To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility

In the 30 years since the Violence Commission, then, America has not met the goals of establishing justice and insuring domestic tranquility, as set forth in the preamble of the Constitution.

How can we implement the Violence Commission's call for "creative new action" that generates "urban reconstruction"?

Part of the answer can be found in the public response in America after the 1992 violence in South Central Los Angeles associated with the verdict in the first Rodney King trial. A New York Times/CBS poll asked a national sample of Americans whether they would be willing to spend more on initiatives that worked in the inner city -- especially on education and employment, even if it meant increased taxes. A majority of those polled answered yes. The next question in the poll was, "What is the major obstacle against doing more?" A majority of those polled around the nation said "lack of knowledge."¹ Americans don't believe we know what works.

But that is not true. To a considerable extent since the Violence Commission, we have learned a great deal about what doesn't work and what does work, based on scientific studies and careful evaluations. It therefore would make sense to stop doing what doesn't work and start doing what does work, but at a "scale equal to the dimensions of the problem," to use the words of the Kerner Riot Commission that immediately preceded the Violence Commission.

In Chapter 4, we review what doesn't work and then what does work. Our criteria for judging "what works" are 1) whether a policy or program reduces or increases injustice and inequality in America and 2) whether a policy or program has proven effective based on scientific outcome evaluation.² As we already have suggested, it is not consistent with available scientific evidence to think that only criminal justice solutions reduce violence, reduce fear and insure domestic tranquility. Many criminal justice solutions don't achieve these goals at all, or not very well, based on existing knowledge. And there is scientific evidence that many human investment strategies provide multiple solutions -- for example, not only less crime but also more child development, more youth development, more progress in school, more employability, more job creation linked to economic development and more effective, community sensitive policing. These multiple solutions are consistent with the opportunity-focused recommendations of the Violence Commission.

We suggested in Chapter 3 that trickle down, supply side economics doesn't work -- except for the rich. Trickle down economics increases inequality and injustice. One part of supply side economics in the 1980s was the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA). We know from evaluations commissioned by the United States Department of Labor that JTPA failed for high school dropouts, who are at high risk of crime. Greatly underfunded, JTPA is more a "work first" than a "training first" program. Another component of supply side economics is the notion of the Enterprise Zone -- something that we imported from England. Enterprise Zones are the notion that, for example, if you provide enough tax breaks, corporations will move to South Central Los Angeles, employ young African-American men who rioted in 1992 and provide job alternatives to crime. It didn't happen. The failure of the Enterprise Zones is well documented -- for example, by the Urban Institute in Washington, DC and by the United States General Accounting Office. The failure also is well recorded in conservative journals like the Economist and Business Week. (The newer notion of "Empowerment Zones" still is under evaluation.) Among other reasons given by corporations for why they would not move back and employ inner-city youth was the opinion that youth were not adequately trained.³ Hence, the need for "training first" programs for the hardest to employ -- at a time when our national policy tends to be "work first."

We suggested in Chapter 2 that prison building has greatly increased racial injustice in America, led to the development of a prison-industrial complex in which rural white communities lobby for big grants to disproportionately incarcerate poor minorities, been extremely expensive, taken budget dollars away from more just and cost-effective programs, had negative impacts on women, and had its crime-and drug-reducing impacts exaggerated by political leaders and the media.

Chapter 2 showed zero tolerance policing has created injustice and inequality by its insensitive treatment of minorities. And there is little scientific evaluation evidence that zero tolerance reduces violent crime.

Many other examples have been documented of criminal justice, youth, education and employment initiatives that have proven to fail.⁴

False Rhetoric

We also need to realize that, in the 1980s and 1990s, a false rhetoric was used to sugar coat such failed policies. Here we refer to phrases such as voluntarism, self sufficiency and empowerment. These can be helpful concepts at the street level -- if applied with wisdom and discretion. But our concern is with their abuse since the Violence Commission.

