Alternatives III: The Justice
System
excerpted from the book
Crime and Punishment in America
Why solutions to America's
most stubborn social crisis have not worked - and what will
by Elliott Currie
Henry Holt, 1998, paper
p162
An enduring response to violent crime
... means making a sustained attack on the social deficits that
breed it. It also means rethinking the purposes of our criminal
justice system.
I've argued that we cannot rely on the
justice system to control crime and that our recent attempt to
do so has been a dismal failure. But that doesn't mean that the
justice system's role in a broader strategy against crime is unimportant.
The problem is not just that we have asked too much of the justice
system, but that we have asked the wrong things. It is not just
that we spend too much on criminal justice as opposed to other
social needs, but that we spend unwisely and heedlessly, and as
a result the justice system itself is badly out of balance. We
have largely ignored its considerable potential to prevent crime,
rather than to react to crime after the fact. We have too often
used the justice system as little more than a dumping ground,
a repository for the casualties of a depriving and volatile social
order. This isn't a new problem; what is new is the widespread
acceptance, even celebration, of the idea that the criminal justice
system's role should be a strictly punitive one. Just as we've
come to accept a high level of violence as a normal part of social
life, we've come to accept a reactive and custodial justice system
as the best we can do. That is partly because many believe that
people who break the law don't deserve anything better. But it
is also a reflection of the widespread myth that we do not know
how to use our justice system for anything other than punishment.
This myth, like the others we've encountered,
is wrong. Though the criminal justice system's ability to prevent
crime may be limited, within those limits it has considerable
potential to reduce crime much more effectively than it does now.
But to make the most of that potential, we need to rethink what
it is we want the justice system to accomplish and to allocate
our resources accordingly.
This is not the place to lay out a detailed
blueprint for reforming the justice system, from policing to parole.
But let me suggest several principles that ought to guide us as
we work to build a revitalized and progressive criminal justice
system for the next century-one that does the best possible job
of protecting us from serious crime while also affirming our best
values as a civilization. The justice system should emphasize
preventing crime, not simply reacting to it; it should strive,
insofar as possible, to reintegrate offenders into society, not
simply contain them. We should make the reduction of violence-not
simply the punishment of people whose behavior may offend us-our
top priority; and we should link that goal to a broader strategy
to attack the conditions that breed violence in the first place.
Three tasks are especially urgent: investing in rehabilitation,
rethinking sentencing, and reducing violence in the community
through more effective police strategies.
*
Until the mid-1970s, it was widely argued
that the criminal justice system ought to be more than just a
place for punishment, and more than a place to warehouse the consequences
of social neglect.
No one doubted that we needed prisons,
or that one of the reasons for using prisons was punishment. But
our goal, at least in theory, was higher: the correctional system,
we believed, should do its best to prepare inmates for a productive
life on the outside. The reasoning wasn't only humanitarian; it
was also hardheaded. Most people who went to prison would, after
all, eventually come out, and it made sense, from every vantage
point, to see to it that they came out in better shape than when
they went in. Common sense, fiscal responsibility, and social
vision merged to put a high priority on "rehabilitation.
"
This, at least, was the theory. In practice,
rehabilitation was never much more than a distant vision in America's
justice system. It is often said that we tried rehabilitation
in the 1950s and 1960s, and it failed. Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters
go so far as to say that the justice system has been "emasculated"
by "the notion that the first purpose of punishment is to
rehabilitate criminals." But that is a stunning revision
of history. Even at the height of the Great Society era, the commitment
to rehabilitation in the prisons was shallow at best; in many
states, it was virtually nonexistent. Listen to what the President's
crime commission had to say in 1967:
The most striking fact about the correctional
apparatus today is that, although the rehabilitation of criminals
is presumably its major purpose, the custody of criminals is actually
its major task.... What this emphasis on custody means in practice
is that the enormous potential of the correctional apparatus for
making creative decisions about its treatment of convicts is largely
unfulfilled.
In general, the commission complained,
the correctional "apparatus was "often used-or misused-by
both the criminal justice system and the public as a rug under
which disturbing problems and people can be swept."
Today, the situation is much worse. As
we have crammed more and more offenders into prison, we have simultaneously
retreated from the already minimal commitment to help them reenter
productive society. Indeed, many states have moved beyond their
traditional indifference to rehabilitation and now embrace what
some criminologists call "penal harm"-the self-conscious
use of "tough" measures to inflict pain and deprivation
on inmates in the name of retribution and deterrence. The pragmatic
(if mostly rhetorical) support for rehabilitation has been pushed
aside by an angry reaction to anything that might seem to "coddle"
criminals. One sign of this shift is the reemergence of chain
gangs, punitive and degrading inmate labor, and prison stripes.
