the past three years and 18,432 people
previously unaware of their HIV status being diagnosed.
TB won’t spread and it’s declining.
Kim Archer 6/16/9
(World Staff Writer for Tulsa World; “Health Department investigating Cushing tuberculosis case,”
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=298&articleid=20090616_298_0_ACushi73421
0)
“Tuberculosis is
hard to spread. It is never transmitted outdoors and is only transmitted with prolonged
contact in close spaces,” Lindsey said. An estimated 150,000 Oklahomans are positive for tuberculosis. But they can’t spread it because
the disease is dormant, he said. Only 10 percent of those cases may become active tuberculosis, he said. “There is no need for panic.
Tuberculosis is completely curable,” Lindsey said. He often has to remind physicians to check for tuberculosis in patients with
prolonged coughs. Good public health practices, screening health care workers, preventative therapy and
effective drug treatment have reduced the number of cases dramatically in the United States the last 50
years or more, he said.
Gottschalk prison reform CP
Text: _____ should implement comprehensive sentencing reform and abolish life in
prison without the possibility of parole as advocated by Marie Gottschalk
Gottschalk and Kilpatrick 15 (Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania and the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. ABOUT
THE INTERVIEWER Connor Kilpatrick is on the editorial board of Jacobin, “It’s Not Just the Drug War: An
Interview with Marie Gottschalk,” Jacobin, 3/5/15, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/massincarceration-war-on-drugs)
CK Let’s talk about solutions: what policies could an effective political movement implement that could roll
this back substantially? MG Let’s aim at minimum to reduce the incarceration rate to about 150 to 175
per 100,000, which is where it was on the eve of the prison boom and is somewhat comparable to
other developed countries. That would mean cutting the rate by about 75 to 80 percent. Some people have
begun to talk about cutting it in half over the next 10 years — and this has been dismissed as a radical idea. We need comprehensive
sentencing reform, and not just for drug crimes. We have to look at the hard cases like child
pornography. We also need to roll back these very punitive sentences for people who’ve committed
some pretty serious crimes — like homicide. We should abolish life in prison without the possibility of
parole. This is a nearly unheard-of sentence in Europe. Everyone serving time should be entitled to a meaningful
parole review. We’ve lost the distinction between somebody who’s done something horrible and
somebody who is a horrible person. Public opinion surveys show that Americans in many ways are not more
punitive than people in other countries. Public officials and politicians in the United States misread
public sentiment on this issue. They’re excessively fearful of public opinion, and they’ve been
unwilling to lead public opinion to dismantle the carceral state, not just trim it around the edges. The
mainstream narrative on criminal justice reform today is that since everything is so polarized in Washington and state capitols, the best we can
hope for is small-bore legislative fixes aimed at the non, non, nons. Comprehensive sentencing reform is considered a nonstarter. But it is
important to remember that the carceral state was not built by legislation alone. In its formative years, a growing number of prosecutors,
police, judges, and corrections officials made a major shift and decided to exert their enormous discretion in a more punitive direction. Now
they can choose to do the opposite. And if you look around today, you will find a handful of maverick prosecutors, judges, police chiefs, and
corrections officials who have become disenchanted with the carceral state. They are displaying some rare examples of political courage as they
wield their enormous discretion to pursue less punitive policies and practices.
