Title: Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1998-1999 Lecture Series.
Series: Research Forum
Author: Mark A.R. Kleiman, Felton Earls, Sissela Bok, and James B.
Jacobs
Published: NIJ, November 1999
Subject: Crime prevention, white-collar crime, and family strengthening
73 pages
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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1998-1999 Lecture Series

Research Forum
Volume III 
November 1999

National Institute of Justice

-------------------------------

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
810 Seventh Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20531

Janet Reno
Attorney General

Raymond C. Fisher
Associate Attorney General

Laurie Robinson
Assistant Attorney General

Noel Brennan
Deputy Assistant Attorney General

Jeremy Travis
Director, National Institute of Justice

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-------------------------------

National Institute of Justice

Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1998-1999 Lecture Series

Mark A.R. Kleiman
Felton Earls
Sissela Bok
James B. Jacobs

November 1999

NCJ 178244

Jeremy Travis
Director

Amy Solomon
Program Monitor

The Professional Conference Series of the National Institute of Justice
supports a variety of live, researcher-practitioner exchanges, such as
conferences, workshops, planning and development meetings, and similar
support to the criminal justice field. The Research Forum publication
series was designed to share information about this and other forums with
a larger audience.

Opinions or points of view expressed in this document are those of the
authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S.  
Department of Justice.

-------------------------------

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime. 

-------------------------------

Preface

As a Nation, we are very fortunate to have a robust academic community
that thinks, researches, writes, teaches, and talks about the issues of crime
and justice. Members of that academic community--including legal
scholars, sociologists, economists, philosophers, organizational theorists,
anthropologists, historians, psychologists, and a small army of
criminologists--look at these issues in profoundly different ways.

As a Nation we also are blessed with a national character trait that allows
us to be open to many new ideas about the policies that we should adopt as
we respond to the challenges of crime and justice. The ideas "in the air"
today represent a stunning array of different and sometimes divergent
policies and issues: truth in sentencing, restorative justice, waiver of
juvenile offenders to adult court, problem-solving policing, zero tolerance,
coerced abstinence, community prosecution, community notification,
concealed weapons detection technology, right-to-carry statutes, home
nurse visitation programs, community policing, hair testing, mandatory
arrest, electronic bracelets, assessment centers, and reparative sentencing
boards, to name a few. It is understandably hard to keep track of all of
these new ideas, and it is harder still to think about designing, funding, and
implementing rigorous evaluations of these new initiatives--particularly
because so much of today's exciting innovation is happening at the local
level and seldom rises to national attention. 

One way we can take a broader, deeper, and more critical view of our
society's responses to crime and justice is to ask the national treasure that
is our academic community to provide a policy perspective on the big
issues, to help us keep the big picture in focus. To that end, we have asked
some of the country's most prominent academics to put aside for the
moment their latest research project, step outside the classroom, take a
break from the latest book, and come to Washington and share their
thoughts with a policymaking audience. Because we videotape and publish
these lectures, we also intend to reach a national and, indeed, international
audience as well. 

This lecture series was established 3 years ago to challenge conventional
wisdom, stimulate lively discussion, and bring new perspectives to the
policy debates that occur in our capital city and in other communities
around the country on the challenges of crime and justice. Our speakers
this year have fulfilled these goals. Mark A.R. Kleiman provoked us to
reexamine theories of deterrence and the role of probation, parole, and
police agencies in carrying out our deterrence policies. Felton Earls
reminded us of the importance of fathers in our society and the paucity of
the understanding of the functions of fathers. Sissela Bok addressed the
timely and troubling topic of media violence and painted a picture of a
society that sacrifices its social bonds through exposure to violence in the
media. Finally, James B. Jacobs tackled a topic that lies at the core of our
democratic institutions: the ability of government to resist the taint of
corruption. He asked the difficult question, what price do we pay for our
efforts to control corruption? 

We are pleased to present the lectures and commentaries in this volume
and look forward to similarly lively presentations and discussions in the
year to come.

Jeremy Travis
Director
National Institute of Justice

-------------------------------

Contents

Preface

Lecture 1: Getting Deterrence Right: Applying Tipping Models and
Behavioral Economics to the Problems of Crime Control
Mark A.R. Kleiman

Lecture 2: Men and Fathers in the Community 
Felton Earls, M.D.

Lecture 3: Violence, Free Speech, and the Media
Sissela Bok, Ph.D.

Lecture 4: Dilemmas of Corruption Control
James B. Jacobs, J.D., Ph.D.

-------------------------------

Getting Deterrence Right: Applying Tipping Models and Behavioral
Economics to the Problems of Crime Control

Presentation by 

Mark A.R. Kleiman 
Professor of Policy Studies
University of California at Los Angeles 

December 3, 1998

Washington, D.C.  

My theme is crime control and how to do it better. I hope to convey the 
excitement I feel: we are, I believe, in the process of learning how to
control crime much more effectively and with much less attendant
suffering than has been within our reach up until now. 

Targeted Zero Tolerance

It is well known that New York's subways and streets are much more civil
and orderly now than they were 5 years ago and that serious crime there
has fallen dramatically. Those efforts were inspired by, and seem to bear
out, the "broken windows theory" proposed by James Q. Wilson and
George L. Kelling, which forms much of the conceptual basis for
"community policing."[1]

But how is it that reducing graffiti reduces mugging? I have a story to tell
about that, and a story that justifies the choice made by Bill Bratton in
New York to employ what might be called "focused" or "targeted" zero
tolerance rather than the usual meaning of zero tolerance: a policy of
making arrests for every observed violation of the law. 

It is less well known that in Boston and Minneapolis, rates of youth
homicide have fallen spectacularly as a result of a coordinated
enforcement intervention targeted at gangs of violent juveniles--an
intervention aimed, not at breaking them up, but at getting them to stop
killing one another.

The Boston pattern is consistent with falling homicide rates in the
northeastern cities that were hit early by the crack epidemic, though the
decline is still pretty dramatic. (See exhibit 1.) But Minneapolis is one of
the cities in the Upper Midwest where crack arrived late and homicide
rates have been soaring. There is no external reason why the Minneapolis
homicide rate should have declined so much. (See exhibit 2.) How did
these programs work? The details varied, but the concepts were identical
(they were both invented by Harvard University's David Kennedy).[2]

When its project started, Boston had an estimated 65 youth gangs with
1,300 active members. Deadly violence among young people was highly
localized in gang-ridden neighborhoods and occurred largely along stable
intergang dispute lines. Given the atmosphere, many participants in gang
activity, and others around them, became afraid that not showing a
willingness to respond to personal affront with deadly violence would be
taken as a sign of weakness, and make them targets for violence by others.
Investigators knew which gangs were shooting, but for all the usual
reasons cases were difficult to make, and in any event would involve only
the individual shooter. Shooting increased gang prestige and thus the
prestige of the shooter within the gang. 

The Operation Cease-Fire team assembled police (gang, juvenile, drug),
probation officers (adult and juvenile), prosecutors (State and Federal),
DEA, ATF, State police, truant officers, and anyone else with potential
authority over the young people involved. The gangs were brought in, in
units, and given the following message:

We know who you are. We know what you are doing, and most of it is
illegal, from playing truant to selling crack. We cannot clamp down on
everyone at once, but we can clamp down on any group we choose to. If
we crack down on your group, you cannot live your (mostly illegal) life. 

There are new rules in force. The rules are: no deadly violence. The
consequence of breaking the rules is concentrated enforcement attention
on the whole group responsible until the whole group says "uncle" and
turns in its guns. 

When it became necessary, the task force conducted a crackdown,
publicized it, and protected members of the target gang after they gave up
their guns. Using undercover drug buys, the task force then conducted an
old-style attack on the most violent group, got them all sent away for long
sentences, and publicized that. The results were spectacular and lasting.

Starting from these two examples, I would like to explore the logic of the
new crime control and suggest how employing it more consistently could
greatly abate what remains, in my view, a society-threatening social
problem and the single greatest barrier to improving economic opportunity
in urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. Many things control
crime--there is not much doubt that early childhood interventions, if we
can learn to do them right, could have a big impact. But today I want to
concentrate on the operations of what is loosely called the criminal justice
system: police, courts, and corrections agencies. 

Rethinking Incapacitation

The classic theory of crime control talks about three crime-control effects
of enforcement and punishment: incapacitation, deterrence, and
rehabilitation.

Incapacitation is the easiest to understand: If we lock up people who
commit more than their share of crimes, the population remaining free will
include fewer high-rate offenders. Since prison cells are expensive,
incapacitation makes sense only if we can lock up people who, on average,
commit lots of crimes.

There is a lot of evidence that we in fact do so, that the average offender in
prison would be causing damage worth much more than $25,000 per year
if he were running around free. But that is true only because a relatively
small number--about 10 percent--of those behind bars commit astounding
numbers of offenses.[3] The famous RAND Inmate Survey revealed that
the median prisoner had committed 17 crimes in the year before
incarceration, but the average offender had committed almost 200.[4]
Offending is widespread, but persistent, serious offending is highly
concentrated. As in so many cases, almost everything depends on the
right-hand tail of the distribution. This is consistent with a famous
generalization called "Pareto's Law": 20 percent of any population
accounts for 80 percent of any activity. Pareto's Law holds true for more
things than you might expect.