Another is the increasing criticism of job training, education,
and even drug treatment in prison as frills that make life too
easy for inmates. And so we continue, as in the 1960s, to recycle
offenders from unproductive confinement to unsupportive, chaotic
communities and back again, but now with a certain self-righteous
satisfaction that we are doing so in the interests of justice
and morality.
What is most frustrating about the virtual
abandonment of the commitment to rehabilitation is that it comes
just as we are increasingly learning that rehabilitation can work.
Once again, there are no magic remedies. But we do know that we
can turn around the lives of many-not all-of the people who must
spend some time behind bars. We have learned enough, indeed, that
we can now move beyond the sterile debate about whether rehabilitation
"works" in the abstract to the more specific question
of what exactly works, why it works, and for whom. As with prevention
programs outside prison walls, there are some common principles
running through the most promising efforts. In particular, recent
research makes clear that the "holistic" or comprehensive
approach that often characterizes the best crime-prevention programs
aimed at vulnerable children, youths, and families is what works
best for rehabilitating prisoners as well. Offenders come into
the prisons with quite tangible problems, what one specialist
calls "criminogenic needs." If we fail to address those
problems, we shouldn't be surprised if released offenders fail
on the outside. If we do address them, we may be able to change
their lives. Consider two examples where the evidence of success
is strongest: drug treatment for prisoners and "graduated
reentry" into society for violent juvenile offenders.
The need for effective drug treatment
for prisoners is obvious enough. Experts estimate that as many
as 50 to 60 percent of state prison inmates have a drug problem
sufficiently severe to warrant treatment. Yet only a fraction
now receive any treatment at all, even under the most lenient
definition of what treatment means- and far fewer get the kind
of intensive, prolonged treatment that is most likely to make
a difference. In 1996, California, with an inmate population of
over 145,000, up to 70 percent of them serious drug abusers, had
only 400 drug-treatment beds in its entire prison system (since
then a 1200-bed treatment facility has been added). Some states
do better, as does the federal prison system. But the overall
picture is bleak.
Here too, it's important to be tough-minded.
Not all drug treatment works, in or out of prison; and no treatment
works well unless it is offered with sufficient intensity and
continuity. But the most effective programs have shown substantial
success in keeping offenders out of crime once they leave prison.
What works best, on the evidence, is intensive residential treatment
in prison followed by comprehensive aftercare in the community.
One impressive recent example is the Key program in Delaware,
which has been studied by the University of Delaware criminologist
James Inciardi.
The Key program enrolled prisoners in
a separate, residential treatment unit within the state's main
prison for twelve to fifteen months of treatment, followed by
six months of aftercare-which included continued drug treatment
and job training-in a transitional house in the community. Among
a comparison group of prisoners who did not participate in either
phase of the program, 70 percent were rearrested over the course
of eighteen months. Of those offenders who went through the in-prison
program but not the aftercare, 52 percent were rearrested. Another
group, which received only the aftercare program, were rearrested
at a rate of 35 percent-suggesting that the aftercare experience,
though relatively short, may have had the most impact. Finally,
only 29 percent of those who went through both the prison and
the aftercare phases were rearrested within eighteen months.
Narrowing the gap between the need and
the availability of treatment is especially important for women
behind bars. We've seen that women are the fastest-growing segment
of the incarcerated population, and most of the increase is accounted
for by drug offenders and women sentenced for property crimes
related to their drug use. Yet the majority of those women lack
access to drug treatment of any kind, much less the kind of continuum
from residential treatment through aftercare that characterizes
the best treatment programs for prisoners. It would be hard to
come up with a more self-defeating policy than this one-to pack
the prisons and jails with women whose main problem is their drug
abuse and then systematically ignore their need for treatment.
