TWELVE
Most contemporary analyses of problems in the urban ghettos have emphasized structural or subcultural factors. Chronic unemployment, a long history of racial segregation, systemic welfare dependency, an entrenched culture of poverty, low median age, and a persistently low gender ratio have all been evoked to explain family decline, increased illegitimacy, high rates of violence, and kindred social maladies. These factors are like the minute hand on the historical clock described in the introduction: relatively slow moving and extending back over generations. Though they are certainly important causes, they are not necessarily the only ones. Other developments, which might be described as recent or sweep-hand factors, have contributed to rising ghetto violence and disorder in the late twentieth century. Among them are the overlapping sexual and media revolutions, the cocaine epidemic, and the declining efficiency of the criminal justice system. None of these is a deep historical cause of ghetto disarray, but they have collectively made a bad situation much worse.
Outside Agitators
During the 1960s and 1970s elite and to a lesser extent middle-class opinion about sexual mores—the propriety of premarital and extramarital sex, the stigma attached to illegitimacy and divorce, the morality of abortion and pornography—underwent a sea change. American culture, once officially prudish, became visibly and commercially eroticized. Cities sprouted singles and topless bars, nudity on stage and screen became commonplace, divorce and abortion became easier and more frequent, high schools stopped expelling pregnant students, and college dormitories did away with visiting hours. The old rules of sexual conduct and responsibility were clearly being relaxed.1
This was not necessarily the best collective message to send to black Americans, then finally achieving the status of full citizens after a century of disfranchisement and legal oppression. If civil rights had come when they should have, after emancipation, blacks would have had a chance to make their way in an industrializing Victorian society that would have provided both economic opportunity and social approval of strict sexual morality at a time when, despite the disruptions of slavery and civil war, the black family was still in reasonably good shape. As it was their historical opportunity came at the worst possible moment, when American society was both deindustrializing and deemphasizing traditional middle-class sexual mores. Blacks may have won their freedom in the 1960s, but the fashionable new ideas about what to do with that freedom (to "get it on") were not conducive to escaping the culture of poverty and the cycle of family disruption and illegitimacy that had become established in the ghettos. The sexual revolution was a cultural variation on the old economic saw that when white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia.2
The primary means through which the sexual revolution was publicized—some say propagandized—was the mass media, in particular television. Poverty in America is, in one sense, historically unique. Unlike the impoverished in most parts of the world, the poor in urban America have seldom been unable to afford a television set or to receive broadcast signals. Since the early 1960s television viewing has become as firmly entrenched in the ghetto as in the larger society. Thus, a paradox: although the ghetto has become more and more physically removed from white society, it has been wired into the white-dominated electronic fantasy world of sex, violent action, and consumption, "a toxic soup of mixed moral messages" that have as their ultimate effect the arousal of desire.3
Among the first to recognize this was the militant black nationalist H. Rap Brown. "America is a country that makes you want things, but doesn't give you the means to get those things," he explained in 1969:
Little Black children sit in front of the t.v. set and all they see are fine cars, perfumes, clothes and everything else they ain't got. They sit there and watch it, telling the rats to sit down and stop blocking their view. Ain't nobody told them, though, they don't have any way of getting any of that stuff . . . And white folks wonder why niggers steal and gamble. I only wish we would stop this petty stealing and take care of Chase Manhattan Bank, Fort Knox or some armories.
Nobody, black or white, was about to do Fort Knox. But looting of the sort that occurred on a large scale during the 1960s race riots and sporadically in cities like Miami and Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s, was an attainable goal. Mostly young, mostly male, and mostly poor, the "commodity rioters," frustrated and tantalized by the seductive images of consumption, helped themselves when the opportunity arose. Television showed them how to do it. (It also showed them—a nice irony— how to steal televisions.) Riots spread by contagion, and video footage was the single most important means of communicating the details, tactics, and rewards of commodity riot behavior.4
Television has been a template of individual as well as collective violence. In an era in which parents are increasingly absent, preoccupied, working, or watching television themselves, children have been tutored by the third media parent that violence is a quick and decisive way to solve problems and that killing is ubiquitous. By the age of eighteen the average American reportedly has, in the course of twenty-five viewing hours a week, witnessed 200,000 acts of televised violence and 40,000 murders. Exposure is even higher among blacks, who collectively spend as much as 47 percent more time watching television than whites.5
Perhaps the one saving grace of television gore is that it is consumed at home. A young person experiencing violence vicariously on the couch is at least not out on the street learning the real thing from peers. This is less true of violent movies, however. They are often attended by groups of young men and have become in recent years increasingly violent. The body count in the gangster film Public Enemy (1931) and the urban vigilante fantasy Death Wish (1974), both highly controversial films when they were released, was eight apiece. The average body count in more recent action pictures like Rambo II (1985), Robocop (1987), Die Hard (1988), Rambo III (1988), and Total Recall (1990) was just under sixty per movie. The primary audience for such movies was sixteen- to twenty-year-olds, who in 1990 constituted 20 percent of the cinema admissions but only 9 percent of the population. The most violent movies, in short, are most often watched by the most violence-prone age group.6 The same is true of the most violent music, rap and its white counterpart, heavy metal. Hard-core rappers defiantly celebrate the violence and sexism entrenched in street culture. "They rapped often about selling dope," recalled Jerrold Ladd, a young black man from Dallas:
the glory of its success, how they had robbed, murdered, kicked, AK 47 sprayed down, Uzi'ed down, beat down, pimped girls, fucked up niggers, and slapped bitches. A lot of us, especially the upcoming dope dealers and the younger generation, were absorbing these messages, having them reinforced over and over again through the music we people loved so dearly, the rhythms and beats we enjoyed so much.7
The actual effects of this sort of posturing entertainment are hard to quantify, though there is broad if not quite unanimous consensus that the effects of violence in music, movies, television, and other electronic media are real and socially destructive.8 To the extent that they are real, however, they would logically be most deleterious in subcultures in which young people consume large amounts of violent fare unmediated by parental supervision, which pretty much describes listening and viewing habits in poor black neighborhoods.
