Follow-up to Chapter 7 Report

Before I post my follow-up comments to the Yellow family's report on Chapter 7: Public Order Crimes, let me call your attention to the previous several blog posts, which you need to check out, especially several of you who have been missing-in-action. Also, I handed back the midterm exam today. So, if you want that you'll need to show up. And now, Chapter 7.

FOLLOW-UP COMMENTS ON CHAPTER 7:

A. Important to note that these crimes are categorized as "malum prohibitum" offenses, that is, offenses defined by law but not recognized as inherently evil (as are "malum in se" offenses). Also, they are classified as "victimless" crimes in the sense that there is a willing exchange of desired goods (drugs or sex) between individuals.

1. The consentual nature of these crimes makes them prone to underreporting and it complicates the job of law enforcement, which often has to resort to undercover operations to apprehend the criminals. So, neither the "Uniform Crime Reports" (UCR), nor the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is of much help in getting at the true magnitude of these crimes. For example, note the huge discrepancy between 80,000 arrests for prostitution in 2001 and an estimated 500,000 prostitutes.

B. The economic and social costs of the drug war have been tremendous. A former chief of police in Seattle estimated that the price tag for roughly 30 years of the drug war may be as much as $1 TRILLION! (this is NOT among the figures presented in "Crime Types.")

C. There is definitely a SUBCULTURAL aspect to public order crime -- that drug dealers, addicts, pimps, prostitutes, etc., inhabit a world where these illegal activities are seen as acceptable, which of course lends support to Differential Association/Social Learning theory. Dabney also mentioned the role of "normative neutralizations" in rationalizing the behavior.

1. One might also argue that Anomie/Strain or even Rational Choice theories might be relevant to the article on the organized marijuana business in rural Kentucky. Seems that marijuana has become a huge cash crop as the coal industry and other economic opportunities have declined. (Interesting to note that the medical marijuana business in California also seems to have had a huge impact on agriculture, given that growing marijuana is so much more profitable than growing other crops.)

D. The "Drugs-Crime" article basically concludes that the causal relation between drugs and crime is a two-way street: drugs cause crime and crime causes drugs. As I stressed in class, crime and drugs do go hand in hand, regardless of which came first. Both crime and drugs, I would argue, grow from similar deteriorated social conditions.

E. In the article on hard-core heroin addicts, a typology is brought out which I believe contains at least one crucial point. The authors make an important point about the effects of heroin and when it is most destructive:

"In sum, contrary to popular belief, heroin use does not inevitably lead to a deterioration of lifestyle. Rather, the physiological dynamics of narcotics use tend to be the most destabalizing under conditions where life structure is already weak and incapable of accommodating the physiological demands imposed by increased tolerance." (p. 274) That is, in regard to the effects of any drug, one must consider the larger social circumstances in which the drug is taken and not just the chemical properties of the drug itself.

F. In "The Miami Sex-for-Crack Market Revisited" we see the intersection of two public order crimes -- prostitution and drugs -- with terrible consequences for those caught up in this world, especially in terms of the extreme risk of contracting HIV.

G. A final note: I was glad that the Yellow family skipped over the last article on prostitution, which I believe was perhaps the most poorly written article in the entire book.
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In our next class on Thursday (11/3), we'll be seeing a documentary on the parole system in California, which is connected with an extra credit opportunity that I posted on this blog. Check that out before Thursday.