The survey findings led Peter Greenwood of RAND, among others, to
suggest that we should rethink sentencing policy to concentrate on
high-rate offenders: a policy he called "selective incapacitation." Selective
incapacitation turns out to be harder than it looks: an offender's criminal
history (rap sheet) is a pretty poor indicator of his actual behavior, since
most crimes never lead to an arrest.[5] Moreover, since criminals, like
basketball players, tend to leave the game in their early 30s, basing
sentences on the number of felony convictions--as in "three strikes"--tends
to fill the prisons with people who would otherwise be retired muggers.

Deterrence: Understanding Offenders' Decisionmaking 

Incapacitation is a pretty mechanical process. Deterrence, by contrast,
depends on changing the behavior of potential offenders by changing their
perception of the likely consequences of offending. The key to deterrent
crime control lies in understanding the decision processes of (actual and
potential) offenders. Since, as noted, serious, persistent offending is highly
concentrated, it is the behavior of serious, persistent offenders--and of
those who might become such offenders--that we most need to understand.

There are two extreme competitors here: models of purely rational
choice--offenders comparing the benefits of offending to its costs--and
models of utterly irrational social determination. I want to offer a middle
way: a model that assumes that offenders seek their own well-being but
that also pays attention to factors that might cause them to deviate from
normative rationality as economists understand it. If offenders tend to
lapse from rationality in specific ways, and if we continue to pass laws and
make policies as if offenders were perfectly rational, we will wind up
inflicting more punishment than we need to for less crime control benefit
than we could have.

That is the "behavioral economics" of the title: offenders are more likely
than most people to be both reckless, in a way described by "prospect
theory," and irrationally present oriented. The argument is simple: people
who calculate rationally and who react strongly to small probabilities of
horrible consequences some time in the distant future do not become
persistent offenders. James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein have
reviewed the data showing that persistent offenders tend to be, in
psychological terms, reckless, impulsive, and present oriented.[6] To
control the behavior of such people, we need consistent and immediate
sanctions, even if the sanctions themselves are relatively mild. What we
have now is a system of severe sanctions applied very sporadically and a
long time after the offense. 

Calculating the Expected Value of Punishment

Now that is not to say that deterrence always fails; in gross terms and for
most people, it works pretty well. The simplest way to think about a
deterrent threat when it is only occasionally carried out is in terms of what
economists call "expected value." An expected value is a
probability-weighted average. (Remember the typical American family of
the 1950s with 2.7 kids? That is an expected value: all the kids divided by
all the families was 2.7.)

If 9 times out of 10 a mugging results in no punishment (because the
mugger never gets caught), but the 10th time it results in 5 years in prison,
then the expected-value punishment is 5 years times 1 chance in 10, or half
a year. By looking at the total number of crimes of a given type and the
total number of people in prison for that crime, we can easily calculate the
expected-value punishment.

Exhibit 3 is a graph of the expected value of punishment for burglary over
time. The punishment rate fell sharply during the early 1960s due in part
to the closing of big, old prisons in many States, and the rate of burglary
started to climb explosively, which of course then pushed the punishment
per crime down even further. The explosion of prison building in the
mid-1970s was closely followed by a peak, and then a steady decline, in
burglary. This is not nearly enough to show cause and effect, but it is
about what a simple deterrence model would predict. 

On the other hand, the expected punishment price of a burglary never went
below about 5 days, and it is now nearly 20 days. That does not seem like
much of a penalty for breaking into your home, but compared to the
average "take" from a burglary, it is really quite a lot. Given the low prices
fences pay for stolen goods, a typical residential burglary nets the criminal
perhaps $200. Even at 5 days per burglary, that amounted to $40 per day
served behind bars. At today's higher punishment price, the effective take
is closer to $10 per day served. Muggers get an even worse deal.

That illustrates an important general principle of criminology: "The wages
of sin are well below the legal minimum." Any purely rational-actor
theory of crime would have a hard time explaining why people continue to
commit such unrewarding misdeeds. The illicit-drug markets, where the
reward-to-punishment ratio tends to be more favorable, still do not behave
as economic rational-actor theories would predict. 

I have to plead guilty here: A dozen years ago, Peter Reuter and I came up
with a model called "risks and prices," which asserted that drug prices
ought to reflect punishment risks. Back then, the problem with the model
was that the price of cocaine seemed unsustainably high compared with
the punishment risk. Now, the puzzle is just the opposite. Even compared
to the growth in cocaine shipments, the growth in cocaine punishment has
been astounding. As a result, the punishment price per ton of cocaine has
soared. Yet cocaine prices, rather than rising, have continued to fall. (See
exhibit 4.) Something is wrong here.

Of course, no offender faces the expected value of punishment, any more
than any family has 2.7 kids. So one problem may be that randomized
threats do not work as well as reliable threats, even if the long-term
average is the same. But the standard theory of rational behavior predicts
just the opposite. We expect rational people to be risk-averse; that is why
they buy insurance policies.

A curve representing how much someone's well-being rises as that
person's income or wealth grows--what economists call a "utility
curve"--turns out to rise less and less steeply: $100 means less to Bill
Gates than to someone living on a minimum-wage job. (See exhibit 5.) If
people's behavior matched this graph, the small threat of  a big punishment
would work wonders. This has led economists modeling principal/agent
relationships to suggest controlling agent behavior by an infinitesimally
small risk of an enormous punishment. It might work for corporate
executives; I doubt it works as well for burglars.

There is a competing theory, not of rational action--I do not think there is
any doubt that rationality implies risk aversion--but of actual behavior.

It is called "prospect theory," and is credited to Amos Tversky and Daniel
Kahneman.[7] According to the theory, in many situations actual behavior
is risk averse in gains but risk seeking in losses. Given a choice between 1
week in Hawaii for sure and an even chance at 2 weeks in Hawaii, most
people will choose the sure thing, just as risk-aversion theory would
suggest. 

But once we start dealing in losses from the current position--if the gamble
is between 1 week in jail and an even chance at 2 weeks in jail--many
people will act as if they are risk seeking and take the gamble rather than
settling for a sure loss. So if offenders tend to behave according to
prospect theory, an occasional big punishment will not deter them as well
as reliable small punishments with the same expected value. That is part of
the story about why the current prison-building boom has not reduced
crime as much as we might have expected: we are overrelying on severity
and underplaying certainty. 

This does not mean there are no benefits from building prisons: they do a
fine job at deterring those who are risk averse, and they lock up a lot of
people who would otherwise be out committing a lot of crimes. But it does
suggest that the returns from further increasing severity will be
diminishing.

Estimating Present Versus Future Gains and Losses 

There is a second possible reason why persistent offenders persist in the
face of high expected-value punishments. Punishments arrive after crimes,
in many cases months after. By definition, the final 25 years of a 30-year
sentence start 5 years from now. Even perfectly rational people value
future gains or losses less than the same-sized losses arriving right away.
After all, if you have money now, you can put it in the bank (or pay off
your mortgage) and either way earn, or avoid paying, interest. 

Economists have a well-worked-out theory of how a rational person would
trade off present versus future gains and losses. It goes under the name of
discounting. The formula is one of geometric decay. It has the property of
depending only on the distance in time between the earlier and later
benefit or cost, and not at all on when the decision is made. Someone
choosing between receiving $100 1 year from now and $110 2 years from
now should make the same decision, whether the decision is to be made
now or a year from now. The decision depends only on that person's
personal discount rate, which in turn depends on the rest of that person's
financial picture, particularly the rates at which that person can borrow or
lend. The result is that the future is devalued compared to the present, but
only at the rate of a few percentages per year.

Again, there is an alternative theory, not of rational action but of actual
behavior. It is well verified in the psychology and behavioral-economics
laboratories, on species ranging from pigeons to sophomores. It has a
different, hyperbolic, formula, which leads to a much more rapid fall-off
over time. It also depends crucially on when the decision is made.[8] 

Imagine offering a 5-year-old one marshmallow now or two
marshmallows tomorrow. Only a pretty tough 5-year-old would be able to
wait. Now offer the same child a marshmallow in a week or two
marshmallows in 8 days. It is the same choice: wait a day and double your
marshmallow. But the result is likely to be quite different. 

Anyone who has ever stayed up all night preparing a paper, a proposal, a
presentation, or a lecture has demonstrated hyperbolic discounting, or
"temporal myopia" as it is known in the literature (though it has been
suggested that "temporal false perspective" would be a more accurate
label). If offenders are even more temporally myopic than the rest of us,
the difference between a punishment now and a punishment 6 months
from now may be, in Mark Twain's phrase, "the difference between the
lightning and the lightning bug." 

One of the worst offenders caught in the Boston crackdown remained
stone-faced through his arraignment on a charge under which he faced a
minimum of 15 years in prison. But he went ballistic when the judge, in
granting him bail, imposed a 6 p.m. curfew. Why? Because the sentence
was some indefinite time in the future; the curfew was that night, and that
night he had things to do. 