The critic and philosopher Cornel West has gone so far as to charge that the mass media are a leading cause of social and psychological pathology among black Americans. His theory is one of relative vulnerability. The media's saturation violence, macho sex, and mindless consumerism are bad for everyone, but they do greatest harm to those with the fewest constructive, pro-social alternatives, especially black people who are young and poor. Isolated and undereducated, they are, in effect, set up to be sucker-punched by profit-driven models of immorality and self-indulgence.9
Poor children who while away their time with television and other electronic diversions are also less likely to do well in school. Black students report spending an average of about four hours a week on math, science, social studies, and English homework; non-Hispanic white students six hours; AsianAmerican students seven. The parents of this last group take a dim view of television, dating, and other distractions. Not surprisingly, their children, who in comparison with black students have put in more than a thousand extra hours of homework by high school graduation, make better grades and score higher on standardized tests. Just as someone who runs every day will do better in a race than someone who occasionally jogs, children who study daily will do better academically than television-distracted peers who sporadically crack the books. One wonders how much of the black-Asian differential in IQ is simply a reflection of differences in parental willingness to turn off the television and seat their children at a desk or table. But a difference is no less real for being nongenetic. Any cultural or familial trait that hinders educational achievement in an information economy is bound, over time, to make family formation more difficult and thus indirectly increase the amount of violence and disorder.10
Television viewing has magnified the fear of violence as well as violence itself. Police-blotter programs such as Cops and Real Stories of the Highway Patrol have become common fare. Television news has become strobe-lit with blue lights. From 1989 through 1991 the three network evening newscasts collectively spent 67 minutes per month on crime stories; by late 1993 the amount of "crime time" had more than doubled to 157 minutes per month. Local news was even more police-oriented. A study of late-night news in Denver, for example, found that 54.5 percent of the news coverage was devoted to crime stories. including eleven of fifteen lead stories and two-thirds of all stories longer than two minutes. Related issues like poverty were given no coverage at all."
The Cocaine Revival
A big part of the expanded crime coverage on television has been the war on drugs, above all the war on cocaine. The coverage, however, has often been simplistic and ritualized: buy and bust, shove and cuff, cut to the powder on the table. Little attempt has been made to explain the origins of this modern plague.
Like most psychoactive drugs, cocaine entered American society under medical auspices. During the 1890s, however, it became popular in the white and black underworlds, and by the early twentieth century a full-blown cocaine epidemic was under way. Prostitutes coked themselves up, street urchins snorted "blow," tabloids ran exposes, politicians fulminated, legislatures passed laws. The epidemic ran its course, as epidemics will, and by mid-century cocaine had lapsed into obscurity. The drug was of little concern to the police, invisible to the general public, and regarded as a rare and expensive treat by street addicts who were geared toward mainlining heroin. Even in New York City, the nation's drug entrepot, cocaine was a scarce commodity.12
Then, at the end of the 1960s, the drug began to come back. One source of the revival was, curiously, the growing availability of methadone maintenance programs for heroin addicts. At a sufficiently high dose methadone blocked the euphoric effects of heroin while satisfying addicts' physical need for the drug. Methadone patients soon discovered, however, that non-opiate drugs, including cocaine, could still produce pleasure. To acquire the cocaine they sometimes sold or traded part of their supply of methadone. By 1970 one Philadelphia methadone patient in five was showing traces of cocaine in his urine."