Public Health Critique
Appeals to public health is a calculation through which empire expands its power –
public health necessitates contagious others excluded from the public–backlash
empirically inevitable
Ahuja 16 [Neel, Professor of English @ University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bioinsecurities]
How does the concept of national defense materialize in the form of living bodies? I begin with two events
that serve as entry points for a theory of the body as a transitional theater of imperial warfare. On July 17, 1902, during the last
smallpox epidemic to hit Boston, a Swedish immigrant named Henning Jacobson refused an order by
the Board of Health of Cambridge for his son and himself to receive the city’s mandatory vaccinations. He was
accordingly fined five dollars (the equivalent of one hundred US dollars in today’s currency). Jacobson sued, contending that the
state’s requirement violated his personal liberty and that vaccination was an unsafe practice. In 1905,
the US Supreme Court ruled in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that a state does have the right to enforce
compulsory vaccination, quarantine, or other public health protections. The majority opinion makes
disease control a national defense priority : “Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount
necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens
the safety of its members.” As the phrasing of the decision compares bacterial and viral species to military
enemies, it invokes the specter of disease as cause for emergency intervention . According to Justice John
Marshall Harlan’s majority opinion, public health authorities acted “under the pressure of great dangers” and
should thus be afforded police powers to impose emergency solutions —including ones that may harm
individuals. This sacrifice they take on echoes the drafted soldier’s “risk . . . of being shot down in [his
their country’s] defense.” Save for the lawsuit that brought his story to national prominence, Jacobson’s refusal of vaccine may have
appeared an unremarkable incident in the history of US public health. Liberal narratives of biomedical progress assert that
health and medical innovations inevitably make humans and their environments more safe, healthy,
and sanitized, despite the anxieties of skeptics who question modern health expertise. Yet Jacobson and
other “conscientious objectors” to vaccination had a rather significant following at the time. They considered the
cow-derived smallpox serum unsafe, unsanitary, and potentially lethal. Controversies over
vaccination, vivisection, quarantine, and other biopolitical interventions were hotly debated across the US
and British empires, from India to the US-Mexico borderlands. Such conflicts emerged at a time when
US officials were increasingly concerned with the uncertainties of exposure to distant lands and
bodies, especially through contact with a rising Asia.1 It is thus no wonder that later passages of the Jacobson decision take
pains to detail the widespread use of enforced vaccination in both the British Isles and colonial India. The court saw transborder
outbreaks as an appropriate arena of governance for empire-driven states. Thus the consequences of
Henning Jacobson’s refusal of smallpox vaccine reverberated far beyond Cambridge, Massachusetts. They
involved concerns that contagions would pass through the bodies of travelers, immigrants, traders,
animals, soldiers, sex workers, and the colonized, whose planetary routes of movement and contact
suggested that the biological character of the nation was being remade via expansion. At the same time, the
Jacobson precedent (which remains standing law) underpinned expanding forms of social control in the twentieth century, including the court’s
infamous ruling upholding forced sterilization.2 After
the long warfare of European settler expansion across the
continent and the genocidal displacement of American Indian nations, the transition from a
continental to a planetary empire invigorated concerns about disease that would buttress new
emergency state powers . Notably, the “American citizen” to be drafted in defense of public health was
one who crossed continents; the Court figures disease-causing epidemics as originating from outside
of the continental borders. Justice Harlan, who in a separate case attempted to deny birthright citizenship to the children of Asian
immigrants, posed state police power as the solution to smallpox , “Asiatic” cholera, and yellow fever—
contagions that had long been associated with immigration, urbanization, and the western and
southern frontiers of Anglo-American settler colonialism. In this sense, the Jacobson decision confirmed
that standard public health interventions were not simply public goods, but were indeed the
privileged state avenue for defending the national body in a world of expanding contact. ---------------------------------------- One hundred years after Jacobson’s refusal of vaccine, US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld
rearticulated Harlan’s ethic of national sacrifice in defense against smallpox. In late 2002, Rumsfeld,
along with Vice President Dick Cheney, promoted a campaign to convince the US military, first responders,
and the general public of the need for smallpox vaccination. The two warned that Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein—whom they depicted as a rogue secretly allied with al-Qaeda— had the wherewithal to weaponize variola virus.
They thus promoted what was known to be an unusually risky live smallpox vaccine.3 Rumsfeld
advertised in a television news interview that, along with President George W. Bush, he would take the vaccine himself in order
to demonstrate its safety and efficacy: “I certainly intend to [take the vaccine], simply because it’s hard to ask people to do
something that you’re not willing to do yourself.” The smallpox program was just one of a host of new biosecurity
measures that were adopted following the September 11, 2001, attacks. These included
establishment of a network of port quarantines at twenty-five US points of entry and three new
multibillion-dollar programs— BioSense, BioShield, and BioWatch —to centralize data on potential
disease outbreaks, to increase drug development capacity and vaccine stockpiles, and to monitor the
environments of major population centers. Yet the smallpox program was both the most high-profile and the most
controversial of these projects. Inverting Jacobson’s refusal of vaccine during an epidemic, Rumsfeld
volunteered to take vaccine in the absence of even a single case of infection. Rumsfeld portrayed
smallpox, like Saddam himself, as “vicious,” claiming the virus “kills so many people so rapidly and spreads
far and wide” that it risked catastrophic harm.4 This fearful rendering of smallpox as a nefarious,
intentional enemy ran up against a complication: smallpox did not exist in the environment. The variola
virus had been eradicated in a coordinated global public health campaign in the 1970s. If the Boston smallpox epidemic of
1901–3 made transparent to the Supreme Court the “great danger” requiring health policing powers,
Rumsfeld’s move scrambled the relationship between public signals of harm, state intervention, and
biological risk as the administration attempted to convince a skeptical public to go to war in Iraq . In this
case, vaccination was the signal of smallpox risk rather than its solution; the prick of the needle could
localize the otherwise diffuse sensation of the soldier’s vulnerability to bioweapons. The optimization
of Rumsfeld’s immune system in US media turned a technique of public health into a technique of
public relations, signaling that American bodies and vital systems ( such as hospitals and the military)
were vulnerable to the designs of faraway enemies. As demonstrated more recently with the cia’s use of a vaccination
campaign to locate Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, vaccination could be transformed from a medical defense into a
weapon.5 In 1902 a known viral epidemic demanded the sacrifice of individual liberty for the cause of
vaccination. In 2002, vaccination made a spectacle of physical vulnerability that could be mobilized
for the cause of war itself .