The principle of providing a continuum
of care from custody to the community also underlies the most
promising efforts to reintegrate serious young offenders. The
Violent Juvenile Offender program (VJO) was launched in 1980 under
the auspices of the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, in response to the inadequacies of the conventional
handling of chronically violent youths. Unlike most programs for
juvenile offenders, VJO was explicitly based on well-established
criminological theories about why youths become involved in violence
in the first place and it sought to address the major obstacles
to reintegration suggested by these theories. In particular, VJO
was designed to strengthen the bonds that linked youths to "prosocial"
institutions-their families, the workplace, the school, and "straight"
peers. Those goals were to be accomplished by a much more concerted,
individualized, and intensive approach than was usual in juvenile
justice. A key feature of the program was its emphasis on "graduated
reentry." Skilled case managers would guide youths through
three phases: first, pre-release training inside the institution,
then aftercare in a transitional living situation outside the
prison walls; and finally reentry into self-sustaining life in
the community. Providing tangible services, including job placement,
was a central part of this process.
The project operated in four cities in
the early 1980s: Boston, Detroit, Memphis, and Newark. As is usually
the case, practice departed considerably from theory. The amount
of help given to offenders at the various sites differed considerably.
The Newark site barely got off the ground at all. In Boston and
Detroit, where the program was implemented consistently and well,
the results were impressive: the program lowered rates of reoffending
among this very tough, chronically violent population substantially,
as compared to a control group, and even those who did reoffend
took longer to do so. One of the most important ingredients of
the success in Boston and Detroit was linking youths to real job
placements with subsidized salaries. Where VJO worked, then, it
seems to have worked in much the same way, and for much the same
reasons, as some of the prevention programs (like multisystemic
therapy) we examined in chapter 3. The case managers approach
was hands-on and individualized; it addressed the whole range
of the youths' relations with community and family and, at its
best, offered tangible opportunities to change young offenders'
lives for the better.
But despite the evidence of effectiveness,
these principles- comprehensive, intensive treatment coupled with
aftercare-have only rarely been put into practice for juveniles,
much less for adults. Critics often complain that the juvenile
justice system focuses too much on rehabilitation, at the expense
of "tough" responses to youth crime. Yet a recent survey
by the National Association of Child Advocates found that, on
average, 60 percent of state juvenile justice spending goes to
house youth in institutions, and only 4 percent to aftercare programs
for young offenders.
Indeed, such is the punitive character
of our current response to young people in trouble that even the
most basic services are in short supply. Half of the country's
juvenile facilities are in violation of federal and state laws
that require at least minimal education for incarcerated minors.
This situation is sometimes defended on the grounds that young
people who have broken the law don't deserve a level of schooling
that even many law-abiding youngsters may not get. But it would
be difficult to imagine a more self-defeating stance: if we want
to ensure that young offenders commit more- and worse-crimes,
this is surely one way to do it.
Nor is this problem confined to juveniles.
The same self-defeating impulse has led to a radical deterioration
in post-secondary education programs throughout the adult prisons.
In 1994, over half of state prison systems reported that they
had made cuts in inmate education programs during the preceding
five years, and some had eliminated them altogether. The 1994
federal Omnibus Crime Bill, which eliminated federal "Pell
Grant" funding for prison education programs, accelerated
the decline. Between 1994 and 1995 alone, the number of state
prison inmates enrolled in post-secondary education dropped from
38,000 to 21,000-this in a population of close to 1 million. As
of the 1994-1995 academic year, about half of state prison systems
offered some kind of baccalaureate program: by the following year,
only a third did.
There is still much to learn. We know
less than we should about how to design effective rehabilitation
programs because we have not launched enough of them to allow
us to learn from our achievements and failures. And it is especially
important not to overstate the case for the programs that now
exist. Much that goes under the rubric of rehabilitation really
doesn't work, at least not well; and on close inspection there
is little reason why it should. Few of these programs have been
rooted in any clear theory of why offenders got the way they are
or what they need in order to change; those that have been based
on clear principles are often weakly implemented and short-lived.
We then evaluate the programs, discover-not surprisingly-that
they don't make much difference, and conclude that all we can
do is to warehouse offenders in cells.
These cautions apply with special force
to some programs that come under the heading of "intermediate
sanctions"-punishments that fall somewhere between simple
probation and incarceration, including boot-camp prisons, electronic
monitoring of offenders, home confinement, and intensive surveillance
by probation or parole officers. Many of these programs are politically
popular; they are often lauded as being both "tough"
and inexpensive. Unfortunately, they are also mostly ineffective.