Restrictions on amphetamines played an unexpected role in the cocaine revival. Introduced in the 1930s, the amphetamines were relatively inexpensive and legal stimulants. Some 200 million tablets were given to American troops during World War II. By the 1950s amphetamine use had spread to college students, athletes, truck drivers, and housewives in the United States. In fact the growing popularity of the amphetamines may well have contributed to cocaine's mid-century eclipse. By the early 1970s, however, amphetamines were becoming subject to tighter restrictions and adverse publicity. These changes made cocaine seem an attractive alternative, at least until 1986, the year the college basketball star Len Bias collapsed and died after using the drug.14
Most of the new cocaine users were young adults entering their prime drug-experimenting years. They had cut their teeth on marijuana, a cheap, double-duty drug smoked for the high and for symbolic protest against the forces of war and segregation. Those who tried marijuana and who suffered no ill effects grew skeptical (if they were not already) of drug abuse warnings, which they dismissed as so much propaganda.15
Snorting cocaine was, for many, the next step. The drug was subtly pleasurable, sexually stimulating, easy to use, considered to be safe, and, though expensive, affordable for those with substantial allowances or good jobs. At some universities the percentage of undergraduates who experimented with cocaine increased tenfold between 1970 and 1980. The American mass media, slavering for trends among the young and affluent, played up the cocaine renaissance. Cover stories on the drug and its revised history appeared in conventional and countercultural magazines. Easy Rider, one of the most popular and profitable films of 1969, opened with a cocaine deal on the Mexican border. It was followed by a string of 1970s hits like Superfly and Annie Hall in which cocaine played at least a cameo role. Retailers capitalized on the trend by stocking cocaine handbooks and gilded paraphernalia, symbols of sexual prowess and conspicuous consumption. As the 1980s began, the dominant impression of cocaine sniffing was that it was an expensive vice, not exactly harmless but not especially addictive or declasse or associated with violence.16
Then everything changed. By 1986 cocaine had acquired a reputation as America's most dangerous and addictive drug. It was linked, as it had been at the turn of the century, with poverty, crime, depravity, and death.
What happened was a shift in the pattern of cocaine use triggered by an increase in supply, a lowering of wholesale and retail prices, and the introduction of new ways of administering the drug, freebasing and smoking crack. Colombian drug traffickers, who in the late 1970s realized that they could earn far more by smuggling cocaine than marijuana, developed an elaborate network for acquiring, processing, and transporting the drug. By 1982 these smugglers had become so sophisticated that they were air-dropping cocaine in watertight containers to waiting speedboats which raced off to Miami. They secured protection for their operations by means of systematic bribery and violence. In Colombia, where assassinations and car bombings became commonplace, uncooperative government officials were subjected to a reign of terror.17
Producers in Peru and Bolivia, whence most of the coca leaves came, expanded their acreage to take advantage of the rising demand. More cocaine entered the smuggling pipeline, driving down prices. Between 1980 and 1988 the wholesale price of the drug in the United States dropped from $60,000 to as low as $10,000 a kilo. Some of these savings were passed on to lowerlevel dealers and consumers. The standardized price, defined as the price paid per pure gram of cocaine in a one-ounce transaction, declined from over $120 at the beginning of 1981 to just $50 in late 1988.18
As cocaine became cheaper in bulk it also began to be sold in smaller and less expensive units. The key was the development and popularization of crack. Beginning in California in 1974 avant-garde users took to converting black-market powder cocaine, which was adulterated and noncombustible, into cocaine freebase. The method, which involved heating cocaine hydrochloride in a water solution with ammonia and ether, was complicated and time-consuming, but it produced pure crystalline flakes of cocaine that were suitable for smoking (actually, vaporization) in a pipe. The vapor went from lung to arterial blood to heart to brain, jolting the user with a powerful rush. Just as smoking cigarettes was a more intensely pleasurable way of using tobacco than dipping snuff, freebasing was a more intensely pleasurable way of using cocaine than sniffing. By the late 1970s freebasing was in vogue in Hollywood and environs, though cost and complexity limited its appeal. The near-death in 1980 of the comedian Richard Pryor, who reportedly set himself on fire while preparing freebase cocaine, served to warn that the process could be dangerous. What was needed from a marketing standpoint was a form of freebase that was cheap and ready to use.
The answer was crack. Heating cocaine hydrochloride in a simple solution of baking soda and water produced a residue of cocaine that was not as pure as freebase but that was nonetheless suitable for the pipe and easy to sell in small chunks. Because the chunks made a crackling sound when smoked, they came to be called "crack."
Crack's big advantage was low unit cost. Cocaine powder generally retailed for $75 or more a gram, but crack could be sold in small vials for $5 or less, bringing it within reach of the poor. By 1984 the crack trade, fueled by ever larger and purer shipments of smuggled cocaine, was flourishing in such impoverished districts as South Central Los Angeles and Miami's Overtown and Liberty City. By 1985 the crack revolution was transforming the cocaine business in Washington Heights, Harlem, and other New York City neighborhoods populated by blacks and Latinos. Heroin, the inner-city drug of choice a decade earlier, was partially eclipsed by cocaine—in Miami, almost totally so. Addicts using only heroin became increasingly rare. In San Francisco and Oakland heroin addicts began smoking crack after injecting heroin-cocaine solutions into their veins.19
Crack abuse was by no means confined to the ghetto. Suburbanites, white kids in Camaros, cruised the mean streets to purchase crack for home consumption. But the heaviest users were concentrated in poor black and Latino neighborhoods. This was particularly true from the late 1980s on, as more and more middle-class users were frightened off. In the ghetto, crack sales, use, and dependency became part and parcel of the daily drug scene. Crack joined heroin, powder cocaine, marijuana, and forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor as a permanent fixture in the inner-city landscape.20
With this difference: crack sales involved teenage runners and dealers to an unprecedented degree. Selling crack was a ghetto youth industry. In Washington, B.C., black teenagers who sold crack could expect to earn an average of $30 an hour, more than four times the hourly wage of the legitimate jobs open to them. Like the young white men who went west in the nineteenth century, they were trading greater risk for higher earnings. "Fuck that factory rap," said one young Detroit gang member, "we going to sell some dope and get paid." "The only business in our hood that bloods run is 'caine for the dope fiends," said another. "Selling 'caine makes more doughski than little bullshit shops in the hood." The crack business was truly their own: no white or "A-rab" bosses to placate, no strictures on language, dress, or demeanor, no forms to fill out, no taxes to pay. Chances for advancement were better than in the legitimate service sector. For those whose future prospects were otherwise bleak, hustling crack was an appealing job.21
Crack and Violence
If they survived. Whatever the monetary advantages of peddling crack, the personal and social costs were steep. Like alcohol, crack distorted judgment. It also led to aggressive, often paranoid behavior in heavy users. It produced violent disputes over ripoffs and territories and financed the acquisition of automatic weapons. It encouraged crime and prostitution and undercut the life chances of drug-exposed infants. And it disrupted, impoverished, and destroyed the lives of individuals, families, and neighborhoods.
