>I wish we could stop discussing this from the premise of "it's controversial whether we should stop locking people up for drug possession". I haven't been arg

>I wish we could stop discussing this from the premise of "it's controversial whether we should stop locking people up for drug possession". I haven't been arguing about that all. At the root of it, I have a hypothesis that a majority of violent crime in our present society stems from some kind of inter-institutional fracas, i.e. people committing violence do so, for the most part, as an attempt to further the goals of the social hierarchy to which they belong. On a parallel level, I also believe that barring some seriously draconian shit, ala Singaporean death penalties, in a lot if not most communities we have basically reached peak law enforcement. (It's worth debating just what is "seriously draconian", though). We basically can't stop people from engaging in ludicrously profitable or enjoyable illegal activities, and at a micro level we can't stop dedicated individuals who want to hurt other individuals. Given these two beliefs, I think your best bet is to shrink the organizations involved by drastically eliminating their profit margins on their most lucrative trade. (As a side tangent, also engage in more expensive deep independent investigations as done in the Wire, but as the Wire shows there are many institutional challenges with that approach also). As it turns out, it's a complex question. What might be true for inner cities might not apply for port cities where you can make a dime doing something else illegal.