Alcohol prohibition in the United States, 1920-1933, and its legacies

Abstract

This chapter charts the American experiment with national alcohol Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. It looks at how such an ambitious and absolutist law was adopted in the first place. It then charts the many unintended consequences of the crusade. While Prohibition has largely been understood as a massive public policy failure, I argue that such a perspective has caused us to lose sight of its many lasting consequences. The alcohol prohibition years pressed the American state into distinctive and permanent molds and built the edifice of the twentieth century federal penal state. The chapter ends with a discussion of the lessons one can draw from this public policy effort and its significant and lasting legacies-not least among them the federal government's crossbreeding penal approach to other illicit narcotics.