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Horsedreams/Crime/Drugs

 
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 1:42 am    Post subject: Horsedreams/Crime/Drugs Reply with quote

PeakTrader:

I doubt everyone will be better off with more crime.

It’s not easy to catch and convict a criminal, even if he committed dozens of crimes over many years.

We should praise the professional work of police, in general, for reducing serious crime rates to 1963 levels.

The U.S. is the best at getting criminals off the streets, rather than having them run amok, like in other countries.

And, a small group of people created a lot of propaganda about the “War on Drugs,” along with decriminalization and legalization.

There’s a positive correlation with drug use and serious crimes, including during the crack epidemic in the 1980s. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg

Tough laws work. Hanging horse thieves, in the Old West, was very effective in preventing horse stealing (since they couldn’t “lock” horses).

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And, the “War on Drugs” isn’t only about preventing and reducing expensive social costs, which include crime, lost productivity, traffic & work injuries & fatalities, health problems & drug treatment, mental illness, unemployment, domestic violence, child abuse, and other social services:

Theatre Reviews – Horsedreams

“Getting high looks like a lot of fun in Horsedreams. Until it doesn’t. And then it looks really, really ugly.

The drug use starts off casually enough.

The important part is the fun they have getting blasted together…and soon enough (or perhaps, too soon) Desiree and Loman are married and raising a baby in Westchester.

But Desiree, who couldn’t make it through her wedding or her pregnancy entirely sober, can’t quite leave the good times behind as a suburban mom. She starts sneaking a line of coke on the weekends, then more during the week, before she graduates to speedballs—mixing her coke with heroin. By the time her son Luka is three, she is a junkie shooting up horse, until she overdoses, needle in her arm on the floor of the bathroom, while her husband sleeps in the next room.

Left to raise a son on his own, Loman moves back to the city and hires a nanny to watch Luka. Mira, a 40-something black woman living in the projects in Harlem, first sees Loman as a rich white guy—an Upper East Side lawyer taking limos around town while someone else raises his kid.

But she quickly realizes what they have in common: Addiction has ruined both their lives. He’s been left widowed and lonely; she’s lost her father and brother to drugs, and has to work at a job that makes poor use of her obvious intellect to support herself and her alcoholic mother. Mira knows the horrors of addiction.

In the end, addiction is addiction—consuming, relentless, devastating. Heroin destroys a rich white man’s life just as surely as it destroyed a poor black man’s life.”

****

Robert, it seems, Sweden hasn’t done well solving crimes (it may be worse in Syria):

Sweden’s unsolved violent crime rate at 95 percent
15 November 2008

“Robberies and violent crimes made up 75 percent of all reported crimes in Sweden last year, which added up to around 900,000. Police managed to solve 5.8 percent of them.

Bengt Svenson, the national police chief, defended his department saying: “There is often very little of value to work with. When it comes to theft, there are no witnesses, and victims often don’t know when the crime occurred. There’s really not much to go on and that obviously makes it hard to solve crimes.”

Justice Minister Beatrice Ask feels the figures are an unwelcome truth for a government that ran on a platform on crime reduction. When elected, the government promised to have 20,000 police on Sweden’s streets by 2010.

Ask feels that part of the problem lies with Sweden’s culture. “I think it has to do with the culture, the idea that there is simply nothing that can be done.” At any rate, Ask says she feels the statistics are rather disturbing and that the Swedish police could do more to clear up these cases.”

http://www.icenews.is/2008/11/15/swedens-unsolved-violent-crime-rate-at-95-percent/

http://www.icenews.is/

My comment: I agree, culture has something to do with crime.

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Baffling, they’re not in prison just for drugs, unless they were trying to sell a ton of marijuana, for example.

Typically, they’re charged with multiple crimes and they often plead guilty to lesser charges.

Or, they’re convicted of both drug and non-drug crimes.

The Japanese have been effective in drug rehabilitation:

“The Japanese in 1954…inaugurated a system of forced hospitalization for chronic drug users. Under this policy, drug users were rounded up in droves, forced to go through cold-turkey withdrawal and placed in work camps for periods ranging from a few months to several years.

This approach to drug users, still in force today, is seen by the Japanese as a humane policy focused primarily on rehabilitation. By American standards, however, these rehabilitation programs would be seen as very tough.

The Japanese from the very beginning have opted for a cold-turkey drug withdrawal. Thus, every heroin addict identified in Japan is required to enter a hospital or treatment facility, where they go immediately through withdrawal.

Conviction through the criminal justice system is not necessary for commitment. Any addict identified, either through examination by physicians or through urine testing, is committed through an administrative process.

As a result courts are not burdened with heavy caseloads of drug users, drug users are not saddled with criminal records and punishment for drug users is swift and sure.