Their epidemic scenario planning is part and parcel of the security state, isolating a
foreign microbe to be quarantined, deported, and exterminated
Masco 14
(Joseph Masco is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. “The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold
War to the War on Terror,” Dec. 1, 2014. )
Put differently, if emerging diseases are a global phenomenon, then the
U.S. logics of anticipatory preemption require an
equally global surveillance and intervention capability, one that mirrors long- standing U.S. military
interests in global force projection. In this regard, Nathan D. Wolfe, Claire Panosian Dunavan, and Jared Diamond (2007) have
identified fi ve pathways for emerging disease, focusing on the animal- human nexus (figure 4.11) as the likely source of the most virulent and
deadly viruses. Emphasizing
the moment of zoonotic emergence— when a disease jumps from an animal to human host—
infectious disease experts now argue that the focus of U.S. biosecurity should be on identifying those
individuals who interact with wildlife in forests and jungles and then travel to urban settings,
becoming maximal vectors for contagion. Thus, biosecurity experts narrow their field of global anticipatory preemption
significantly. They also align their project with the larger U.S. counterterror strategy of, as President Bush
famously put it, “taking the fight to the terrorists abroad, so we don’t have to face them here at home.”
Mirroring the logics of the War on Terror, which focuses on preempting attacks by overseas terrorists,
this emerging biosecurity project seeks to identify those populations that interact with wildlife in
zones of the world considered the likely sources of new diseases (see Keusch et al. 2009). Given a global population
of seven billion people, anticipatory preemption here requires building an expert capacity to identify and
track specific individuals (and, extending the logic, potentially specific animals and microbes), whether they are marked as
terrorists or vectors. There are two important conceptual effects of this focus on zoonotic diseases within the larger U.S. biodefense
project: first, since infectious disease does not recognize borders, it creates a borderless world of threat
(one in which state bureaucracies can slow down or prevent U.S. surveillance and preemptory response); second, U.S. domestic
preparedness is now a global and potentially limitless future horizon, one of infinite and emerging
complexity linking state actors, terrorists, and naturally occurring diseases as objects of preemption.
Bioterror has no singular domain, but rather a galaxy of potentials requiring expert surveillance,
assessment, preemptive response, and/or containment. The ever- fl exible U.S. biosecurity apparatus
is expanding once again to meet this mission, seeking to establish a future capacity to detect and
preempt diseases on an emerging planetary scale.39 The cdc, for example, is increasingly operating on U.S. military bases
around the world, creating a network of new sites for the pursuit of threats from the forests and jungles of Latin America, Africa, and Southeast
Asia that might jump species— and continents— to endanger the United States.40 Similarly, there is a second tier of U.S. biosecurity facilities
(on top of the bsl- 4 laboratories) being built in the United States to look specifi - cally at the animal- human nexus. Perhaps counterintuitively,
Kansas, the cattle capital of the country, has won the bid to host the new National Bio and Agro- Defense Facility (figure 4.12) to study the most
virulent infectious diseases in animals and has embarked on an ambitious new biotech initiative exploring the links between plant, animal,
human, energy, and drug economies, called the Kansas Bioscience Authority.41 Both the
National Bio and Agro- Defense
Facility and the larger Kansas Bioscience Authority represent an eff ort to fuse biosecurity, biodefense,
and biotechnology to produce a new midwestern regional economy grounded in biothreat,
bioscience, and capitalist hype. At the Authority, animal health, bioenergy, biomaterials, plant biology, and
drug discovery and delivery merge state- based biosecurity concerns with the long- term interest of
biotechnology in acquiring basic patents and new markets. Biosecurity, as we have seen, accrues
objects and logics. What might be considered its conceptual instability (a proliferating field of objects and interests)
is actually its great strength, as the term biosecurity is imbued at every level with military- industrial,
biomedical, and fi nancial logics, meaning that each new object of concern represents both a new
logistical problem to solve and a new market. The extraordinary power of biosecurity to link food, health, military, fi nancial,