Small amounts of cocaine taken at irregular intervals do not usually produce violent behavior. Large amounts taken at frequent intervals by inhalation or intravenous injection—the most direct routes to the brain, and the most toxic—are another matter. Cocaine acts at the brain's synapses to stimulate the release and block the reuptake of norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine, substances associated with aggressiveness, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. Long-term cocaine use also increases dopamine sensitivity at the postsynaptic receptors, a neurological change associated with paranoia. Just as a male group will have a greater statistical tendency toward violent behavior because (among other things) it has a higher testosterone level than a female group, a cocaine-using group will have a greater tendency toward violent behavior than a nonusing group because its altered neurochemistry favors aggressive, impulsive, and paranoid behavior.22
Two studies conducted in New York City are particularly suggestive. The first involved fatalities from Russian roulette during the years 1984-1987. Russian roulette, a deadly game popularized by the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, involves putting a bullet in a revolver chamber, spinning the cylinder, putting the barrel to the temple, and pulling the trigger to find out what happens, click or bang. The losers who came under the autopsist's knife were mostly black and Latino men, unmarried and unemployed, who challenged one another in the presence of others to "prove they were men." Nearly two-thirds of the victims tested positive for cocaine, a rate almost twice as high as the control sample.23
The second New York study involved all known homicide deaths among city residents in 1990 and 1991. Nearly a third of the victims had cocaine metabolites in their blood, with the highest rates for Latinos and blacks. The authors believe that the victims may have provoked their own deaths through irritability, paranoia, or verbally or physically aggressive behavior, all known pharmacologic effects of cocaine. Most of the deaths, particularly among young minority men, involved guns.24 With cocaine as with alcohol, set and setting matter. Cocaine use is especially dangerous among the young and the armed, just as drinking stimulant-laced whiskey was so dangerous among pistol-toting frontiersmen.
The expanded cocaine trade itself gave rise to violence. Drug trafficking is a big business, but because it is illegal and unregulated it operates in Darwinian fashion. It is structured as a parasitic chain, with drugs coming down from the cartel bosses to kilo connections to street dealers to users, and cash moving back up the chain until it is collected, laundered, and deposited in offshore banks. Anything that interrupts the flow of drugs or cash—a rip-off, a customer who refuses to pay, too much cocaine or heroin into a dealer's own nose or arm—is apt to provoke an extremely violent response, no excuses accepted. "You know—fuck that—that's just yo' ass," shrugged a middlelevel distributor. One New York City dealer who "messed up the money" was beaten with iron pipes, then dragged to a curb and placed with his feet extending into the street. His connection then drove a car over his legs, crippling him for life. Another young dealer who ran afoul of his suppliers was stripped naked, had a tube inserted in his rectum, and was pumped full of raw alcohol. Knowing that the game is played in this fashion, and knowing that their profits make them inviting targets for theft, drug dealers take pains to arm themselves, thereby increasing the chance that their disputes will end lethally. Guns and ruthlessness are prerequisites for surviving in the world of drug dealing. The more ruthless a dealer is, the more apt he is to move up the chain.25
The drug trade is highly territorial. Dealers do not like competition. They have been known to "drop a dime" on their rivals, using the police to eliminate them, or to attack them directly. By 1986 and 1987 the big-city crack trade was beginning to attract heavily armed gangs like the Shower Posse, so named for showering automatic fire on their opponents. A 1990 study of drug dealing in the nation's capital concluded that, between turf disputes and robberies, a ten-year career selling drugs in the District entailed a one-in-seven chance of violent death and a seven-in-ten chance of serious injury.26
The time-honored solution to such bad odds was to get out of Dodge. As the bodies and drugs stacked up in the metropolises, driving profits down, enterprising gang members began taking their product elsewhere, branching out into second-tier cities like Seattle or Kansas City and even Mississippi Delta towns like Clarksdale. "Too many dope dealers in Los Angeles," explained one gang member. "So they take it out of town. The profits are better. Here you can sell an ounce for $600, over there you can sell it for $1,500."27
A fair share of the crack proceeds went for guns, especially for expensive automatic or semiautomatic weapons that had previously been out of most gang members' reach. In the old days, one veteran Blood explained, gangs got their guns by stealing whatever was lying around other people's houses. "But then, when the cocaine thing came around—shit, just go buy a gun. And then, as the cocaine came around more and more, most of those people whose houses you used to break into, they started in smokin', so they bringin' the guns to you now, to trade."28
Before the crack revolution a typical street gang had perhaps one good gun stashed away somewhere out of sight and not easily accessible. After crack more and more members, whether they were dealing or not, went about armed with their own high-powered, rapid-fire weapons. They were compact, easily concealed, affordable, available on the black market, status symbols within the group, and objects of juvenile fantasies. "To me a gun changes a person," observed a youthful Boston gang member. "It makes 'em brave. Sometimes, I would go on the roof and shoot in the air. I felt like, 'let 'em come up on me, I'd be like Hercules.'" Others believed that guns offered protection. "You get it because you fear what is happening out there," explained a New York City teenager. "Once you have it you feel like a god. You feel invincible."29