Misinformation About Punishment Risk 

A third theory is that deterrence works imperfectly because offenders
misestimate deterrent threats. Offenders frequently find themselves quite
ignorant of the actual threats they face, especially under obscure
punishment-enhancement laws. That suggests it is important to
communicate the threat. 

Jeremy Bentham wrote that the two most important characteristics of a
deterrent punishment were certainty and celerity.[9] Prospect theory and
temporal myopia suggest why. To Bentham's two C's I would add a third:
communication. Communication, in this context, is not merely verbal.
Actions also communicate, proverbially better than words. Offenders, like
other people but probably more so, are likely to believe their own
experience more than what they read or what others tell them. In judging
the likely consequences of lawbreaking, they will refer largely to what has
happened to them. 

For most offenses, no one is even arrested. Most arrests do not lead to
convictions. And most convictions, especially for the minor, nonviolent
offenses by juveniles that form the beginning of most criminal careers, do
not lead to any real sanction. 

The insistence on very long sentences for identified persistent, serious
offenders, combined with budget realities, means that the typical
punishment for the first few detected offenses is probation: that is, under
current conditions, nothing. That sends a very bad signal about the
consequences of lawbreaking. It makes sense only if our goal is to develop
career criminals. 

How is an offender supposed to judge which "last chance to go straight" is
really his last? He is likely to keep testing the system until it lands on him
hard, which is bad news for him and us alike. So a first implication of this
line of thinking--which says that offenders tend to be reckless, short
sighted, and ill informed rather than cool calculators of likely
consequences--is that every detected nontrivial violation of law ought to
lead to some nontrivial deprivation of liberty. 

That cannot mean prison or jail--we do not have enough cells--so by
definition it must mean probation. The trick is making probation mean
something. That is essential for another reason as well. Since serious,
persistent offenders are eventually caught, most of them are (or should be)
on probation or parole if not actually behind bars. This gives us the
capacity to supervise their behavior in much more detail than is the case
for those whose liberty is unconditional. But the current probation and
parole systems rely on the same sort of low-probability, deferred, but
occasionally severe sanctions used by the rest of the system. 

Community Corrections

Community corrections is the potential key to crime control. To make that
potential real requires that community corrections officers have three
things: 

--The technology to monitor behavior that occurs outside their presence. 

--The authority to impose rapid and predictable sanctions. 

--The resources (budget and staff) to acquire and use the technology and
administer the authority. 

For example, if every cocaine-using burglar on probation faced two drug
tests a week, with 2 days' confinement immediately for every missed or
"dirty" test, we could eliminate about 40 percent of the total market for
cocaine and substantially reduce the amount of time that population
spends behind bars. The drug test is a way to monitor, in 5 minutes and for
$5, one slice of the offender's behavior over the past 72 hours.[10] Another
potentially important technology of community corrections is electronic
position monitoring. Day reporting, and the creation of data links to other
institutions that come in contact with probationers, can also increase the
effective capacity of a probation officer to observe probationer behavior. 

The point here is not the technical details, but the principle of establishing
behavioral standards and enforcing them with swift and consistent
sanctions. Giving the community corrections system that new technology
and authority will require more resources: a "caseload" of 300 implies that
very little effective supervision can occur. To make this work, we should
be prepared to reallocate money away from prisons and jails--which with
about one-fifth of the total corrections population account for nearly 90
percent of corrections spending--and toward probation and parole. 

But just adding more bodies without adding technology and authority
contributes little to crime control. Current probation supervision in Los
Angeles, for example, is effectively nothing, and twice, or even four times,
nothing is still nothing. Pouring resources into a fundamentally
misconceived process just increases its futility. In short, we need to apply
to crime control the common-sense principles that apply to child raising
and puppy training. 

Enforcement "Swamping" 

So much for the behavioral economics of crime control. Now for the
"tipping" part.

Even for perfectly rational offenders, the rational amount of offending by
any one person depends in part on how many other people are committing
the same offense in the same area. Thus, decisions to offend are
interdependent decisions. If punishment capacity is scarce,
punishment-per-crime tends to fall as the rate of offending rises, as
happened during the 1960s. Therefore, some people who would not offend
when offense rates are low will offend if offense rates are high, because
having lots of "competition" for enforcement attention reduces their
individual chances of being caught and punished. That is the logical
structure of a riot. It is described by a class of models invented by Thomas
Schelling and known by his label of "tipping" models because of the way
that results "tip" from one extreme to another after some threshold is
crossed.[11] I call the version of tipping applicable to crime "enforcement
swamping": once violations are high enough to swamp the capacity of the
enforcement system, increases in offense rates will feed on
themselves.[12] 

Imagine a parking lot designated "Shoppers Only: No Commuter
Parking." 

It has 1,000 parking spots. Parking there is free for shoppers; commuters,
if caught, face a $15 fine. A single attendant is in charge of locating and
ticketing commuter vehicles; he has the capacity to write up to 100 tickets
per day. A nearby lot offers all-day parking for $7.50. If all commuters
who park illegally are ticketed, they would be better off paying for legal
parking. On the other hand, if fewer than half are ticketed, then it is
actually cheaper (on an expected-value basis) to park in the free lot and
take your chances. So the least-cost solution to the parking problem from
an individual commuter's viewpoint depends on how many of the other
commuters decide to take their chances in the free lot. If more than 200
commuters risk it, they will all save money on average. 

Now consider how the situation might develop over time. If very few
commuters park illegally, those who do will quickly learn that it is more
expensive that way. That will drive the number of illegally parked cars
toward zero. On the other hand, if many commuters park illegally, that
will turn out to be the cheaper option, and the number will tend to grow.
Eventually, the entire lot may fill with commuters, leaving no spaces for
shoppers; that too is a stable, self-reinforcing condition. 

What could the parking authorities do once the high-violation equilibrium
had established itself? One option is a temporary boost in ticket-writing
capacity, on the model of a standard police "crackdown." In the example, 
if there is enough capacity to write more than 500 tickets per day, parking
illegally will never be the least-average-cost option, no matter how many
commuters try it, because even with 1,000 violators the probability of a
ticket will be more than one-half. A sanction probability of 0.5 is the
"crossover" or "tipping" point of the system--values below that tend
toward zero, while values above that tend toward one. 

Once the burst of enforcement starts to drive down the number of
violations, enforcement capacity can be reduced. Once the number of
violators is safely below 200 per day, even a single ticket writer will be
enough to keep legal parking the cheaper option. 

An alternative strategy would be to rely on a self-fulfilling bluff. Put up
big signs that read, "As of Monday, all illegally parked vehicles will be
ticketed." If enough people believe the signs, the threat will be carried out.
If it works, the bluff alone will be sufficient. Or the threat could be added
to an actual boost in enforcement as a way of speeding the transition from
the high-violation to the low-violation stable state. 

Creeping Zero Tolerance

Even if additional enforcement capacity is unavailable, all is not lost. If
one-tenth of the lot is designated a "zero tolerance" area where all illegally
parked vehicles will be ticketed, that threat can be carried out even with
the original level of resources and 100-percent violations. The result will
be that commuters learn not to park in the "zero tolerance" spaces. As the
number of violators in that area shrinks toward zero, the zone of total
enforcement can be gradually expanded without exhausting enforcement
capacity. Eventually, unless the commuters can organize themselves for a
campaign of massive resistance, the entire lot can be moved from a
high-violation stable state to a low-violation stable state, without ever
expanding the number of ticket writers. (Violators could be targeted on
any other characteristic that does not include more than 10 percent of them
in any one category: last digit of the license plate number, for example.) 

This creeping zero-tolerance model has four important implications: 

First, a modest increase in enforcement after an increase in offending may
have little effect, especially if the increase is temporary or sporadic. The
task is to change the entire climate of expectations that can make high
offense rates self sustaining. That is likely to require large and sustained,
rather than small and temporary, enforcement interventions. 

Second, since expectations matter, communicating the message that
enforcement has increased is essential to success even if the offenders as
individuals are perfectly rational, and even more important if some of
them are not. (As noted, a sign that reads, "All misparked cars will be
ticketed" will be true if enough people believe it.) This sort of advertising
also will increase the value of any increase in actual enforcement. David
Kennedy has proposed an innovative, communication-based approach to
breaking up open retail drug markets. His approach seems likely to work
at much lower cost than the standard long-term, concentrated crackdown
typified by the "Pressure Point" operation that broke up the heroin bazaar
on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the early 1980s, and perhaps even
better than the more complex market disruption strategies pioneered by
Tampa's QUAD.[13]

Assume there is a big open market in a neighborhood called Vial City, and
that we have decided to break up the market on D-Day, 30 days from now.
Start now by leafletting the area with fliers reading, "We have decided to
shut this market down as of [D-Day]. Do not buy or sell drugs here after
that date, or we promise you will be arrested." Then have the police
approach known buyers and sellers personally, conveying the same
message. Note the license plate numbers of nonlocal buyers, and send
postcards to the registered owners saying, "As of [D-Day], the drug bazaar
in Vial City will be closed. As a reminder, automobiles found with drugs
in them are subject to seizure and forfeiture." 