pharmaceutical, and environmental interests was on full display at the first-ever biosecurity panels offered at the bio International Convention
in 2010. The meeting, which I attended, brought together a remarkably diverse set of experts, including top officials from the Food and Drug
Administration; the cdc; the Departments of Health and Human Ser vices, Homeland Security, Defense, and Agriculture; the National Security
Council; the U.S. Army; the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; the Kansas Bioscience Authority; and the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation— as well as a host of specialists on emerging diseases and scientists from agricultural colleges, biotech companies (Novartis, Merke,
PharmAthene, and Vertex), and biodefense fi rms. Key
policy makers in government, military, research, and biotech
all agreed that biosecurity was vitally important— an urgent concern— even while using substantially
diff erent operational definitions of the term. An argument emerged over whether the most deadly terrorist was “man”
(necessitating a counterterrorism strategy focused on engineered biological weapons and located in the Department of Defense) or “Mother
Nature” (requiring an orientation toward public health and emerging diseases located in the Department of Health and Human Ser vices and
the cdc). However, the
terror of epidemic disease (whether naturally occurring or engineered) allowed the diverse
experts to merge these distinct concerns, producing a new kind of “national health security” that was
formally committed to the preemption of disease in all its forms. The word biosecurity has, thus,
become the great institutional translator in U.S. national security and health debates, enabling new
linkages across institutions with historically diff erent interests, priorities, and forms of expertise, now
unifi ed in an expert confrontation with terror (of disease, of the WMD, of the unknown). In its first de cade, biosecurity
has expanded from a narrow set of concerns about the safety of the domestic food supply to an everemerging project of surveillance and preemption at the planetary level, linking individuals and
microbes as objects of counterterror concern. Within such a rapidly expanding universe, one can expect extraterrestrial life
to be folded into the mission at some point, as biosecurity has become an expert project that creates, encompasses, and enfolds external
threat in all its living forms.
That justifies global violence and surveillance of marginalized populations – any
potential benefit of American intervention is eventually turned and outweighed by
the structural violence that it creates
Masco 14
(Joseph Masco is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. “The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold
War to the War on Terror,” Dec. 1, 2014.)
Because one cannot have too much health or too much security, biosecurity is today an emblematic project of the counterterror state. Indeed,
under current biosecurity logics there is no space on planet earth that the United States does not
potentially need to police nor any population (publics to experts to wildlife to microbes) immune to
its anticipatory reach. Under this counterterror logic, U.S. personnel are deployed globally to protect the
homeland, and seek the ability to move across international borders at will in pursuit of microbes or
terrorists, creating a planetary scope for U.S. defense. The latest Quadrennial Defense Review Report (the Department of
Defense’s strategic plan) identifi es the ability of U.S. personnel to move freely and quickly around the world as a paramount objective,
referring to the need to defeat local “anti- access strategies aimed at impeding the deployment of U.S. forces” (U.S. Department of Defense
2010, 31). Public
health, along with counterterrorism, development projects, and drug enforcement,
becomes part of a larger geopolitical and diplomatic tool kit for U.S. interests, giving U.S. agencies
interested in gaining access to specific regions of the world new codes to use in that pursuit. 42 It is
easiest to see this new focus and mode of global governance when comparing the current maps of
emerging diseases with what the Pentagon calls the “arc of instability”— the regions of the world
where poverty, lack of infrastructure, and scarcities of natural resources are believed likely to “breed”
future terrorists (Barnett 2004; McDew 2010). Figure 4.13 is a map of international requests to the cdc for assistance with emerging
diseases in the period 2007– 11 (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2011; see also Jones et al. 2008). Compare the frequency of
emerging diseases in parts of South America, Africa, and South Asia in this map to a map of U.S. military operations since the end of the Cold
War (figure 4.14). In
the name of combating emerging diseases, we have an emerging concept of U.S.
