When the laws are ones that everyone agrees should be crimes, like murder, spend the resources to convict anyone who commits the crime.
e.g. nobody will prosecute any property related and others low level crimes (e.g. damage is less than hundreds or at least tens of thousands). Crime rates will increase and the system will collapse at some point.
By contrast, drug use has no theft victim to report the crime and then even harsh penalties don't act as a deterrent because detection rates are low and addiction is a stronger motivator than the spoils of petty theft. So you would stop prosecuting recreational drug use (compensating by increasing addiction treatment programs etc.), and thereby also eliminate all of the associated crimes as drug cartels murder over territory and drug users commit serious robberies to afford street drug prices that otherwise wouldn't cost more than a bottle of aspirin, avoiding the need to prosecute those either.
At which point crime goes down and you can spend more resources prosecuting the remaining cases.
Which you won’t be able to do if the cost of prosecuting someone increases several times (i.e. no plea bargains anymore).
> you would stop prosecuting recreational drug use
Aren’t these already (realistically) misdemeanors at most in a lot of places?
Even in the best case e.g. lets say case load decreases by 25% that doesn’t seem enough to balance things out.
I’m confused, though. Are you suggesting legalization? Or just saying that law enforcement should ignore drug traffickers and dealers (because they will certainly continue engaging in violent crime if it’s the latter)
To truly minimize drug related crime you’d need legitimate drug companies to start selling OxyContin/etc. in the candy section at Walmart.
Well sure you can. It just costs more. But since you're still doing it, the deterrent is still present and then the expensive cases you have to prosecute remain rare.
> Aren’t these already (realistically) misdemeanors at most in a lot of places?
Not for the sellers they're not.
> Are you suggesting legalization?
Yes.
If you could go buy codeine or lisdexamfetamine for $5/bottle from the pharmacy counter at Walmart then there are no more drug cartels, no more drug cartel murders, no more street pushers lacing what was supposed to be MDMA with fentanyl that causes people to OD or get addicted to opioids, fewer addicts robbing people for drug money, higher deterrence for other crimes because police aren't spread so thin, less poverty and desperation because fewer kids have fathers in prisons or coffins, fewer neighborhoods held hostage by drug gangs.
That's a whole lot of crime that just goes away.
More to the point, consider where we are in terms of efficiency. It costs on the order of $100k/year to incarcerate someone. Every one of those drug murders you prevent is saving twenty million dollars worth of keeping someone locked up for two decades. That pays for a lot of two day jury trials for petty theft.
Here's how things have manifestly played out over the past 150 years: procedural rules are strengthened because citizens are afraid of unjust prosecution. Some high profile bad guys, or parade of run-of-the-mill criminals, get off because of said procedural loopholes, after which voters demand politicians expand substantive criminal law to re-balance the equation. Upon which more unjust prosecutions enter the public consciousness. Wash, rinse, repeat.
This is what systemic injustice looks like, and the cycle continues as unabated as ever. On the one hand, you have movements like BLM, which have indeed effected change even in the most conservatives jurisdictions, largely by changes in procedural rules by courts and in policy by prosecutors and municipalities. At the same time, you have #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, etc, which has resulted in the expansion of sexual crimes and punishments, and elimination of statutes of limitations, partly because procedural protections have made it extremely difficult to prosecute past behaviors, not because they strictly weren't already cognizable crimes.
Nobody is going to lose sleep over Weinstein, but long-term which demographics will bear the brunt of this tightening of the screws through the substantive law? You see the fundamental contradictory behavior here? There's tremendous overlap between the #MeToo groups and the BLM groups, and for both their demands are premised on empathy and justice, but at the end of the day we're going to end up with a harsher system that will further disproportionately punish some segments of the population over others. That's what systemic racial injustice looks like, yet nowhere can you find ill intentions or a desire to oppress anyone.
There's an alternative path, here. Notice how the legal screws have taken centuries to slowly but inexorably tighten without any concerted effort, yet in less than a single generation the normative behaviors of individual judges and other legal professionals, both as regards defendant rights (BLM) and victims rights (#MeToo) has seen a sea change. That suggests that by giving back more discretion to the system, not less, it's possible and, IMO, much more likely we could end up with a more fair system all around. Not guaranteed, of course, but neither is it guaranteed that just throwing more money and resources at the existing system would, even assuming we could even achieve let alone maintain that degree of attention from society. The difference between these two approaches, though, is that one requires trusting our fellow citizens, while the other holds out the (fantastical) prospect of an engineered solution.
Nothing about it requires a dictator. You vote for politicians who repeal laws that don't have widespread consensus, when enough people vote for them they get repealed. Ideally you then do something that makes it more difficult to re-pass them.
> Some high profile bad guys, or parade of run-of-the-mill criminals, get off because of said procedural loopholes
The procedures aren't loopholes. They're prerequisites for a conviction. They by no means make a conviction impossible, but you have to do the work.
> At the same time, you have #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, etc, which has resulted in the expansion of sexual crimes and punishments, and elimination of statutes of limitations, partly because procedural protections have made it extremely difficult to prosecute past behaviors, not because they strictly weren't already cognizable crimes.
The problem here is not procedural rules at all. It's evidentiary difficulties. How do you distinguish between someone who consents but then has regrets and changes their story, or someone who has sex with someone wealthy in order to extort them for money, and someone who was actually sexually assaulted?
There is no perfect solution to that, but "innocent until proven guilty" is the only sane one. What you then need is a system that can uphold that standard even when there is pressure not to.
> That suggests that by giving back more discretion to the system, not less, it's possible and, IMO, much more likely we could end up with a more fair system all around.
It suggests that when you give more discretion to the system and the system favors you at this moment in time, you get what you want, for now.
But then there is another election and you may not like what someone else does with that discretion.
Well, you can. Its impact is heavily amplified, but there certainly are ill intentions and a desire to oppress people.