At D minus 14 days, start visiting the mothers and girlfriends of the
known sellers. Tell them, "Ms. Smith, please make sure Johnny is not
selling in Vial City on [D-Day]. If he does, he is sure to get busted." Keep
up the leafletting and make another round of personal contacts starting at
D minus 7 days. Put up a billboard if the budget will support it. 

On D-Day, send out some additional uniformed and undercover police
officers, with instructions not to "sweep the streets," but merely to make
arrests if they observe dealing activity. If the publicity has worked, they
will be profoundly bored. Only a few very sleepy or skeptical buyers and
sellers will show up, and as soon as the arrests start they are likely to make
themselves scarce. The next day, the market will be as dead as vaudeville,
and the courts will be less, rather than more, burdened with Vial City
crack-distribution cases than before the crackdown. 

This is not a solution to the drug abuse problem; most (though not all)
buyers will find other sources of supply once Vial City is closed. But it is
a solution to the problem the market has imposed on Vial City's residents.
(This is more than a thought-experiment; someone ought to actually try it.) 

Third, equal opportunity enforcement is sometimes the wrong rule. If you
cannot get past the crossover point for everybody, get past it for somebody
and work outward. Anything that creates a subset of offenders or offenses
for whom enforcement is not swamped will eventually clean that subset of
offending; then you slowly expand the "clean" subset until it includes
everything. 

That is how the New York City subway system solved its graffiti problem.
It designated--and clearly marked--10 percent of its cars as "clean cars"
and committed that they would never roll until they were clean of graffiti.
At that point, spraying those cars became unrewarding because no one
would see the tags. 

At only 10 percent, the system could afford the commitment; if a few cars 
had to stand idle, that was no disaster. The Transit Authority then slowly
expanded the "clean" fleet until it included all the cars. Another form of
concentrated enforcement is to concentrate it, or threaten to concentrate it,
on the most egregious offenders. That sets up a competition among
offenders (or groups) to avoid enforcement attention. That is part of the
story of Operation Cease-Fire in Boston. 

Fourth, anything that signals high offense rates will therefore serve as an
invitation to offend; anything that signals low offense rates will serve as a
deterrent to offending. That is one reason "broken windows" strategies can
work.

The analysis above suggests some new principles of crime control:

--Ensure certainty and celerity before severity.

--Communicate threats: Do not just strike the rock; talk to the rock. 

--Impose some nontrivial punishment for each conviction.

--Add technology, authority, and resources to make community
corrections effective punishment. If we cannot learn to punish people and
control their behavior when we are not paying for their room and board,
we are out of luck.

--Target zero tolerance for specific "broken-windows" behaviors keyed to
specific neighborhoods, to try to move them to low-offending equilibria. 

--Target zero tolerance for any offending by individuals and groups
whose serious offenses earn them special attention. 

--Make offenders compete to avoid enforcement attention. 

Crime will always be with us. But the crime wave that swept the United
States starting about 1960 and Western Europe starting about 10 years
later does not have to be the wave of the future. We can do better. We
should. 

Question-and-Answer Session 

Christine Mayman, Martinsburg Police Department, West Virginia: I
agree with almost everything you said. However, in this time of inundation
of new theories and new ideas, how do you convince policymakers, who
are inundated with lots of varying recommendations over the years, that
this brand of policy change is one they want to do, especially when it
means not only changing what they do, but changing how they view
things?

M.K.: There are various kinds of academics who pay attention to crime. I
am a policy analyst by trade; my job is trying to figure out what a sensible
policy should be. The politics of crime is not my specialty. That said,
policymakers are under the pressure of popular discontent in dealing with
crime. One of the problems with adding resources to probation and parole
is that people can (and have) run for reelection as Governor with an
elective platform saying, "I built x number of prisons in my tenure; more
than all the other Governors in the history of the State." Substitute "hired
probation officers" for "built prisons" and you have a much less exciting
campaign pitch. Corrections is a politically vulnerable area.

The thing that is coming to bear now on the other side is that, in State after
State, Governors are discovering that they can have bigger prison systems
or a working university system, but not both. When I started thinking
about these matters, building prisons seemed to be thoroughly justified. By
calculation the other day, I saw that if you look at the Federal Bureau of
Prisons budget and calculated the fraction of that that is for drug offenders,
it turns out that we pay more money every year to keep last year's drug
dealers in prison than we give to DEA to catch next year's drug dealers.
That is probably a bad allocation of funds.

Gary Albrecht, U.S. Capitol Police, Washington, D.C.: I absolutely agree
that certainty and swiftness are critical to deterrence. I am very skeptical,
however, that probation or parole can have any deterrent effect
whatsoever. I've never run into a criminal who was very afraid of
probation. I would suggest that pretrial incarceration, "disappearing
immediately" the day they get arrested, has much more deterrent effect,
both on the individual and on his colleagues who observe what happens.

M.K.: Both halves of that comment are truly important. First, what you
say is right about probation; it is known as "taking a walk." It is accepted
as zero punishment. We have to change that. We simply do not have
enough cells to hold everybody who needs some punishment, so we have
to learn how to make probation real punishment. Probationers need to
know that their behavior will be closely monitored in various ways and
that any crossing of a clear set of lines is going to mean consequences. The
folks conducting drug testing on probationers should say to their clients,
"If you think you're going to be dirty, bring your toothbrush." 

I agree that probation as it stands is not real punishment. But if we do not
figure out a way to make it real punishment, then we simply cannot get the 
job done. Someone looking at my day-per-offense analysis might have
said that the President's program to add 100,000 police officers was not
going to do anything very useful because we're already arresting a lot more
people than we can lock up. But of course, arrest is also very unpleasant,
and it happens right now. The fact is that a large fraction of the effective
deterrence we are handing out is from arrest. But if it turns out arrest has
no consequence past the arrest, then it starts to lose effect.

There are some fascinating research results if you look at juveniles, most
of whom, sometime in their growing up, do something against the law.
Some get caught; some do not. If you look at juveniles in terms of their
self-reported misbehavior, the ones who got caught go on to much more
serious criminal careers. It looks as if being arrested causes more crime in
the future. Some criminologists explain this in terms of "labeling," but
there is a simpler, more parsimonious theory: Once you get arrested as a
juvenile and see how little happens to you after you get arrested, then you
have been reinforced in your offending. The kid who breaks a law and
does not get caught still thinks that if he broke the law and got caught, it
would be bad. The one who got caught and knows that nothing bad
resulted may go on to be a serious offender. We need to look at what can
really be done to juveniles that they really do not like (and that we are
willing to do), remembering that two-thirds of the serious juvenile
offenders (having done things that, if done by an adult, would have been
felonies) never get arrested for any adult serious crime. Moving the
punishment closer to the crime is essential, whether it is pretrial detention
or a kind of pretrial release that is a serious means of control.

Christian Warren, Public Defender Service, Washington, D.C.: I really
was struck by your point that three-quarters of the population under justice
supervision is on probation and parole, but that we spend 90 percent on
prisons. I think that is where we have to start because most of the time my
clients on probation will tell me things like, "Well I went to community
service but nobody was there. I reported and then went home." The next
thing they say is "I didn't do it." I don't think there are mechanisms in
place that can change values. 

The other thing you said, that there was not a message being sent to
offenders in terms of what the price is: I would really disagree with that.
Most of my clients have fathers, uncles, brothers, who are doing 25 or 20
years in Lorton [correctional facility in Virginia] locked up. I do not know
how much closer they could be to it. I don't know what the answer is, but
most people who are multiple repeat offenders have relatives supervised
by the criminal justice system.

M.K.: I think people who get to be serious offenders take more seriously
what is happening to themselves than what they hear has happened to
somebody else. But you are right; it is a difficult question to see what they
think the risk really is. Insofar as they think it is going to happen to them
at some indefinite time in the future, that may not be powerful for them.
You mentioned community service; that is a term I hate. "Community
service" is joining the parent-teachers association. We are really talking
about punitive labor. It can be a very effective nonincarcerative
punishment if we learn how to do it. The key is getting community
organizations to start developing projects for which they need labor and
then make the deal that they will contribute the supervisory work in return
for the labor. If we can do that, we can have an expandable capacity for
serious but nonincarcerative punishment. Such programs can also be truly
restorative if the beneficiary of the labor is the community that sustained
the original injury.

Marie Ragghianti, U.S. Parole Commission, Washington, D.C.: I'm
wondering why you haven't mentioned graduated sanctions. It seems that
the concept of graduated sanctions is one way to deliver the kind of
sanction that you are talking about with both swiftness and certainty. It is
also a way of making probation and parole effective. 

