To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility

Principal Policy Recommendations

1. A new "grassroots federalism" is needed in which the federal government identifies sufficient resources to replicate what works to a scale equal to the dimensions of the problem -- but then targets most funds directly to local governments, and to the local, private, nonprofit organizations responsible for so much of what works. With the economic boom, we can find the money now to replicate to scale. The federal government also should require revenue sharing alliances among central cities, inner ring suburbs and, if possible, suburbs further out. The model experience of Minnesota should be replicated widely.

2. Funding priority needs to be given to replicating to scale investments that have proven through scientific evaluations to reduce crime at the same time they improve educational performance and help develop children, youth and young adults in positive directions. Most of these successes also reduce drug involvement and increase employability. Leading examples include Head Start preschool; safe havens after school -- like the Dorchester Youth Collaborative in Boston, Koban, Inc. in South Carolina, and Centro Isolina Ferre in San Juan; the public School Development Plan of Professor James Comer at Yale University; full service community schools, like the El Puente Academy in Brooklyn, where nonprofit organizations partner with individual inner-city schools; the Ford Foundation's Quantum Opportunities Program to keep inner-city youth in high school; the South Bronx Argus Community's "training first" (not "work first") job preparation investments in out-of-school youth; YouthBuild USA in which drop outs rehab houses; problem-oriented, community-equity policing in which minority officers are trained by local, private, nonprofit organizations to mentor at-risk youth; and the San Francisco Delancey Street model for self-sufficient reintegration of ex-offenders. To better measure the successes of replicating what works to scale, we need new measures of endemic criminality.

3. To help finance what works to scale, we need to cut back on programs that don't work -- including the "war on drugs," prison building, boot camps, supply side tax breaks to the rich, Enterprise Zones, and the Job Training Partnership Act for high risk youth. We need to reduce by a fraction affirmative action for the rich, corporate welfare and the military budget. We need to use a fraction of any future budget surpluses.

4. To support what works, we need a macroeconomic policy that gives first priority to eliminating child poverty and generating full employment for the hardest to employ in the inner city and in pockets of rural poverty. In spite of official and media reports, the present "jobs gap" for the hard-to-employ is perhaps 4 million -- not counting the almost 2 million in prison. To generate jobs, we need to invest in more local, private, nonprofit community development corporations, as pioneered by the Ford Foundation and modeled after Robert Kennedy's Mobilization for Youth, and invest in local, private, community-based banking, like Chicago's South Shore Bank, on a much broader scale. The for-profit private sector should be encouraged to close as much of the "jobs gap" for the hardest to employ as it is willing and able. But public sector jobs are needed. Public urban infrastructure regeneration is in great demand, as is public service employment -- especially for child care, work in schools, and work with local inner city nonprofit organizations.

5. Federal and local policy should significantly shift away from prison building and toward cheaper, more effective treatment alternatives in the community, following the model of the state of Arizona. Interrelated models of success like Delancey Street for the reintegration of ex-offenders, drug courts and community courts should be replicated much more widely. A National Sentencing and Drug Treatment Commission should be formed to 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 alternatives, including innovations 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.

6. Established progressive foundations and new foundations generated by information technology fortunes should fund a major new communicating what works movement that lets citizens know we do have the answers. "Televison Schools" need to be funded to train perhaps a thousand nonprofit leaders each year in how to perform effectively on television, how to advocate for reduced violence on televison news and how to organize to persuade media to increase news on what works. The clergy need to be organized to communicate that we know what works and that what doesn't work often is immoral. Building on ideas by Bill Moyers, "high tech pamphleteering" needs to be funded to create a new generation of advocacy-based, community web sites, run by grassroots, private, nonprofit organizations and the youth they serve. The sites should function as ongoing town meetings, debate reform, reformulate budget priorities, organize against local television news that leads with violence and fails to report on what works, and support candidates who have a what works agenda.

At the same time, the federal government should reduce the power of big media conglomerates so we can reduce entertainment and commercial violence on televison, reinvigorate public televison, and establish a national media literacy policy as a core component of the K-12 education curriculum. National nonprofit organizations should advocate that the television industry needs to pay for use of the electromagnetic spectrum. Presently it doesn't. This amounts to taxpayer subsidies of billions per year -- almost enough to fully fund Head Start.

7. Established progressive foundations and new foundations generated by information technology fortunes should increase funding to private, nonprofit organizations, like Public Campaign, to educate the public and fight for lasting campaign finance reform to overturn our present "one dollar one vote democracy." We need to level the political playing field -- so that more persons can be elected who are not beholden to an America economic system that presently runs our political system. In many ways, real campaign finance reform is the reform that makes possible the replication to scale of education and jobsprograms that work in the inner city and for the truly disadvantaged.

8. Just as the President and Surgeon General successfully framed smoking as a public health issue and changed the tobacco industry, so they need to frame network television entertainment and commercial violence, local televison news violence and firearms violence as public health issues requiring changes in industry behavior. Campaign finance reform will reinforce such a campaign by the President and Surgeon General, better controlling the power of media conglomerates and big monied special interest groups that presently protect television and firearms violence.

9. Established progressive foundations and new foundations generated by information technology fortunes should increase funding to national and local nonprofit organizations and other citizens groups to educate the citizenry on the need for more state-based and local-based initiatives against firearms; local alliances between city residents and more conservative "soccer mom" suburbanites in the wake of the killings of youth in our schools; litigation against firearms manufacturers; a national handgun licensing system; a federal ban on Saturday night specials; and federal regulation of firearms as consumer products.

10. Private national and local nonprofit advocacy organizations should refocus their education and organizing efforts on the creation of a new voting majority, a new political alliance in America. The alliance should bring together middle income Americans (who often need 2 or 3 jobs in the family to make ends meet) wage earners (who need to be reminded that their CEO's earn on the average 419 times as much as they do) and the poor (who suffered in the 1980s and hardly improved in the 1990s). The alliance should unite around an unfair economic deal, resentment over economic rewards to the rich that are disconnected from the efforts that go into securing them, and the education and training needed by the poor, working income people and middle income people to compete in the global marketplace.

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