Time for a Serious Debate about Drug Legalization

With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals?

In response to this question from his online Town Hall, Obama's answer was a simple no. This answer may have been good for momentarily appeasing some on the political right, but it did not wrestle with the seriousness of the question.

The Huffington Post fleshed out the issue with a remark from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition:

Despite the president's flippant comments today, the grievous harms of marijuana prohibition are no laughing matter. Certainly, the 800,000 people arrested last year on marijuana charges find nothing funny about it, nor do the millions of Americans struggling in this sluggish economy. It would be an enormous economic stimulus if we stopped wasting so much money arresting and locking people up for nonviolent drug offenses and instead brought in new tax revenue from legal sales, just as we did when ended alcohol prohibition 75 years ago during the Great Depression.

From The Economist, March 7th, 2009:

In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to leaglise drugs.

"Least bad" does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

From Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, March 27th, 2009:

It's an indictment of our fact-averse political culture that a statement of the blindingly obvious could sound so revolutionary. "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters on her plane Wednesday as she flew to Mexico for an official visit. "Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border . . . causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians."

. . .

First, though, let's be honest with ourselves. This whole disruptive, destabilizing enterprise has one purpose, which is to supply the U.S. market with illegal drugs. As long as the demand exists, entrepreneurs will find a way to meet it. The obvious demand-side solution -- legalization -- would do more harm than good with some drugs, but maybe not with others. We need to examine all options. It's time to put everything on the table, because all we've accomplished so far is to bring the terrible violence of the drug trade ever closer to home.

If we are lucky, some day we will conduct a serious analysis and debate about decriminalizing drugs.

More Than Just Bonuses

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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The outrage over the AIG bonuses runs the risk of missing the larger point of the increasing income inequality in America. The culture-of-poverty argument about the black poor also misses this development. Since the 1970s, the wealth created by the American economy has been increasingly concentrated among the richest Americans. We can see this shift by looking at the minimum wage and the wages for workers by decile.

In 1968, the minimum wage was $7.63 in 2005 dollars [PDF]. In 2005, it had declined by about a third to $5.15. The minimum wage serves as a floor for all low wages. When it moves up, it pushes up the wages of workers earning just above the minimum wage. When it declines, the reverse happens. These workers at the bottom of the wage distribution are disproportionately black.

In 1975, workers at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution earned 3.8 times [PDF] what workers at the 10th percentile did. By 2005, the ratio had increased to 4.5. A similar trend occurred with the ratio of the 90th percentile and the 50th percentile. That ratio went from 1.9 in 1975 to 2.3 in 2005. Again, the workers in the lower half of the wage distribution are disproportionately black.

When the poverty punditry talks about black poverty without paying any attention to economics, they are "getting it wrong." The increasing income inequality that America has experienced since the 1970s is one reason why the black poverty rate is so high.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Another Black Public Intellectual Gets It Wrong

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
________________________________________________________________________

[Stanford University law professor, Richard Thompson Ford, whose bio states that he is a regular contributor to Slate, came to my attention because of his review of William Julius Wilson's new book More Than Just Race in the New York Times Book Review. In Ford's review, he makes all of the "classic" mistakes that I identify in Getting It Wrong. The following is an open letter to him.]


Dear Professor Ford:

The second sentence of your New York Times book review of William Julius Wilson's More Than Just Race states: "The poverty, violence and hopelessness in America’s inner cities have become increasingly dire in the four decades since the height of the civil rights movement." This statement is not correct.

The Census Bureau reports that in 1966 the black poverty rate was 41.8 percent. In 2007, it was 24.5 percent, 17.3 percentage points lower than in 1966. The Center for Disease Control's Health, United States, 2008 reports that in 1970 the age-adjusted homicide rate for black men was 78.2 for every 100,000 men. In 2005, it was 37.3 per 100,000. For black females, the 1970 homicide rate was 14.7 and 6.1 in 2005. Many of the leading black public intellectuals are nostalgic for the past, but this is only because they do not accurately remember how rough the 1960s and 1970s were.

Just about every leading black public intellectual who discusses the black poor recently gets these and other basic facts wrong. The consensus among these black elites is that there is an epidemic of bad behavior among lower-income blacks that has led to a big increase in black poverty. Juan Williams states, "too many poor and low-income black people are not taking advantage of opportunities to get themselves out of poverty." Cynthia Tucker claims, "drug use, poor classroom performance and the embrace of outlaw culture have done nothing but cement the black underclass at the bottom of American society." Henry Louis Gates argues that America now has "the largest [black] underclass in our history" and "it’s time to concede that, yes, there is a culture of poverty." You see that your second sentence fits with this theme.

Apparently, none of these commentators took much time to examine the black poverty trends. Over the 1990s, when lower-income blacks were supposedly mired in a culture of poverty, they experienced the largest reduction in black poverty since the 1960s. In 1992, the black poverty rate was 33.4 percent. By 2000, it had reached its lowest level on record, 22.5 percent. The culture-of-poverty idea or the "tangle of pathology" as William Julius Wilson has called it does not help us understand this historic decline in black poverty.