governance, one that imagines building a global surveillance system capable of locating individuals
anywhere in the arc of instability that might pose a potential threat, whether that threat is an
emerging disease, a WMD, narcotics traffi cking, or terrorism. Finally, attempting a global preemption of
existential threats now presents U.S. officials with a roster of policy options— including
counterterrorism, war, development, and public health— to allow the United States to intervene
worldwide, making U.S. defense a concept that also has no borders: in its first de cade, counterterror
has transformed domestic defense into a planetary project. Since September 2001, the emerging U.S. biosecurity
project has been enormously productive at both the domestic and international level, enabling a powerful new merging of public health
concerns with a militarized U.S. worldview. The assassination of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda’s leader, in Pakistan in 2011 clearly illustrates this
new fusion of health and counterterror. Prior to the nighttime commando raid that killed bin Laden, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
sent Pakistani medical professionals to off er free hepatitis B immunizations to neighborhood
populations in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden was believed to be living. Their real goal was not to fight
infectious disease but to collect dna samples from people living in bin Laden’s house hold to test
against tissue samples from bin Laden’s family already in CIA possession (see Shah 2011). Armed with covert
recording devices and syringes, these medical professionals were attempting to create a ge ne tic database to be used in identifying the person
of Osama bin Laden. How should we assess this act? Was it a medical program with an assassination team attached to it, or a military attack
promoting preventive medicine? The
killing of bin Laden presents the iconic fusion of war and health in the new
U.S. vision of counterterror, merging covert operations, biosecurity, and biometric databases. In the
end, the CIA vaccination team offered residents only one of the needed three shots, demonstrating
that war trumped public health in this mission. This example also shows the rising global stakes for biosecurity in all its
forms: in light of the cia’s operation— which transformed an international promise of future community health through preventive
medicine into a targeted killing— organizations devoted to disease eradication have become increasingly
politicized entities in the region (Walsh 2012a).43 In reaction to the CIA vaccination ruse, at least one Pakistani leader
has eliminated a polio vaccination program in his region, leaving roughly a hundred thousand
Pakistanis at risk (Walsh 2012b) and hindering eff orts to eradicate the disease. The killing of bin Laden
reveals the potentially devastating global health consequences of a militarized approach to
biosecurity, in which health becomes simply another vector of counterterror. In the end, just as the Manhattan
Project scientists could not have foreseen the effect that the atomic bomb would have on everyday American life, biosecurity experts are
producing a future we cannot yet see, off ering new institutions, meta phors, and practices to create a world full of threats and
countermeasures while rendering other worlds and other notions of security unspeakable. Because
its objects, techniques, and
domains are all cast as emergent, biosecurity is both a highly fl exible mode of governance and very
likely to be a lasting contribution of the War on Terror. The ambition of the U.S. biosecurity apparatus
today is to be nothing less than a planetary infrastructure, able to secure life in all its forms. Although
the goal of securing all life remains the future- oriented fantasy of experts, it nevertheless creates a
powerful vision and ideology of American power, one that will shape government agencies for de
cades to come, producing unpredictable effects. In practice, not all forms of life are valued equally or
subject to the same situational awareness or modes of care by the security state, creating immediate
gaps, hierarchies, and blind spots in biosecurity institutions. But biosecurity today is not a story about how experts
ward off danger. Instead, it is a case study in how Americans build future capacities and what fears (of infections, of technologies, and of terror
itself) give expert thought enough affective intensity to overwhelm all other immediate concerns.
interventionism in the name of international health ignores its legacy rooted in
imperial rhetoric and action of sanitation
Ahuja 16 [Neel, Professor of English @ University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bioinsecurities]
The racial and colonial legacies of medicine and public health compound these uncertainties over the
future of social democracy in the international context, particularly as it relates to global public
health . The intensifying problem of antibiotic resistance has been accelerated by a pharmaceutical
empire that has unequally distributed antibiotics across the international division of labor and has
improperly allowed industrial agricultural use of the drugs . At the same time, many publics openly reject
or question medical and sanitary authority backed by Western nongovernmental organizations and
international organizations. In the introduction, I explained that a technique like vaccination had become deeply
politicized , with Donald Rumsfeld using it to advertise the nation’s shared vulnerability to Saddam
Hussein, and
the CIA using it as a clandestine weapon in the hunt for Osama bin Laden . In the twenty-first
century, such nefarious uses of health internationalism for strategic military or political objectives —
combined with many failed international medical and sanitary projects in the Global South — continue
to threaten the advertised neutrality of health and medical interventions . This is a problem that
endlessly frustrates global health experts who hope to battle “superstitious” distrust of modern
medical knowledge and practice across poor countries and, increasingly, in the U nited S tates and
Europe as well. As I explained in the discussion of paranormal discourse in Puerto Rico in chapter 3, it is necessary to
understand such political logics of suspicion . Resistance to the racialized differences in health and
medical outcomes is political, not simply cultural . It is alive and well today, apparent in the Taliban’s
execution of health workers in Pakistan ; the mistrust over sexual education programs in southern
Africa and Ebola screening in West Africa ; and the rising antivaccination campaigns in the U nited
S tates and Britain, to name a few examples. As I have argued throughout the book, disease interventions are constantly
confronted by the challenges of patient activists , related social and political movements , and the
unruliness of bodies and media assemblages . The results are uneven. For example, in attempts by
patients to gain access to experimental Hansen’s disease treatments in chapter 1, the state was criticized
as the barrier to obtaining more expansive care . This dynamic was reversed in chapter 5, where racialized
HIV quarantine involved a violence that completely broke down trust in doctors and their diagnoses .
