Raucous, uncontrolled debauchery: Where has it gone? Students used to begin drawing plans to paint the town red around mid-October, piecing together their costumes and loading up on enough alcohol to fuel Keith Richards for a week. This was our "carnivale," where every street and dorm showcased a legitimate topsy-turvy parade of hedonistic extremes, if only for a weekend.

However, given the last four years of rioting, It made sense to change strategy. The introduction of the Freakfest Halloween festival seemed to have had the desired effect on crime. Arrests at the 2006 Halloween celebration were nearly half that of the 2005 debacle. Things seem to be quite orderly.

But that's the problem. Halloween was never about being orderly; it was about letting loose. Now, instead of the student body waiting in anticipation for the citywide celebration like some sort of vodka-drenched Christmas, it shrugs. Students know they're getting a watered down, Shirley Temple type of holiday. Frank Productions, the company Madison has hired to organize this year's festivities, has tried to tart up the mediocre Freakfest with a few B-list rock bands. Despite the horror some city officials expressed at seeing Spongebob Squarepants costumes being cast into a State Street bonfire, Lifehouse torturing a sparse crowd at the Capitol with its ’90s-style Christian rock may be even worse.

Sure, we have a safe Halloween, but for what? A neutered, thinly populated, Mountain Dew-sponsored walk through a day-glow, half-mile long catwalk at the expense of a unique Madison experience?

We should have been able to learn these lessons from the Mifflin Street Block Party. In 1996, Mifflin's annual springtime boozing ended in chaotic fashion, with the drunken mobs setting fire to nearly anything in the vicinity. However, after working to reorganize the party and increase police presence, the Mifflin Block Party was eventually restored to its former glory, even with an increase in numbers.

Last year's Halloween followed a similar method. By regulating admission to State Street and banning guests in the public and private dorms during the weekend, the number of Halloween hooligans dropped from an unmanageable 100,000 people to a mere 30,000. Sure, it was a little bland, but security was finally established, and our student traditions could be slowly re-established.

However, this year's Halloween has shifted too far from the Mifflin model. Instead of gradually restoring Halloween to a level between tame sideshow and insurmountable beer blast, Madison is stripping the celebration of any sort of unique character it had left, putting a homegrown soiree into the hands of private enterprise with market research to back it up. Halloween today is like a Playboy with the pictures cut out — it goes by the same name, but where is the fun in it now?

Yet, the bigger problem with Halloween isn't just that it's one less opportunity to get plastered. The success of Freakfest 2006 was a misguided epiphany to Madison's city leaders: Restrictive measures solved crime! With this in mind, they have attempted to apply this theory to citywide safety — most notably with the Alcohol License Density Plan. After all, if curtailing drunkenness worked in one scenario, an even more elaborate measure must work on a tremendous scale!

Except that Freakfest's success is far from proven. If we continue to pare down a celebration that is supposedly notorious for the liberties it allows on a Friday and Saturday night, students will become fed up with this put on and take back the night in poorly managed house parties, dorm rooms and alleyways.

And when that happens, Halloween in Madison will be far more frightening than ever before.

Jason Smathers ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism and history.