It is my hypothesis that Wilson's work (as well as the work of others over the 1980s and early 1990s) is a major factor in why black public intellectuals keep getting the facts wrong about black America. Wilson's underclass theory shifted the analysis of poverty away from an economic theory of poverty to a cultural theory of poverty. People spend less time looking at economic data and more time looking for "evidence" of bad black behavior which, according to underclass theory, has been on the rise since the 1960s. Gates reported that America has "the largest [black] underclass in our history" in the middle of the historic 1990s decline in black poverty.

Please be aware that I am not just playing a silly game of gotcha. Blacks are much more likely to be poor than whites. But if we wish to reduce black poverty, we absolutely have to understand the 1990s decline. The only way we can have further reductions in black poverty is to know what works. The immensely popular culture-of-poverty idea does not.

You are based at Stanford University. I would like to direct your attention to a short article in Pathways magazine. Pathways is a publication of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. The Winter 2009 issue has a short article discussing research on the change in child poverty over the 1990s in 12 advanced countries including the United States. The Pathways piece concludes: "Much headway against child poverty can be made by combining full employment policy with aggressive income transfers." These are important findings that one sees over and over again in the economic analysis of poverty. Unfortunately, this knowledge seems to have been lost among the leading black public intellectuals in their culture-of-poverty haze. If we wish to reduce black poverty, we need to return to an economic analysis of poverty and heed its lessons.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Less Crime, Lower Costs: The Smart-on-Crime Approach

We can have lower crime rates, a less expensive criminal justice system, and more humane criminal justice policies. This was the message of a summit convened by Representative Robert Scott of Virginia on March 3rd. Representative Scott brought together a panel of researchers, advocates and criminal justice professionals to highlight smart-on-crime approaches to crime prevention, sentencing and ex-offender reentry. Representatives Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan were also present to show their support for smart-on-crime approaches.

The U.S. criminal justice system is without a doubt the least effective and most expensive criminal justice system among advanced countries. Our incarceration rate is about seven times the rate of other advanced countries. One might think that with this extraordinarily high incarceration rate we would have a relatively low crime rate. This is not the case. We have a slightly above average overall crime rate among advanced nations. In other words, most of the Western developed world has policies that produce both less crime and less incarceration than in the United States. Our tough-on-crime approach has succeeded in providing us with the worst possible outcomes. Although the tough-on-crime approach has failed us for more than three decades, we continue to think that if we become even tougher on crime we will somehow produce different results.

The panelists assembled by Representative Scott showed clearly that there is a better way: smart-on-crime. What smart-on-crime means is that, as a first step, we need to increase our use of scientifically-proven programs that prevent individuals from ever beginning involvement in crime. If we prevent people from ever committing crime, there are fewer crime victims, lower criminal justice costs and more people working instead of languishing in prisons. A society with fewer criminals—not more inmates—is the absolute best for everyone.

Brian Bumbarger of the Prevention Research Center at Penn State University presented the audience with a menu [PDF] of rigorously-evaluated programs that prevent youth from engaging in criminal activity. Big Brothers/Big Sisters reduces youths’ likelihood of becoming involved in crime and increases student test scores. For a societal standpoint, when the criminal-justice savings are factored in, any investment in Big Brothers/Big Sisters ultimately pays for itself. The Nurse-Family Partnership program targets at-risk pregnant mothers for prenatal health care and for personal-development and parenting-skills training. This program reduces the likelihood of substance abuse and child abuse by the mother and dramatically improves child outcomes. For every dollar invested in this program, the societal financial benefit is over $3. It was mentioned at the summit that many youth in foster care end up in prison. But when foster care is paired with effective treatment programs through Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care the likelihood of a child in foster care becoming involved in crime is significantly reduced. For every dollar spent on this program, the societal benefit is more than $11. These are just a few of the options we have if we ever decide that we are serious about reducing crime and saving money.

The better an ex-offender reintegrates into mainstream society, the more likely the person is to give up on criminal activities permanently. Unfortunately, as part of our tough-on-crime mentality, we continue to devise ways to prevent the formerly incarcerated from living normal lives. Even after an individual has done the time for a particular crime, we find ways to punish them over and over again. At the summit, Margaret Love of the American Bar Association reported on an over-200-page report [PDF] which documents all of the federal laws and regulations that limit the access of people who have paid their debt to society to housing, voting, employment and social benefits. These tough-on-crime policies ultimately work to increase crime by preventing the reintegration of the formerly incarcerated.

One of the most important things to keep someone who was incarcerated from re-offending is a job. The Eastern District of Missouri has redefined the role of probation officers as Doug Burris, the chief probation officer, reported. In that district, the probation officers actively assist the formerly incarcerated in finding work. The officers have been highly successful at finding ex-offenders work and keeping them from re-offending. An evaluation of the Eastern District's program found that while the recidivism rate was 68 percent nationally, it was only 15 percent in the Eastern District. Jobs fight crime.

Representative Scott has done the country a service by highlighting the work of many people who are developing smart-on-crime strategies. These strategies will make our communities safer and save us money—if we ever manage to wean ourselves off of the failed tough-on-crime approach.