The Policy Game: From Entrepreneurship to the State Lottery In the decades after emancipation, people were legally free but largely excluded from the economic opportunities needed to build wealth. Segregation, discrimination, low-wage employment, restricted access to capital, and limited business opportunities made the promise of the American “bootstrap” ideal difficult to achieve. In response, communities developed alternative economic institutions—including the policy game, an underground lottery that became especially important in Black neighborhoods. Players selected numbers and placed bets through a network of runners, writers, bankers, and operators. The business generated income and employment in communities where legitimate economic opportunities were severely restricted.

The Jones brothers—Edward, George, and McKissack Jones—became some of the most successful policy operators in Chicago. Their family operation grew into a sophisticated enterprise generating enormous revenues. Their success demonstrated that the policy game was not merely street gambling; it could function as a substantial business and economic institution.

The success of policy operators attracted organized crime. As Prohibition ended and illegal liquor became less profitable, Mafia organizations increasingly looked toward gambling. They learned from and competed with established policy operators, eventually using money, political connections, and violence to take control of portions of the gambling business.

The story ultimately took another turn: the government legalized and institutionalized a version of the same basic numbers-gambling concept through state lotteries. What had once been treated as illegal gambling became a legitimate source of government revenue.

People did not simply “turn to crime” after emancipation. They faced an economic system that severely restricted access to capital, property, business opportunities, and wealth-building institutions. The policy game became one way to create an alternative economy when the formal economy offered few paths upward.

This exposes a contradiction in American capitalism: an economic practice can be considered criminal when created and operated by people excluded from the formal economy, yet become legitimate and enormously profitable when absorbed by organized crime or the government.

The policy game therefore represents more than gambling. It was an early example of entrepreneurship operating outside a system that had largely shut people out of legitimate wealth creation—and a business model that was eventually appropriated, transformed, and legalized by more powerful institutions.