This is exactly wrong. No one is safe in the midst of a teenage arms race, which is bound to increase the frequency and lethality of hot-headed, spur-of-the-moment shootings. In 1984 only 5 percent of the shooting victims treated at Chicago's Cook County Hospital trauma unit had been hit by more than one bullet. In 1994 it was 30 percent. The effect of the automatic barrage was to offset the advances in emergency medical care that had kept the homicide rate down in the early 1980s. The best emergency room in the world could not do much for someone with three rounds in the torso.30
Automatic weapons greatly increased bystanders' deaths and injuries. Gang members, who lack the discipline and opportunity to practice regularly, are notoriously bad shots. But when they are armed with assault weapons that spray a dozen bullets with one squeeze of the trigger, marksmanship becomes secondary: someone is going to get hit. Insofar as these casualties required payback from rival gangs, the shootings fed on themselves. Feuding is bad enough. Incompetent feuding with automatic weapons firing high-velocity, wall-penetrating rounds in neighborhoods fought over by revenge- and turf-conscious teenage gangs has proved to be a complete disaster."
The cocaine epidemic and the related spread of automatic weapons help to explain the big increase in the number of teen homicide offenders and victims in the late 1980s and 1990s. Historically the twenties have been the prime age for male homicide, but this has changed as more teenagers have become involved in selling drugs. They work more cheaply than adults, do less time if caught, and will take chances that adults would shun. They have also been emboldened by powerful, rapid-firing guns. When killing was close-in work done with knife or bludgeon or cheap, small-caliber handgun, someone who was, say, twenty-five had a physical advantage over someone who was fifteen, so the latter was less inclined to take on the big boys or for that matter his own peers. But automatic weapons certainly lessen, possibly eliminate, and may even reverse the teenage disadvantage, given the immaturity and fearlessness of the very young. "Guns and kids are probably the most dangerous combination there is," comments Peter Reinharz, a New York City prosecutor. "A 13- or 14-year-old holding an Uzi submachine gun has no understanding of his own mortality, let alone your mortality."32
One index of just how bad shootouts with cocaine-financed weaponry had become by the early 1990s was the nostalgia people expressed for the "good old days" of heroin trafficking. Claude Brown, a writer and former narcotics user, pointed out that at the height of the heroin epidemic only one four-block area in New York City (114th Street to 118th Street on Eighth Avenue, the "DMZ") was controlled by armed dealers. "But with the advent of the crack epidemic, people came out of nowhere and took over entire communities, and people were afraid to come out of their houses." Crack dealers even came into buildings, ordering tenants not to come and go during certain hours when their presence would interfere with business. "And, of course, you didn't want to give them an argument because they had some pretty heavy firepower to persuade you.""
A few people, mostly working-class men, fought back. "They were laughing at the whole neighborhood," said Perry Kent, a twenty-nine-year-old Detroit man who got fed up and helped burn down the local crack house. "The kids couldn't play outside. The police said to wait till something bad happened. Well, we couldn't do that." Indicted and tried for arson, Kent was promptly acquitted by a sympathetic jury. "I would have been more violent," one juror explained. In Philadelphia a group called Mantua Against Drugs attempted to close crack houses by harassing their patrons. "We're not Gandhi and King here," explained Herman Wrice, the group's six-foot, four-inch leader. "Cops need hard evidence to fuck with you. Neighbors don't." Nor do voters. Elected judges who dared to set dealers' bail too low were stared down in their own courtrooms and their names circulated in a newsletter.34
The emergence of urban vigilantism, though it has been criticized in some quarters, is hardly surprising. It is a time-honored response to the absence or breakdown of regular law enforcement. What is surprising is how anemic and uncoordinated contemporary vigilantism is compared to that of the frontier. One reason is undoubtedly fear. Inner-city residents understand only too well the dangers they face. Teenage gangsters and crack dealers will shoot if crossed, keep on shooting, and if they should miss or run out of ammunition their running partners will not. "Kids with automatic weapons and no sense," was how one man described the situation. "These young boys were like crazed animals," said another, referring to a local gang. "The boy that was the leader, he wasn't really 15, he wasn't like no teenager, he was a cold-blooded man, a ruthless killer . . . Old people, young people, everybody is scared of these gang boys."35
The crack trade made for addiction as well as terror, and addiction also contributed to a rise in neighborhood crime. Much of it was petty and nonviolent: drug-hungry addicts shoplifting, stripping metal from buildings, selling food stamps at a discount. But it could also be predatory, as the eighty-one-yearold Civil Rights heroine Rosa Parks found out the night of August 30, 1994. Joseph Skipper, a young black crack user, entered her Detroit home, beat her, and robbed her of $53. After she identified him in a police line-up she moved into an apartment building protected by white security guards, an act that said as much about the strange career of race relations in late twentieth-century America as any that might be imagined.36
By the late 1980s it was clear that many inner-city crack smokers, in some places a slight majority, were women. This was highly unusual in that nonmedical drug addiction had previously been concentrated among lower-class men. (The change was partly due to the fact that crack was cheap and did not have to be administered with a needle, the usual, unappealing way of administering adulterated street heroin.) Many of the newly addicted female crack smokers resorted to free-lance prostitution or its equivalent, trading sex for drugs. The exchange often took place in "freak houses," a freak being a woman who would perform any type of intercourse, oral, anal, and unprotected vaginal. "It was an aphrodisiac nightmare," wrote a Dallas observer, who witnessed acts of public sexual degradation. "I do things for crack that I would never do for heroin," one woman admitted. Thus crack contributed to the other great epidemic of American life in the 1980s and 1990s, the spread of HIV infection."
