Dealing with Drunks

The "crime" that accounts for one out of three U.S. arrests, endlessly plagues police, clogs the courts, and crowds the jails is common drunkenness.

Roughly 6% of American adults are alcoholics or "problem drinkers," and U.S. law persists in treating even those who peacefully litter the streets as criminals rather than sick people.

In a 131-page report, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice recently condemned the legal handling of drunkenness as a total mess. In most cities, anti-drunk laws affect only the helpless and the homeless, never affluent alcoholics. In a nightly ritual, police skim the derelicts off Skid Row, parade them before a magistrate and offer such unscientific evidence as "staggering gait" that often overlooks other ailments. Rarely represented by counsel, the bleary defendant is invariably stuffed into the "tank" long enough to get somewhat sobered up--then released and rearrested, often hundreds of times before the pathetic cycle ends with burial in a pauper's grave.

Compounding the Problem. Because no other institution is prepared to cope, drunks continue to be a police responsibility in all cities, but are dealt with in wildly different ways. With one quarter of New York City's population, for example, Los Angeles averages more than three times as many drunk arrests--100,000 a year. Yet, as the presidential commission sees it, arresting drunks is fruitless anywhere. Not only do "revolving-door jails" intensify the despair that drives men to drink in the first place; they also compound the police problem. In Washington, D.C., a survey turned up six chronic offenders who had been arrested a total of 1,409 times and served a collective 125 years in jail. In Los Angeles, 20% of drunk arrests involve repeaters who wind up in jail as often as 18 times a year.

Until recently, American courts consistently held that an alcoholic was responsible for his public drunkenness, because he had started drinking voluntarily. But in 1962, the Supreme Court began eroding that fiction by ruling in Robinson v. California that drug addiction is a sickness that cannot be deemed a crime without violating the Eighth Amendment guarantee against "cruel and unusual punishment." In 1966, two U.S. appellate courts invoked Robinson to excuse alcoholics from charges of public intoxication. Yet in this past term, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from an alcoholic despite a sharp dissent by Justice Abe Fortas, who argued that "the use of the rude and formidable weapon of criminal punishment of the alcoholic is neither seemly nor sensible, neither purposeful nor civilized."

Reformed Reformers. If the court eventually agrees with Fortas, authorities will have to develop public-health institutions far better prepared to handle the problem than they are now. For its part, the presidential commission urges more U.S. communities to emulate St. Louis, one of the few cities to start a "detoxification" program. Largely because of that program, St. Louis at one point cut drunk arrests by 66%. Since 1963, St. Louis police have taken drunks to a hospital instead of a tank; now they see to it that drunks get treatment involving vitamins, sedation, counseling and group therapy. If a drunk does not need medical care, he can be held only until he sobers up--and never longer than 20 hours. In 1965, St. Louis recorded only 2,445 drunk arrests, while Washington had 50,000.

Other cities are moving toward reform. New York's Vera Institute of Justice, a private foundation, will send three-man teams to the Bowery next fall to help get derelicts into an infirmary and lodging houses run by the Bowery Mission or Salvation Army. In Boston, the South End Center for Alcoholics and Unattached Persons has counseled 1,422 alcoholics and referred as many as 153 a month to a drying-out facility. The Philadelphia Diagnostic and Relocation Service Corp., a nonprofit center that helps derelicts move out of areas scheduled for redevelopment, got nowhere when it used graduate students as workers. Now it sends reformed drunks, who get results. Of 1,800 derelicts who received the Philadelphia group's intensive treatment, 1,000 left Skid Row, and most of them seem to have left it for good.

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