For example, a highly publicized 1997 national summit on voluntarism for crime, drug and other programs in poor communities was viewed with skepticism by many observers. The summit was held in Philadelphia. At the time of the summit, the New York Times interviewed residents in the impoverished Logan neighborhood of North Philadelphia. One resident thought that summit was a bit "naive" because "you need a certain expertise among the volunteers, and in communities like Logan, people don't have the expertise." The director of a non-profit community program in the neighborhood observed, "Volunteering is really good, but people need a program to volunteer for, and in order to do that, you have to have dollars." Pablo Eisenberg, former Executive Director of the Center for Community Change and now a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, concluded that "no matter whether you attract lots of volunteers, money is still the most important ingredient in reducing poverty and helping poor people. You need money even to organize volunteers." In an article on America's Promise, the national organization created at the Philadelphia summit to promote volunteerism, among other goals, Youth Today magazine asked whether the organization was "delivering for youth or fatally flawed." The executive director of one Midwest non-profit community group concluded that, after 2 years, the new creation was "long on talk and hoopla and short on doing." Although America's Promise promotes people working for free, as volunteers, the New York Times reported that the president and CEO of the group was being paid $250,000 per year.⁵

Or take an international comparison to illustrate political buzzwords. In the early 1990s, America won the war in the Persian Gulf because of large numbers of well trained professional staff, large numbers of well trained support staff and a huge amount of expensive, high quality equipment. Yet, when it comes to investments in the inner city and the truly disadvantaged, including crime and drug prevention, we often are told that there is not enough money for adequate and adequately paid professional staff, adequate and adequately paid support staff, and good equipment -- like computers and facilities in public schools and at the headquarters of the inner-city, grassroots community-based non-profit organizations that are responsible for a great deal of what works. Instead, we are told that, for example, a grassroots community group ought to get initial grants from the public and private sectors. Then it ought to convert into "self sufficient" operations, in part with the help of (often poorly trained) volunteers. Volunteers should be combined with "partnerships" and "coalition building" among other financially competing and often penurious groups in the inner city. This, we are told, will lead to the "empowerment" of our neighborhoods and our schools, less injustice, less crime and more domestic tranquility. But it hasn't usually worked that way -- as anyone who has labored in the trenches knows. This is the rhetoric of those who have a double standard. They are not prepared, financially or morally, to invest to scale in our human capital -- in our children, youth, families and neighborhoods.

We cannot ignore this moral dimension. We must keep in mind the Violence Commission's "higher claim on the nation's conscience." We suggest that:

• It is immoral for the states to spend more on prison building than on higher education.

• It is immoral for white corporations to profit from incarcerating minorities sentenced with racially biased drug laws.

• It is immoral for the rate of incarceration of African American men in America today to be 4 times higher than the rate of incarceration of Black men in pre-Mandela, apartheid South Africa.

• It is immoral for the federal government to let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

• It is immoral for almost a quarter of America's youngest children to live in poverty.

• It is immoral for CEOs to earn 419 times as much as their factory workers.

• It is immoral, through lack of campaign finance reform, for America to create a one dollar one vote democracy, rather than retain a one person, one vote democracy.

We cannot give up the moral high ground if we are to establish justice and insure domestic tranquility. We need to mobilize the clergy of America to make this point.

So much for examples of what doesn't work, for the political sugar coating that often encases them, and for their not uncommon lack of morality. It is more hopeful to talk about what works. We want to give just a few interrelated examples, based on scientific evaluation.⁶ The examples cover preschool, safe havens after school, public school reform, "training first" jobs programs, community development and banking, and problem-oriented, community-equity policing.

