Crime and substance abuse

Definition: Alcohol and illicit drugs are involved in approximately 60 percent of all criminal offenses leading to arrest and incarceration in the United States. Common crimes involving substance abuse are domestic violence, driving under the influence, assault and battery, and property offenses such as theft and burglary.

Background

The precise relationship between substance abuse and crime is difficult to define. First, the cultivation, manufacturing, possession, and sale of illicit drugs are each crimes in their own right. This fact is aligned with numerous studies that have connected the propensity of persons who abuse illicit drugs to commit crimes. Similarly, laws dictating the appropriate distribution and consumption of alcoholic beverages exist throughout the United States. While these statutes themselves are often violated, there exists a well-established parallel between abusive alcohol use and criminal behavior.

It is widely accepted that the behavior of persons impaired by illicit drug and alcohol abuse are prone to erratic tendencies, poor judgment, impulsivity, and violence that lends itself to criminal activity. Repeated abuse of alcohol and drugs also decreases the self-control and inhibitions that distinguish criminals from law-abiding citizens.

Data acquired from the prison population in the United States illustrates that a considerable number of criminals and prison inmates were under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or both, when committing offenses of all kinds. According to a 2009 survey of ten metropolitan areas in the United States by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the number of criminals who tested positive for at least one controlled substance during their arrest was as high as 82 percent in some locales. The most prevalent drugs of choice for arrestees included marijuana, cocaine, heroin, morphine, and methamphetamine. Fifty percent of jail and prison inmates have clinical addictions.

Crime and Alcohol Abuse

Motor vehicle violations make up the majority of alcohol-related crimes in the United States. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports that about 1.5 million Americans are arrested for driving while intoxicated each year, cases that result in 780,000 criminal convictions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that alcohol-related automobile accidents cost taxpayers about more than $44 million annually. In 2020, 11,654 Americans died in alcohol-impaired driving accidents, an increase of 14 percent since 2019, according to the NHTSA.

While decades of public interest campaigns led by national law enforcement agencies like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and nonprofit organizations such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the DUI Foundation have kept the dangers of drunk driving in the public eye, alcohol abuse is also ubiquitous in a wide variety of non-vehicle-related crimes. Domestic violence, underage drinking, and assault are the most frequently occurring non-vehicle-related but alcohol-related crimes in the United States.

While research has uncovered a recurring coexistence between domestic violence and alcohol abuse, not all domestic abusers are alcoholics and not all alcoholics are domestic abusers. A contrary rationale is that while alcohol abuse is regularly a contributing factor in many acts of domestic violence, there also are cases in which alcohol abuse is used as an excuse or an avoidance of accountability by its perpetrators.

There is a less scholarly gray area between alcohol use and criminal behavior by underage people. Consumption of alcohol by persons younger than age twenty-one years is itself a commonly perpetrated crime. According to the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, underage drinkers consume 4 percent of all the alcohol consumed in the United States each year, despite the illegality of doing so. CDC reports that underage alcohol abuse leads to higher rates of school absence and reckless sexual behavior, and to brain development and memory problems.

Like their adult counterparts, abusive underage drinkers also have a higher propensity to violate laws against drunk driving and to engage in or be victimized by physical assault. The risk of criminal behavior appears to follow underage drinkers into adulthood, according to a study by the University of Miami that linked abusive underage alcohol consumption with a greater probability of committing property crimes like theft or predatory crimes like assault later in adulthood.

In 2022, the National TASC reported that alcohol is more closely associated with violent crime more than any other drug, with the exception of robbery. It is a factor in 40 percent of all violent crimes. Alcohol plays a role in 37 percent of sexual assaults, 15 percent of robberies, 28 percent of aggravated assaults, and 25.5 percent of simple assaults.

Crime and Drug Abuse

Drug-related offenses are broken down into three categories by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA): drug possession and sales, offenses committed to support preexisting drug abuse, and drug-related involvement in criminal activities not related to drugs. In 2020, Drug Policy Facts reported that there were 1,555,610 arrests for drug law violations, more than in any other crime category. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) arrests more than twenty-six thousand people for possession each year, and has done so every year since 1986.

A majority of illicit drug abusers rely on petty crimes to support their habit. These crimes range from petty theft to burglary to grand theft auto. NIDA research also ties drug use to several other felony convictions, including money laundering, grand theft, and counterfeiting.

While a majority of drug-related crimes can be attributed to the illegality of drugs themselves, research shows that a majority of criminal acts are carried out by persons acting under the influence of or in the pursuit of many types of illicit drugs. That said, the relationship between drugs and crime remains extremely difficult to determine from a research perspective and remains a topic of debate among criminologists and sociologists.

Youth-Oriented Prevention

Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies have developed numerous systems and processes aimed at reducing the appeal of drug use in hopes of simultaneously halting the various criminal activities that accompany that use. Aimed largely at school-age children and young adults, the agencies’ primary goals have been to prevent persons from entering into the culture of drugs. These programs, which involve coursework and demonstrations of the negative aspects of drug use, have met with varying degrees of success.

The Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (D.A.R.E.) is an example of a failed nationwide effort to curtail drug use and violence. Founded in 1983 by former Los Angeles Police Department chief Daryl Gates, the program was widely utilized in public schools in the United States to explicitly educate young people on the dangers of drug use and activity through lecture-style lessons, drug identification demonstrations, and attempts at building trusting relationships with local police officers through in-school interactions.

By the late 1990s research began to show that the D.A.R.E. program not only was ineffective in decreasing drug use in the majority of communities in which it was utilized but also contributed to a rise in alcohol and drug use among its participants. Evaluation studies demonstrating the program’s ineffectiveness were made by several federal agencies, including the US Office of the Surgeon General and US Department of Education (DE). The program’s widespread reputation for ineffectiveness led the DE to prohibit schools from utilizing federal funds for the program in 1998.

New strategies fostered by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign in online campaigns, such as TheAntiDrug.com and AboveTheInfluence.com, detract from the communal, schoolroom-oriented strategies of previous programs like D.A.R.E.. The AntiDrug.com program emphasizes positive parental influence as a crucial dissuasion from the temptations of drug-related activity, while AbovetheInfluence.com seeks to tear down the status of illegal drug use as a popular counterculture. New models in Europe that emphasize teaching youth to get high naturally through music, dance, or other self-improvement classes, as well as an outdoor nightly curfew for anyone aged thirteen to sixteen, have seen dramatic results in curbing underage misuse of drugs and alcohol, but the United States has not adopted their national models.

Bibliography

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