M.K.: I agree entirely. I think that we need graduated sanctions programs
for probation and parole. And I think they ought to be formulaic, not
discretionary, to put all the control in the hands of the offender. One of the
things that Adele Harrell reported in her evaluation of the D.C. Drug
Court's sanctions track is that it changed offenders' subjective locus of
control. Usually, offenders talk about what happened to them in terms of
somebody else's agency: "The judge did this to me, the cop did that, the
probation officer did the other . . . ." This is what psychologists call having
an "external locus of control." It is reinforced by discretion. Everybody in
the system wants discretion, but discretion means to the offender that he
has to accept everybody else's choices.

In her report from the D.C. Drug Court, Dr. Harrell found that offenders
started to change and say that they got sanctioned "because they used
drugs." There is a California Drug Court judge who makes a little speech
to people entering his program, "From now on, I have no control over
what happens to you. The prosecutor, the probation officer, the defense
lawyer--none of them has any control over what happens to you. You
control what happens to you." What we need is formulaic sanctions,
whether graduated or not. That means convincing people, particularly
probation officers and judges, that their job is not clinical. One of the
conclusions coming out of the D.C. Drug Court experience was that
"changing addict behavior is easy; changing judges' behavior is hard."

George Kanuck, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C.: More than just drug
testing, what is the role of meaningful drug treatment for these people?
This is a continuum problem. We have to do something more than just test
them. 

M.K.: That is a question I hope CSAT will research. Imagine a seriously
drug-involved offender. There are a number of things we could do. We
could do nothing; we could offer treatment if he wants it; we could
mandate treatment; or we could say, "You will be tested twice a week and
every time you are dirty you are spending 48 hours in jail." We could also
impose testing and sanctions and, on top of that, offer or mandate
treatment. Which one of those boxes is going to be the most effective and
most cost-effective? No one knows. The answer probably varies from
offender type to offender type.

Here is what I propose. Everybody who is convicted of a crime that has a
high drug-use rate associated with it is to be tested at arrest; if tested
positive, that person should be subject, as part of a probation sentence or
postincarceration-supervised release, to twice-a-week drug testing. Many
members of that population will be able to control their own drug use
under that sort of pressure, usually after they fail a couple of times.
Eventually, they will stop. But there is a group (I do not know how big; it
probably varies from offender type to offender type) who will just keep
failing. That group obviously needs treatment. Having failed several times,
they are also likely to have noticed that they need treatment. If you talk to
a treatment professional, what is the first step in helping someone into
recovery? Breaking through denial. Testing and sanctions is a wonderful
way to break through denial and to create a therapeutic alliance. It is not,
"You have to come to my treatment program or I'll tell your probation
officer on you," but "You have to get clean or that probation officer is
going to put you in jail. So let's work together on getting you clean."

Testing and sanctions will work for a large portion of the population. I bet
testing and sanctions alone will outperform treatment alone. Maybe it
won't outperform treatment that is delivered by really great providers and
that clients go to all the time, but that treatment is not in the real world.
Testing and sanctions ought to be compared with the treatment we are
actually capable of delivering and the attendance rates we are actually
going to get. But treatment is going to cost a multiple of what testing and
sanctions cost. Testing and sanctions, with referral to treatment for people
who keep failing, has to be the right solution. And it is the solution
everyone will be pushed to if you have a working testing-and-sanctions
program, because testing-and-sanctions programs mean that continued
drug use by that population is expensive for the criminal justice system.

Let me try and state two views on this issue. One view is that we know
something about drug abuse. We know it is a treatable disorder, and a very
large fraction of persistent offenders have this disorder. If they stopped
having that disorder, they would be better off and so would we. We should
ensure that everybody who enters the criminal justice system gets an
evaluation of his or her treatment needs. And we ought to prepare a
treatment plan for that person, require compliance, and make the treatment
resources available. That is the view embodied in the "Breaking the Cycle"
program.

Here is what I find problematic about that. We do not have the treatment
resources. If we took every possible treatment slot and assigned it to the
criminal justice system, we still would not have the resources. And the
capacity of the system to make people go to treatment is not nearly as
great as we would like it to be. Requiring treatment first risks bankrupting
the treatment system and the capacity to do the needs assessments.
Imagine 5 million people are coming into probation every year and
needing 5 million drug treatment needs assessments. Who is going to
conduct them? 

I'm worried that we will be able to implement that sort of Cadillac
program for only about 10 percent of the population; everybody else will
have to wait in line. 

What we can do on a mass scale is testing and sanctions. That's cheap and
efficient, and it is adequate for many drug-using offenders. Since we know
how to do that, let's do that for everybody and let the people who need
treatment identify themselves by failing. Then we can make and execute
treatment plans for that hard-core population rather than trying to do it for
everyone. In terms of crime control, I love drug treatment; making drug
treatment more available to offenders who want it is probably one of the
most important things we can do to control crime. But if we let our need to
reduce drug consumption among offenders wait for Congress to allocate
enough treatment money, we are going to wait a long time.

Jim Gibson, U.S. Sentencing Commission, Washington, D.C.: We don't
have time to go into details with you about targeting crime hot spots. But
I'm wondering about the connection between that idea and your need for
swift punishment. If we can figure out where these hot spots are, would
that be enough to formulate an effective response that would be swift and
certain punishment?

M.K.: I think you could look at a process like the one that Bill Bratton put
into effect in New York. When there is a situation where crime is
overwhelming enforcement, instead of trying to control everything at
once, try to control something. Pick an area; pick an offender group; pick
an offense type. Say, "We are going to try to drive this pretty close to
zero." Then, once you have done that, spread it out. That's the way they
went after the graffiti problem in the New York subways. They didn't try
to control all the cars at once. They controlled 10 percent of the cars. Then
when they convinced the graffiti artists that there was no point in painting
those cars because they were never going to leave the station dirty, then
they made it 20 percent, and so on. The trick is to get enough
concentration so that you can move the offending rate and transform the
group dynamics. 

In fisheries management and in forest management, there is an idea of
"maximum sustainable catch" or "maximum sustainable yield." You try to
figure out how many trees you can take or fish you can catch without
depleting the population. Too much of our law enforcement looks like we
are trying to achieve the "maximum sustainable catch" of arrests. What we
want to do is "over-fish" or extinguish kinds of behaviors so that arrest
counts go down. The goal is maximum control with a minimum number of
arrests, and that is done by concentrating.

You know those old movies in which the Texas Ranger is facing an angry
mob and he has only one bullet left in his gun. How does he control the
entire mob with one bullet? He says, "The first guy who takes two steps
forward, I'm goin' to kill!" If people believe that, he does not have to
shoot anyone. That ranger ought to be our icon.

Notes

1. Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling, "Broken Windows: The
Police and Neighborhood Safety," The Atlantic Monthly 249 (3) (March
1982): 29-38; Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling, "Making
Neighborhoods Safe," The Atlantic Monthly 263 (2) (February 1989): 46-
52; Perspectives on Policing (series), published jointly by the Program in
Criminal Justice, Harvard University, and the National Institute of Justice;
Goldstein, Herman, Problem Oriented Policing, New York: McGraw-Hill:
1990; Skogan, Wesley G., Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of
Decay in American Neighborhoods, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992.

2. Kennedy, David M., "Pulling Levers: Getting Deterrence Right,"
National Institute of Justice Journal 236 (July 1998): 2-8.

3. Kleiman, Mark A.R., Kerry D. Smith, Richard A. Rogers, and David P.
Cavanagh, Imprisonment-To-Offense Ratios, Boston: BOTEC Analysis 
Corporation, 1988.

4. Chaiken, Jan M., and Marcia R. Chaiken, Varieties of Criminal
Behavior, Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1982. 

5. Greenwood, Peter W., Selective Incapacitation, Santa Monica: RAND 
Corporation, 1982.

6. Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human
Nature, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

7. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman, "The Framing of Decisions
and the Psychology of Choice," Science 211 (January 1981): 453.

8. Ainslie, George, "Specious Reward: A Behavioural Theory of
Impulsiveness and Impulse Control," Psychological Bulletin, 82 (1975):
463-496.

9. Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, Chapter 14, paragraphs
18-19.

10. Kleiman, Mark A.R., "Coerced Abstinence: A Neopaternalist Drug
Policy Initiative," in The New Paternalism, ed., Lawrence M. Mead,
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997: 209-210.

11. Schelling, Thomas C., Micromotives and Macrobehavior, New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

12. Kleiman, Mark A.R., "Enforcement Swamping: A Positive-Feedback
Mechanism in Rates of Illicit Activity," Mathematical and Computer
Modeling 17 (2) (January 1993): 65-75.

13. Kennedy, David M., and Mark Moore, "Closing the Market:
Controlling the Drug Trade in Tampa, Florida," Kennedy School of
Government: Case Studies in Public Policy and Management, Cambridge:
Harvard University, January 1993.  

-------------------------------

Men and Fathers in the Community

Presentation by

Felton Earls, M.D.
Professor of Child Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School 

February 4, 1999

Washington, D.C.  