It also gave rise to a new pathology, crack babies. In utero cocaine exposure increased sharply after 1985. In that year 5.3 of every 1,000 New York City birth certificates reported exposure to cocaine or crack; in 1990 the rate was 17.6. About 66 percent of the cocaine-exposed babies born in New York City in 1990 were black, 20 percent Puerto Rican. Similar statistics from other cities emphasized that the problem of crack babies, like crack smoking itself, was concentrated among the nonwhite and the poor.38
Researchers have disputed the magnitude and source of crack babies' medical problems, but it is a safe assumption that cocaine dependency is not the most propitious way to begin life. If there is anything to the theory that the underclass is composed of people of low intelligence, this may be it. Children who are exposed to cocaine—or alcohol, or tobacco, or any other toxic drug that is more common in the ghetto than in the general population—and who consequently suffer low birth weight and neurological problems are in jeopardy. They are likely to do less well in school than peers who are not exposed to drugs, be less employable in the information economy, and hence have diminished prospects of saving money, forming stable families, and escaping the ghetto, in which their own, often illegitimate and drug-exposed, children will be born.
Children also suffer if their biological fathers are mixed up with drugs. "Stepping off," refusing to acknowledge and support offspring, is more common among young men who become involved with drugs and related street crime. This holds for all urban ethnic groups, white and Latino as well as black. Conversely, acquiring a spouse and children can lead young men previously involved with drug use or trafficking to reassess their situation and quit for the sake of their families, another instance of the protective effect of marriage."
Children without parents are themselves more likely to get into trouble with drugs or to have more trouble getting off of them. "The family is there," recalled one young man who kicked after being addicted for two years:
No matter how bad it is or how shameful, you can always go back to them. And that's what I did ... I knew I could always go back. I knew a lot of my friends that wanted to kick didn't have no place to go but jail. I remember cats, man, that would be glad to go to jail because at least they are eating a square meal and they could de-tox. So, "Hey, take me, man." That was their family—jail, man. I discovered a lot of people didn't have no place to go. Nowhere. They didn't want to go to jail so they stayed out there in the street life. They stayed out there. But I had a family to go back to, which probably saved my ass.40
This young man happened to be a heroin abuser, but the same principle applies to those dependent on cocaine, alcohol, and other drugs. Recovery is more likely with strong family support. And recovery is personally and socially imperative, for without it the compulsive user's trajectory is toward degradation, crime, illness, and early death.
The drug trade ruined neighborhoods as surely as it ruined individuals. Armed crack dealers and larcenous addicts made normal life impossible. Mothers who would otherwise have sought employment were unwilling to risk traveling to and from work or leaving their children alone. In a survey of Atlanta residents published in 1989, 74.7 percent listed drugs as the most serious local problem, followed by crime and violence. Only 2.3 percent cited housing conditions as their top concern and a bare 0.4 percent a lack of jobs. More than four-fifths of the sample said they stayed indoors at night as a matter of course. In Chicago several public housing residents who were, by court order, relocated to the suburbs reported taking jobs for the first time: "They previously had seen no point in working because it only made them more conspicuous targets for robbery or theft."41
From a purely economic point of view the crack trade and its attendant crime and prostitution would not have been so devastating if the proceeds had stayed in the neighborhood. They did not. The money ultimately ended up in Colombian or Mexican traffickers' counting rooms, Bahamian banks, or the tills of mall jewelry stores, boutiques, and gun dealers. The ethnographer Ansley Hamid has likened crack to a giant vacuum cleaner sucking money from the inner-city economy, with teenage dealers merely the free-spending labor force through which it passes on its way out of the neighborhood.42 Like alcohol in the main stems or opium in the Chinatowns, crack cocaine is a leech drug.