My point in this book has not been to denigrate medical sciences and public health as inherently violent
or exploitative, nor to idealize patient activists, writers, or research animals as sites of resistance to
the imperial order. Although Frantz Fanon once emphasized the Manichean resistance of the colonized body to dissection by the
disciplines of medical surveillance, the various cases of disease intervention I have reviewed demonstrate more
complex biopolitical relations, especially once patients actively take part in treatments and when
medicine links human and animal research subjects across circuitous geographies of pharmaceutical
intervention. Health and medicine are embedded in logics of intervention that are not internal to their
own practice. One lesson of this book, then, is that such disease interventions have never followed a strictly
scientific logic guiding which diseases to target and how to produce therapies and policies to
maximize public good for humans writ large or even for specific national communities. They are
embedded in dominant forms of state vision and media assemblages that take planetary space and
interspecies relation as proper sites of intervention and expansion, even as they also proliferate
racialized visions of freedom and precarity, debility and independence . Thus more equally distributing health care
is undoubtedly one important political strategy, but it may also open new forms of imperial securitization that layer power across an expanded
range of bodies and environments.
Both PH & CJ together best
Public health framing is not incompatible with criminal justice framing—we can have
both—1950s--1970s proves
Neill 14 (Katharine A. Neill, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Public
Administration at Old Dominion University. “Tough on Drugs: Law and Order Dominance and the
Neglect of Public Health in U.S. Drug Policy,” World Medical and Health Policy 6(4): 375-394.)
Drug policy can be broadly understood in terms of two policy models. A law and order approach views
drug use as a criminal act and emphasizes authoritarian means to reduce the supply of drugs and
punish drug offenders. In contrast, a public health policy model generally views drug addiction as a
disease to be prevented or treated. Various public health approaches to drugs exist. The model
discussed here is a harm-reduction approach. A harm-reduction approach assumes that eradication of drugs from society is
not possible and offers as effective alternatives prevention, treatment for addicts, and safety for those unable to abstain. The overall goal is to
reduce the negative individual and societal consequences of drug use. Although the
law and order and public health models
are not necessarily incompatible , in the United States, the former has often superseded the latter, with some brief exceptions.
For example, from the 1950s to the early 1970s there were efforts to both criminalize more offenses and
increase funding for treatment and rehabilitation. However, with the War on Drugs that began in 1971 the law and order
approach became the exclusive weapon for this fight, which only recently has shown signs of abating. The drug war was part of a larger punitive
shift in crime policy where the goal was to punish lawbreakers and isolate them from society. With changes in sentencing laws drug offenders
ended up behind bars more often and for longer periods than ever before. Mauer and King (2007a) find there has been an 1100 percent
increase in the number of drug offenders serving time in jail or prison since 1980, and almost 60 percent of those in state prison have no history
of violence.
AT: Safe injection sites
Supervised injection sites are bad—can’t be monitered
Glaser 18 (Plain Dealer Travel editor Susan Glaser visited Amsterdam in mid-May. During her time
there, she toured one of the city's heroin-assisted treatment clinics, talked with director Ellen van den
Hoogen and interviewed patient Frank Paauy, “Dutch cut overdose deaths by dispensing pure heroin,”
Jul 15, 2018
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/07/in_amsterdam_the_government_pr.html)
There are two key differences between these supervised injection sites and the heroin-assisted
treatment centers in Europe: Who provides the drugs, and what they're likely to contain. In
Amsterdam, participants are given pure, pharmaceutical-grade heroin. It's powerful, but it's predictable.
There is no risk of contamination with potentially lethal drugs like fentanyl, which have killed many American
users. At supervised injection sites, participants bring their own drugs. They obtain them illegally, and
risk contamination from additives or synthetic heroin substitutes. The goal of these supervised sites is
to reduce the number of deaths from opioid overdoses. But the crimes associated with the illegal drug
trade continue, said Katharine Neill Harris, a drug policy expert at Rice University's Baker Institute.