These policies dramatically and rapidly cut drug use. Within four years of the 1954 amendments, the number of people arrested for violating the Stimulant Control Law dropped from 55,654 to only 271 in 1958.

Japan began experiencing serious problems with heroin. By 1961 it is estimated that there were over 40,000 heroin addicts in Japan…tougher penalties against importation and selling, and by imposing a mandatory rehabilitation regime for addicts.

The results of Japan’s tough heroin program mirrored those of its successful fight against stimulants. The number of arrests for heroin sale and possession fell from a high in 1962 of 2,139 to only 33 in 1966 and have never risen above 100 since.”

****

“We know from the most recent survey of inmates in state prison that only six percent (6%) of prisoners were for drug possession offenders, and just over four percent (4.4%) were drug offenders with no prior sentences.

In total, one tenth of one percent (0.1 percent) of state prisoners were marijuana possession offenders with no prior sentences.

Federal data show that the vast majority (99.8 percent) of Federal prisoners sentenced for drug offenses were incarcerated for drug trafficking.

Federal prisoners… represent 13 percent of the total prison population.”

http://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/frequently-asked-questions-and-facts-about-marijuana

****

Howard, alcohol is legal.

Most people don’t get drunk on a glass of wine.

However, they can get high on a marijuana joint or a small dose of another drug.

Also, alcohol in one hand and marijuana in the other is a powerful combination.

****

Crime is expensive and government spending is needed to reduce crime – to catch, convict, and keep criminals in jail.

Drug use not only creates drug-related crimes, e.g. violent and property crimes, it harms society in other ways.

For example:

“As more and more addicts were created, Emperor Dao guang (1821-1850) of the Qing Dynasty became alarmed. He ordered that Guangdong (Canton), the only port then open to foreigners, be closed to all opium traffic.

But British captains evaded the edict by smuggling opium into China with the help of local pirates.

Opium presently became so widespread that by 1838, officials in Guangdong and Fujian were notifying the Imperial government that nine people out of ten in these provinces were addicts.

The Emperor responded by naming as High Commissioner to Canton Lin Zexu. Lin was given strict orders to rid the country of opium.

In a letter to Queen Victoria which was never sent, Commissioner Lin chided:

“… so long as you do not take it (opium) yourselves, but continue to make it and tempt the people of China to buy it, you will be showing yourselves careful of your own lives, but careless of the lives of other people, indifferent in your greed for gain to the harm you do to others: such conduct is repugnant to human feelings …”

After confiscating and destroying the opium stocks and pipes being sold by Chinese merchants, Lin put pressure on all merchant ships in the harbor carrying the drug to deliver their opium stores to him. Although these stores were publicly disposed of, it did not restrain the British as he had hoped.

One tension led to another, finally erupting in the war of 1839 to 1842, called the Opium War by the Chinese. It was an epithet bitterly resented by the British, who piously maintained that the war’s purpose was to teach the Chinese a lesson in free trade.

Just what kind of trade was meant was obvious from the swarm of opium boats which followed the Royal Navy upstream to Nanjing, where the Qing Dynasty was forced to sign a treaty opening China to trade.

Peace had barely been concluded when the opium boats began to hawk their wares: ‘Opium is on sale very cheap at Sui Shan – an opportunity not to be missed.’"

****

Would you feel safer in Syria, Russia, Brazil, or Mexico?

“It is often said that United States is a more violent nation than most European countries. Look at the murder statistics, and the statement looks like it has weight…Based on the murder rate alone, the US is indeed a more violent country than most Western European nations.

For my data I went to the European Union data information portal for both the European Unions and America’s violent crime rate so I hope that any European readers might not think this as a ‘statistical’ hit and run using questionable information.

First off, how crimes are recorded are different between each nation.

Second, when I created the violent crimes per 100,000 individuals I used the latest rounded census information I could find. This could potentially cause the data to be skewed because of varied population growth rates. However, outside of the US, population growth was relatively minimal. This does mean that violent crime rates will be understated for America coming up to the years approaching 2010; but realistically I don’t think it affects the data that much.

Lastly, I would have liked to find a break down of different types of violent crime, however, the EU data portal does not break the data down this far.

As we can see, when comparing the US to the EU, the EU has a far higher instance of crime. But using this data alone would be disingenuous since the EU has two hundred million more people than the US.

Having normalized the data we still see that there is a significant difference between the European Union and the US. The EU has a violent crime rate nearly a third higher than the United States. At this point we can say, assuming my data is in the ball park, that while the US has a murder rate far higher than the EU it has lower instances of other violent crimes relative to the European nations.

Scandinavia is well known as a collection of nations that are very safe to live in. I was surprised to see that their combined instances of violent crime was more than double that of the US.