One of the best examples of what works is preschool. According to the conservative CEOs on the Committee for Economic Development in New York, for every dollar invested in preschool, America gets almost $5.00 of benefits in return -- over the lifetime of a child who receives preschool. Those benefits include less involvement in crime, less involvement in drugs, less involvement in teen pregnancy, more likelihood to complete school, and more likelihood to become economically independent. Preschool makes economic sense. Yet less than half of all eligible poor children are enrolled in Head Start -- because we are told we don't have the money for our children, especially the 1 in 4 of the youngest, who are living in poverty. At the same time, in many European countries, like France and Sweden, preschool is considered a basic human right.⁷

Some claim that, after a child leaves Head Start in America, the benefits decline. That point is subject to scientific debate. For example, a recent study by researchers in North Carolina found that poor African-American children who received high quality day care from infancy to age 5 outperformed their peers all the way into adulthood.⁸

However, if, in fact, benefits do decline, at least for some, after a child leaves Head Start, is that not what one might predict -- given present policy? If we only partially fund Head Start, decrease the amount of money available to Head Start programs for management and training (as has been the case in recent years), and throw a child back onto the mean streets at age 5 or 6 without any corresponding interventions, what can we expect?

Every competent professional who works with children and youth has learned that America needs a continuum of interventions from early childhood through adulthood.

That is why, for children slightly older than preschoolers as well as for preteens, safe havens after school have worked. Evolving from the formative Carnegie Corporation report, A Matter of Time, in 1992, safe havens have become known as places where kids can go after school -- for help with their homework, social support and discipline from adult role models.⁹ During the week, youth get into the most trouble from 3:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. in the U.S.

Scientific comparison group evaluations by Columbia University and the Eisenhower Foundation have shown safe havens to be successful in reducing crime in public housing and other low income settings. Some indigenous, nonprofit, grassroot organization successes -- like the Dorchester Youth Collaborative in Boston; Koban, Inc., in Columbia, South Carolina; and Centro Sister Isolina Ferre in San Juan, Puerto Rico -- combine paid civilian coaches, counselors and advocates with paid police mentors.¹⁰

There are many local nonprofit programs that claim success, but the ones just illustrated can show scientific proof of success based on control group or comparison group designs. Some of the evaluated successes are secular and some are part of the outreach of religious organizations. Just to focus on one group or another, or to identify groups based on political ideology, misses our primary criterion for identifying a model to be replicated: statistically significant pre-post evaluation outcomes using valid comparison or control groups. All the evaluated, indigenous youth development successes identified here also are centers of local moral influence.

Big Brothers-Big Sisters, the largest national mentoring program, has been shown to work. Big Brothers-Big Sisters adult mentors meet with selected youth for several hours, 2 to 4 times a month for at least a year. A scientific control group evaluation by Public/Private Ventures of 8 sites, where more than 60 percent of the participants were from minority groups and 40 percent were very poor, showed significant impacts. Youth with matches to mentors were much less likely to start using illegal drugs or alcohol, and this was particularly true among minority youth. School behavior improved as did relationships with families. Public/Private Ventures concluded that $1,000 per year was needed per "volunteer" -- for recruitment, training and supervision by paid staff.¹¹ This recommendation complements findings by the Eisenhower Foundation that volunteerism cannot replace a solid and sufficiently large professional and support staff at the nonprofit organizations that are so successful implementing much of what works. Local nonprofit groups also need to possess, or secure, through technical assistance, skill in management, financial management, staff development, and board development, among other components of institutional capacity building.¹²

The foregoing successes are carried out after school. There also are many good examples of reform that work during school hours. One is the School Development Plan of James P. Comer, the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Child Study Center of Yale University. Parents, teachers and principals take over the management of inner-city schools -- and additional investments in youth, like counseling and mental health services, are available. Scientific, comparison group evaluations have been positive -- for example, in terms of less crime, less drugs, and higher grades for youth in Comer Schools versus youth who are not.¹³ Similarly, "full service community schools," as articulated by Joy G. Dryfoos in Safe Passage, have begun to demonstrate their worth. Partnering with nonprofit organizations, such schools integrate the delivery of quality education with whatever health and social services are judged necessary by a specific community. An illustration is the El Puente Academy of Peace and Justice in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.¹⁴ For high schoolers, a good example of success is the Ford Foundation's Quantum Opportunities program. Well-trained adult mentors work one-on-one with inner-city high school youth -- keeping them on track to good grades and high school completion, working out ways to earn money in the summer and providing venues for college education, if youth so choose. The original Brandeis University scientific control group evaluation showed that Quantum Opportunity students did much better than controls -- for example, in terms of less crime, less drugs, less teen pregnancy, better grades, more likelihood to complete high school and more likelihood to go on to college.¹⁵