AT: Netherlands
AT: Netherlands—can’t compare practically
Glaser 18 (Plain Dealer Travel editor Susan Glaser visited Amsterdam in mid-May. During her time
there, she toured one of the city's heroin-assisted treatment clinics, talked with director Ellen van den
Hoogen and interviewed patient Frank Paauy, “Dutch cut overdose deaths by dispensing pure heroin,”
Jul 15, 2018
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/07/in_amsterdam_the_government_pr.html)
The concept offends John P. Walters, the drug czar under President George W. Bush, who is currently chief operating officer of the
conservative Hudson Institute. "Keeping people addicted for the purposes of controlling them? Is that a policy
that is consistent with the moral foundations of a moral society?" he asked. He has practical, as well as
philosophical, objections: In the United States, opioid-addiction rates have skyrocketed in recent years; in
2016, more than 64,000 Americans died of an opioid overdose. "How big of a colony of statesupported, locked-up addicts do you want to create?" he asked. Opioid abuse rates in the Netherlands
are much lower: In 2016, just 235 residents of the Netherlands died of an opioid overdose, compared
to 4,050 in Ohio -- and Ohio has far fewer people. While overdose deaths have increased in the
Netherlands since their nadir in 2010, they are still only a fraction of the overdose deaths in Ohio. The
Netherlands have a population of about 17 million. Ohio's population is smaller at around 11 million.
Misc
Aff – All 193 countries in the UN agree—drug use is a public health issue not a criminal
justice issue
Volkow et al. 17 (Nora D. Volkow, 1 Vladimir Poznyak, 2 Shekhar Saxena, 2 Gilberto Gerra, 3 and
UNODC‐WHO Informal International Scientific Network 1National Institute on Drug Abuse, National
Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA 2Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, World
Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland 3Drug Prevention and Health Branch, United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime, Vienna, Austria, “Drug use disorders: impact of a public health rather than a criminal
justice approach,” World Psychiatry 16 (2): 213-214. June 2017.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5428163/)
The Outcome Document of the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs
(UNGASS 2016), unanimously approved by the 193 Member States, has recognized “drug addiction as
a complex multifactorial health disorder characterized by chronic and relapsing nature” that is
preventable and treatable and not the result of moral failure or a criminal behavior. Historically, most
nations’ strategies for addressing substance use disorders have centered on punishment, and thus recognition of the need to shift from a
criminal justice to a public health approach represents a major shift in mentality by United Nations Member States. This
achievement
was the result of a continuous dialogue between policy makers and the scientific community during
recent sessions of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs. In 2015, the United Nations Office of Drugs and
Crime and the World Health Organization created an Informal International Scientific Network,
consisting of experts in addiction sciences, to advise the Commission. Network members were appointed by
Member States and represented widely diverse geographical regions, political systems, and cultures. The Network's input for the
Commission's preparation of UNGASS 2016 provided the scientific support for the concept that
substance use disorders are brain disorders1; that they can be treated; that people with even the
most severe forms can recover with access to evidence‐based treatment and social supports2; and
that criminal sanctions are ineffective at preventing or addressing these disorders . It also highlighted
evidence‐based approaches to drug policy based on public health principles, emphasizing social
protection and health care instead of conviction and punishment. The Network issued eight recommendations,
which were adopted unanimously by all the United Nations Member States at UNGASS 2016 and summarized in the Outcome Document of that
meeting. These recommendations are a testament to a momentous shift in mentality, to which science and the Network have contributed.
Define public health—has to be about the whole population and can’t be aimed at
individuals
Mold 18 (Alex Mold, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK, “Framing drug and alcohol
use as a public health problem in Britain: past and present,” Nordisk Alkohol Nark, 2018 ‘apr; 35 (2): 9399, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6130767/)
Before considering the ways in which drugs and alcohol came to be regarded as a public health
problem, it is worth considering what this might mean. Defining ‘public health’ is a difficult enterprise.
