Because our words influence how we think, we do well to choose our words carefully. Our labels for things affect our thoughts about them. Whether a space weapons program is termed “Star Wars” or “The Peace Shield” can subtly affect people’s thoughts and feelings about it. Liberation movements recognize this power of words to shape thought. Public order crime shares a nearly inextricable bond with what we know as the criminal subculture. Sex and drug violations are illicit pleasure pursuits that take place on the proverbial underbelly of society. Given their sensual attractions and victimless qualities, these crimes draw a healthy cadre of repeat customers. Over time, these widespread and routinized transactions become intertwined in the underground economy and criminal subculture. Our research on street prostitutes, bar prostitutes, and study of upper-level drug smugglers reveal how isolated forms of public order crime (and their repeat offenders) are readily folded into the criminal subculture. These people share the same social space and go about their business with little concern for those around them. Most of all public order offending takes shape as what is called deviant exchanges. This entails two or more persons (usually a distributor and a client) engaging in illicit trades or sales as a means of exchanging good and services. Often times, these exchanges become routinized to the point that we think of them as deviant markets. The collective nature of this offending means that most offenders orient to one another as either peers, colleagues, or team members. An example of a peer arrangement would be two drug users who share needles, dope, or a common “shooting gallery.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Still other public order offending gets organized along what is called a teamlike alignment. Routinized offending and a division of labor leads to set roles and cooperation among the offenders. Take, for example, drug dealers, pimps, or drug smugglers. These individuals will often work in concert with one another to maximize their profits and minimize risk of outside interference. Small-time cocaine dealers prefer to operate in small collectives. One person might hold small, prepackaged units of the drugs on a street corner to perform the actual exchanges with drug users. Another serves as a street-level lookout who also holds the larger sums of money. A third person is located in a nearby apartment where one cuts and packages more drugs for sale. A fourth person serves as the runner who keeps a fresh supply of drugs moving from the apartment to the street corner. There is a great deal of scripted interaction and socialization that takes place between the participants of public order crime. For example, prostitutes and their clients must develop and follow a scripted set of interactions that allow the participants to identify one another and negotiate the terms of a transaction while somehow not arousing the suspicions of those around them. Male street prostitutes and their clients enact a series of verbal and nonverbal exchanges en route to agreeing on the terms of a sexual transaction. In fact, numerous scholars have documented rudimentary forms of socialization or tutelage occurring among parties to the public order crime transaction. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
To further highlight this illustration, consider how we have documented how pimps and madams recruit and even train prostitutes. Some prostitutes even develop agreed-upon rules that dictate where and when to do business and often shepherd one another into drug use. Public order crimes receive a mixed statutory response from the criminal justice system. Our nation’s “war on drugs” has led criminal justice officials to reconsider their formal response to drug crimes. Crimes such as the possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia, possession with intent to distribute, and the manufacture or trafficking of illegal drugs were once afforded serious misdemeanor or minor felony distinctions under the law. Prior to the early 1980, the vast majority of these offenses were dealt with by state or local authorities. This all changed under the Reagan administration, when the federal criminal code was revised. More severe, prescribed charges; and sentencing guidelines were enacted to allow for federal authorities to rigorously pursue and punish drug offenders. Crimes that used to be classified as state misdemeanors suddenly became class 1 felonies, subject to 20 years in federal prison. Moreover, broad, never criminal offense such as “continuing criminal enterprise” and conspiracy offenses were added to the criminal code affording federal law enforcement officers and prosecutors a broader array of offense designations to direct toward drug offenders. Prosecutors began applying mandatory minimum sentencing and the principles of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) to drug offenders, further upping the statutory ante by treating drug dealers and smugglers as members of criminal syndicates. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
