On midnight January 16, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment was put into effect. All importing, exporting, transporting, selling and manufacturing of intoxication liquor was put to an end by this. Shortly after that, the Volstead Act was put into effect. This determined that only something having an alcoholic content of more than 0.5 percent was to be considered intoxicating. Thus this omitted alcohol used for medical and sacramental purposes. Alcohol was seen by some as a devil's advocate and thereby crime, poverty, death rates, and the economy would all improve with it gone. Prohibition was ineffective and unenforceable though, it caused an explosive growth of crime, and it surprisingly enough increased the amount of alcohol consumption.
Liquor did not disappear with the passing of this Amendment, instead people tried to find ways to hide their liquor. Some of the most popular ways were to hide it in a hip flask, false books, hollow canes, but when it came down to it, they would use anything they could think of. Just because the saloons were shut down, it didn't mean the end to bars, instead illegal speak-easies appeared. During this time there were over 100,000 speak-easies in New York City alone. Furthermore the illegal liquor business fell under the control of organized gangs, and they overpowered most law enforcement.
As a result of the lack of enforcement of the Prohibition Act, there was a creation of an illegal industry and in response an increase in crime transpired. Prohibitionists had thought that it would decrease drunkenness in America and thereby decrease the crime rate. At the beginning of Prohibition this purpose seemed to be fulfilled, but the crime rate soon skyrocketed, to nearly twice that of the pre-prohibition period. In the cities the homicide rate went from 5.6 per day to nearly 10 per day, a 78 percent increase. Serious crimes such as homicides, assault, and battery, increase nearly 13 percent, and other various crimes rose by 9 percent.