A growing number of evaluation studies, for example, have found
little evidence that the typical boot-camp approach-which usually
involves putting young offenders through a regime of quasi-military
discipline for a few months and then releasing them into unchanged
communities-has any effect on recidivism. Studies of electronic
monitoring and home confinement generally show similarly limited
results, as do evaluations of most intensive supervision programs,
which are designed to tighten control over offenders through increased
contacts with parole officers, frequent drug testing, and other
measures. A careful study of "intensively supervised probation"
(ISP) programs conducted by the RAND corporation in the early
1990s, for example, found that most had little, if any, impact
on recidivism.
Overall, what these studies suggest, not
for the first time, is that the quest for the quick fix is illusory:
programs that promise fast results at low cost, but in practice
deliver nothing more than new forms of monitoring and punishment,
are unlikely to be successful. By themselves, as Francis Cullen,
John Paul Wright, and Brandon Applegate put it in a comprehensive
review, "surveillance and control appear to have little impact
on offender recidivism." On reflection, that isn't very surprising:
simply forcing people on probation to undergo regular drug testing,
for example, without simultaneously offering them serious treatment
for their addiction is obviously a prescription for failure.
On the other hand, in the relatively rare
instances where intermediate sanctions also include a systematic
effort to address offenders' underlying problems-where the programs
adopt an explicit commitment to rehabilitation-the results are
often much more encouraging. RAND's study of intensive probation,
for example, found reductions in recidivism in those ISP programs
that offered clients some form of treatment. Evaluations of the
bootcamp program in New York State, which has a much stronger
emphasis on treatment and reintegration of offenders than those
in most other states, also note more positive results, at least
in the short run.
Finally, what holds for prevention programs
outside the justice system applies inside as well: even the best
efforts at rehabilitation of offenders will be undermined unless
they are linked to a broader strategy to improve conditions in
the communities to which offenders will return. We won't be able
to place young offenders in jobs if the jobs don't exist. (For
that matter, it's unrealistic to expect much public support for
that kind of investment when many law-abiding youths can't get
jobs either.) We know that intensive drug treatment for inmates
can make a difference, but we also know from years of research
that the likelihood of long-term freedom from relapse is slim
without the support of a steady job and a stable family. The VJO
researchers emphasize this point in assessing both the virtues
and the limits of their program: the reintegration of young offenders
into productive society, they remind us, requires "the availability
of concrete alternatives and opportunities."
One reason why rehabilitation became so
widely discredited after the 1970s is that it was tagged as "soft"
on criminals. But in the most effective rehabilitation programs,
the opposite is true.
Our current practice of simply recycling
offenders from institutional warehouses to blighted communities
and back again without serious attention to their underlying needs
is certainly punitive; and it may help to soothe public anger
about crime. But it also makes few if any demands on offenders
to change their ways or to do their part to confront and overcome
the problems that brought them into prison in the first place.
We say, with much self-righteousness, that people who "do
the crime" should "do the time." But though doing
the time may be painful, by itself it asks nothing of the prisoner.
A reintegrative approach, on the other hand, insists that inmates
take responsibility for their futures-that they get clean, learn
a skill, learn to read, learn to manage their anger, and, where
possible, help to provide restitution for their victims. In effect,
a serious commitment to rehabilitation represents a kind of contract
between inmates and society. We agree to provide the tools that
can help offenders "make it" in legitimate society;
offenders agree to learn to use them. We should ask nothing less.
*
Building a reintegrative justice system,
however, also requires us to reopen the question of whom we are
putting in prison and what we hope to accomplish by doing so.
We need to ask whether all of the people who are now incarcerated
really ought to be behind bars, and for how long; and how different
states are faring under different sentencing regimes. It may come
as a surprise that we now know astonishingly little about any
of these questions, but it is true. For the most part, the rush
to incarcerate has been both indiscriminate and conducted with
an astonishing absence of serious evaluation. It is more than
a little odd that some of the same people who would scrutinize
every penny of spending on, say, a job-training initiative or
a rehabilitation program for delinquents have been more than willing
to throw money at untested and unevaluated sentencing reforms
that collectively amount to one of the largest governmental efforts
at social engineering of our time. We need to bring to the enterprise
of punishment some of the hard-nosed accounting we routinely apply
to other kinds of government spending.
Some people would respond that there is
no need to examine these issues, because virtually everyone now
in prison is there for good reason, and their sentences are, if
anything, far too short. It is common to read, for example, that
94 percent of state prison inmates are either violent or repeat
offenders-which implies, of course, that all of them belong there.
That figure-popularized by Princeton's John DiIulio and repeated
over and over again in the popular press-is technically correct.
