In Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance, Kai Erikson states,
…the agencies built by society for preventing deviance are often so poorly equipped for the task that we might well ask why this is regarded as their “real” function in the first place. (p. 14)
He notes that the amount of deviance and crime found in a society is largely related to how many resources we commit to looking for it. And once we’ve created institutions and industries to deal with particular types of deviance, we tend to continuously find enough deviance to continue to justify the system’s existence. If we’ve built a large criminal justice system, that system takes on a self-sustaining life of its own. Even if we eradicated all major crime as we know it, Erikson suggests, the agencies would turn their attention to behaviors we’ve previously ignored or treated as relatively unimportant, finding a new reason for the system’s existence and access to resources.
In the past several decades, fighting the War on Drugs has become an important role of the U.S. criminal justice system. Drug infractions are a major cause of the growth in imprisonment rates and, especially, the racial gap in incarceration.
I thought of Erikson’s insights when I recently saw the trailer for The House I Live In, an upcoming documentary about the impact of the War on Drugs. The trailer highlights the way that low-level drug dealers and addicts are fed as raw material into the criminal justice system. Law enforcement agencies often benefit directly from seizures of cash or property during drug busts, which then becomes property of the agency; additionally, agencies that design programs to target drug use/sales often get access to federal funds for training and equipment that they’d have no way to purchase otherwise:
The War on Drugs is an industry, one with vested interests with a powerful motivation to ensure its continued existence and expansion, regardless of any objective cost-benefit analysis of the consequences of incarcerating such a large proportion of the population or even of the effectiveness of our policies for actually decreasing drug use.
Comments 9
The Industry of the War on Drugs » Sociological Images « National-Express2011 — September 18, 2012
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Ben — September 18, 2012
Excellent post! I look forward to this documentary.
inkyisfat — September 18, 2012
Another reason we should have voted for Ron Paul.
Yrro Simyarin — September 18, 2012
Wonder how high public support for ending the drug war has to get to make a dent against the machine. 60%? 80%?
decius — September 18, 2012
Nitpick: Federal agencies aren't active agents and make no decisions. The people in charge of agencies might be making decisions, or they might be making calculations regarding how to best execute their specific job description.
Daily Interesting Stories — September 18, 2012
[...] The Industry of the War on Drugs [...]
Link Roundup — The Good Men Project — September 20, 2012
[...] Sociological Images talks about the prison-industrial complex. [...]
flamings — September 21, 2012
I wonder if the documentary will spell out clearly that the War on Drugs is also another form of violent racial profiling that aims at surveilling, brutalizing, persecuting, segregating and locking-up people of color, and especially low-income and poor POCs.