Prohibition  started in January 1920 and lasted until 1933. Prohibition was the law where you could not sell alcohol. This law was the 18th Amendment. The reason they got rid of alcohol was because they wanted crime rates to go down and because it made people lose their money. The effect of this was it made crime rates go up instead of down. It also caused the economy to go down.

A lot of people would waste their money on alcohol before they showed up to their jobs and they would be out of sorts. People were then starting to spend more money on alcohol than on food and things they needed to survive. It was not used correctly at the time and many people abused this privilege. Before they made Prohibition a law they were hoping the crime rate would go down. Alcohol was causing fifty percent of crimes. Alcohol caused husbands or any family member to hurt loved ones because of the ingredients inside the alcohol. Many women did not like alcohol because of what it did to you. This law eventually became legal because many people didn’t like alcohol in the first place.

The things Prohibition created involved gangs, speakeasies, and bootleggers. Gangs usually involved violence and theft. An example of a gangster would be Al Capone. He bootlegged and was the host of over 10,000 speakeasies. Speakeasies were when you would sell alcohol illegally. They called it that because in order to get in you would have to whisper and speak “easy” because when you entered these places it was illegal to sell alcohol at the time and if the police found this speak easy they would arrest everybody. Bootleggers were people who would secretly put beer or alcohol in their boot and carry it around with them wherever they went because they didn’t like the law. But when they made this law it didn’t stop crime to go down it went up. Average people were commiting crimes to get this alcohol.

The only reason Prohibition became an amendment was because the government hoped for the crime rate to go down. Prohibition ended in 1933. They repealed it because crime rate went so high. People became grateful  the crime rate went down after alcohol became legal. This amendment was unlike any other because it had been a great mistake to the people who decided to make this a law and made history change.