But it is also disingenuous, since it glosses over what, exactly,
the repeaters were repeating. In the state prisons, at last count,
about one in five inmates had neither current nor prior convictions
for any violent crime; though many of them are indeed repeaters,
they are nonviolent repeaters. In the federal prison system, similarly,
roughly one in five inmates have been sentenced for offenses that
are both minor and nonviolent, mainly low-level drug crimes. The
criminologist Joan Petersilia of the University of California
at Irvine has calculated that, as of the early 1990s, about 26
percent of new admissions to California's state prisons were for
technical violations of parole (like failing to show up for an
appointment with a parole officer), minor property crimes, or
administrative parole violations involving minor drug offenses.
At the end of 1995, California's prisons held over 6,000 inmates
sentenced for what, in law-enforcement jargon, is called "petty
with a prior"-petty theft with a prior conviction for another
crime of theft. Over 12,000 more were sentenced for simple drug
possession. Incarcerating these two groups of offenders costs
California taxpayers about a quarter of a billion dollars a year.
The usual justification for incarcerating
so many offenders who have been convicted of minor crimes is that
they are actually very dangerous people, whatever the nature of
their current offense (or that the current offense has been "pled
down" from something much more serious). And that is doubtless
true for some of them. But how many? And should the rest be in
state or federal prison? If so, for how long? If not, where should
they be? A handful of studies in individual states have tried
to answer these questions. So far, they suggest that though the
number of truly non-dangerous people in prison may be less than
some critics of incarceration have argued, it is more than defenders
of our current sentencing practices have acknowledged.
One of the consequences of our too-quick
resort to incarceration, paradoxically, is that we are not tough
enough on some kinds of minor offenders who could benefit from
more stringent, but also more constructive, sanctions. The movement
to establish special drug courts in many cities both illustrates
the problem and suggests one kind of solution. The war on drugs
has flooded the courts, jails, and prisons with low-level drug
offenders who pose little danger to the community. What usually
happens now is that large numbers of those offenders are shunted
into institutions, where they receive no serious help with their
addiction, and are then dumped back into the community without
any improvement in their prospects for successful reintegration.
That is obviously a recipe for futility, and it results in a depressing-and
costly-cycle of repeated incarceration and petty crime. The drug
court- pioneered in cities like Miami and Oakland-is designed
to stop that cycle by keeping minor drug offenders out of jail
while using the threat of jail to push them into treatment. Those
who successfully complete a treatment program have their charges
dropped.
Like the most effective rehabilitation
programs inside the prisons, the drug court, at its best, establishes
a kind of contract with the offender. Freedom is contingent on
making a serious effort to change. Breaking the law, therefore,
has real consequences, but ones that are designed to help offenders
take responsibility for their lives. For many of the people who
wind up in drug court, taking on that challenge is much harder
than simply "doing the time" in a jail or prison yet
again, which is why some prefer to go to jail rather than undergo
the rigors of the drug court's program. Drug courts are not a
panacea, and they will not live up to their potential unless we
also invest more in treatment facilities that are usually inadequate
in most cities that have established drug courts. But they are
a creative response to the twin problems of overincarceration
and neglect, and the principles they embody may apply to other
kinds of low-level offenders as well.
The needless and costly incarceration
of less serious offenders, moreover, is only one side of the problem.
Another is the dangerously clumsy way in which our current approach
to sentencing handles the most violent offenders. The rush to
ever more rigid mandatory sentences has sharply reduced discretion
in the justice system, and that cuts two ways. It means that many
minor offenders, who might be released if they were given an individualized
evaluation, are now indiscriminately sent to prison. But it also
weakens the systems ability to isolate those offenders who-even
on their first crime-clearly pose enough of a threat to require
long-term separation from the community. As a result, we may let
truly violent people out of prison more quickly than we do relatively
minor drug offenders. That is an invitation to tragedy, and coming
up with a better approach is one of the genuinely tough challenges
for a more progressive criminal justice system. Some observers
have suggested that we need to return to a greater degree of "indeterminate"
sentencing-restoring to judges the discretion to invoke open-ended
sentences for particularly dangerous offenders. That strategy
raises formidable and troubling questions of its own; for now,
the point is that we need to slow down long enough to put those
questions on the table. In California, recent legislation has
established a sentencing commission that will examine that issue,
among others. Something similar is needed at the national level.
We should establish a national commission to review our current
sentencing practices, assess what we know about their impact on
crime rates and on our communities, and evaluate possible alternatives.
