"Nobody’s actually in the business of doing what the institution’s supposed to do."

The Straight Dope

Tangentially related to the discussion of Wall Streeters who sink their own companies.  An interview with David Simon, creator of "The Wire".  I didn't really enjoy the Wire much (I'm not a cop show fan) but I suppose I need to give it another whirl.

David Simon: Stats, you know, dope on the table. “We’ve made so many arrests.” I mean, under one administration they used to ride around Baltimore and say, “If we can make fifty-four arrests a day, we’ll have an all-time record for drug arrests.” Some of the arrests, it was people sitting on their stoops and, you know, loitering in a drug-free zone, meaning you were sitting on your own steps on a summer day. Anything that is a stat can be cheated, right down to journalism. And I was sort of party to that.
So I would be watching what the police department was doing, what the school system was doing, you know, looking outward. But if you looked inward you’d see that the same game is played everywhere, that nobody’s actually in the business of doing what the institution’s supposed to do.
Bill Moyers: Many people could see what you saw simply if we opened our eyes. And yet the drug war keeps getting crazier and crazier, from selling guns to Mexico’s drug cartel to cramming more people into prison even though they haven’t committed violent crimes. Why don’t the policies change?
David Simon: Because there’s no political capital in it. There really isn’t. The fear of being called soft on crime, soft on drugs. The paranoia that’s been induced. Listen, if you could be draconian and reduce drug use by locking people up, you might have an argument. But we are the jailing-est country on the planet right now. Two million people in prison. We’re locking up less-violent people. More of them. The drugs are purer. They haven’t closed down a single drug corner that I know of in Baltimore for any length of time. It’s not working. And by the way, this is not a Republican-Democrat thing, because a lot of the most draconian stuff came out of the Clinton administration, this guy trying to maneuver to the center in order not to be perceived as leftist by a Republican Congress.