page_title: Repeal of Prohibition in the United States
section_title: Impact of prohibition
hierarchical_section_title: Repeal of Prohibition in the United States / Impact of prohibition
caption_attribution_description: English: Woman's Christian Temperance Union Fountain This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 09000052
context_page_description: The repeal of Prohibition in the United States was accomplished with the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 5, 1933.
context_section_description: Scholarly literature regarding the effect of prohibition is mixed, with some writers insisting that that popular claim that prohibition was a failure is false. Prohibition was successful in reducing the amount of liquor consumed, cirrhosis death rates, admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis, arrests for public drunkenness, and rates of absenteeism. 
  Mark H. Moore, a professor at Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, stated, with respect to the effects of prohibition:
  Alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.
  Specifically, "rates for cirrhosis of the liver fell by 50 percent early in Prohibition and recovered promptly after Repeal in 1933." Moore also found that contrary to popular opinion, "violent crime did not increase dramatically during Prohibition" and that organized crime "existed before and after" Prohibition. The historian Jack S. Blocker Jr. stated that "Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect." In addition, "once Prohibition became the law of the land, many citizens decided to obey it". During the Prohibition era, rates of absenteeism decreased from 10% to 3%. In Michigan, the Ford Motor Company documented "a decrease in absenteeism from 2,620 in April 1918 to 1,628 in May 1918."
  
  Journalist H. L. Mencken, writing in 1925, believed the opposite to be true:
  Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.
  Some supporters of Prohibition, such as Charles Stelzle who wrote Why Prohibition! (1918), believed that prohibition would eventually lead to reductions in taxes, since drinking "produced half the business" for institutions supported by tax dollars such as courts, jails, hospitals, almshouses, and insane asylums. In fact, alcohol consumption and the incidence of alcohol-related domestic violence were decreasing before the Eighteenth Amendment was adopted. Following the imposition of Prohibition, reformers "were dismayed to find that child neglect and violence against children actually increased during the Prohibition era."
  Kenneth D. Rose, a professor of history at California State University, says that 'the WONPR claimed that prohibition had nurtured a criminal class, created a "crime wave," corrupted public officials, made drinking fashionable, engendered a contempt for rule of law, and set back the progress of "true temperance."' Rose, however, states that a "prohibition crime wave was rooted in the impressionistic rather than the factual." He writes:
  Opponents of prohibition were fond of claiming that the Great Experiment had created a gangster element that had unleashed a "crime wave" on a hapless America. The WONPR's Mrs. Coffin Van Rensselaer, for instance, insisted in 1932 that "the alarming crime wave, which had been piling up to unprecedented height" was a legacy of prohibition. But prohibition can hardly be held responsible for inventing crime, and while supplying illegal liquor proved to be lucrative, it was only an a
caption: A temperance fountain erected by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union during the Prohibition era in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware
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