Backlash
Welcome to Substance, a newsletter about drugs and crime by Tana Ganeva and Zachary Siegel
First, a little about us:
We (Tana, Zach) are journalists who cover drugs and criminal justice. We aim for substance; hot takes are not our thing! Our work is based on investigative reporting and well-informed analysis of America's sprawling carceral state. (Please, go elsewhere for the latest mishegas/shitstorm about woke Oberlin students). Over the course of reporting for a diverse range of news outlets––like the Washington Post, The Intercept, Reason, Teen Vogue, Business Insider, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and the New York Times––we've gained the trust of excellent sources who possess solid info that will clarify and advance debates about a wide range of issues from forensics and the chemistry of drugs to crime and punishment.
Backlash…
Stories about drugs and crime pivot around “heroes” and “villains.” Cops, criminals, victims, dealers, junkies, politicians, judges, prosecutors exist in the public imagination at opposite poles of virtue and vice.
In Law and Order: SVU, the longest running police procedural, the bad guys are easily presented as evil: pushers, sadists, rapists, killers, sex traffickers. The cops and prosecutors are tough but honorable, devoted to seeking justice for the victims. (In reality, the NYPD barely invests in the Special Victims Units. The Manhattan Special Victims Squad has fewer than ten staffers. In comparison, the narcotics division of South Manhattan alone employs seventy-two officers, including close to a dozen undercover cops).
Characters in this morality play might change over time. The glorified citizen crime stopper of the 1980s has become the reviled Karen calling the cops at the drop of a hat. The idealization of officers as brave enforcers of public safety has been chipped away by evidence that some commit more crime than they solve. Marijuana used to cause the babysitter to get so high she mistook the baby for a turkey and roasted it in the oven; today pot is a legal and thriving business in more than a dozen states. Some stories appear to change, yet at their core remain the same. We’re allegedly treating people addicted to opioids with compassion instead of prison, in large part because of their perceived race and class—yet we’ve nevertheless set-up a completely artificial dichotomy between user and dealer, in order to punish someone, even though in most cases addicted people share and sell drugs to maintain their own habits. Even as the New York Times and other publications apologized for stirring up panic about “crack babies” in the 1980s (there was no scientific basis to the claims), the same outlets were issuing dire warnings about babies born “addicted” to opioids. Yesterday’s crack is today’s fentanyl, an opioid so potent that cops––allegedly––overdose just by looking at it.
These tropes are inextricable from race, class, gender, national and regional identity, and many other cultural factors that shape our perceptions of ourselves and the world. The deeply emotional reactions to issues like crime and drug use might explain why the “solutions” tend to make no rational sense; why they generate moral panics and new laws with worse outcomes than the problems they’re meant to solve; why any effort at real change to the criminal justice system (a term that gives this nonsensical patchwork too much credit) is followed by a fear-driven backlash perpetuated by police unions, shoddy media coverage, conservative think tanks, and lawmakers looking toward reelection.
The minimal reforms of the last few years and the changing dialogue around criminal justice —such as the brief time ‘defund’ entered the Overton window—have triggered an immense backlash. Progressive prosecutors Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, George Gascon in Los Angeles, and Susan Rollins in Boston, have targets on their backs. Silicon Valley multi-millionaires have funded a recall campaign against Boudin; mainstream media sow panic about crime in the DA’s respective cities, without bothering to cross-check crime rates in jurisdictions run by more conservative DAs.
Rising crime rates are also blamed on bail reform, with critics eliding the fact that in many places, including NYC, bail reform was swiftly rolled back. The surge in pretrial detentions have led to deadly overcrowding in the city’s jails and to date, there have been 16 deaths on Rikers this year alone. Most people in jail are legally innocent, as they are pretrial.
Meanwhile, proponents of the so-called Ferguson Effect blame rising crime on the BLM protests against police abuse. Apparently, a combination of defund and antipathy towards cops has resulted in police unable or unwilling to do their jobs. Once again, purveyors of this idea ignore the fact that no large department was deprived of resources (and now many are getting more money). Nor do they follow the argument that police are underperforming to its logical conclusion—namely, that public servants tasked with preventing violence shouldn’t stop doing their jobs because their feelings are hurt.
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In “Substance” we aim to interrogate stories about drugs and crime, which at this point in our discourse essentially function as one word: drugsandcrime. We’ll analyze news coverage and trace the discursive basis for and against reform. We’ll dip back in time for false narratives from the past. We’ll interrogate junk science like forensics and studies about the effects of drugs. We’ll engage in media analysis of current coverage, from fear-mongering about crime to stories based entirely on police department P.R. We plan to be mad at the New York Times a lot.
Beyond tearing down false narratives, we’ll also feature original investigative reporting on prisons, police, mass incarceration, harsh sentencing and interviews with legal and academic experts, police officers, activists, and other stakeholders in the creation of a just — and sane — criminal justice system. We will also highlight new and interesting empirical research, explaining the latest research findings and why they matter. This newsletter will be free till we get some halfway decent content up, after which it would be rad if you signed up for paid membership: $5 a month.
Thank you!
Tana Ganeva and Zachary Siegel