These are all examples of public school reform. Private school vouchering schemes can create inequality. Persons who propose them like to say that the issue is choice. That is not so. There are plenty of scientifically proven inner-city public school successes for a school system to choose from -- like safe havens, the Comer School Development Plan, full service community schools and Quantum Opportunities. The real issue is accountability. Private schools funded through vouchers are not accountable to the taxpayers whose public sector money finances them.

For example, in Milwaukee, an African-American student who criticized her voucher school as racist was expelled. She sued on the grounds of free speech, but lost. The federal judge who wrote the opinion concluded that "restrictions on constitutional rights that would be protected at a public high school ...need not be honored at a private school.¹⁶

The issue in education also is money. The rich, who tend to support vouchers, often say the issue is not money. But what do the rich do? They send their teenagers to Andover or Exeter -- spending $20,000 a year on them. What we need is public financing of education that allows the annual level of investment per child in American inner cities to be the same as the annual level of investment per child in the suburbs.¹⁷

When young people do drop out of high school, we know that there are alternatives to the failed Job Training and Partnership Act -- and to crime -- that can get them back on track. Often, these are "training first" initiatives. Good examples are the Argus Learning for Living Center in the South Bronx and the Strive initiative, which also was begun in New York City. These programs begin with "tough love" for inner-city dropouts, many of whom have drug problems. The priority is on changing attitudes. A high initial priority is on life skills training -- like how to manage money and how to resolve conflicts. Then there is education and remedial education. When participants are ready, they move on to job training -- focused on jobs for which there is a demand. In the case of Argus, some training is for jobs in drug counseling. In a replication of Argus, in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., training is for excellent paying jobs for African-Americans in repairing telecommunications equipment. The program thus seeks to reduce the "digital divide." After the training and job placement, there is follow-up to ensure retention. Retention is a crucial phase because there are often adjustments that need to be made once a person is in the workforce.¹⁸ Child care and transportation, for example, need to be in place. Sometimes help is needed with how to get along with fellow employees and with supervisors. Without this kind of "training first" strategy, it is difficult to believe that America's present "work first" welfare reform will succeed for those who are the hardest to employ, including persons with drug problems.

In scientific comparison group evaluations of Argus, and in replications of Argus, the Eisenhower Foundation found Argus trainees to be less involved in crime, more likely to be employed and likely to have higher earnings more than comparison group members.¹⁹

A related model of "training first" success is the public sector Job Corps. Job Corps takes seriously the need to provide a supportive, structured environment for the youth and welfare recipients it seeks to assist. Job Corps features classroom courses, which can lead to high school equivalency degrees, counseling, and hands-on job training for very high-risk youth. Hence, as in individual community-based, nonprofit programs, like Argus, Job Corps carefully links education and training first, placement and support services. Job Corps participants are high school drop outs, usually about 16 to 22 years old, and often at risk of drug abuse, delinquency and welfare dependency. The average family income of Job Corps participants is less than $6,000 per year, 2 of 5 come from families on public assistance and more than 4 of 5 are high school dropouts. The typical participant is an 18-year-old minority high school dropout who reads at a seventh-grade level. ²⁰

In the 1980s, evaluations sponsored by the U.S. General Accounting Office and others included a representative sample of participants from 61 program sites. Participants and comparison youth were matched on age, race, poverty status and educational level. During the first 6 months after the program, Job Corps participants were 5 times more likely to have earned a high school diploma or general educational diploma than comparison youth. In contrast to comparison youth, program youth experienced improved health, employment and earnings outcomes over a 4 year period after the program. The program also was associated with reduced criminal behavior. During the program, participants had arrest rates significantly lower than comparison youth, and in the 4 years after the program, participants had significantly fewer arrests for serious crimes than comparison youth. A 1991 evaluation by the Congressional Budget Office calculated that for each $10,000 invested in the average participant in the mid-1980s, society received approximately $15,000 in returns -- including approximately $8,000 in "increased output of participants," and $6,000 in "reductions in the cost of crime-related activities."²¹

