At the beginning of Prohibition, the Reverend Billy Sunday stirred audiences with this optimistic prediction:. The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs.
Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent. He and other champions of Prohibition expected it to reduce crime and solve a host of social problems by eliminating the Demon Rum. Early temperance reformers claimed that alcohol was responsible for everything from disease to broken homes. High on their list of evils were the crime and poverty associated with intemperance. They felt that the burden of taxes could be reduced if prisons and poorhouses could be emptied by abstinence.
That perspective was largely based on interviews of inmates of prisons and poorhouses who claimed that their crimes and poverty were the result of alcohol. America had experienced a gradual decline in the rate of serious crimes over much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. That trend was unintentionally reversed by the efforts of the Prohibition movement. The homicide rate in large cities increased from 5. The Volstead Act, passed to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, had an immediate impact on crime.
According to a study of 30 major U. The study revealed that during that period more money was spent on police But increased law enforcement efforts did not appear to reduce drinking: arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct increased 41 percent, and arrests of drunken drivers increased 81 percent.
Among crimes with victims, thefts and burglaries increased 9 percent, while homicides and incidents of assault and battery increased 13 percent. Instead of emptying the prisons as its supporters had hoped it would, Prohibition quickly filled the prisons to capacity. Those convicted of additional crimes with victims burglaries, robberies, and murders , which were due to Prohibition and the black market, were incarcerated largely in city and county jails and state prisons.
Before Prohibition and the Harrison Narcotics Act , there had been 4, federal convicts, fewer than 3, of whom were housed in federal prisons. By the number of federal convicts had increased percent, to 26,, and the federal prison population had increased percent. The number of people convicted of Prohibition violations increased 1, percent between and , and fully half of all prisoners received in had been convicted of such violations.
The explosion in the prison population greatly increased spending on prisons and led to severe overcrowding. Total federal expenditures on penal institutions increased more than 1, percent between and Despite those expenditures and new prison space, prisons were severely overcrowded.
In the normal capacity of Atlanta Penitentiary and Leavenworth Prison was approximately 1, each, but their actual population exceeded 3, each. For example, Dr. Fabian Franklin noted that according to one measure, crime had decreased For example, theft of property increased The number of violations of Prohibition laws and violent crimes against persons and property continued to increase throughout Prohibition.
Figure 4 shows an undeniable relationship between Prohibition and an increase in the homicide rate. That rising trend was reversed by the repeal of Prohibition in , and the rate continued to decline throughout the s and early s. Not only did the number of serious crimes increase, but crime became organized.
Criminal groups organize around the steady source of income provided by laws against victimless crimes such as consuming alcohol or drugs, gambling, and prostitution. In the process of providing goods and services, those criminal organizations resort to real crimes in defense of sales territories, brand names, and labor contracts.
That is true of extensive crime syndicates the Mafia as well as street gangs, a criminal element that first surfaced during Prohibition. The most telling sign of the relationship between serious crime and Prohibition was the dramatic reversal in the rates for robbery, burglary, murder, and assault when Prohibition was repealed in Prohibition Caused Corruption. It was hoped that Prohibition would eliminate corrupting influences in society; instead, Prohibition itself became a major source of corruption.
Everyone from major politicians to the cop on the beat took bribes from bootleggers, moonshiners, crime bosses, and owners of speakeasies. The Bureau of Prohibition was particularly susceptible and had to be reorganized to reduce corruption.
Public corruption through the purchase of official protection for this illegal traffic is widespread and notorious. A number of other states had followed suit by the time the Civil War began in By the turn of the century, temperance societies were a common fixture in communities across the United States. Women played a strong role in the temperance movement, as alcohol was seen as a destructive force in families and marriages.
In , a new wave of attacks began on the sale of liquor, led by the Anti-Saloon League established in and driven by a reaction to urban growth, as well as the rise of evangelical Protestantism and its view of saloon culture as corrupt and ungodly.