At present, drug dealers, as well as those who manufacture and smuggle the illicit drugs into and through the United States of America, face some of the most severe and vigilant criminal justice responses of modern times. For example, in 2023, the Federal Drug Control Budget was listed at $42.5 billion, there will be approximately 1.5 million drug arrests by December 31, 2023, and 3 million pounds of drugs (marijuana, hashish, cocaine, fentanyl) will be seized by the end of the year. Drug cases make up one-third of our nation’s total prison population. At the same time, other broad forms of vice such as gambling and prostitution are afforded petty misdemeanor status and draw little or no formal enforcement response from criminal justice officials at any jurisdictional level. For the most part, federal law enforcement and prosecutors refuse to be bothered by these “nuisance” offenses and direct the vast majority of their vice-related interdiction toward drug crime. In many cases, state and even local authorities adopt a similarly lukewarm response to these crimes. According to the Compendium of Federal Criminal Justice Statistics, there were a paltry 491 nonviolent sex offenses recorded by federal law enforcement authorities in 2000. While exact figures are not available, scholars agree that the clearance rates for public order crimes are woefully low. We have identified several factors that contribute to low arrest numbers and clearance rates for prostitution and drug offenses. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
First, most of these crimes occur in private settings, outside of police and public view. Second, police must conduct clandestine investigations without the benefit of complaining witnesses due to the victimless nature of the offense. Third, these crimes are viewed as minor offense, meaning the beat police officers are not pressure internally by their superiors or externally by the public to crack down on their occurrence in the same way that they are with more heinous offenses. Fourth, public opinion tends to be supportive or neutral toward these crimes, thus undermining potential deterrent effects. Court officials clearly take drug offenses seriously. An analysis of federal justice statistics reveals that approximately 35 percent of all U.S.A. attorney investigations were directed toward drug offenses. In addition, these federal prosecutors declined prosecution for only 20 percent of these cases—no other form of offense was pursued with this level of tenacity. Drug cases thus comprise nearly 40 percent of prosecutorial caseload. We also found that nearly 40 percent of the felony cases that were processed in state courts were drug cases. Researchers also found that nearly three in four state-level drug cases yielded a conviction of some sort, more often than not it was a felony conviction obtained through a plea arrangement. A similar trend is observed among deferral drug defendants—90 percent of these cases produce convictions with 85 percent coming as the result of a plea bargain. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
The available data suggest that sentencing hearings provide more bad news for convicted drug offenders. A full 72 percent of state-level convictions and 89 percent of federal convictions led to a term of incarceration for the guilty party. State-level convictions yielded an average prisons sentence of 47 months while persons convicted in the federal system faced an average prisons term of 74 months, and the type and quantity of drug involved, the presence of an injured party, the use of a weapon, and the defendant’s criminal history were all factors that contributed to longer federal prison sentences. Strict sentencing guidelines at the federal level means that offenders will end up serving better than 90 percent of these prescribed prison terms. Things are a bit more relaxed at the state level, where on average, drug offenders serve 49 percent of their original sentences behind bars. As of March 14, 2023, it was documented that there are over 350,000 people serving time in state prisons for drug convictions, and 94,678 in federal prisons on drug charges. These figures represent 20 percent of the state inmate population and 55 percent of the federal inmate population and do not include the nearly 514,000 individuals housed in U.S.A. jails. There are currently 1,047,000 people in state prison, and 209,000 in federal prisons and jails. In the juvenile system, there are 36,000 youths, 8,000 people in territorial prisons, 34,000 people in immigration detention, 22,000 in involuntary commitment, 2,000 in Indian country jails, and 1,000 in military jails. Drug offenders account for 17 percent of the growth in state inmate populations and 65 percent of the federal inmate population growth in 2022. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
Society adopts a mixed message when it comes to the informal social control of public order crime. In the case of drug crime, it appears that we are mobilized in a broad antidrug initiative that approaches drug use and its accompanying criminal activities as a public health concern. Such an approach emphasizes the addiction issues and orients to the behaviors from an informal treatment and education perspective as opposed to a punishment one. For example, drug, alcohol and other addiction rehab in the United States of America is big business–$42 billion this year. There are now over 14,000 treatment facilities and growing. A total of 4 million persons received treatment, but many more need it and facilities are filled to capacity. It has become increasingly popular to discuss the possibility of legalizing public order crimes such as prostitution and drug use. Assume that any one of these crimes were to be legalized and subject to some form of governmental regulation. What impact would this likely have on the behavioral, cognitive, cultural, and