There have been criticisms in the 1990s of too much violence and drug abuse in Job Corps Centers. Such problems must be taken seriously. But the success of Argus in a drug-free, alcohol-free and violence-free environment demonstrates that Job Corps can refine itself with Argus-type solutions. Another criticism of Job Corps in the 1990s was that the success rate -- of youth who move on to a job or full-time study-- was too low in some centers. Individual centers can vary. But the overall success rate in the 1980s was 75 percent. Given that Job Corps takes the most troubled youth and that the cost of Job Corps (about $22,000 per year for the residential version) is lower than a year of prison in many places, a 75 percent success rate appears to us to be high.²²

Many of the jobs for "training first" programs like Argus and Job Corps can be generated by community development corporations in the private, non-profit sector. Community development corporations were the brainchild of Robert Kennedy's Mobilization for Youth in the late 1960s. Initially, there were 10 such community development corporations -- and now there are over 2,000, spearheaded by Ford Foundation leadership and investments. A good example is the New Community Corporation in the central ward of Newark -- founded in the ashes of the 1960s riot there by Monsignor William Linder, who has received a MacArthur Foundation Genius award. The New Community Corporation has generated thousands of economic development and associated services jobs in the Central Ward of Newark. One of its affiliates also owns the only Pathmark Supermarket in Central Ward. Income streams from this for-profit operation help finance the non-profit operations. Inequality is reduced.²³

The capital for community development corporations often can be secured via community-based banking. Here the model is the South Shore Bank in Chicago. Many banks do not bother with branches in the inner city. When they do, typically a bank will use the savings of inner-city residents to make investments outside of the neighborhood. South Shore does just the opposite. It uses the savings of the poor to reinvest in the inner-city neighborhoods where the poor live. Inequality is reduced -- and South Shore still makes a profit.²⁴

Our last illustration of what works is community-based, problem-oriented policing. This essentially means getting officers out of their cruisers and into foot patrols. They work shoulder-to-shoulder with citizen groups to focus on specific problems and solve them with sensitive efficiency.

For example, in a scientific, comparison group evaluation by the Police Executive Research Forum of problem-oriented policing in Newport News, Virginia, the burglary rate in high crime public housing was reduced by 35 percent over a 2 year period. This was not done through making more arrests after crimes had occurred, but by improving maintenance of public housing properties, among other preventive strategies.²⁵

Another example is community-equity policing, as developed by the Eisenhower Foundation -- through 12 years of replications of neighborhood police ministations that are housed in the same space as youth safe havens. (Neighborhood ministations were pioneered by the police in Japan, and after-school safe havens have been popularized in America by the Carnegie Corporation, as discussed earlier.) Grants are made to non-profit grassroots youth development organizations, and police chiefs co-target 2 or 3 officers as local match. The officers are trained as mentors for youth. Officers on foot patrols are accompanied by citizens. In 4 initial replication cities -- San Juan, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago -- a quasi-experimental evaluation design showed serious crime to decline by at least 22 percent and by as much as 27 percent over a minimum of 3 years. Across the 4 cities, the decline in the 4 target neighborhoods where the police-community partnerships were replicated was significantly greater statistically than for either the surrounding precincts or their cities as a whole. In a fifth city, Baltimore, a quasi-experimental design over 18 months showed that program youth had less high risk behavior, less alcohol use, less drug use, less self-reported delinquency and better coping skills than comparison youth. The differences were statistically significant. In addition, racial and community relations with police have improved with such community equity policing.²⁶

