Back in 2011, the city of Seattle launched an experimental drug enforcement program that has been compared, if somewhat unfairly, to the infamous “Hamsterdam” episode of HBO's The Wire. Fans of the show of course remember the story: Major Howard “Bunny” Colvin, tired of fighting a losing battle, single-handedly decriminalizes drugs in a deserted corner of Baltimore and then brings in social workers to pass out needles and condoms.
On The Wire, the extralegal drug free-zone dubbed “Hamsterdam” was eventually discovered and shut down. But today in Seattle, something like a sanctioned version of Hamsterdam actually exists, and a new study suggests it works better than the traditional criminal justice system at preventing crimes.
Researchers at the University of Washington followed 203 participants in Seattle's Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, or LEAD, over varying lengths of time—anywhere from six months to nearly three years, depending on when participants joined the program. When the researchers compared them with a control group of 115 people who had been arrested, jailed, and prosecuted in the usual fashion, they found that the LEAD participants were 34 percent to 58 percent less likely than their counterparts to have committed new crimes since the original arrest.
[For more of this story, written by Saki Knafo, go to http://www.citylab.com/crime/2...s-is-working/389952/]
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