Legality of War on Drugs Questioned by Writers of The Wire
In recent months, major media outlets have drawn attention to American's high rate of incarceration: according to a report by the Pew Center for the States, more than 1% of the United States is behind bars. This is the highest rate of any nation for which reliable figures exist. Many people believe that it's time for change.
Writers for the HBO television drama The Wire recently penned an article for Time magazine and the show's co-creator contributed to a piece in Reason. The pieces offer commentary and suggestions for how to address the problems caused by the United States' War on Drugs and its effects on cities and prisons.
In the 1970s, Richard Nixon coined the phrase "War on Drugs" as a label for increased enforcement of drug laws and other new laws that took a "get tough" approach to crime prosecution. Since those policies were adopted, according to Time, arrests for drug-related offenses have skyrocketed - at the expense of arrests for violent felonies like murder..
The Wire writers claim, too, that law enforcement has been negatively affected by the focus on enforcing drug laws: the pressure to "fight drug crime" leads to funneling resources to lower-level offenders, who are easier to catch and imprison than big drug lords.
Unfortunately, as the article points out, focusing on quotas and stuffing jails with bodies allows less time for investigating and catching more serious offenders and those who have committed more socially threatening crimes.
The writers also express the opinion that the War on Drugs has essentially become a War on the Lower Classes, since poor, uneducated individuals often receive the brunt of police attention. Worse, even as prison populations increase dramatically, the problem of drug use and abuse has not lessened.
In Reason, Ed Burns, one of The Wire's co-creators, offers three steps toward fixing the current situation:
- Decriminalize drugs.
- Shift priorities to educating and offering opportunities to lower class children so that they aren't forced to turn to crime to make a living. Rather than funneling money toward clogged prisons, pump it into the education system.
- Focus on quality, not quantity, of arrests. Currently, the arrest of a small-time dealer looks the same statistically as the arrest of a huge drug lord, which allows police to get no more credit for difficult arrests than for "easy" ones.
Until the government acts to address the problems caused by the War on Drugs, the writers of The Wire have pledged to engage in a form of civil disobedience to draw attention to the issue: jury nullification.
They vow in Time that, should they sit on the jury in any trial in which the defendant is charged with drug crimes, they will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. This act, they reportedly believe, is one of the few avenues of effective protest available to American citizens who oppose the drug war.
Jury nullification, they assert, is a way to make dissenting voices heard and listened to.
For more information on this fascinating issue, check out the original articles in Time and Reason.