Look at how these few examples of what works interrelate -- or can be made to interrelate through a wise national policy for the inner city and the truly disadvantaged. Problem-oriented, community-equity policing can help secure a neighborhood. The security can help encourage community-based banking. Community-based banking can provide capital for nonprofit community development corporations. Community development corporations can invest that capital in ways that generate good jobs for local residents. Inner-city youth who are out-of-school can qualify for those jobs if they have been in "training first" job training, like that at Argus, Strive and Job Corps. Similarly, inner-city youth can stay in high school if they have been involved in human capital investments like the Ford Foundation's Quantum Opportunities mentoring program. They can get that far if they have been in Comer schools, full services community schools and after-school safe havens. And they can get that far if they have been in preschool. So what we see, when we ask what works based on scientific studies and careful evaluations, is what Lisbeth Schorr at the Harvard University School of Public Health calls "multiple solutions to multiple problems."²⁷ Solutions that work are not single, narrow and categorical. They are creative, comprehensive and interdependent.

Such comprehensive interdependence is at the core of the national policy we propose. Our policy concentrates on school, youth development and job reform. That is what scientific evaluations suggest is most important in reducing inequality, reducing injustice, reducing crime and drugs, and insuring domestic tranquility. Improved educational opportunity and jobs at reasonable wages were what the Violence Commission had in mind when it called for effective steps to realize the goal of the Employment Act of 1946, of a useful job for all who are able to work. (Chapter 1). Public opinion polls support school and job reform, as we later will show.

So framed, our policy means expanding Head Start preschool to all qualified inner-city young people. It means replicating to scale proven public education reforms -- like safe havens, Comer schools, full service (public) community schools and Quantum Opportunities. It means a new "training first" program for the hardest to employ -- including out-of-school youth and persons on welfare. In addition to their child development, youth development, education and employment goals, all of the proven models here also have been scientifically evaluated to reduce crime.

To generate jobs, we need a commitment by the federal government to full employment, especially for the hard to employ in the inner city and in pockets of rural poverty. As discussed in Chapter 2, in spite of media reports, the "jobs gap" is over 4 million jobs needed. As many of those jobs should be generated by the private sector as possible -- especially through a new national community-based banking program modeled after the South Shore Bank. But some of those jobs should be created by the public sector. A good many of those public jobs should be in the repair of decaying urban infrastructure -- that resulted from the public disinvestment of the 1980s. America is far behind almost all other industrialized democracies in investment in its public infrastructure. Here, an excellent model is YouthBuild USA, where founder Dorothy Stoneman, another MacArthur Genius award winner, trains high school dropouts to rehabilitate housing.²⁹ But we also need public service jobs, many of which can be used to reform welfare reform. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs needed for child care workers, assistants to teachers in inner-city schools, staff for non-profit grassroots community-based organizations and drivers to get people to the jobs.

Implemented comprehensively and to scale, these investments not only will reconstruct our cities but also will significantly reduce child poverty.

Federal Economic Policy³⁰

Federal economic policy needs to be supportive of the education and employment investments we have proposed. First priority should be on reducing child poverty by creating full employment.

The evidence of the last few years is that, if the jobs are created, poor people who can work will take them. The strong economy has pulled many people into the labor market who just a little while ago were said to be unemployable because they lacked skills and attitudes. For example, a recent study found that the increase in available jobs in 14 metropolitan areas had raised the workforce participation of young, less-educated African-American males from 52 to 64 percent.

To get people out of poverty, we need to make work pay. How? We should raise the minimum wage, support livable wage campaigns, increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, and remove restrictions in our labor laws that discourage workers from joining unions. To upgrade skills so people can earn still more, we need a world-class skills training program for all Americans, integrated into the "training first" reform of JTPA we already have recommended.

Supportive economic policy also should include a realistic view of the limits of economic growth; a fiscal policy that separates long-term investments from short term operating expenses; a monetary policy that gives first priority to full employment for the poor, working class and middle class; and a trade policy that raises labor and human rights standards.

