{"id":14260,"date":"2018-02-12T18:51:08","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T18:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/?p=14260"},"modified":"2018-05-10T19:22:26","modified_gmt":"2018-05-10T19:22:26","slug":"kathy-gyngell-crime-rates-soar-where-we-fail-to-enforce-laws-against-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/2018\/02\/kathy-gyngell-crime-rates-soar-where-we-fail-to-enforce-laws-against-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathy Gyngell: Crime Rates Soar Where We Fail To Enforce Laws Against Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drug law enforcement is not just unnecessarily punitive but discriminately so. We\u2019d all be better\u00a0without\u00a0it. \u00a0No that\u2019s not what I think.\u00a0 It\u2019s the received wisdom of drug legalisation campaigners that George Soros has been putting his billions behind. \u00a0Law enforcement is more harmful by far than the effects of the noxious drugs its purpose is to control, they claim.<\/span><\/p>\n

In any debate on drugs policy I\u00a0take\u00a0part in, figures are\u00a0routinely\u00a0flung at me of the number of people unjustly incarcerated in the United States or unjustly convicted in the UK. \u00a0Suddenly I find democracy US\/UK style is racist and as evil as ISIL.<\/span><\/p>\n

Typically, I am told that half of all federal prisoners in the US are\u00a0in for drug offences and that this \u201c\u2026punishment falls disproportionately on people of colour\u201d. \u201cBlacks make up 50 percent of the state and local prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes\u201d\u00a0is typically claimed<\/a>\u00a0and rarely challenged.<\/span><\/p>\n

As for our punitive drugs laws on this side of the pond, I am also routinely informed that \u00a0\u201c\u2026roughly 87,000 people are being wrongly convicted every year\u201d\u00a0some 70 per cent of which are for that delightful social drug\u00a0cannabis<\/a>,\u00a0strangely about the same number as the total number of prison places in the UK.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fact and fiction could not be more different. \u00a0A recently published\u00a0written answer<\/a>\u00a0shows that in\u00a0any of the last 5 years, the number of people sentenced to more than a year in prison in the UK for\u00a0 a Class A drugs offence can be counted on two hands ; a sentence of over 6 months for class B drugs (which include cannabis) \u00a0can be counted on one hand.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though \u00a0cautions, discharges and rehabilitation orders far exceed all other sentencing (which includes fines and community orders) outraged liberals like Sam Bowman of the Adam Smith Institute\u00a0irresponsibly\u00a0persist in \u00a0their hyperbole that, \u201cprohibition means putting thousands of people in jail, giving criminal records to hundreds of thousands of others\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The law is unjust they insist,\u00a0despite\u00a0the absence of any evidence for this, that\u00a0\u00a0\u2018possession\u2019 arrests damage lives, fill prisons and waste police resources.<\/span><\/p>\n

The latest to get behind the gross social injustice\u00a0banner\u00a0is Bill de Blasio, the Democrat Mayor of New York City \u00a0(the first Democrat since 1993). \u00a0Under this banner and persuaded that\u00a0the enforcement of federal marijuana laws\u00a0doesn\u2019t so much protect minority communities as harm them,\u00a0he\u2019s instructed the New York Police Department not to enforce them.<\/span><\/p>\n

The reality is otherwise, however, as\u00a0John Walters and David W Murray explain \u00a0here<\/a>. As here in the UK the\u00a0actual risk of arrest<\/a>\u00a0while using marijuana in the States is stunningly low – about one arrest for marijuana possession for every 34,000 joints smoked.<\/span><\/p>\n

Drug arrests are far from being a significant portion of law-enforcement activity. \u00a0Possession arrests for marijuana do not fill US prisons – fewer than 0.3 per cent of the total of those incarcerated in state prisons (which is where most US inmates are incarcerated) in fact. \u00a0And many of these have \u201cpled down\u201d from more serious offences.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nor, as we are supposed to uncritically\u00a0believe,\u00a0\u00a0are African-Americans the directly targeted victims of the drug laws; race is not the driver of \u201cdisparate impact\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Walters and Murray will not make themselves popular for explaining why there are more black drug arrests. The simple facts are that: African Americans are more engaged in drug trafficking; their drug use \u201coften occurs in areas with intensive policing, such as urban street corners\u201d which means, yes, \u00a0that the risk of arrest for African-Americans is indeed higher than for whites, whose use of drugs is typically less conspicuous.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nor is it just drug-related crime where there are racial disproportions in arrests and incarcerations. As they point out, the same is true for almost all crimes.\u00a0 This difficult fact leaves the outraged liberal in the \u2018logical\u2019 but untenable position of having to believe that \u00a0virtually all efforts to combat crime must be \u201cwars on communities of colour\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The trouble is with this specious racial discrimination position is that the only solution would be to\u00a0decriminalise all\u00a0crime.\u00a0 Where that leaves minority communities is far from protected.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mayor de Blasio only has to look at recent crime rises California to understand this.<\/span><\/p>\n

There,\u00a0the recent passing of Proposition 47 has reduced or eliminated prison time for certain drug and stolen property crimes, \u00a0the most visible impact of which is its effect on drug possession cases; making California the first state to make drug possession crimes\u00a0misdemeanours<\/a>\u00a0instead of felonies.<\/span><\/p>\n

The impact has been immediate. It appears to be responsible for an increase in crime figures.<\/span><\/p>\n

In\u00a0certain areas, aggravated assault is up 9.9 per cent since the law came\u00a0into effect<\/a>\u00a0and burglary by a whopping 30.7 per cent in the same period.<\/span><\/p>\n

Myths about the harm of punitive enforcement are myths. \u00a0The price of no\u00a0enforcement\u00a0is severe\u00a0– much more crime which threatens all our well being, whatever our colour.<\/span><\/p>\n

By\u00a0<\/em>Kathy Gyngell\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0conservativewoman.co.uk\u00a0\u00a0 19th<\/sup> Dec.2014<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drug law enforcement is not just unnecessarily punitive but discriminately so. We\u2019d all be better\u00a0without\u00a0it. \u00a0No that\u2019s not what I think.\u00a0 It\u2019s the received wisdom of drug legalisation campaigners that George Soros has been putting his billions behind. \u00a0Law enforcement is more harmful by far than the effects of the noxious drugs its purpose is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,14,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-violence-prison","category-social-affairs","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}