As a physician and social scientist, I have been interested in the idea that
fathers matter in some specific and crucial way to children and to the
wider society since I began research in the late 1960s.[1] The interest was
spurred by a belief I developed in medical school that the introduction of
the contraceptive pill would mark the greatest achievement of the 20th
century--a development more revolutionary than atomic energy or space
exploration. Despite the profound implications of understanding how men
generally and fathers particularly are adapting to changes brought on by
the reproductive and political emancipation of women, this issue has
remained the least informed and murkiest of all my interests. 

I am driven by the conviction that social science research can increase
understanding of our social world and eventually become a basis for the
promotion of justice and security. But social science is young, immature in
the best sense of the word, and aspiring, to be sure. So being in a policy
arena such as this is akin to being on a skateboard: exciting, daring, and
requiring extraordinary balance and constant attention to perform well. As
a 10-year grantee of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), I am heartened
to witness NIJ's effort to address the basic issues of human development
in relation to criminal justice. 

I have three aims in this presentation. The first is to characterize the status 
of the American father in relation to the family and the larger society. The
second is to place fatherhood in a wider context of manhood. Finally, the
third is to discuss both these issues as they relate to the Project on Human
Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a large-scale interdisciplinary
study of youth development in an urban community. This project is
concerned with two pertinent problems: charting the developmental
pathways of males and females from birth to young adulthood and
examining the mechanisms by which communities guide or deflect these
pathways toward healthy or pathological behaviors. It is this second
concern that most acutely occupies the project today; that is, how
community influences are conceptualized, how compelling they are alone
and in combination with other factors, and what clues suggest efficient,
ethical, and potent strategies for strengthening communities. 

Fathers in Time and Space

Beyond being fertilized as an egg and having a biologically and socially
competent mother, one might naively ask, What is the specific
significance of having a father? Or to put the question more generally, Is
there any reason to believe that men play a crucial role in the rearing of
children? Admittedly this is a crude question but one a contemporary
social scientist should be asking. 

It is instructive to begin with a broad view of American family life as it
has evolved over the past century. Donald Hernandez describes two
distinctive demographic transitions during this period.[2] The first
occurred gradually as the population shifted from farms to cities. With less
dependence on a large number of children, families in these urban
communities became smaller. Correlated with this change were a greater
emphasis on schooling and an increase in the educational attainment of
parents and their children. This transition was completed by the 1940s. 

New changes were set in motion after the postwar economic boom. With
industrialization on the decline and new economic challenges facing
society, the forces that drove families to cities were redirected; families
began to look elsewhere and discovered the suburbs. These same factors,
combined with continued emancipation, led women to join the labor force
in greater numbers than ever before. While it is not possible to say
definitively why these changes occurred, two phenomena quickly resulted
and show no signs of reversing: an increase in breakdown of families
resulting in growing numbers of mother-headed households and an
increase in child poverty. The latter is a direct consequence of fathers
contributing less and less to their children's welfare. 

The traditional two-parent family structure has dramatically declined
during the past four decades. Currently, only 12 percent of American
children live in families with a father who works full time and a mother
who does not work outside the home; 26 percent live in families with a
father working full time and a mother working outside the home part time;
and 16 percent live in families in which both the mother and the father
work full time. If these two-parent structures are "ideal," nearly half of
America's children live in "less than ideal" family configurations. Because
I am focusing on both family-level and community-level phenomena in
relation to fathering, it is worth noting that indicators of declining civic
engagement may well be coupled with the decline in traditional family
structure. 

Decline of Male Authority

The following passage from Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City captures in a
poignant way the significance of male authority figures at the
neighborhood level:[3]

If it was football season, Father Lynch didn't want anyone to leave the
church before he could pressure them to attend the upcoming game. . . .
The Catholic elementary schools played on Sunday afternoons in the
1950s and for Father Lynch football was merely an extension of the
religious service. Virtually all the boys went out for football, even ones
without a trace of athletic ability. Nearly all the eighth grade girls were
cheerleaders. He was a sincere believer in the doctrine that "football is a
new crusade; it kills prejudice and it stimulates faith." 

These are the strong values and potent words of a patriarch. But the
religious orientation of the priest was reflected in the secular sectors of this
neighborhood as well, by teachers, police, and local businessmen. 

St. Nicholas of Tolentine, which is depicted in The Lost City, was a
complex, enveloping institution in the neighborhood. In exchange for
membership it provided a moral and social anchor for life. It dispensed
rules to live by or to rebel against, clear rules with no grey zone. You
either accepted Father Lynch or despised him. When Ehrenhalt returned to
this same neighborhood in the early 1990s, this kindly, intimidating, but
wholly committed authority figure had been lost. There was no
replacement for Father Lynch. The neighborhood retained many of its
physical features and sense of place, but to the writer it appeared valueless
and socially adrift. This was reflected not just in the visibility of the
church but with attitudes that characterized the schools, the police, and
local entrepreneurs. 

This is not an uncommon experience for many Americans of my
generation. When I read this account of a Chicago neighborhood in the
1950s, I reminisced about my own neighborhood in New Orleans. Our
patriarch was not a Catholic priest, but Oscar Hansberry, a committed
professor of music and the most authoritarian teacher imaginable. His
mission in life was to tame young children by teaching them music and
making them members of a band in which they would learn to keep time
and be punctual. They also would learn the importance of interdependence
and loyalty and to accept authority as the inevitable price a child has to
pay to achieve anything worthwhile. 

The male authority figure in the community and the father as head of the
family both became relics in the decades following the 1950s. The
American family could not meet massive new obligations within this
patriarchal system. Indeed, social scientists learned that terms such as
patriarchal and matriarchal were hypothetical categories that no longer fit
the existing profile of American families. By the 1960s the family was
well along the path of becoming egalitarian, and with this change marriage
had to become a partnership. Psychology backed up this spirit of
democratic marriages and bilateral child rearing. Russell Lynes, the social
critic,[4] put it succinctly and in terms that were undeniably emasculating:
"The man, once known as the head of the family is now partner in the
family firm, part-time man, part-time mother and part-time maid." These
words carry such strong negative connotations that they must have made
many people at the time wonder whether this phenomenon could ever be
adaptive. We now know the answer: Yes, it is adaptive. Yet the words
have not lost much of their chastising intonation. 

With the loss of authoritarianism and patriarchy (however mythical the
term), it may be argued that we have lost not only the ability to enforce
standards of conduct but also any clear sense of what standards we would
wish to enforce. In most areas of American life we have enshrined choice,
and all choices are supposed to be treated equally. Surfing television
channels or the Internet have become the contemporary metaphors for the
values that regulate life, that provide whatever degree of order and
predictability in daily affairs we have. To quote Ehrenhalt again,[5]

This generation will come to adulthood in the early years of the next
century with an entirely different set of childhood and adolescent
memories from the ones their parents absorbed. They will remember being
bombarded with choices, and the ideology of choice as a good in itself;
living in transient neighborhoods and broken and recombinant families
where no arrangement could be treated as permanent; having parents who
feared to impose rules because rules might stifle their freedom and
individuality. 

In place of authoritarianism, as personified by Father Lynch and Professor
Hansberry, we have drifted into a kind of egalitarian obesity. Our children
simply have too much choice. Let me be clear that this pessimistic opinion
represents a white, working- and middle-class perspective. Further, it is
not the speculation of a researcher, but of a social observer. Can scientific
evidence back it up? Before turning to research, however, I must introduce
a contrasting perspective on manhood and fatherhood, that of the
African-American male, because it is sufficiently distinct in historical,
social, and economic terms to command special attention. 

My Mother Who Fathered Me--Female-Conditioned Socialization of Boys 

It is a challenge for two parents to raise a child in a way that does not
undermine their curiosity or their constant urge to explore, experiment,
and test limits. The average single parent has an impossible task. 

Being careful not to risk stereotyping, I am deeply worried about the plight
of a large proportion of African-American families, those that live in
poverty and that at least functionally fit the category of single-parent,
female-headed household. This group of families has never done well
economically in American society, and their plight today is as serious and
bleak as ever. The phrase, "My mother who fathered me," comes from the
title of a West Indian novel that describes a boy growing up in a
female-dominated household and community (a so-called matriarchal
society). Many of the circumstances that define the relationship between
men and women, patterns of decisionmaking and working to achieve a
sense of economic security, appear to be the catastrophic and persisting
legacy of the past. The striking correlation between the proportion of
female-headed households in poverty and community violence represents
a deeply rooted and inescapable reality of much of contemporary urban
life. 

Geoffrey Canada, in Reaching Up for Manhood,[6] recalls his father in
these terms: 

He was simply a man who had helped to create me and seemed to take no
special interest or pride in that fact. In many ways our family was luckier
than most who had no fathers because we had a strong mother who did
everything she could to make up for the fact that our father was not around
and not interested in his children. Yet even though I came to accept that
my father would never be there for me, would never see me play varsity
football, or basketball, never see me graduate from high school or college,
I couldn't help but wonder what it felt like to have a father in your life. 

In another passage, Canada captures exactly the research question that has
occupied me for so many years:[7]

And while some of my friends had fathers, we couldn't figure out if in the
end their families were that much better off than the families of those of us
who didn't. The fathers on our block were spoken of in hushed tones. You
never saw them outside teaching their children to roller-skate or play
football. When my friends talked about their fathers it was usually in the
context of discipline. Fathers, we were told, hit harder than mothers. They
were hard characters who demanded quiet when they came home from
work, and quick and complete obedience to their every demand, and who
expected mother and child to act respectful and even fearful. 

