Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [216]
Prohibition had a short, stormy, unhappy life. Millions of people never wanted it, never accepted it. Yet, in the ranks of the “dries” were many true believers. When Prohibition ran into trouble, as it became obvious that hordes of sinners were breaking the law, the dries cried out for more muscle, more teeth, more enforcement, more rigor. They got their wish in the Jones Act (1929), which stiffened federal penalties.68 It did not, however, get at the roots of the problems that plagued the “noble experiment.”
It is taken for granted today that Prohibition was a ghastly failure, indeed, that Prohibition was unenforced and unenforceable. But this has to be taken with a grain of salt. This “unenforceable” law put thousands of people in jail. In Columbus, Ohio, in 1929, there were 1,958 arrests for violations of liquor laws, which was ten times the rate of arrest for auto theft, and almost twenty times the rate of arrest for robbery.69 Courts in many states were positively jammed with Prohibition cases. In Virginia, in 1917 (before the Volstead Act), there were 1.8 liquor-law felony charges per 100,000 population; in 1928 the figure was 63.9, and liquor felonies dominated all other forms of felony.70 To be sure, most felony liquor charges did not stick: they were often downgraded to misdemeanor charges. Still, all this activity is a far cry from “nonenforcement”; the law was in vigorous use.
It is not easy to tell exactly what impact Prohibition had on law and society. People probably, in fact, drank less. Prohibition certainly affected the time, place, and manner of drinking. But it failed to get rid of the liquor problem; and many people thought it led to a general breakdown of law and order. Prohibition, as one Virginia judge put it, was enacted by “hypocritical representatives” who were “publicly dry and privately wet,” and it brought about “contempt for all law.”71
Worst of all, Prohibition fed the growth of organized crime: the gangsters, the “overlords of vice,” flourished in its shadow. The phrase quoted is from E. W. Burgess, writing in the pages of the Illinois Crime Survey (1929). Burgess thought there was no “blinking the fact that liquor prohibition has introduced the most difficult problems of law enforcement in the field of organized crime. The enormous revenues derived from bootlegging have purchased protection for all forms of criminal activities and have demoralized law enforcing agencies.”72
This charge against Prohibition somehow stuck; one hears it repeated, to this day. It is part of the enduring legend of Prohibition. No doubt there was something to it. Prohibition was the age of Johnny Torrio, the boss of Chicago, and his more famous successor, Al Capone, the boss of bosses in Chicago after 1925. Capone ruthlessly slaughtered and suppressed rivals; he controlled bootlegging, gambling, and other “rackets.” In 1927, by one estimate, his organization pulled in some $60 million a year in ill-gotten gains.73 To men like Capone, Prohibition was like a pot of honey to a bear.
Ultimately, Capone went to jail, for tax evasion; and Prohibition ended (in 1933). But the gangs went on. The forces that led to the rise of “organized crime” surely went deeper than the Prohibition laws. And liquor was not, and is not, the only illegal commodity people want to buy. Gambling and prostitution are two others; another is drugs; these supported a criminal culture long before Prohibition—and long, long after.
In retrospect, Prohibition was a last-ditch defense against powerful and primitive forces that had been somehow unleashed in the country. What “respectable society” labeled vice, a substantial minority (or majority?) labeled pleasure. Drinking was only one example. Drugs were another; gambling a third. In the case of “inverts” and “perverts,” the letter of the law demanded that they utterly repress behavior that flowed out of basic human desires, that they deny a vital aspect of their selves. This was an extreme