www.justiceblind.com

The Failure of War
*Matthew Robinson, PhD

War, aside from declared armed hostile conflict between nations, generally refers to some form of hostility, antagonism, or struggle between opposing forces.

In the United States, we love war. We love military war, like the war in Afghanistan after the attacks of 9/11. Americans even originally loved the idea of invading Iraq, a nation that had literally nothing to do with 9/11.

As noted by author Chris Hedges, war is a force that gives us meaning. But, aside from military wars, Americans gleefully embrace other wars in their names. Wars like the war on crime. The war on drugs. The war on terror. In spite of the suffering created in our names, we accept war and even cheer on the troops who fight them.

We once even fought a war on poverty, and yet in 2005, 37 million Americans lived below the federal poverty level (a measure which vastly underestimates true poverty).

Were we ever forced to examine the outcomes of our wars, we’d see clearly that none of them is going very well. Yet, each continues on, largely unchallenged, in spite of their failures.

Victimization from violent street crime fell precipitously in the 1990s. Writers noted that “the bottom fell out of crime.” People were less likely to be assaulted, robbed, and even murdered.

Yet, the declines in violent crime had little to do with crime fighting. Sure, some things helped, like a mass imprisonment binge unprecedented in world history. But imprisonment only explained about one-quarter of the declines in violent crime while imposing enormous costs on society. Further, in the long term mass imprisonment exacerbates conditions that produce crime – things like poverty, economic inequality, family disruption, and stress.

More important to understanding crime declines were factors like economic improvement, an aging population, legalized abortion, and the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic. While the latter had something to do with criminal justice, crack markets became less violent mostly because of simple evolution – eventually less violent dealers emerged to sell crack to anyone who wanted to use it.

The fact that crack use is as nearly as high today as during the crack epidemic of the late 1980s is proof of this. Crack did not go away, just the violence associated with the crack market.

Research clearly shows that the war on crime and the war on drugs are failing.

In the war on crime, the most severe punishment available is capital punishment. The number of executions in the United States increased from 14 in 1991 to 98 in 1999, yet this had nothing to do with declining violent crime. My research on the administration of capital punishment in the United States shows that executions fail to achieve the goals of retribution, deterrence and incapacitation.

Because killings so rarely lead to an execution in the United States, capital punishment does not achieve justice for society or for relatives of murder victims, does not scare would-be murderers, and does not kill enough murderers to have any impact on the murder rate.

For example, in the United States between 1977 and 2006, there were more than 575,000 killings on the streets of America. These led to 7,072 death sentences and only 1,063 executions. Thus, roughly 1.2 percent of killings from 1977 to 2006 led to death sentences, and only 0.18 percent of killings have led to an execution so far. The rarity of the death penalty is precisely why it is so ineffective.

Further, the death penalty is plagued by significant biases based on race, social class and gender.  Killers of whites are far more likely to be executed than killers of blacks – regardless of the race of the killer – but especially when the killer is black and the victim is white.  In the United States since 1977, 213 blacks who killed whites have been executed, versus only 15 whites who killed blacks.

Additionally, virtually every person on death row is poor, consistent with the evidence that what determines who gets executed is not the heinousness of the crime but the quality of the defense.  And citizens in every state with capital punishment are remarkably squeamish about executing women.

As if this were not bad enough, there is still a serious risk that capital punishment will be used against the factually innocent.  Not only do we know that 113 people in twenty-five states have been released from death row since 1977, there is also no doubt that states have recently executed innocent people.  Clear cases of innocence have emerged in Texas, Missouri and Florida.

On top of all this, executions generally cost at least twice as much as alternative and more effective punishments such as life imprisonment without parole.  This is an enormous waste of resources that could be invested in crime prevention strategies that would save lives.

Judged by any standard, the death penalty is a failed policy.  It fails to meet its goals, and its costs clearly outweigh the modest benefits.

