Moral Panic and Prison Growth

Since presenting a talk a few weeks ago on the "hidden costs of drug prohibition," I've been interested in whether (a) the war on drugs was in fact exogenous (I'm not convinced it was) and (b) whether voters willingly hold to false beliefs about the dangers of drugs which are capitalized on by politicians. In other words, I wanted to know if the growth in the number of prisons and the size of the prison population - driven by the increased prosecution of drug offenses - was a political action taken to capitalize on a brief moral panic that happened in the mid-1980s, and coalescing with Len Bias's death from a cocaine overdose.

In looking around, I found this interesting-looking paper by Ruth Gilmore entitled "Globalisation and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism", published in Race & Society, 1999. It's a bit polemical in places, and I'm not finished so I can't give my opinion, but I thought this really was wrong on the face of it.

Another explanation for the burgeoning prison population is the drug epidemic and the threat to public safety posed by the unrestrained use and trade of illegal substances. Information about the controlling (or most serious) offence2 of prisoners supports the drug explanation: drug commitments to federal and state prison systems surged 975 per cent between 1982 and 1996. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that widening use of drugs in the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s provoked prison expansion. According to this scenario - as news stories, sensational television programmes, popular music and movies and politicians’ anecdotes made abundantly clear - communities, especially poor communities of colour, would be more deeply decimated by addiction, drug dealing and gang violence were it not for the restraining force of prisons. The explanation rests on two assumptions: first, that drug use exploded in the 1980s and, second, that the sometimes violent organisation of city neighbourhoods into gang enclaves was accomplished in order to secure drug markets.

In fact, according to the BJS, illegal drug use among all kinds of people throughout the United States declined precipitously, starting in the mid-1970s. Second, although large-scale traffic in legal or illegal goods requires highly organized distribution systems - be they corporations or gangs - not all gangs are in drug trafficking; for example, according to Mike Davis, in Los Angeles, an area of heavy gang and drug concentration, prosecutors in the late 1980s charged only one in four dealers with gang membership.

First of all, it's neat to see that my own instincts aren't original. Not surprising, of course, but nonetheless interesting. Secondly, though, I think Gilmore's got it wrong here. Notice the one word missing: crack. I just generated the following graph, which is based on the Fryer, et al. crack indices. These data, if I remember correctly, are constructed using factor loading, and are based on a handful of state-level measures of crack cocaine usage, including cocaine-related emergency room visits, cocaine related arrests, and other things along those lines.

It's extremely hard to believe Gilmore's argument that drug abuse was declining since the 1970s when in fact crack cocaine - a technological innovation that ultimately led to cheaper forms of cocaine to flood the market, and particularly among low income folks in inner cities - appears by this graph to have "exploded" in the 1980s. You can see the two vertical lines in 1986 and 1988. They correspond to the 1986 and 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Acts. These introduced many things, including mandatory minimum legislation for drug possession and differential (harsher) sentences for crack.

At the least, I think it's hard to make the claim that the building up of prisons - which I'm saying is partly due to these two omnibus bills - was unrelated to underly drug consumption, or that drug consumption was falling. Granted, this paper was written in 1999, and the Fryer, et al. data is from 2006. But, I still think it's absurd on the face of it. I still think writers - and I've been guilty of this in my own writings - are too quick to talk about the war on drugs as though it was merely a federal policy unrelated to underlying crime or drug use. In my mind, I think the two omnibus bills are obviously a response to the growing crack problem, and the accompanying violence and social ills it created. Now, whether the optimal response to such problems is prison expansion is a different matter. But that it was a response? I think that's a no-brainer.