We've barely begun to ask these questions, in the current climate,
much less answer them.
*
A third priority is to shift criminal
justice resources toward promising community-oriented policing
strategies. I've argued that criminologists have generally been
on target in their analysis of the limits of incarceration and
in their understanding of the links between social exclusion and
violent crime. They have been less so when it comes to the potential
of the police. For years, conventional criminological wisdom held
that there was little the police could do to prevent crime. That
conclusion was based on sparse evidence, notably from a handful
of studies of the effects of minor variations in conventional
police patrol tactics. But as far back as the 1970s, there was
scattered but suggestive evidence that some police strategies
could prevent crime-at least in the short term. And today our
sense of what the police can do is changing rapidly. We now have
intriguing signs that the way the police operate may matter a
great deal.
It is important not to take this point
too far. The recent sharp declines in crime in New York City,
for example, are often attributed to the more intensive police
practices adopted since the early 1990s, and that is doubtless
true to some extent. But no one knows exactly how much of the
decline is the result of new police strategies, and how much reflects
other factors-such as shifts in drug use and drug dealing, the
spread of prevention programs, or changes in young people's attitudes
about violence. Some other cities have enjoyed substantial declines
in street crime in the same period without adopting similar police
practices (Los Angeles is one major example). And even if we grant
that something the New York police are doing is partly responsible
for declining crime rates, it is not yet clear what, exactly,
that something is. Many people believe that the "zero tolerance"
or "quality of life" approach to disorder-"rousting"
youth on street corners, moving the homeless or assertive "squeegee
men" off the street, and so on-is responsible for the declines
in violent crime. But little evidence has been offered to support
that view, and there is much to argue against it. "Zero tolerance"
policing tends to sweep large numbers of low-level offenders into
the justice system and, typically, to recycle them quickly back
to the street with little else done to change their lives. To
be sure, some genuinely dangerous people may be caught up in the
net. And it is certainly plausible that cracking down on minor
offenders and on community disorder can have an indirect impact
on more serious crime by generally improving the quality of neighborhood
life. But it is much less plausible to argue that this approach
could bring reductions in homicide and other serious crimes of
violence that are not only dramatically large, but larger than
those for less serious offenses.
A much stronger case can be made for other
policing strategies that, unlike "zero tolerance," focus
directly on some of the most important sources of community violence.
Efforts to get guns off the street and to target open-air drug
markets and violent drug gangs exemplify this approach, and may
be the most important ingredient of police successes in New York
and elsewhere. These strategies are based on some important realities
about the distribution of violent crime in the cities that we've
only recently begun to appreciate. One is that a very large proportion
of violent crime is concentrated in a handful of high-crime neighborhoods,
often in a few specific "hot spots" within those neighborhoods.
And within those high-crime areas, violence is disproportionately
likely to be the work of repeat offenders carrying guns. Accordingly,
focusing police attention on gun carrying in high-crime neighborhoods
can, in theory, have a concentrated impact on crime.
And some promising recent research suggests
that the theory is correct. The clearest evidence comes from a
study by Lawrence Sherman and his colleagues of a police crackdown
on guns in a high-crime area of Kansas City in the early 1990s.
A team of officers was assigned to a "target" beat with
a homicide rate twenty times the national average. Their strategy
was to ferret out illegal weapons, mainly by intensifying traffic
stops of suspicious cars to search for guns. (One of the experiment's
more disturbing findings was that about one out of every twenty-eight
traffic stops turned up at least one illegal firearm.)
Apparently, the intensive focus on guns
worked. Gun crime in the target beat was 49 percent lower during
the six months of the experiment than in the six months before
it began. There were other encouraging findings as well. One common
limitation of similar police crackdowns has been that they often
"displace" crime to other parts of a city, rather than
reducing it overall. But that did not seem to happen in the Kansas
City experiment. Neighboring police beats did not suffer significant
increases in gun crime during the period of the experiment, and
some had decreases- suggesting, if anything, that the positive
effects may have "spilled over" from the experimental
beat to adjoining neighborhoods.