Crack, in brief, made life increasingly dangerous and miserable for the black urban poor and accelerated the rate at which their neighborhoods tipped into hyperghettos. Once tipped they stayed that way, assuring that the young grew up in an atmosphere of fear and violence with street-culture role models and fewer and fewer decent educational or employment opportunities. The usual cliche about America in the 1980s, that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, is correct but incomplete. What happened, at least in the big cities, was that the rich got richer and the poorer got crack cocaine.
The Drug War and Its Aftermath
The disturbing consequences of crack smoking and dealing became known to the American public in 1986 when the media seized upon the story and gave full play to its most sordid elements. Although mass-circulation newspapers and articles had not been alarmist about cocaine in the 1970s or early 1980s, crack was portrayed as extremely addictive and a prolific source of urban crime. Similar fears were voiced in congressional hearings where crack was compared to the Black Death. Crack catalyzed what came to be known as the drug war, formally declared by President Ronald Reagan in August 1986. By 1993 the drug war had produced three nationally televised presidential addresses, two omnibus federal antidrug laws, a national "drug czar," and a fivefold increase in the federal drug control budget. It was the most dramatic, sustained, and controversial governmental response to drug abuse in American history, and a marked contrast to the nineteenth-century tactic of simply fining or ostracizing vice purveyors. Under the new laws drug dealers were risking their assets, their freedom, and even their lives.
The drug war succeeded in making a dent in casual cocaine use. By 1988 cocaine was declining in popularity among more affluent users made wary by the negative publicity and new emphasis on its addictive potential. Crack was also becoming less popular among potential initiates. The drug war had less impact on those who were already regular consumers, however. An aging cohort of heavy users who had begun their careers in the 1970s or 1980s persisted in abusing cocaine and began developing serious health problems as a consequence. The number of such users has been disputed, but it is widely agreed that during the late 1980s cocaine abuse became increasingly confined to a residual group of hard-core users who were concentrated in urban minority groups.43
The transformation of cocaine from golden drug to ghetto drug was reinforced by the way the drug war was conducted. Nationally blacks were four times as likely—in some cities more than twenty times as likely—as whites to be arrested on drug charges. The high rate for blacks has been variously attributed to racism, search tactics based on minority profiles, and the fact that minority drug dealers and couriers are highly visible, easy targets for police. Whatever the motivation for the large number of black arrests, their ritualized presentation in newspapers and television news programs intensified the impression that cocaine use and dealing were the near-monopoly of the poor black community, reinforcing the determination of the middle class, white and nonwhite, to stay as far away as possible.44
Another consequence of the drug war was to further overburden the nation's courts and prisons. In 1986, year one of the Reagan drug war, the number of days of imprisonment a felon could expect per serious crime was already only about a fifth of what it had been in 1959. The stepped-up campaign against crack and other drugs jammed court dockets and made prison crowding worse, particularly in the federal system. By 1992 six in ten federal inmates had been convicted of drug charges, compared to fewer than three in ten in 1980.45
States with widespread illicit drug use and trafficking also experienced serious prison crowding. "Earlier in [1993], almost all our early releases were violent offenders, and a lot of those taking up their bed space were just first-time drug offenders or couriers," complained Kevin Roberts, a controlled-release officer of the Florida State Parole Commission. The drug war, agreed the law professor William Stuntz, was one of the main reasons for the paradoxical state of the American criminal justice system: shockingly low levels of expected punishment for offenses like robbery or assault combined with a shockingly high prison population.46
All of this was made worse by mass-arrest tactics like street sweeps of lower-level dealers, which compounded the overload and increased the number of cheap plea bargains. Short sentences and prison overcrowding in turn fed public skepticism about whether criminals would be punished for any length of time. The skepticism contributed to a national decline in the willingness to report offenses. By 1990 only an estimated 38 percent of all crimes and 48 percent of violent crimes were being reported to police.47
Daniel Patrick Moynihan has called this trend "defining deviancy down." Because the amount of deviant behavior in American society has expanded much faster than the institutional capacity to deal with it, deviancy has been redefined to exempt conduct that previously was stigmatized. We have, Moynihan believes, quietly raised the normal level in categories where the behavior is in fact abnormal by any previous standard. Ignoring incivility, dumbing down schools, and failing to investigate (or simply not reporting) crimes are all symptoms of a social malaise rooted in the growing inability of families and other institutions to shape and restrain behavior. With so many holes suddenly appearing in the dike of social control, authorities have been reduced to plugging the most serious leaks.
The historian Roger McGrath has explored the defining-down phenomenon in his own city. "I grew up in a Los Angeles that had very little crime," he writes. "We locked the door to our house with a skeleton key, when we remembered." The plots of the Dragnet radio series that first aired in the early 1950s accurately reflected what the police did: Sergeant Joe Friday might occasionally collar a robber or killer, but he spent much of his time doggedly pursuing shoplifters, hot rodders, and bicycle thieves.