societal reactions to what was once a form of criminal behavior? The United States of America spends billions of dollars each year trying to stop the flow of illegal drugs into this country. Still, no other country sees more drugs being used and sold on its streets. What is it about the American way of life that makes drug use so appealing, and hence, makes demand side programs so hard to effectively implement? #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Prostitution is a crime that goes largely unsanctioned by the police and prosecutors. When enforcement does occur, these efforts tend to focus much more energy on the female prostitutes than on the male clients. Feminists argue that this constitutes sex discrimination while others content that it constitutes efficient supply reduction. Formulate several policy initiatives that might effectively and efficiently target male clients for demand reduction without seriously infringing upon citizen’s civil rights. Human intelligence, mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment. These are some conditions of intelligence: Biological conditions during: Infancy: Physical stimulation through handling and caressing stimulates perceptive responsiveness to the environment. Childhood: Having other children to play with fosters intelligence; having none retards it. Preadolescence: Regular and thorough examination and correction of deficiencies in hearing and seeing improve intelligence in children; hearing difficulties particularly lead to attributions of lack of intelligence, and to self-conceptions and unintelligent. Adolescence: The span of involvement in episodes of learning behavior can be steadily lengthened by progressively adjusting new tasks to the margin of ability. Adulthood: The event of parenthood clarifies adult identity, thus remental resources for chosen tasks. Later maturity: Energy reluctantly expended in pathogenic, but energy expended willingly in response to stimulation, even in large amounts, is generally hygienic. Not quality but quality of work is the gauge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Economic conditions during: Infancy: Objects that can be manipulated, and which disclose their principles by being disassembled and assembled, foster intelligence. Childhood: Use of adult objects—despite cost and waste—improve the child’s comprehension of its environment. Preadolescence: If both father and mother can send much time with their children, being responsive to their initiative, rather than doing thing for them, the children’s intelligence improves. Adolescence: The opportunity to explore and experiment before being committed to a vocation makes more probable a choice which will utilize potentialities fully, thus fostering their growth. Adulthood: Opportunity for success-experiences and for their recognition by self and others through reference to a visible product encourages intelligence. Later maturity: To continue to have people and projects dependent upon one for support preserves motivation and faculties. Social-legal conditions during: Infancy: A general atmosphere of neighborhood interest in births and babies stimulates response and development. Childhood: Subcultural emphasis on the values of learning and professionalism encourages the development of intelligence; anti-intellectualism discourages it. Preadolescence: Cultural emphasis on the values of personal performance rather than on those of birth, race, and family connection, lifts the ceiling of motivation imposed by inherited status. Adolescence: The complementarity of receptive and assertive approached to knowledge and control of reality is best appreciated and employed in coeducational institutions. Thus all types of intelligence are cultivated best by coeduction. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Adulthood: As profound cultural stereotypes about the innate intellectual inferiority of particular minorities are demolished by criticism, the intelligence of these minorities rises. Later maturity: The making of social demands upon the aged to take responsibility for themselves as a group (when put with respect and not as punishment or rejection) evokes a flow of ingenuity not obtainable when responsibility is withdrawn. Interpersonal conditions during: Infancy: Maternal responsiveness fosters alertness to novel elements in experience; ger enjoyment in the child’s discoveries intensifies one’s own. Childhood: To involve the child in the pursuit of knowledge through discussion between parents, especially where there is a dialectic and reasonable resolution, cultivates one’s intelligence. Preadolescence: A chum with whom one can assimilate new intellectual challenges, by kindly mutual criticism and by confiding fears, is a great help in forming strategies for mastering fears. Adolescence: Reciprocal, frank discussion of the standards of adolescent peers versus the parent-teacher generation reduces ambiguity in the self-evaluation of progress, and makes criticism bear clearly on the sources of mistakes. Adulthood: Self-conscious recognition by a continuing critical, appreciative audience of significant others promotes disciplined attention to standards of performance. Later maturity: Foster-home placement of aged persons stimulates their faculties when it furnishes them identification with the purposes of a younger family, and a chance to contribute to those purposes. