keronprime.blogg.se

• #Medicine byword for crack crack#

The relationship of life course events - especially employment - to desistance and resumed offending suggest that social policies may be more effective than criminal justice sanctions in reducing drug offending. Findings support a growing conclusion that severity of punishment is a less powerful deterrent than certainty and that adjustments in certainty after arrest are offense-specific. The limited relevance of sanctions to offenders' thinking about risk avoidance contextualizes the widespread failure of policies designed to deter drug sales. Only one attributed lasting desistance from offending to a sanction, although life course events such as parenthood and employment were associated with short-term and planned desistance. Rationales for these shifts included sanctions, personal preference, and life course events or circumstances. Respondents were highly risk-averse but used a narrow definition of sanctions relevant to shaping future offending behavior, typically making small adjustments in sales techniques. It examines their risk perceptions and risk management strategies and techniques, exploring rationales for shifts in offending behavior. This dynamic examination of apprehension avoidance strategies relies on in-depth interviews mapping out the careers of 20 drug sellers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Extant research and current drug policy both fail to examine the interaction of risk perception, management techniques, and life course events or circumstances. Previous studies find that instead of absolute deterrence, or the termination of criminal activity, drug offenders employ restrictive deterrence, or a variety of risk management strategies. Policies undergirding the American War on Drugs assume that drug offenders respond rationally to adjustments in sanction certainty and severity.

This study considers a wider range of strategies, including visibility reduction, charge reduction, and risk distribution techniques employed by drug sellers in this modern-day social and criminal justice context. With the decline of crack's popularity since the early-to-mid-'90s (Golub & Johnson, 1997), the expansion of cell phone use (Pew Research Center, 2013), the heightened visibility of police and expansion of surveillance in inner-city communities (Goffman, 2009), and the decriminalization or legalization of marijuana in some jurisdictions, it is reasonable to expect that modern-day drug sellers may have developed a different perceptual landscape by which they assess their risk of sanction and subsequently identified new strategies and techniques for avoiding arrest.

#Medicine byword for crack crack#

One limitation of this literature is that the vast majority was produced during the height of the crack era and thus focuses heavily on open hand-to-hand street sales (Jacobs, 1996 Jacobs and Miller, 1998 Johnson and Natajaran, 1995). By contrast, district-level drug deaths are not significantly related to sponsorship of punishment-oriented bills.Ĭonclusions: These results suggest that the racial inequalities and double standards of drug policy still persist but in different form. The relationship between district-level drug deaths and subsequent sponsorship of treatment-oriented legislation is greater for opioid deaths than for cocaine-related deaths and for white victims than for black victims. Using legislator fixed effects models, we then test how changes in drug-related death rates in legislators' districts predict changes in (co)sponsorship of treatment-oriented or punitive legislation in the subsequent year and assess whether these relationships vary by race of victim or drug type.įindings: Policy makers were more likely to introduce punitive drug-related bills during the crack scare and are more likely to introduce treatment-oriented bills during the current opioid crisis. Methods: To assess this conjecture, we compile new longitudinal data on district-level drug-related deaths and (co)sponsorship of legislation on drug abuse in the House of Representatives over the past four decades. Context: Many observers believe that the policy response to the opioid crisis is less punitive than the crack scare and that the reason is that victims are (stereotypically) white.