How the Rockefeller Laws Hit the Streets: Drug Policing and the Politics of State Competence in New York City, 1973–1989

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that the punitive drug laws enacted in the mid-1970s led to a sharp increase in incarceration only in the mid-1980s, when city police departments started policing street-level drug markets much more intensively. The case study of New York City in the wake of the Rockefeller Drug Laws of 1973 presents an explanation. Only when new policing ideas, popular dissatisfaction with street crime, and the revival of the city's fiscal capacity coalesced as part of a larger project to rebuild urban governance in the aftermath of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s did New York turn toward street-level drug enforcement. An examination of the political history of street-level drug enforcement offers a better understanding of the history of New York's war on drugs, as well as a new chronology of the political dynamics of state rebuilding in the 1980s.