Economic growth is an unquestioned cornerstone of the agenda of both major American political parties. But this growth hasn't gotten jobs for the structurally unemployed in the inner city. Our political rhetoric doesn't fit the economic reality of the inner city. The poor have not benefitted from trickle down policies. Nor has a rising tide lifted all boats. As David Kallick has advised, we need to measure economic improvement in terms of increased wages, reduced hours, improved working conditions and better integration of work and family life -- rather than rising stock prices, productivity rates and corporate profits. We should formulate policies that will achieve those goals.

Jeff Faux observes that, as with businesses and households, "the correct measure of fiscal responsibility is a stable or falling ratio of debt to income, or in this nation's case, gross domestic product (GDP). As long as that rate is not rising (and it is not rising today), there is no economic reason not to expand public investments, especially at a time when they are so desperately needed in order to provide our children with the tools they will need to compete in the world." Faux recommends that the U.S. establish a capital budget that separates long term investments from the short term operating expenses of the federal government. We concur.

Monetary policy is controlled by the Federal Reserve (the Fed), which sets interest rates. In the words of Jeff Faux, today the Fed "protects the value of financial assets over the value of jobs by consistently overestimating the level of unemployment necessary to retain price stability. No one knows what the right level is, but we do know that the opinion of the financial punditry on this question has been consistently wrong." Faux argues that the Fed must be reformed -- to "live up to its mandate to pursue both high employment and price stability by probing much more forcefully the limits of the economy's capacity to produce without inflation."

We endorse these recommendations, as well as the conclusions of William Drayton:³¹

Trade agreements are needed that raise labor, human rights and environmental standards around the world. Trade agreements should be opposed if they are good for large corporations but lower the living standards of the poor, working class and middle class. It is in the spirit of the Violence Commission to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to guarantee the right to organize unions, the right to minimum health and safety standards and prohibitions of child and prison labor. Countries that do not enforce basic human rights should be denied access to U.S. markets.

Our priority is on jobs, linked to training, education, and supportive economic policy. But prison and sentencing policies also have been powerful in creating the job, income and racial breaches in America. Policy must, therefore, address interrelated criminal justice reform based on replicating what works.

Our criminal justice policy recommendations are as follows:³²

• Encourage problem-oriented and community-equity policing, and models like them, as more just, effective and proven than zero tolerance policing. In part, encourage this policy directly through existing appropriations from federal agencies like the United States Department of Justice, and through increased foundation funding of progressive nonprofit organizations like the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). Groups like PERF need to be funded to more widely communicate scientifically proven models to local police.

• Encourage better training of officers for policing models like those in Boston; Columbia, SC; and San Diego that are both more effective and more sensitive to the community. To begin early, the federal government should create a National Police Cadet Corps modeled along the lines of the Reserve Officer Training Corps. One goal should be to encourage more minorities to enter policing.³³

• Encourage as federal policy that local police departments and highway patrols avoid using pretextual stops (which often lead to racial profiling) as a law enforcement tool.³⁴

• Encourage as federal policy that we shift significantly away from prison building and toward cheaper, more effective treatment alternatives in the community, following the Arizona model (below).

• Invest in community courts, which move away from the assembly line justice that all too often characterizes urban courts, to provide serious assessment of defendants?needs, match defendants with appropriate services (including drug treatment), and emphasize community-service sentencing and other alternatives to the needless incarceration of nonviolent offenders.

• Provide greater support for treatment-oriented drug courts which allow drug offenders?charges to be dropped if they successfully complete a drug treatment plan. Drug courts in several cities have been evaluated as effective in bringing addicted offenders into treatment and avoiding the cycle of repeated incarceration.

• Replicate proven high-quality drug treatment programs in the community, closely integrated with local drug courts, to insure a continuum of comprehensive care for addicted offenders and their families. This must mean not simply providing treatment in the medical sense alone, but linking treatment with skill training, education, and needed support services, including transportation and child care. Successful community-based programs that work with families of addicted offenders, like La Bodega de la Familia in Manhattan, need to be replicated to enhance families?capacity for self-sufficiency and reduce relapse and recidivism.

