Prohibition Essay - 1739 Words

On midnight of January 16, 1920, American went dry. One of the personal habits and everyday practices of most Americans suddenly diminished. The Eighteenth Amendment was passed, and all importing, exporting, transporting, selling, and manufacturing of intoxicating liquor was put to an end. The Congress passed the Amendment on January 16,1919, but it only went into effect a year later. The Volstead Act was passed with the Eighteenth Amendment on October 23, 1919. The Act was named after Andrew Volstead, a Republican representative from Minnesota. The Volstead Act, also known as the National Prohibition Act, determined intoxicating liquor as anything having an alcoholic content of more than 0.5 percent, excluding alcohol used for medicinal†¦show more content†¦That would be true if someone is examining only minor crimes, such as swearing, mischief, and vagrancy, which also did decrease due to prohibition. The major crimes, such as homicides, and burglaries, increased 24 percen t between 1920 and 1921. Also, the number of federal convicts over the course of the prohibition period increased 561 percent. The crime rate increased because prohibition destroyed legal jobs, created black-market violence, diverted resources from enforcement of other laws, and increased prices people had to pay for prohibited goods (Thorton, 10). The contributing factor to the sudden increase of felonies was the organization of crime, especially in large cities. Because liquor was no longer legally available, the public turned to gangsters who readily took on the bootlegging industry and supplied them with liquor. Most speak-easies were owned by bootlegging mobsters. On account of the industry being so profitable, more gangsters became involved in the money-making business. Crime became so organized because criminal groups organize around the steady source of income provided by laws against victimless crimes such as consuming alcohol (Thorton, 13). As a result of the money involve d in the bootlegging industry, there was much rival between gangs. The profit motive caused over four hundred gang related murders a year in Chicago alone (Stack, 4). Prohibition actually enabled organised crime to grow and in an effort to stay inShow MoreRelatedProhibition Of Drugs And Alcohol1492 Words   |  6 PagesPopular belief holds that consumption of drugs and alcohol encourages violence and that the appropriate response is prohibition of these goods. However, a different viewpoint is that prohibition creates illegal underground markets, which require violence and crime to remedy in-house disputes. 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