To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility

Principal Findings

The 1969 National Violence Commission understood that pervasive and deep-rooted violence in a highly fragmented and unequal society cannot be reliably contained by criminal justice policies -- even extreme ones. The experience of the past 30 years has proven the Commission right, indeed more dramatically than anyone could then have expected. The Commission has been proven correct in its vision of a "City of the Future" with rampant suburbanization as a response to central city decline. But it did not foresee how unsuccessful and self-defeating the strategy would turn out to be. Crime and violent acts in the suburbs, such as the Littleton massacre, and the deterioration of the older "inner-ring" suburbs show that, in the long run, one can't simply abandon the nation's social problems. The Commission foresaw that a city based on the principle of flight to safety would only deepen social divisions.

In spite of welcome reductions of fear and violence since about 1993 that have been coterminous with the economic boom and less unemployment in the inner city, fear and the FBI Index of violent crime have increased when the late 1960s are compared to the late 1990s. Specifically, in a national poll in 1967, Americans were asked, "Is there any area right around here -- that is within a mile -- where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?" In 1967, 31% answered yes. In 1998, 41% answered yes. Similarly, the FBI Index of violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and assault combined) has increased from a big city offense rate per 100,000 of 860 in 1969 to 1218 in 1998. (Appendix 5.) America's rates of violence remain much higher than most other industrialized nations, as in the 1960s. Today the rate of homicide death for a young man is 23 times higher in the U.S. than in England. In 1995, handguns were used to kill 2 people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 30 in Great Britain, 106 in Canada, 213 in Germany and 9,390 in the United States. In addition, official "crime" statistics in the U.S. do not measure the rate at which our nation produces criminality. Official statistics understate and hide the endemic problem.

America's failure to reduce endemic fear and violence over the long run is paralleled by its failure to establish justice. Nearly 1 quarter of all young children live in poverty. America is the most unequal country in the industrialized world in terms of income, wages and wealth. As a result of the racial bias in our mandatory sentencing system, especially for drugs, 1 of every 3 young African-American males is in the prison-industrial complex, on probation or on parole in America at any one time. In big cities, it is about 1 of every 2.

There is a new "triumphalism" about crime that is misleading. The triumphalism exaggerates the role of tough sentencing and "zero tolerance" policing and underestimates the role of explanations that may be more important, like the economic boom and the related waning of the crack epidemic.

Prisons have become our nation's substitute for effective public policies on crime, drugs, mental illness, housing, poverty and employment of the hardest to employ. In a reasonable culture we would not say we had won the war against disease just because we had moved a lot of sick people from their homes to hospital wards. And in a reasonable culture we would not say we have won the war against crime just because we have moved a lot of criminals from the community into prison cells.

The good news is that we are at a point in our history when we actually have the wherewithal -- both the knowledge and the material resources -- to launch an honest and effective attack on the violent crime that still afflicts us, in ways that are both enduring and community-wise. Since the late 1960s and based on scientific evaluations, we have learned a great deal about what doesn't work and about what does work to insure domestic tranquility at the same time that we establish justice. America has the scientific information and the money to replicate what works at a scale equal to the dimensions of the problem.

Much of what doesn't work also is immoral -- like tax breaks for the rich while young child poverty is almost 25% and more spending by the states on prison building than on higher education.

Local televison news too often emphasizes violence and too seldom produces thoughtful stories on what works. This helps create a "mean world syndrome" in the minds of viewers, who then often conclude that nothing works. In terms of network television entertainment violence, not every child who watches a lot of violence or plays a lot of violent games will grow up to be violent. Other forces must converge, as they did recently in Colorado. But just as every cigarette increases the chance that someday you will get lung cancer, every exposure to violence increases the chances that some day a child will behave more violently than they would otherwise.

If there ever were a metaphor for a failure of democracy, lack of firearms control may be it. The firearms death rate in America is 8 times greater than those of the 25 other wealthy nations combined. In the late 1960s, there were 90 million firearms in the U.S. Today, there are almost 200 million firearms in this country. They are no longer mostly designed for hunting and target-shooting. Today, most are high-powered, rapid-firing, easily-concealed weapons that have no other logical function than to kill humans. The impact of a flood of such weapons into an urban society is profound. Any confused teenager feeling disparaged by fellow students can blow a number of them away. A worker who has problems on the job can put an end to it with a massacre at the office. A litigant who feels wronged by the justice system can set it right by shooting up the courthouse. Most people resolve things in a more reasonable way -- but in a nation of 230 million people and 200 million firearms, the law of averages is producing a growing number of massacres. In the 1960s, the dialogue on firearm violence was dominated by political assassinations and the shock of losing some of our nation's most promising leaders. In the 1990s,the dialogue has shifted to our children, and to public shootings in schools, places of worship and day care centers.

Dominated by the economic system, America's leaders presently lack the will to act, to replicate to scale what we already know to work based on scientific evidence -- in spite of considerable public opinion to the contrary and unprecedented prosperity.

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