• Develop sufficient intervention programs for youths in trouble -- along the lines, for example, of the Argus Community and the Multisystemic Therapy programs in South Carolina and Missouri -- to allow juvenile justice authorities the realistic possibility of referring youths to intensive services outside the formal juvenile justice system.

• Develop comprehensive, community-based centers to address the multiple needs of the low-income women who now, in the absence of effective intervention, are rapidly increasing as a proportion of prison populations -- with particular focus on building long-term economic self-sufficiency, freedom from domestic violence, substance abuse treatment, and family support.

• Expand in-prison drug treatment along the lines of successful models, such as Delaware's Key Program, which links intensive, residential treatment behind walls with serious vocational and literacy training, and community based aftercare.

• Invest in comprehensive strategies to reintegrate offenders into the community. Replicate much more widely the self-sufficient Delancey Street model in San Francisco, which already has been successful in several locations around the nation.³⁵

• Establish a policy at the federal and state levels that all new sentencing initiatives, including mandatory minimum sentences and "enhancements" of existing terms, be justified through a rigorous accounting of their predicted social, economic, and racial impact -- including credible estimates of the probable costs of housing and servicing new inmates, the realistic capacity to deliver services to them that could prevent further offending on release, and the "opportunity costs" of the proposed spending in terms of lost funds for meeting other pressing public needs. Condition all federal funding for state correctional agencies on the production of acceptable social impact statements.

• Establish a national-level Sentencing and Drug Treatment Commission to thoroughly review federal and state sentencing practices, the impact of recent sentencing trends on the fiscal health and public responsibilities of state and federal governments, the impact on serious crime, and the feasibility of a broad range of alternatives. The Commission should gather evidence on promising alternative strategies in the United States, as well as innovative approaches in other nations that have kept their levels of incarceration relatively low by American standards. The Commission should propose a new policy to eliminate the disparity in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine, by reducing excessively long sentences for crack-related offenses.

As these models are replicated, we need to respond to the failure of the "war on drugs," as acknowledged by its director (Chapter 2), by revising our budget priorities. America spends 30% of its anti-drug resources on treatment and prevention and 70% on law enforcement. In many European countries, the percentages are just the opposite -- 70% on prevention and treatment and 30% on law enforcement. In America, we need a ratio closer to that in Europe. One model for shifting budget priorities is the state of Arizona. Arizona held referendums in recent years on the high costs of prison building. Voters decided to begin to divert non-violent offenders from the prison system into treatment alternatives. Under this law, treatment programs are funded for anyone who is convicted of a crime and has a substance abuse problem. Those convicted for the first or second time for possession of drugs for personal use are required to be sent to a treatment program rather than to state prison. An evaluation commissioned by the Supreme Court of the State of Arizona found recidivism rates for people so diverted to be low and concluded that a considerable amount of money had been saved for the taxpayers of Arizona.³⁶ If Arizona can begin to move in this direction, then, we believe, other states can do the same.

One estimate is that there are at least 700,000 persons not in prison who are addicted, need treatment and cannot get it. Part of this population consists of drug and alcohol abusers and addicts who leave prison each year. (It is estimated that there are 1.2M addicts and abusers in prison.) The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University estimates that, for each person "who successfully completes such treatment and becomes a taxpaying, law-abiding citizen, the annual economic benefit to society -- in terms of avoided incarceration and health care costs, salary earned, taxes paid and contribution to the economy -- is $68,800, a tenfold return on investment in the first year. If a year of such comprehensive treatment turns around only 10 percent of those who receive it, it will pay for itself within the next year. Even with the difficult inmate population, success rates are likely to reach at least 15 percent of those who receive such treatment and training."³⁷

Shifting the budget priorities of the war on drugs, with an eye to the potential benefits articulated by the Columbia Center, raises the broader question of how much our proposed national urban, economic and criminal justice policy will cost. That is the subject of Chapter 5.

Notes

Previous Section  |  Next Section  |  Select Section Pricipal Findings Principal Policy Recommendations Executive Summary Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 Appendix 5 Chapter Notes to go  |  Publications  |  Home