More talk

Safer Cities:
"MR. BLUMSTEIN: The drug story is a particularly complicated one, in part because one facet of the improvement we've been seeing lately is that the word is out on the street that the crack drug is a very has very undesirable consequences, and so we've seen a major decline in the use of it, really regardless of the drug war. So this nuisance feature that George mentioned is far less an issue out on the streets. We have in the meantime built up enormous prison populations. Over 20 percent of state prisoners, and over 60 percent of the people in the federal prisons, are there on drug charges.

Now lots of those folks are in on very long-term mandatories, have done nothing more serious than selling drugs, but the sanctions we've endorsed for drug selling in our attempt to do something about the drug problem have become very large. And I think it's fair to say that we haven't averted very many drug transactions through this enormous growth of incarceration, largely because it's a resilient marketplace. Whatever the demand is out there, the market finds ways to meet that demand by the current sellers working harder or recruiting new people.

One of the consequences was that in the mid-80s there was major recruitment of young African-American males not in the drug business, and if you're in that business you have to carry a gun because you're vulnerable to attack by street robbers. What we saw was a major spreading of guns from the kids in the drug markets to their buddies, and that was a major factor in the growth of the homicide and other violence during the late 80s."