The picture is much the same for the war on drugs. The federal agency in charge of the nation’s drug war – the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) – has been unable to meet any of its stated goals since it was created in November 1988.

Its goals, though fluctuating over the years, are to reduce illicit drug use, availability of illegal drugs, and drug-related health consequences.

Each year, ONDCP produces its National Drug Control Strategy to report to citizens and members of Congress how the drug war is going. ONDCP’s own empirical evidence shows clearly that, since ONDCP was created, most forms of drug use have not been reduced and drugs are still widely available.

For example, after decades of the drug war, data from 2006 show that more than 48% of high school seniors admit to having tried an illicit drug at least once in their lives. And 85% and 47% still report that it is “fairly easy” or “very easy” to get marijuana and cocaine, respectively.

Further, efforts to disrupt drug markets have not achieved ONDCP’s goals of increasing drug prices or reducing purity. ONDCP has also been unable to meet its recently stated goal of “healing drug users” – the vast majority of people who need drug treatment do not get it.

The drug war also fails in a costs-benefits analysis because the drug war imposes enormous costs above and beyond its modest benefits. For example, the budget directed by ONDCP exceeded $19 billion in 2002 and has grown every year since (in 2003, ONDCP changed its budgeting format to produce the appearance of drastic spending reductions in the war on drugs, even though the money is still being spent).

The drug war also leads to corruption in law enforcement, increased violent crime, erosions of civil liberties, and actually increases the risk that recreational users will get sick and die. In fact, drug users in the year 2000 were four times more likely to die than users in 1979.

And this says nothing about what the war on drugs does to people in other countries – like those killed and sickened by our aerial fumigation and crop eradication programs.

So, how goes America’s war on terror? We obviously have not been significantly attacked again at home since 2001. But then, less than six years have passed. We went eight years between al-Qaeda’s first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 9/11. Further, al-Qaeda has always claimed that each subsequent attack must be larger and more spectacular than the last. Stated simply, it takes time for al-Qaeda to do what they do so well.

This is not to say that everything implemented since 9/11 has had nothing to do with the lack of terrorism in our borders. But, who has even asked the costs associated with laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, the Military Tribunals Act, as well as President Bush’s domestic spying program, his promotion of torture, extraordinary-rendition, and declaration of enemy combatants. The president has destroyed or weakened much of what we stand for in his effort to prevent terrorism.

And terrorist groups have killed Americans and citizens from other countries on numerous occasions since 2001. In Iraq alone, we’ve lost more than 3,000 additional Americans in a war that we now know was initiated for the ideology of the so-called “neo-conservatives” rather than for the safety of the American people.

Research shows that recruitment is up for al-Qaeda, that the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan, and that worldwide terrorist attacks have increased since 2001. Further, the US military is stuck in the middle of a civil war in Iraq with more Americans dying every day for a war that US intelligence shows is already lost.

Perhaps the problem is our approach. To those killed by it, there is no difference between war and terrorism. Both can be understood as using violence against civilians to achieve a political purpose.

War, like terrorism, creates enemies and problems rather than destroying and solving them.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are putting our country at greater risk for future terrorist attacks. The sons and daughters of those we kill will seek revenge, as will their children. Further, people from Arab and Muslim countries across the world already hate us more than ever.

And of course, when it comes to the war on crime and drugs, the enemy is literally us. Wars on crime and drugs are wars on American citizens.

It’s time to try an approach other than war. It’s time to invest in prevention and treatment, each of which is more efficacious and cost-effective than our current war approach.

It’s time to address the root causes of crime and drug use. And it’s time to treat those who fall into drug abuse.

Finally, it’s time to stop creating terrorism through US foreign policy. Let’s use our money and our might to stop terrorists before they become terrorists by creating a better world for all the people in it.

There’s a better way than war.

*Matthew Robinson is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He is author of Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics (State University of New York Press, 2007) and Death Nation: The Experts Explain American Capital Punishment (Prentice Hall, 2007).