Quoted:
Usually if a park has a lot of drunks on benches it's a bad sign, the same as a neighborhood with a lot of drunks staggering around it. If I have to explain the coorelation then you won't understand.
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Yeah, I understand that it looks bad. But the USSC already decided a long time ago (Sundance case, I believe) that it was unconstitutional to arrest people for simply being alcoholics. Besides, putting them in the drunk tank doesn't really do much to solve the problem. Nobody gets cured of an alcohol problem in jail.
As to the topic about how terrible prohibition was, I lived in a dry county for a little while and it really wasn't all that bad. Contrary to the current falacious reasoning, the roads weren't clogged with drunks because they had to drive to the next county to get drunk. It was a nice clean little town. There were a lot of people that would have been considered poor but the poor areas were not consumed by blight and crime.
It was Greenville Ala in case anyone wonders.
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One county doesn't prove much. As for your assumption about drunks on the road, the number of drunks on the road went up during alcohol prohibition. You might say that was just due to more cars being around and that might be partially true. But, at the same time, the arrests for public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and similar alcohol-related offenses broke all previous records by a margin of at least thirty percent during prohibition. You can read some research on the subject at
Did Alcohol Prohibition Reduce Alcohol Consumption and Crime? It includes various tables of stats to illustrate what happened.
You will find that, among other things, it caused the biggest teen drinking epidemic ever seen in the US. That was one of the major reasons it was repealed.