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Changing the Public Drunkenness Laws: The Impact of Decriminalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

David E. Aaronson ,
C. Thomas Dienes  and
Michael C. Musheno
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Abstract

Laws that decriminalize public drunkenness continue to use the police as the major intake agent for public inebriates under the “new” public health model of detoxification and treatment. Assuming that decriminalization introduces many disincentives to police intervention using legally sanctioned procedures, we hypothesize that it will be followed by a statistically significant decline in the number of public inebriates formally handled by the police in the manner designated by the “law in the books.” Using an “interrupted time-series quasi-experiment” based on a “stratified multiple-group single-I design,” we confirm this hypothesis for Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis, Minnesota. However, through intensive “microanalysis” of these two jurisdictions, we show that Minneapolis, in responding to strong business pressure, developed several alternative means of keeping the streets clear of transient public inebriates while Washington, D.C., treated decriminalization as an opportunity to shift police priorities and relied on informal “safe zones” to handle the inebriate population.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 12 , Issue 3: Special Issue on Criminal Justice , Spring 1978 , pp. 405 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This article is based on a larger study of the decriminalization of public drunkenness funded by LEAA-NILECJ, Grant No. 74NI-99-0055. Those parts of the study that deal with police discretion as an explanation for the impact of decriminalization, and with the analysis of alternative policies for dealing with the pickup and delivery of public inebriates, are contained in our final report (Aaronson et al., 1977b) and in another journal (Aaronson et al., 1977a, 1978). We gratefully acknowledge the many persons who commented on earlier drafts and criticized the methodological development of this paper: Richard Abel, Egon Bittner, Bruce Bowen, Gene Glass, Dorothy Guyot, Michael Hindus, Laura Irwin, James Levine, Dennis Palumbo, David Perry, H. Laurence Ross, Peter Rossi, Charles Ruttenberg, and George Silberman.

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