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Notes -
Hold on.
Didn’t we try “tough on crime” over and over again? Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, all spearheading different approaches to shooting the dealers and locking up the addicts. Okay, Nixon had a really confusing stance on remediation, but his admin popularized the “war on drugs!” So what were these guys doing wrong?
@JarJarJedi and @FarNearEverywhere posit that progressive idpol is holding us back from implementing harsh solutions. This train wreck of a wiki article suggests the same…but most of its examples are post 2010. There were massive race riots before Clinton was elected, yet the 1994 crime bill saw huge bipartisan support. Reagan wasn’t deferring to victim narratives. It’s plausible that today, progressives are unwilling to accept the trade off, but that doesn’t explain what happened in the 80s and 90s.
I’m sympathetic to the argument below: America is so damn rich that our drug-addled homeless don’t mind it too much. That demand curve makes it hard to suppress the supply of drugs. Maybe reinstitutionalizing would help make up the difference. I just have little confidence that it would succeed where two generations have failed.
state vs. federal. War on drugs was in response to trafficking of cocaine and large scale stuff. Dealers who avoid federal laws can get much more lenient sentences, same for users . It does not cover local, smaller scale dealing of homegrown weed, homemade drugs, resale and abuse of prescribed opioids, etc .
If the sentiment was strong enough to get wild bipartisan support, I’d expect some of the same policies to show up. California was red until ‘92, the same year of the LA riots. It can’t have always matched up with today’s politics.
Did states generally break from the feds on this one issue? That seems really odd.
No, it wasn't. From 1960-1992, it had two Republican Senators for about 4 years. Governors largely alternated party. The State Assembly was majority Democratic from 1971 to 1995 [Note that the sift to R happened after your 1992 cutoff] and the State Senate has not been majority Republican since 1970. Republican candidates have gotten a lower pct of the vote in CA than in the country as a whole in every election since 1984. The Briggs Initiative lost overwhelmingly in 1978.
Moreover, re crime, the Three Strikes initiative was adopted after 1992, as were other initiatives to increase penalties for certain crimes. See here and here
Everything else is fine if arguable, but as far as the Briggs Initiative goes, it was opposed by...Ronald Reagan, as he was about to become the standard bearer of conservatism only two years later.
Nevertheless, a red state would not have such a lopsided vote. Compare that with the 69-31 vote in 1979 to repeal Miami-Dade County's ordinance oulawing anti-gay discrimination.
And, was Ronald Reagan the standard -bearer, or the Moral Majority?
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Huh. That's what I get for just looking at the presidential vote.
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And, perhaps relevantly, local prosecutors have no incentive to seek long sentences but every incentive to get convictions, so they offer really good plea bargains which result in dangerous criminals getting short sentences. The rest of local court systems usually don’t have the resources to actually process all of these cases, either. The plea bargain system makes ‘just throw the book at ‘‘em’ difficult to implement as a solution even when large parts of the system aren’t actively conspiring against punishing criminals because reasons.
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