In addition, many factory owners supported prohibition in their desire to prevent accidents and increase the efficiency of their workers in an era of increased industrial production and extended working hours. In , after the United States entered World War I , President Woodrow Wilson instituted a temporary wartime prohibition in order to save grain for producing food. That same year, Congress submitted the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors, for state ratification.
Though Congress had stipulated a seven-year time limit for the process, the amendment received the support of the necessary three-quarters of U. Ratified on January 16, , the 18th Amendment went into effect a year later, by which time no fewer than 33 states had already enacted their own prohibition legislation. In October , Congress put forth the National Prohibition Act, which provided guidelines for the federal enforcement of Prohibition.
Both federal and local government struggled to enforce Prohibition over the course of the s. In general, Prohibition was enforced much more strongly in areas where the population was sympathetic to the legislation—mainly rural areas and small towns—and much more loosely in urban areas. Despite very early signs of success, including a decline in arrests for drunkenness and a reported 30 percent drop in alcohol consumption, those who wanted to keep drinking found ever-more inventive ways to do it.
In addition, the Prohibition era encouraged the rise of criminal activity associated with bootlegging. Such illegal operations fueled a corresponding rise in gang violence, including the St. Saloons proliferated. It was not uncommon to find one saloon for every or Americans, including those who did not drink.
Hard-pressed to earn profits, saloonkeepers sometimes introduced vices such as gambling and prostitution into their establishments in an attempt to earn profits. Many Americans considered saloons offensive, noxious institutions. The prohibition leaders believed that once license to do business was removed from the liquor traffic, the churches and reform organizations would enjoy an opportunity to persuade Americans to give up drink.
This opportunity would occur unchallenged by the drink businesses "the liquor traffic" in whose interests it was to urge more Americans to drink, and to drink more beverage alcohol. The blight of saloons would disappear from the landscape, and saloonkeepers no longer allowed to encourage people, including children, to drink beverage alcohol. Some prohibition leaders looked forward to an educational campaign that would greatly expand once the drink businesses became illegal, and would eventually, in about thirty years, lead to a sober nation.
Other prohibition leaders looked forward to vigorous enforcement of prohibition in order to eliminate supplies of beverage alcohol. In language that some found confusing, the act called for the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service in the Treasury Department to oversee enforcement and make adjustments to the regulations as needed.
The IRS subsequently established the Prohibition Unit, staffed by agents who were not required to take Civil Service exams, leaving the door open for members of Congress and local pols to appoint their cronies, including applicants with questionable backgrounds.
The government provided funds for only 1, agents at first to enforce Prohibition across the country. They were issued guns and given access to vehicles, but many had little or no training. Effective enforcement of Volstead was almost doomed from the start. Prohibition agents and cooperative local law enforcers throughout the country seized warehouses full of whiskey, busted up stills, smashed countless bottles of liquor, took axes to beer barrels and dumped the contents into gutters and sewers.
Some attained national fame. Not only were Izzy and Moe truthful and law-abiding, they took their jobs to a level no one could match. Izzy, a rotund, 5-foot, 5-inch Austrian Jewish immigrant and former postal worker, was a wiz at foreign languages. He spoke German and three other tongues, knew words in Russian, Spanish, French, Italian and Chinese, and could imitate foreign accents in English. He also played the violin. To bust violators of Volstead, Izzy dressed as a woman, a Texas oil man, a Southern colonel, a football player in a muddy uniform or a horse wagon driver, then he might fake the accent of his choice to create a diversion.
Izzy one day convinced his friend Moe, a cigar store owner and small-time boxing manager who was flabbier than Izzy, to join him as a Prohibition agent. Working together they posed as everything from firemen to farmers, gas meter inspectors, street cleaners, gravediggers and truck drivers.
One of their two-man shows in New York was for Moe to masquerade as an out-of-towner and Izzy as his loudmouthed sidekick. While at a restaurant, Izzy would quietly tell the waiter his traveling friend was looking for some liquor, then arrest the server when he produced it. They also arrested bootleggers who obtained wine meant for Jewish sacraments and for industrial alcohol sold for manufacturing tobacco.
They even blackened their faces to raid a deli in the African-American district of Harlem.
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