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Educational conditions during: Infancy: Abundant talking with the infant before one learns to talk stimulates the growth of intelligence. Childhood: When teachers proceed explicitly, not on the notion of an original self that has to be trained, curbed, expressed, or molded, but by construing education as a joint process of discovery and mastery, they reduce resistance to learning and encourage the appetite for it. Preadolescence: Practice in group methods of problem-solving, exempli gratia, through admission to family councils, furnished an overt, dramatic model of careful thinking, which can be assumed individually by identification. Adulthood: Children’s questions—if welcomes and used—provide the parent with a review of one’s own intellectual biography and stimulate self-analysis of one’s resistances to learning, and so many reduce them. Later maturity: Adult education, to evoke serious involvement when it is not to be put to vocational use, must foresee a significant audience for the products of the knowledge and skills acquired. Recreational conditions during: Infancy: Patient play by parents with a child as one struggles to master new phases of development creates confidence in approaching new experience. Childhood: Observation of play furnishes clues to problems perplexing the child; spontaneous response to these problems in a friendly, spontaneous way helps in their recognition, verbalization, and control by the child. Preadolescence: Play is both preparator and assimilational; adequate rehearsal before and after each new accession of understanding is a means of securing it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Adolescence: Adequate opportunity (space, time, respect for privacy) for reverie, whenever learning exceeds the rate of immediate assimilation, prevents the building-up of resistance and helps to build major themes of unified selection and composition of new experience. Adulthood: If they parent (or teacher) in play permits one’s likeness as an omniscient being to be laughed at, both one and the children gain in discriminating real from false intellectual control. Later maturity: Utopian speculation leads to discrimination of the novel and emergent, thence to fresh attacks on familiar problems. When passivity of body takes place it practically means a cessation of conscious action, because this passivity affects sight, hearing, smell, taste, feeling, et cetera. Any person in normal health should be able to focus one’s eyes on whatever object one chooses, randomly or by design, and should have similar control over all one’s other senses. They are avenues of information for one’s mind and spirit. However, when any of these senses are kept in a passive state, consciousness becomes dulled and deadened. Such a person, unaware of what one should be keenly alive to, becomes mechanical in one’s actions. Peculiar or even repulsive habits easily take hold. It is much simpler for persons in this condition to see these flaws in others than to recognize what is going on in themselves, even though they may be fully aware of external influences which affect them. When this passive condition brought about by evil spirits reaches its climax, passivity of other parts of the body may result, such as stiff fingers, lost elasticity of the frame in walking, lethargy, heaviness, stooping of the back and spine. The handshake is flabby and passive; the eyes will not look straight into the eyes of others, but move from side to side—all indicating passivity, brought about by deepening interference of the powers of darkness with the whole man, resulting from the initial passive condition of the will and mind, in which the man gave up his self-control, and use of his will. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Autonomy can also be considered as the result of an eviscerating process which is described a the profanization of religion by the secular. This process is called “profanization” rather than “secularization,” because the term “profane” in its genuine meaning expresses exactly what we call “resisting self-transcendence,” this is, remaining before the door of the temple, standing outside the holy.” Thus it is a more graphic expression, although equivalent to secularization. The profanization of religion reduces it to a finite thing among other finite things. However, religion should manifest the holy, should transcend itself, so that its elements—Holy Scripture, holy communities, acts, persons, and offices—should point beyond themselves, should be translucent to the holy. When this does not happen, the ambiguous character of religion asserts itself, and religion is profanized. Profanization occur in two ways: the institutional way and the reductive way. Religion is institutionalized when it becomes just another object—a set of prescribed activities to be performed, a set of stated doctrines to be accepted, a social pressure group along with other, a political power with all the implications of power politics. It can also be profanized by being reduced to culture and morality. This comes about when the veil of self-transcendence is taken away from religion, and one finds there cognitive insight and aesthetic expression, personality development, and principles of community. Culture and morality then have no need of religion, for it offers them nothing that they do not already possess. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
