If we don't manage vice, it will certainly manage us.
The difficult policy decisions exist in a sea of hogwash, victimless crime defining one shore and sin defining the other. When policy gets blown too far in either direction, people suffer.
First, let’s be clear what I mean by “vice.” That would be money made off your bad habits, as opposed to my own bad habits. Your bad habits are immoral; mine are endearing eccentricities.
Vice is a culture-bound idea, and individuals within cultures have different tolerances.
To some, any drinking is a vice. To others, any drunkenness. Still, any lawyer who has picked a jury in a DWI case knows that there are people who do not consider even drunken driving to be wrong.
I personally quit smoking dope in the US when I took the oath to be a judge, not because I think it’s wrong but because I cannot deal with the hypocrisy, which raised the social cost of getting high over what I was willing to accept. Mileage differs for other judges, I’m sure.
Judges are just people, people. So are police officers.
In the past few years, I have seen the destruction of a Texas-Mexico borderlands culture I have always loved. Like most bad effects from drugs, it is the prohibition rather than the drugs causing the destruction.
I remember shortly after I was elected to the Travis County Court at Law, one of three judges hearing criminal cases, we asked for two new courts. It was a reasonable request, but it was obvious to me at the time that if all criminal cases related to alcohol were subtracted, we had plenty of judges.
Many of us forget that alcohol prohibition was a progressive idea with which some Christian fundamentalists happened to agree. Hearing criminal cases, I came to understand why, and if it were not for the bad economic consequences I could support alcohol prohibition in spite of my liking for frozen margaritas.
Did this country learn nothing from alcohol prohibition? The “war on drugs” is no different.
Want a running dipstick on how the local drug war is going? Forget amounts seized or dealers sentenced.
Give one teenager in each school district $100 and tell him or her to bring you as much methamphetamine, cocaine, or heroin as that sum will buy. Without opening the baggie of white powdery substance you will get in return, send it off to the crime lab. You want to know three things.
Is it the real deal?
How much by volume did $100 buy?
What level of purity?
When a controlled substance goes up in price, the product gets “stepped on” more before reaching the retail user.
Enter all this into your computer every month for a year, do a little combination of bar graph and color code, and you will have a picture of your drug war at any given time, immune from press releases about the “street value” of seizures.
In some neighborhoods, I expect you could produce an algorithm to express the price of addictive drugs in the burglary rate, but direct measures are superior to both indirect measures and self-interested propaganda. What you need to know is price action.
Radical changes in the price line are to be avoided. Too low produces overdose danger from competition over purity. Too high produces more burglaries or even robberies.
People do not quit when the monetary price goes up. They quit when the social price exacted by family and friends gets too high or the user has a life-changing health crisis.
As a sentencing judge, I think my job is to use the limited tools the law presents to raise the social costs of using. The magic of “drug courts” is that they give judges who understand what is going on more tools to raise the cost to the individual without raising the cost to the public.
Like judges, the police are politically limited in how much truth they can reveal, but I should say that using kids to keep tabs on drug prices is no slap at law enforcement. Vice has to be easily available to the public, like any business.
I presume most voters would prioritize vice somewhat below violent crime and property crime. To say that a beat officer knows who is hooking or dealing drugs is not a valid criticism of the police. Read a few hundred warrant applications and you will understand that it’s necessary to get information from people who have it.
When there is police corruption, it invariably starts in the vice squad, where the duty is to stop behavior that can’t be stopped serviced by individuals who make more money in one transaction than a policeman makes in a year. The management perspective is that you don’t let people stay in vice too long. On the other hand, vice cops need to know the players and that takes time.
Kids know where to buy drugs. Tourists can quickly engage prostitutes. These businesses must be visible enough for customers but not too visible for the comfort level of the community. The police have to act when people get angry.
When people are not angry, corrupt police are paid off with money and honest police are paid off with information, often in cases where there is a dire need for information.
Austin police, in my time, were honest. When they did something wrong, it was overzealousness rather than trying to retire above their pay grade.
With all the evils that flow from prohibition, I still don’t buy the “victimless crime” argument, and destroying it was one of the goals of my criminal justice teaching. I lack the space fully to address it here, but one “victimless” issue is whether the government owns the power to prohibit self-destructive conduct. The two principal limits on governmental power are due process and equal protection. Those limits have not been applied to vice crimes and it’s hard to see how to apply them coherently.
There is no question that the government owns the power to prevent you from doing harm to yourself, and that there are valid arguments about how the cost/benefit analysis should come down in regulation of alcohol and drugs. Less so in prostitution and gambling and my favorite personal vice, enchiladas.
All that admitted, the destruction of the US-Mexico borderlands culture is an extraterritorial result of enforcement by the fantasy that it’s possible to stamp out other people’s vices by diverting law into what is a social and medical enterprise.
History will not judge this kindly.