If it is the private persona of fathers that matters in the creation of family
life, it is the public persona of men acting in fatherly ways that seems
important in repairing or building strengths at the community level. The
public image of fathers has taken a serious beating, with terms such as
"deadbeat dads," "throwaway dads," and "underground fathers" becoming
commonplace. Men may be more marginalized in relation to their families
than ever before in American history. And this circumstance is not a
temporary separation caused by going away to war or working at a remote
location. The terms used today specify a father who borders on being
virtually useless. How has this happened so quickly? Does research tell us
why we are in this state of affairs, how deep it is, and how out of control it
is? 

What Research Has Shown About Fathers

In providing an overview of research on fathers, it is important to
underscore the reality that social science rarely rises above the norms and
conventions of the historical period in which it is conducted. Interest in
fathering was not reflected in child psychology until the decade following
World War II. This first generation of questions involved the effects on
children of absent fathers brought on by the war. This body of work
produced important findings, but overall the effects were thought to be
largely transient and indirect (that is, filtered through the mother-child
relationship). It is sobering to look back at the era of the 1950s to witness
this as the period in which traditional family structure began its steady
decline. 

The issue of absent fathers and children's development spawned work on
the impact of the death of a father as the most extreme example of loss.
The basic question was: Does the death of a father leave emotional scars
equivalent to those left by the death of a mother? The answer was a
qualified yes. The loss of a father appears to have a greater effect on
adolescents than on younger children, but frequent remarriage and family
reconstitution following paternal death produce their own separate effects,
making it difficult to say what effect death alone has on behavioral and
emotional functioning. 

As I completed my training in pediatrics and child psychiatry in the 1970s,
a third generation of research was taking root. On the basis of previous
decades of work indicating that the absence or loss of a father was
important, new questions were asked about the specific contributions
made by a present and involved father. This agenda began by addressing
the sanctity of attachment theory, a psychoanalytical concept positing that
a secure affiliation with the mother in a single and dominant relationship
was a requirement of good mental health. Research challenged and
eventually undermined this notion. Children not only become emotionally
bonded to multiple figures including fathers, but their relationships with
fathers also possess a quality that distinguishes it from the relationship
with mothers. Involvement with fathers appears to promote independence
and stimulates academic success over and beyond that of involvement
with mothers.[8] Although it has not been demonstrated, to the best of my
knowledge, that father involvement operates as a specific protective factor
against the development of criminal behavior, this can be inferred from the
literature. It is difficult for the researcher to demonstrate the importance of
fathers during the same period in which society appears to turn its back
against them. 

One important area of research that relates directly to my major interest
unfortunately never materialized over the past four decades. It concerns
the role fathers play beyond the family in fostering a climate for healthy
development of the child within the community. In large part this is due to
the overwhelming focus on the mother relationship and family influences
over community influences in child development research. Various efforts
were made to approach groups of at-risk fathers in a manner similar to that
adopted for at-risk mothers. This approach typically includes forming a
therapeutic or support group to educate parents about child development
and provide emotional support and concrete advice. 

In practice, this approach generally does not work for men, yet I can find
only a single paper in the vast literature of child development that presents
some explanation of why it does not. While setting up a fathers' group
parallel with an ongoing mothers' group in a disadvantaged section of
Chicago, Samuel Tuck discovered that men wanted a more active role in
changing the community climate for children than could be realized from
participating in support groups.[9] This group of fathers started by
planning a series of activities, such as street fairs and field trips, to
stimulate academic success in their preschool children. But this level of
action was soon superseded by a more ambitious program aimed at
transforming the neighborhood environment and gaining greater
community control. At the time Tuck's report was written, the fathers had
operated an ice cream truck during the summer months and were
establishing a supermarket and a much-needed cooperative credit union.
They had made an important transition from increasing the academic skills
of their nursery school children to creating a healthful community
environment for all children.

When I read Tuck's article 25 years ago, I was convinced that it contained
strong clues for designing effective child development programs and
research. Until quite recently, the significance of these ideas has been
dormant. Child researchers continue to design much of their science
around the perspectives and activities of mothers, and programs of all
types continue to treat fathers as marginal. 

Toward a New Research Agenda and the Chicago Study 

Summing up a 1994 report covering the past 30 years of research on
fathering, the National Research Council (NRC) identified four limitations
of the existing research, two of which are relevant to this presentation.[10]
One limitation is the failure by researchers to understand fathering as a
negotiated matter. "Men do not just assume the role of father," says the
NRC, "they negotiate it, either in partnership or in conflict with their
children's mothers." The report urges researchers to examine how this
process of fathering is established in families with, for example, a disabled
child, where virtually nothing is known about the father's roles but where
the impact of paternal involvement may be particularly discernible. 

The second limitation relates to the community context of fathering. This
concern arose while discussing the role of older men in inner-city
communities but was expanded into questions about how community
norms of responsible fathering are established, communicated, sustained,
and transmitted from one generation to the next. These issues are
especially acute for children raised in father-absent households for whom
community norms and nonparental male role models are likely to be
important. But where are these role models? They are rare in elementary
schools and even rarer in preschool and early child care settings. How
fathers view their role in the family, how they behave privately and
publicly, and the nature of their formal and informal civic contributions
within various social settings are richly deserving of study. 

The Chicago project provides at least four areas in which to study the
relationship of men and fathers in response to large-scale community
transformations: 

--The devolution of public housing.

--The acculturation of Latinos, primarily rural Mexicans, to the lifestyle
of a large city.

--The impact of welfare reform on both fathers and mothers.

--The marginalization of a substantial proportion of African-American
men in the criminal justice system.

Each of these conditions is important to research because of the
demographic characteristics that are pivotal to forecasting what our cities
will be like over the next generation. Cities represent the leading wave of
population change that is reflected in "minorities" becoming the statistical
majority in some sectors of American society. Another reality, already
discussed, is the change in family structure that results in men no longer
playing the role of dominant breadwinner or authority figure. The
adjustment and modeling of boys and men to their negotiated manhood in
the community and their negotiated fatherhood in the family are centrally
important to how these changes ultimately support or undermine the
stability of American families and communities. 

The Chicago study engages two research strategies to address these
problems. The first is to longitudinally chart the extent and nature of
men's involvement with children as fathers, other relatives, teachers, and
coaches and its impact on children's well-being. Social class and ethnic
variations are of great importance in this analysis. The second strategy is
to study the attitudes of boys and men toward fertility and child rearing
and examine these as aspects of a changing male ideology. Terms such as
"hypermasculinity" (indicating antifemale attitudes used to justify a lack
of involvement and caretaking behaviors) have crept into the research
literature without a great deal of evidence for its occurrence. We are
primarily interested in the extent to which these behaviors are shaped and
sustained by community expectations and values. 

Producing results such as these takes some time. In the current phase of
the study, we are chiefly concerned with the level at which men participate
in the study and the accuracy of their responses. We examine community
knowledge and residents' perceptions of the social organization of their
neighborhoods. This work has shown that social cohesion among adults
and their willingness to intervene in the lives of children are correlated
with lower rates of violence. The sample was identified by randomly
selecting households from each community and requesting that an adult
household member participate in an interview averaging 45 minutes and
addressing issues of safety, security, and quality of life for children. All
neighborhoods in Chicago were stratified according to the race, ethnicity,
and economic status of residents. 

Much to our surprise, 41 percent of respondents were male. We are
surprised because, when conducting research on children, we have become
conditioned to look for mothers to participate in our interviews. But we
also are surprised by how little variation there is among neighborhoods in
the proportion of men involved in the study. This figure ranged from 33
percent in low-income African-American areas to more than 50 percent in
some working- and middle-class neighborhoods. What this means is that
men are at home to answer the door, they agree to participate, and they
provide responses that are similar to and as valid as those provided by
women. Although this does not jibe with the prevailing societal view of
men and fathers, it is not a radical finding. 

We have examined our data for evidence of gender differences in
perception of neighborhood characteristics and find very few to report.
Scores on our measure of collective efficacy (social cohesion and informal
control), the major focus of our work thus far, are exactly the same for
men and women. The few differences are: 1) men participate in
neighborhood organizations at a higher rate than do women and 2) women
perceive greater levels of danger and disorder than do men. The broad
similarities are encouraging and compel us to look more closely at how
men and fathers are involved in the four family- and community-level
processes previously mentioned (public housing devolution, welfare
reform, immigration of Latinos, and overrepresentation of
African-Americans in the criminal justice system). 

What's in Store for the Next Decade?