In both processes of profanization, by either the institutional or the reductive way, the nature of the secular appears as self-sufficiency which resists transcendence. The Catholic Church runs the perennial risk of profanization by superstitious devotions devoid of true religious content, while Protestaintism is always in danger of reductive secularization. The formulation of a new military strategy will also shape that other leg of the power triad, America’s economy Skinning the U.S.A. military down from a Second Wave force based on mass to a Third Wave force based on mobility, speed, and reach, the military equivalent of miniaturization, could pump new energy into the U.S.A. economy. Ad hoc defense cuts, made under pork-barrel pressures from Congress, could destroy key research and development projects and slow down technological advance in the American economy, which has, until now, benefited from Pentagon contracts. However, the same troop withdrawal that could double Europe’s military costs could, by the same token, help reduce the U.S.A. budget deficit, meaning less reliance on Japanese finance. It would create at least temporary unemployment. However, it would also tend to lower interest rates and increase investment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
There is no guarantee that freed-up federal funds would necessarily be channeled to overdue social renovation, but some at least would find their way into education, day care, job training, and other uses that, intelligently planned, could help spark next-generation economic gains. Much tooth-gnashing and wailing has taken place over America’s relative economic decline—actually a measure of the success of its post-World War II strategy for putting Japan and Europe back on their feet. The fact is that, despite misconceptions, the United States of America still represents about the same share of Gross World Production that it did 35 years ago. (The big decline in this indicator came just after the war, when the destroyed European and Japanese economies came back on stream. Since the mid-1970s, the United States of America has roughly held its own.) However, manufacturing is no longer the most important gage of an economy’s importance. In the services and information sectors, which represent the leading edge of the super-symbolic economy, the United States of America outpoint not only Europe but Japan. As a result, unemployment in the United States has proved a less persistent problem than in Europe. The trade imbalance, too, which for a time caused near panic in Washington, needs to be reconsidered in the light of the new economy. First, the widespread impression that U.S.A. exports have fallen is incorrect. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
During the 1980s, American exports to the World actually rose 61 percent. The problem was that imports rose one and a half times faster. Exports to Japan alone jumped 114 percent, but imports soared over 200 percent. That disparity is now narrowing. However, far more important, an economy shifting toward domestic services may be quite healthy, even though many of its new products are not exportable—medical care, for example, or education. More serious than America’s much-lamented “twin deficits,” both likely to decline, are the institutional obsolescence and social instability eroding American society and threatening to tear families, communities, and ethic groups apart, and the spread of drugs in society whose members are alienated from the state and from one another. It seems because crisis after crisis has happened since September 11, 2001, that the American government has never been able to fully recovery and the World is feeling the impact of this devastation. Public debt has soared in countries all around the World. For government to balance their budgets, spending has to be trimmed on overseas assistance, and other government projects. This will naturally lead to public sector jobs being cut. Government employees will retire without replacement. State spending will have to be frozen, tax loopholes will be closed. However, with another COVID crisis looming, health care spending is likely to increase. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Withdrawing U.S.A. troops from overseas conflicts is another way to reduce spending. Otherwise the economy will remain sick. The pills needed to cure those sick men are so strong that, while taking them, they will be able to move along at a slow pace, coughing and sniffing, if not bleeding. Large-scale issuance of government bonds may crowd out private investment. Raising interest rates, although inflation is on the raise, a mix of spending cuts and tax increase will negatively affect households’ discretionary income, curtail many economic activities, and cause social tensions if not unrest. Massive antigoverment demonstrations may breakout in various places around the World. This could lead to mass rioting and looting. It all will reflect despair and the wrath of the growing number of have-nots feeling betrayed by their governments. More and more, class warfare, in a Marxist sense will be visible. The West’s economic future will largely depend on its ability, even under tough financial constraints, to do much more to help domestic business enhance their global competitiveness and capture markets in the developing World, especially China. America, Europe, and Japan need strong government policies supporting industrial upgrading and exports. If, amid a neoconservative drive, this dimension is forgotten, the global economic clout of major Western powers will be weakening at a growing speed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 