Christopher Hamlin points out that ‘Any historian of public health first confronts the problem of definition –
health that is truly public. For the history of public health is not merely concerned with change of content, but also with inchoateness
of concept.’ (Hamlin, 2011) Jane Lewis argues that the problem of definition is especially acute for public health
in more recent times: ‘While the focus of nineteenth-century public health seems clear, writers have found it hard to
describe the content of public health in the twentieth century.’(Lewis, 1986, p. 5) In their examination of a series of
definitions of public health from the 1920s onwards, Marcel F. Verweij
and Angus Dawson found that some of these are very broad
and others more narrow. Despite these differences, they suggest that all the definitions of public health had two
elements in common. Firstly, public health is about the nature of the health of the public: that is the
population, the whole, or the collective. Secondly, all the definitions encompassed interventions or
practices that were aimed at protecting the health of the public. These interventions were not
primarily those of an individual, but involved some form of group response. (Verweij & Dawson, 2007) Public health, as
Dorothy Porter puts it , is concerned with ‘collective action in relation to the health of populations’. (Porter,
1999, p. 4) How, when and why have such ideas been applied to drugs and alcohol in the UK?
More definitions- public health means lots of things
RHI Hub 16 (Rural Health Information Hub, “A Public Health-Based Approach to Addressing Substance
Use Disorders,” https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/toolkits/substance-abuse/1/public-health-basedapproach)
The Surgeon General's 2016 Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health calls for a public health-based
approach to addressing substance use disorders and discusses the importance of building awareness of substance misuse as
a public health problem. Public health is the science of preventing disease and injury and promoting and
protecting the health of populations and communities. The public health system in the U.S. consists of
federal, state, local, tribal and territorial public health agencies, including rural public health agencies,
as well as non-governmental organizations and other partners, and is guided by the ten essential
services. Public health approaches recognize the multi-faceted nature of substance misuse and focus
on addressing the myriad of individual, environmental, and social factors that contribute to substance use
disorders.
Big magnitude- -affects 225 million people globally
Shrivastava et al 14 (Saurabh Rambiharilal Shrivastava*, Prateek Saurabh Shrivastava and Jegadeesh
Ramasamy
Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, Shri Sathya Sai Medical College & Research
Institute, Kancheepuram, India, “Public Health Measures to Combat the Menace of Drug Abuse,”
Primary Health Care 4:e110. doi:10.4172/2167-1079.1000e110 https://www.omicsonline.org/openaccess/public-health-measures-to-combat-the-menace-of-drug-abuse-21671079.1000e110.php?aid=26896)
The World Health Organization has estimated that more than 225 million individuals or one in every
twenty adults have consumed an illegal drug once in the year 2010 [4]. The public health concern of
drug abuse does not recognize any boundaries and affects all the persons irrespective of their
socioeconomic status or their belonging from a developed or developing country [1,3,4]. In addition,
globally more than fifteen million persons are indulged in drug abuse and the problem of injectable drug abuse has
been reported in more than 145 nations [6,7]. In fact, it was reported that in the year 2011, almost 22 million people have
consumed an illicit drug within a span of one month in the United States alone [8]. Furthermore, the problem
of drug abuse not only runs in families, but is significantly influenced by the environmental factors - influencing attitudes toward drug use and
serving as a source of drugs of abuse [9,10].
Laundry list of impacts
Shrivastava et al 14 (Saurabh Rambiharilal Shrivastava*, Prateek Saurabh Shrivastava and Jegadeesh
Ramasamy
Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, Shri Sathya Sai Medical College & Research
Institute, Kancheepuram, India, “Public Health Measures to Combat the Menace of Drug Abuse,”
Primary Health Care 4:e110. doi:10.4172/2167-1079.1000e110 https://www.omicsonline.org/openaccess/public-health-measures-to-combat-the-menace-of-drug-abuse-21671079.1000e110.php?aid=26896)
As already discussed, drug abuse tends to affect the individuals from the middle-age group substantially, the aftermaths of drug abuse not only
results in adverse health consequences, but even affects the quality of life and family inter-dynamics [24,25]. Substance
abuse has
produced a significant impact on health and social dimensions like poor academic performance [26];
increase in the incidence of school dropouts [6]; rise in cases of juvenile delinquency [27]; aggravated
cases of familial disharmony [26]; enhanced cardiovascular risks [28]; psychological morbidities like
depression and adjustment disorders [13,29]; more frequent adoption of high risk behavior [26,30];
HIV / AIDS infection [13,26]; cerebro-vascular accidents [31]; metabolic complications in elderly [32];
drug-abuse related deviant or criminal activities [26]; favors trauma recurrence and reduces the
trauma-free period [29,33,34]; casualties due to interpersonal violence [26]; and rate of admission in
hospitals owing to drug overdose or infections from needles [24,35]. In addition, drug abuse imposes a
substantial economic burden on the country because of the added direct and indirect medical and
non-medical expenditures [25].