There are limits to the Kansas City findings-for
one thing, the follow-up period was quite short-but they suggest
what may be possible if police forces concentrate their efforts
on the most critical sources of a city's violence problem. Doing
so may help to break the self-perpetuating cycle of guns, violence,
and fear in the most stricken inner-city neighborhoods. Much gun
violence- especially among youths-is defensive: young people carry
guns because others are carrying them, and, rightly or wrongly,
they believe that arming themselves in response will protect them
against potential assault. (In a 1996 poll, 2 out of 5 teenagers
living in high-crime neighborhoods reported that they carried
a weapon for protection.) Reversing that malign logic through
a concerted effort at local disarmament could bring substantial
benefits-especially if police departments work closely with other
agencies to tackle the roots of concentrated gun violence in the
cities.
Precisely this kind of partnership may
help account for recent striking declines in gun-related youth
violence in Boston. In response to an upsurge in youth homicides
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a coalition that included the
city police, federal agencies, the probation and parole authorities,
and a variety of community organizations came together to develop
a coordinated strategy to target guns and those most likely to
use them. Police and federal agents scrutinized local gun markets,
tracking guns used in violent crimes back to their original source
and cracking down on the gun dealers most responsible for allowing
guns to fall into youthful hands. Analyzing patterns of youth
homicide in the city, they found that it was heavily concentrated
in a few high-crime gang "turfs," and that most of those
involved-as offenders or as victims-had encountered the criminal
justice system before. Police presence was beefed up in those
areas; it was also made clear to gang youth that further violence
would be followed by increasingly tough measures against probation
or parole violations and increased arrests. Meanwhile, both public
and nonprofit agencies worked to expand the opportunities available
to youths vulnerable to the appeals of gangs and violence. The
city opened a network of community centers staffed with street
workers whose job was to reach out to gangs and to defuse potentially
violent situations. The police department itself helped to create
after-school programs, a youth basketball league, and a program
offering summer jobs (and part-time school year jobs) to local
youth. It is difficult to know exactly how much of the city's
declines in youth violence can be attributed to this combined
effort (other Massachusetts cities have also seen large drops
in weapon-related violence among youth); but the early evidence
suggests that it has had a significant impact, and in a very short
time.
A number of other promising strategies
also involve linking the police more closely with community residents-especially
the young-in order to head off violence before it happens. In
New Haven, for example, an innovative program brings police together
with mental health workers from Yale University to work with children
who have experienced violence at home or on the streets. The goal
is to reduce the damage to childrens' development that often follows
exposure to severe violence-damage that, as the New Haven team
points out, may lead to more violence in the future:
When a child is exposed to violence on
a regular basis, identifying with the power and excitement of
delinquent and violent role models may become a chronic hedge
against feeling helpless and afraid. When the most powerful models
in the home and neighborhood exercise their potency with a fist
or a gun, the lure of violent and criminal activity may overcome
the power and rewards in productive participation in the life
of the community.
Inner-city children are routinely exposed,
often repeatedly, to serious violence (40 percent of sixth, eighth,
and tenth graders in high-crime neighborhoods, in a 1992 survey,
reported witnessing at least one violent crime in the preceding
year). But few receive any systematic attention when it happens.
In most cities, the traditional police response has been to arrive
after the fact, gather information, and leave. If a child is seen
at all by mental health professionals after a violent incident,
it is usually long afterward. In the New Haven approach, police
officers are trained in child development issues, and in turn
mental health specialists spend time with police on the street
getting to know the realities of both violence and .police work.
Mental health workers provide a consultation service that enables
police to refer children quickly to appropriate help; a team of
clinicians is on call twenty-four hours a day, able to see children
on the spot, if necessary, at the police station or in their homes.
The principles behind this kind of creative
response are clear: to prevent violence in the future by making
a supportive response to violence in the present, to ensure that
youthful victims are not simply left to cope on their own, and,
at best, to link immediate incidents of violence to the underlying
problems that so often give rise to them, as in this example recounted
by the Yale team:
A fifteen-year-old boy at the periphery
of a drug-dealing operation was shot and killed in a crowded housing
project.... In the following days, crowds of distraught teenagers
gathered on the street at the scene of the killing, and local
merchants and neighbors complained that they were causing a disturbance.
The district police supervisor ... directed officers under his
command not to arrest the youths and instead invited them to the
local substation for a series of discussions focused on the grief
associated with their friend's death and the general frustration
and hopelessness regarding opportunities for young people in the
community. Subsequent to these meetings, the supervisor contacted
parents he knew and worked with them to organize a meeting for
the teenagers with representatives of job training services.
Another promising police-community partnership,
launched by the Washington-based Milton Eisenhower Foundation
in the early 1990s, was inspired in part by Japanese examples.
