It's worth pausing to reflect on what the author means when he says "it worked." As he surely knows, illegal drug use and gangs that sell narcotics remain ubiquitous in the United States. It is true that the crime rate has recently fallen, but that hardly coincided with the Nixon Administration's criminal justice policies. As Goldman himself acknowledges, a generation of African Americans has been crushed by these policies, and as he fails to point out, American drug prohibition is hugely complicit in the violent black market that is responsible for the tens of thousands of deaths he wants to address in Mexico. That is this drug warrior's definition of success!

As you can imagine, his recommendations for Mexico are horrifying:

Contrary to what the libertarians argued, you can control the population of prospective criminals - not by going after the top, where there always is room, but by waging a war of attrition at the bottom. In the past I compared the war on drugs to the American Civil War, which was won by killing off such a large proportion of military-age Southern men (nearly 30%) that the Confederate Army lacked soldiers to put into the ranks. That was the most heroic thing America ever did.



That is the United States, where the number of young people sufficiently poor to risk life and limb in criminal activity is comparatively small. What happens in a poor country with a much larger proportion of unemployment youth? Mexico's incarceration rate is just 200 per 100,000 population, roughly a quarter of America's. To attack criminality from the bottom up rather than the top down would imply a social dislocation of catastrophic proportions... It is questionable whether any Latin American government can deliberately reduce the criminal element in its own population. Peru's former President Alberto Fujimori will remain in prison for decades after his 2008 conviction stemming from the use of death squads against the "Shining Path" guerrillas. And Fujimori had a relatively free hand during the 1990s because the guerrillas' main support came from indigenous people in rural areas, where street justice is hard to document.



Nonetheless, if it is to break the hold of criminal gangs on many of its cities, Mexico has no choice but to take a page from James Q Wilson's book. To undertake the Herculean labor of suppressing criminality from the bottom will have terrible consequences, as in Enrique Krauze's chilling analogy to the 1910 Revolution. The only thing worse is the alternative. It is not enough to arrest the drug lords; it is also necessary to attrite the ranks of their gunmen. How much will it cost? If you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford to be a country.



One part of the column that I skipped over is worth mentioning, for I'm sure a lot of readers are thinking, Rather than knowingly devastate the poorest Mexicans by embarking on a deliberate program of mass incarceration, why not just make drugs legal if only on the chance it could work?Here's a rebuttal that the author apparently finds persuasive. "Libertarians used to argue that arresting criminals was futile as long as crime paid, because there always would be someone willing to take the job; the only remedy, they added, was to legalize drugs, bring down the price and eliminate the economic incentive," he writes. "The trouble is that the Mexican gangs do not restrict their predations to drugs, as the frightful incidence of kidnapping makes clear." He is apparently blind to the fact that those gangs would be far less powerful, far less formidable to stop from kidnapping people, if they weren't enriched with obscene amounts of wealth the likes of which they could only plausibly obtain from one source that can in fact be eliminated: drug profits. Prohibition era gangs committed crimes besides producing and selling alcohol. Do you know what made them less powerful? Or why they've long since ceased to terrorize law-abiding Americans?



But this is the illogic of a drug warrior. His solution requires locking up vast swaths of a country's population in cages while the folks that remain free are caught in a hopeless attempt to eliminate a black market. He nevertheless points at the libertarian solution and says, as if its a commensurate complaint, "Even if you legalize drugs there will still be other crime in Mexico."



Yet his side is still driving policy in the United States.



A related piece worth reading, if this topic interests you, is James Q. Wilson himself defending America's high incarceration rates. One line in particular jumped out at me as I read his arguments: "If we knew how to make street gangs less attractive to boys we could reduce dramatically the number of murders our cities experience, but so far we do not know how to do this." How about destroying the black market that permits many people in street gangs to earn vast amounts of money? Its hard to imagine how that could fail to make street gangs less attractive.