Try calling the LAPD today, McGrath sardonically suggests, to report that your bicycle has been stolen. Though the city's population has risen about 75 percent from the Dragnet days, rape has gone up 350 percent, auto theft 1,100 percent, murder 1,350 percent, and robbery 1,540 percent. The norm was seventy murders a year in the early 1950s compared to ninety or more a month by the early 1990s. In these circumstances offenses like petty or auto theft were either ignored or processed in a routine, statistics-gathering fashion. Korean merchants complained that thieves were brazenly pocketing merchandise and walking out of their stores, confident in the knowledge that the police were too busy to respond to such crimes.48
The drug war itself has been affected by the defining-down phenomenon. A good way to convict traffickers is to make cases for tax evasion or money laundering rather than drug smuggling per se. Big-time dealers seldom handle drugs themselves, though they do take in large amounts of money. Attempts to conceal or launder the profits can leave a trail. But money-laundering investigations, which are complicated and time-consuming, are hampered by a shortage of personnel and prosecutorial resources. In Los Angeles, a major money-laundering center, by 1991 the U.S. Attorney's office had simply given up prosecuting drug money cases involving less than a certain amount, reportedly $500,000. Mere "smurfs," professional criminals who specialized in laundering drug money by making multiple deposits in amounts less than $10,000, had little to fear in L.A.49
The criminal justice systems in Los Angeles and other big cities are like huge and not very efficient engines that have begun to break down under an ever-growing load. The national murder clearance rate (the proportion of cases resulting in arrest) fell from 91 percent in 1965 to about 65 percent in 1995, largely because drug- and robbery-related slayings had become so numerous and so difficult to solve. Homicide detectives are not pleased when strangers kill strangers. There are no obvious suspects of the jealous-spouse variety and witnesses, if any, are reluctant to talk. Or, if they do, they are not always believed by a jury. One Kansas City murder case featured a ten-year-old girl who had the side of her head blown off by a drive-by bullet. The jurors decided not to accept the plea-bargained testimony of one of the assailants. The other three defendants were acquitted. "I don't believe in justice anymore," said the girl's embittered father.50
In New York City murder victims' families sometimes avoid the police altogether, preferring to take care of the matter themselves. "They don't have any faith in the criminal justice system and I can't really blame them," said Lieutenant Mike Sneed of New York's Ninth Precinct. "If a loved one of yours gets killed and we catch the guy that did it and we manage to convict him, what's he going to get? Three or four years max. Most of the homicides don't even make the newspapers."51
The journalist David Simon made a careful study of the disposition of 200 murder arrests in Baltimore for 1988. Ninety percent of these involved blacks accused of killing other blacks, and only 60 percent resulted in convictions. Factoring in unsolved homicides, the chance of being caught and convicted after killing someone was only a little more than 40 percent despite the fact that most of the murderers were sloppy, leaving behind material evidence of their crimes. Half of the killings, Simon estimated, were tied to drugs.52
The problem of drug-related violence and the overcrowding of the courts and prisons with drug offenders has contributed to a growing movement for the controlled legalization of substances like cocaine. Legalization is an old idea, but by 1990 it had a cast of new and reputable supporters, ranging from the Nobel Prizewinning economist Milton Friedman to Baltimore's mayor Kurt Schmoke. If the spirit of their argument was libertarian, the logic was utilitarian. Drug prohibition was simply causing more trouble than it was worth. While drug abuse was admittedly a bad thing, abuse in a milieu of armed suppliers selling adulterated drugs at black-market prices was a fiasco—the same argument that had been advanced against prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and 1930s.
The catch was that no one knew what would happen under legalization. There might be millions more addicts, each perhaps a little less harmful than the illegal users but in the aggregate imposing a much heavier burden on society. Whatever one thinks of the merits and risks of drug legalization it is a revealing bit of policy history, a perfect example of Moynihan's point that a society swamped by rising disorder will find reasons to define deviancy down.
When Moynihan addressed himself to ghetto disarray in 1965 he attributed the problem to instability of the black family. The matriarchal arrangement, as he called it, was a legacy of slavery, the chronic lack of good employment opportunities, and the emergence of a self-sustaining culture of poverty. Though historians subsequently cast doubt on the slavery thesis, socialscientific and ethnographic inquiry has sustained Moynihan's claims about the importance of intact families, the destructiveness of long-term unemployment, and the reality of a ghetto street culture in which generations of young men have made virtues of unpleasant necessities.
What Moynihan could not have realized in 1965 was how seriously the structural and subcultural problems of the black ghetto would be worsened by outside forces. Among these were the sexual revolution and heavy consumption of television shows, movies, videos, and music that depicted or celebrated acts of violence; a Vietnam-era epidemic of heroin addiction followed by an even more widespread and destructive wave of cocaine abuse; and the concurrent decline in the effectiveness and credibility of the criminal justice system. By the time of the crack wars the justice system had taken on the aspect of a nuisance or rite of passage for many ghetto youth or even, perversely, a refuge from their gun-toting enemies." Any sane ghetto youth contemplating shooting someone is far more worried that a payback bullet worth thirty cents will dispatch him than that the man downtown will catch him and spend several million dollars of taxpayers' money over the course of fifteen years to strap him into an electric chair or tie him to a gurney and infuse poison into his veins.
Not that the man downtown is inclined to do any such thing. The chances are he will settle for a plea bargain, content to send another black man to prison, call it a day, get in his car, and drive home to his family in the suburbs.