Even more interesting is that the United Kingdom, known as the violence capital of Europe is comparable to the other Scandinavian nations. The data I have seen so far suggests that the UK isn’t as nearly as violent as portrayed…and this data warrants a deeper look at Europe as a whole because for some reason Europe has higher instances of violent crime than the US.

So is America really as violent as we in West believe? The data would suggest otherwise, though the murder rate here is intolerably high relative to European nations.

One final point needs to be made. The argument over which nation is more violent is largely academic. The point is that in most parts of Western Europe and the US you do not have to fear harm coming to your person. There are parts of cities across both sides of the Atlantic that would be foolish to reside in for very long after dark, but the fact is that the violence levels in both continents are far lower than they are in other parts of the world (save parts of East Asia).”

http://cogitansiuvenis.blogspot.com/2012/07/is-america-really-more-violent-than.html

****

I’d say some alcoholics are crime prone and some aren’t.

The question is do we want more drug addicts, who are crime prone, and more drug addicts, who aren’t?

I certainly wouldn’t want to run a liquor store, in part, because they get robbed so often, at gun point. However, they’re legal.

There’s certainly more crime around marijuana medical dispensaries.

Does drug use cause crime or does crime cause drug use?:

Is Illinois winning the War on Drugs?
Chicago Tribune
July 24, 2011

“Jack Riley, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Chicago….About 70 percent of all crime can be traced to drugs, he said…They (law enforcement) believe in what we’re doing because they see the devastation drugs are causing.””

I suspect, legalizing drugs will create many irresponsible drug users, who will spoil it for responsible drug users.

THE EDUCATOR – Spring 1998
Drug Enforcement Works

“Strong drug enforcement in the United States is correlated with dramatic reductions in crime, drug use, and drug addiction rates.

Drug arrest rates are not an accurate measure of how tough the nation is on drugs.

There are three times as many alcohol related arrests than drug arrests. Is alcohol policy three times tougher than drug policy?

Permissive drug policy was an abject failure in the U.S.

A drug criminal was four times more likely to serve prison time in 1960 than in 1980 and the incarceration rate plummeted 79 percent.

This drug-tolerant era brought a doubling of the murder rate, a 230% increase in burglaries, a ten-fold increase in teen drug use, and a 900% rise in addiction rates.

From 1980-1997…the incarceration rate rose over four-fold and crime and drug use began a steady, unprecedented decline.

Murder rates fell by over 25 percent, burglary rates dropped 41 percent, teen drug use reduced by more than a third, and heavy cocaine and heroin use levels fell.

With peak drug incarceration rates, many cities such as New York, reached record low crime levels.”

****

National Organization of Black Law Enforcement (NOBLE)
September 2, 2010

“…the movement in California as outlined in Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana is not in line with NOBLE’s mission, history or stance on drugs in our communities.

As an organization, NOBLE does not support the legalization of marijuana. The true social and community impact that this type of legislation will have is speculative, however, history has shown that the impact of similar actions can be devastating.”

“NOBLE has and continues to be concerned about disparities in sentencing and treatment in the criminal justice system, however, this legislation will not eradicate that issue.”

NOBLE joins a growing list of law enforcement organizations legal professionals who recognize the flaws in the measure and the harmful effects it will have on California and are opposed to Proposition 19, including: the California Police Chiefs’ Association, the California Narcotic Officers’ Association, the California District Attorneys Association, the California District Attorney Investigators’ Association, the California Peace Officers Association, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Association, and the Peace Officers Association of Los Angeles County, as well as 40 County sheriffs, 32 police chiefs and 31 district attorneys.

Other groups opposed to the initiative include: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the California Chamber of Commerce, the Association of California School Administrators, the League of California Cities, the California State Firefighters’ Association, Californians for a Drug-Free Youth, Crime Victims United, gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman, Attorney General candidates Steve Cooley and Kamala Harris, and many more.”

****

Legalizing Marijuana Not Worth the Costs
CNBC
20 Apr 2010

“State governments are exploring convenient fixes for overcoming massive debts burdening their states… some legislators are proposing the legalization of marijuana to boost tax revenue.

…findings from a white paper by the California Police Chiefs Association’s Task Force on Marijuana Dispensaries: California legalized “medical” marijuana in 1996, and dispensaries where the drug is handed out – to pretty much whoever comes in with a doctor’s note – have become catalysts for serious crime.

According to the white paper, dispensary operators have been attacked, robbed and murdered. Also, “drug dealing, sales to minors, loitering, heavy vehicle and foot traffic in retail areas, increased noise and robberies of customers just outside dispensaries” are all criminal byproducts resulting from California’s medical marijuana distribution.”

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