At the beginning of Prohibition, the Reverend Billy Sunday stirred audiences with this optimistic prediction: The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent (Thorton).

The people of America thought that the eradicating of alcohol would bring crime to a stop and the goodness of people would be brought forthright. To many people’s dismay, the opposite resulted. The Prohibition act of the 1920s was ineffective because it was difficult to enforce, it caused an explosion in the crime rate, and it increased the amount of alcohol consumption.

“The act was condemned by a large number of the American population who considered it a violation of their constitutional rights” (www.spartacus.schoolnet). The large number of people who felt this way formed groups against the Prohibi

tion Act. Stories of people moon shining in their bathtubs scattered the cities, pubs behind or below local shops could be found by the desired. “Prohibition is better than no liquor at all,” Will Rogers (Behr, 127). Bootleggers smuggled liquor from oversees and Canada, stole it from government warehouses, or produced their own. People known as speakeasies led drinkers to hidden pubs and bars. Many people hid their liquor in hip flasks, fake books, hollow canes, and anything else they could find. The speakeasy was now an accepted part of the American scene, particularly in the big cities. Many bootleggers set up gangs or mafias to be protected by “power in numbers”. They used these gangs for business purposes and protection from the law.

At first people thought that it would be very hard to acquire alcohol after the Prohibition Act was set, but they soon found out that it was not.

Not only did the number of serious crimes increase, but crime became organized. Criminal groups organize around the steady source of income provided by laws against victimless crimes such as consuming alcohol or drugs, gambling, and prostitution (Thorton).

When people began to form gangs, they realized that they could produce much more alcohol and be safer while doing it. This caused an immediate explosion in the number of gangs. People began to realize that it was much easier to perform illegal bootlegging and smuggling in numbers rather than alone.

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