Many neighborhoods in Japanese cities have "kobans,"
mini-police stations staffed by officers who take a particularly
active role in reaching out to community residents. Eisenhower
built on this experience, setting up koban-style programs in four
cities-Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Each site mixed community policing with a variety of youth development
initiatives. The San Juan program, for example, operated in Caimito,
an extremely poor neighborhood with high unemployment and school
dropout rates. A well-established Puerto Rican nonprofit organization,
Centro Sister Isolina Ferre, established a "campus"
in Caimito that joined a neighborhood police koban with classrooms,
small businesses, and recreation facilities. There were computer-
and office skills training classes, day care, alternative schools
for dropouts, health screenings and immunization for neighborhood
children, and an after-school "safe haven" program for
six- to twelve-year-olds.
Centro also hired "streetwise"
young people to work as youth advocates (or "intercesores"),
mediating among neighborhood youth, the schools, and the justice
system. These advocates worked closely with the koban-based police,
who would contact them when local youths were detained. In pursuit
of what the foundation calls "community equity policing,"
the youth advocates and neighborhood residents worked as genuine
partners with the police; community leaders even helped to select
and train the koban-based officers. Estimating the impact of local
programs like these on crime rates is intrinsically difficult,
but a careful evaluation found that serious crimes fell significantly
over four years of the program in Centro's target neighborhood-considerably
moreso than in the city as a whole.
All of these innovative police strategies-from
targeting illegal guns to working with grief-stricken victims
of violence-share two basic themes. They are sharply focused,
and they are explicitly preventive. They are not designed to intimidate
unruly youths or to sweep troublesome or unsightly people off
the street under a vague mandate to promote "order";
they target the sources of serious violence in the hardest-hit
communities, and they try to address them before the violence
erupts. Instead of simply acting as a mechanism to funnel offenders
into the criminal justice system after they have already caused
damage, the police work to keep crime from happening in the first
place and to reduce its destructive consequences for individuals,
families, and communities. This is a better way to think about
policing, and it has much in common with the "holistic"
approach of the most effective early intervention and youth development
programs.
But to realize the potential of these
innovative strategies, we will need to shift our priorities in
criminal justice spending. It seems increasingly clear that the
police are the part of our justice system with the greatest potential
for making significant inroads against violent crime. But in many
cities, police departments have been fiscally strapped for years
while more and more funds have been diverted into the prisons.
Making a bigger investment in the police
must also be accompanied by a stronger insistence that police
departments be held accountable for what they do-a principle we
are in danger of forgetting in the current enthusiasm for aggressive
policing In New York, the adoption of assertive "quality
of life" policing has gone hand in hand with growing numbers
of police shootings and spectacular examples of excessive force
and police harassment in minority communities. But there is no
evidence that police must endanger lives and violate basic civil
liberties in order to control crime. There is a difference between
investing in smart, targeted policing strategies and simply giving
the police free rein to run roughshod over the poor. Good police
work can be an important addition to a broader arsenal of weapons
against violent crime, but we must avoid the temptation to deploy
the police as a cordon sanitaire to contain the urban problems
we have chosen not to confront.
Despite the troubling drift of criminal
justice policy in recent t; years, these new approaches-from drug
courts to creative police community collaborations-represent the
stirrings of a more hopeful vision of what the justice system
might accomplish. And though they take a variety of forms, these
emerging strategies share some common themes. One is that a central
purpose of the criminal justice system should be what public health
specialists call "harm reduction": it should emphasize
preventing violence over simply punishing offenders after the
fact, look for ways of neutralizing the factors-especially guns-that
often cause troubles to escalate into tragedies, and defuse the
settings in which violence is most likely, like open-air drug
markets. Another theme is what we could call the principle of
constructive consequences. The best of the new approaches to rehabilitation,
for example, affirm that offenders should be held accountable
for their behavior. But they should be held accountable in ways
that promote enduring changes, breaking the futile cycle of offending,
punishment, and reoffending by resolving the underlying problems
(like drug addictions or lack of skills) that typically set it
in motion. Both principles, if widely translated into practice,
could take us several steps closer to a justice system that is
at once more effective and more humane-and, for that matter, less
expensive. As with prevention programs outside the justice system,
the path seems increasingly clear. Whether we will follow it,
of course, is a very different question.
p190
... the state of California has opened
only one college since 1984 -- and twenty-one prisons.
Crime
and Punishment in America
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