Hacker News Reader

Comment by cgrubb | Hacker News Reader

prison population by type of crime (2012):

    violent: 47.7%
    property: 17.1%
    drug: 20.5%
    public order: 13.8%

"public order" includes drunk driving, weapons possession, and prostitution. Source http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...

Recidivism rates (2005):

    violent: 71.3%
    property: 82.1%
    drug: 76.9%
    public order: 73.5%

Source: http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welco...

View on HN

I wonder, though: How many of the violent crimes are drug-related? That is, if a drug dealer shoots another over territory, is that reported as "violent", or as "drug"?

My guess is that it is reported as violent, and therefore that legalization would reduce crime more than you would expect from the 20.5%.

Unfortunately, "legalization" means marijuana. It doesn't mean all drugs. That means that there will still be drug crimes, and violent drug-based crimes, over cocaine and heroine and meth and on and on. And I'm not sure that legalizing the other drugs would be beneficial. Even more, I'm sure it's not going to happen any time soon. That means that legalization would only eliminate the marijuana-related crimes which, while many, are by no means all the drug-related crimes.

For prostitution the U.S. ought to follow the Swiss (I think) model: to sell is legal, to buy is criminal, for the reason that the buyer inherently victimizes the seller.

Drugs? I suppose some form of regulation would be better. Governments get scary when they attempt to legislate morality. Drug use is immoral (IMO), but perhaps it shouldn't be illegal.

Do you drink coffee? Wine? Smoke cigarettes? Take Aspirin? Are those immoral? Sure, some drugs are worse for the user than other drugs, but you could make the same argument for eating sugary foods or not exercising enough. A bad idea, probably, but not immoral.

>for the reason that the buyer inherently victimizes the seller

you'll have to explain here, because it seems to me that under a legal regime, a prostitute making a clear decision to sell sex is no more a victim than the owner of a convenience store deciding to sell slurpees.

It's contentious— there is certainly a class of sex worker who is empowered and fully in control of the economic transaction being carried out. But there are also many, many who are trapped and not making their own decisions, especially when drugs are part of the picture.

Ban an entire market because sometimes the sources of labor are repugnant?

What percentage of the market has to be drugged-out sex slaves (often imported from some other countries, if the horror stories are true) before it's acceptable to shut down the whole market by criminalizing it?

Does criminalizing the market help those drug-addicted sex slaves, or does it make their situation worse?

Criminalizing the market us why its run by the same groups that run the illegal drug trade and why the people working in it often feel they have no recourse against abuse -- it is, in other words, the reason why there are drugged out sex slaves. If it was legal, well-regulated, with effective workplace protections, the character would be radically different.

Lots and lots of women enter prostitution when they are <18yo, many of them manipulated by older men(pimps).

And that should/would remain a crime. By legalizing the 'profession' you open it up to more scrutiny.

Prostitution is illegal as a matter of public health, codified by religious texts. It doesn't jibe well with the notion of individual liberty, nor does the personal use of drugs, defended also as a matte of "public health."

These types of laws (cascading down to the less oppressive blue laws) are attempts to create a unified morality. The problem is fares poorly with human behavior, hence the inevitable creation of black markets.

> For prostitution the U.S. ought to follow the Swiss (I think) model: to sell is legal, to buy is criminal, for the reason that the buyer inherently victimizes the seller.

Is there evidence that the Nordic model (of prostitution laws - go after buyers, not sellers) accomplishes anything, or is it a feel-good law that at first glance looks like it has the right law enforcement incentives (don't punish the sex workers), but doesn't deliver on making sex workers safer or improving their lives?

http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/04/criminalizing-sex-work-cli...

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/02/25/european-parlia...

From "The Nordic Model" paper:

>> Since the introduction of the law, street prostitution has decreased (while increasing dramatically in Sweden’s neighbors) and Sweden has become an undesirable destination for pimps and traffickers. In addition, the new law has influenced attitudes regarding the purchase of sex: from 1996 (before the law) until 2008, the number of male sex buyers decreased from 13.6% to 7.9%.

The first table seems off given other data, e.g. http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offens..., which seems to represent drug related crime at a much higher rate.

You source appears to be for federal prisons only. Those numbers only add up to about 200k inmates. Most people are imprisoned by the state or county.

I'm curious how the "drug" category breaks down in terms of dealing vs. possession/use. I support legalization, but I also think that if we nullify the black market for drugs, we'd better be ready with alternative non-criminal opportunities for those who currently are involved that trade.

Maybe drug tax income could be earmarked for educational funding in underfunded districts... Create a school to employment pipeline.

Unlikely. Street level drug trade is a minimum wage job. In general, we systemically don't give a hoot about people in that situation.

We will never really know what the breakdown is, because definitions have been deliberately blurred. There are many ways possession can be turned into a charge for dealing (e.g. did they find two or more baggies? it's "packaged for sale") and plea bargains that reduce dealing back down to possession.

One of the well known problems with statistics for "dealing" is that a common plea bargain tactic is to reduce the charges in exchange for the defendant naming someone else as their "supplier". This works out well for actual dealers, as they often know people they can throw the charges at. Unfortunately, one of the common targets is the former (or current...) girlfriend that is only tangentially involved if they even knew about the dealing at all. They usually don't have a name to offer for a plea deal, so they end up serving time for the dealing charge.

So I don't believe it is actually possible to know what the breakdown really was. What we do know is that the sentencing doesn't really line up with the actions of the people involved; often the correlation is inverted from what it should be.

/* obviously, legalizing this entire mess so it can be regulated is the proper solution */

Reply on news.ycombinator.com