I would like to conclude by envisioning the types of events that may well
focus our attention during the next decade on the role of men and fathers
in creating a higher level of security and a higher standard of living in our
cities. First, the character and function of a social movement may give
greater definition and clarity to the position of men in American society.
This movement has been given license by several writers and activists,
prominent among them Robert Bly in Iron John,[11] the Good Fatherhood
Program of David Blankenhorn, the Father to Father Campaign established by
Vice President Al Gore, and the Rheedlen Centers established by Geoffrey
Canada. One manifestation of this movement is the impetus and meaning it
gave to events such as the Million Man March and the Promise Keepers
movement. As poorly understood mass events on the American scene,
they each have a continuing presence at the local level. The failure to
document and understand this presence is as much a shortcoming of public
policy and the media as it is of social science research. 

Major new research centers at our universities, such as the National Center
on Fathers and Families at the University of Pennsylvania, will stimulate
new work in this area. This center has set a research agenda that includes
the following seven propositions to guide research and practice over the
next decade:[12]

--Fathers care.

--Fathers' presence matters.

--Coparenting must be bargained. 

--Impregnation carries a deep and enduring responsibility. 

--Joblessness undermines fathers assuming responsibility. 

--Government policies regulating family life act as barriers to achieving
responsible fathering.

--The intergenerational transfer of values, beliefs, and behaviors is a 
powerful force in shaping good parenting.

These hypotheses reflect much of what I have discussed in terms of
manhood and fatherhood, but in their comprehensiveness and depth they
still stop short of helping to establish the community norms stressed in this
presentation. 

Increasing men's engagement in the lives of children in their
neighborhoods can contribute to the decline in violence now documented
to be taking place in many cities around the country. This can be seen in
Boston with groups such as the Ten Point Coalition, a group of
African-American ministers who seriously monitor and care for at-risk
youth. This image stands in marked contrast to the depiction of
African-American men in Geoffrey Canada's community. Indeed, it is a
celebration of human potential that Canada is now committed to training
boys to become the good father he never had. 

A second area to watch and study is the expansion and intensification of
the professionalization of child rearing. Child care has increasingly
become a commercial market, and most parents have difficulty finding
acceptable arrangements for their children. This means that mothers and
fathers are becoming less critical determinants of their children's success
or failure in life. Their achievements are increasingly related to the indirect
influence of the quality and stability of child care and school and
after-school programs, when available. The decline in family structure
witnessed during the past 50 years may be followed by a decline in the
significance of parents over the next few decades. We are witnessing a
particularly ugly rendition of this breakdown of families in some parts of
Eastern Europe and Russia with their reliance on large and impersonal
institutional care for young children.[13] I hate to imagine that any
approximation of this nightmare could happen in the United States. 

The Roles of Minority Fathers

Two issues relate to minority populations. Much of the future of urban
communities in this country is contingent on how Latinos become
acculturated. I anticipate that some of the most important findings to
emerge from the Chicago study are related to this issue. An essential
aspect of the acculturation process involves adaptation by men and boys.
Latinos' ideology about masculinity and their involvement with children
and communities in relation to American values and lifestyles represent
perhaps the most significant current social transformation in our society. 

Much research is reactive in nature. Researchers have not kept up with the
pace and direction of changes taking place in society. A new social norm
evolves or a new policy is introduced, and researchers then aim to discover
the reason. Two examples had a major impact on African-American
fathers. First, current welfare reform legislation might make fathers even
more distant from their children. Requiring these mostly poor and
underemployed men to make child payments could easily backfire by
fostering increased resentment toward their children's mothers and the
government. Second, as the number of incarcerated minority males has
risen dramatically, so has the stigma of worthlessness and debilitation that
is being attached to ex-convicts. Not only does this have a negative effect
on individual families; given the numbers and the selectivity of the
phenomenon, it must exert a negative impact on communities as well.
How well prepared are we for the reentry of these men into their
communities and families? Might they be returning less well prepared for
the roles and obligations of manhood and fatherhood than they were
before entering the criminal justice system? One of my keenest and most
immediate aspirations is that our research forcefully addresses these
questions. 

The continued support of governmental and nongovernmental research
agencies may help create a scientific platform from which to anticipate
changes in our social world and better understand the distinctive
contributions both men and women, both fathers and mothers, make to
justice and security. Levels of crime and violence are symptomatic of the
way families and communities function and how they are changing. A
more balanced research agenda, one that pays as much attention to men's
as to women's roles in society, is needed to advance our understanding of
how to create a secure and prosperous community. The relatively hidden
male must be more sharply revealed, and the relatively overexposed
female must be diminished in this endeavor. Social science research
represents a powerful vehicle to achieve this goal.

Question-and-Answer Session

Devon Brown, District of Columbia Department of Corrections,
Washington, D.C.: My question relates to how differences in the
perception of masculinity relate to crime prevention. I think it's pretty
well established in the correctional field that one crime seems to be
race-based, and that is child molestation. Child molestation is not usually
an African-American crime. Is this because the community believes in the
idea of hypermasculinity and child molestation would be the worst thing
to happen? 

F.E.: This is a tough question. There are differences in racial experience
relating to specific kinds of crime in the family. A certain attitude might
guard against committing child sexual abuse. The social class distribution
of child sexual abuse differs from child physical abuse. Child physical
abuse is heavily related to poverty; sexual abuse occurs more equally
across all income groups. As a child psychiatrist in Boston, I once looked
for sample cases of matricide among black families and was unable to find
one. This kind of homicide is one area in which there may be an important
difference from white families and perhaps it relates to black families
being more matriarchal. 

Donald Murray, National Association of Counties, Washington, D.C.:
What differences have you seen, as a result of recent welfare reform, in the
mother's use of time, considering the importance of children's early
years? 

F.E.: In Chicago, I have heard the phrase "the clock is ticking." Many
women turn to informal child care arrangements when they enter the labor
market. There has been rather murky reporting on that type of child care,
with the assumption that a center is the best arrangement, then family day
care, and next an informal child care arrangement. I'm not sure about this
assumption. Many women in Illinois work with organizations like United
Parcel Service or nursing homes and must work shifts for which no child
care is available. What kind of arrangements are these women making?
Professionalization of child care is a concern. I would not want to see here
in the United States what I saw in the Romanian orphanages. 

Christopher Stone, Vera Institute of Justice, New York, New York: I want
to ask, in relation to men and fathers, how much is defined beyond the
individual male role? By that I mean social policies, behavioral influences,
and involvement of the community, etc. 

F.E.: The meaning of biology is being redefined in our time. Last year,
20,000 babies were born from in vitro fertilizations. Biology should speak
of a social commitment, but there is no compelling reason that it will. We
are seeing an uncoupling of the implications of social commitment in
biology. As an example of commitment in communities and families, I
intentionally chose a Catholic priest in my example, a "father" who has no
children. Men who care about children have an important role in
communities. Most families and communities have both cooperation and
conflict. Children need to be able to witness and learn from the process of
going in and out of circumstances of cooperation and conflict. This is a
process of learning from social experience. 

Lauren Hampton, Charles Mott Foundation, Flint, Michigan: Have you
looked at collected data on workforce participation, on a day-to-day basis,
in the neighborhoods of your project?

F.E.: Yes. It takes more time to get a clear picture; people make some very
complex arrangements. We have spent much more time asking about labor
market items than I expected. People often have more than one job, and
their jobs change. Transportation can be a very big issue. Where people
live and where the jobs are differ a lot. The transportation system is
frequently opposite to their needs. They spend a lot of time waiting on bus
routes, etc. 

This is one area that particularly shows the need for a support system for
men returning from incarceration. Mentally ill people who are coming out
of prison may simply be told to go to a certain mental health center. The
center could have a long waiting list. Prerelease programs should look at
employment and other support. There are no clear health standards or
standards on community support. People are released with serious
problems, ranging from asthma to substance abuse and mental illness. The
effects of these problems have not been clearly documented. 

David Anderson, National Victim Center, Arlington, Virginia: There has
been a lot of criticism about social service programs that "do to" people
rather than "do with" people. What are your impressions of John
McKnight's asset-building or capacity-building approach? 

F.E.: Measures need to be bottom-up as well as top-down. Robert
Sampson, one of my colleagues, is looking at structures of leadership in
the community. Leaders may come from business, the police, the schools,
or the citizens, and there will be much variation in their views. The
leadership structure may be horizontal across sectors, or vertical and
truncated with a strong father/authority figure and not many other links.
An important question is sustainability of effort. Many communities do
work. To repair or help communities, we need better intervention
strategies. 

Jean O'Neil, National Crime Prevention Council, Washington, D.C.: One
piece of information you are giving to communities is that men are at
home; they answer the door and are concerned about children. We should
clear up the idea that these men are not valuable, direct some help to them,
and support fathers to be a valuable part of the community. 

Charles Sullivan, Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE),
Washington, D.C.: I'd like to hear about incarcerated fathers. We are
going to have 2 million incarcerated by the year 2000 and 94 percent of
those are men, of whom 84 percent are also fathers. About 50 percent are
under the age of 25. What can we do so they can connect with their
children? We will have to bring the children to the prisons and make
prisons more "child-friendly" to keep those fathers close to their children. 

F.E.: Prisons are one of the more invisible institutions in our society. We
have quadrupled the prison population. Some look at these issues as
human rights violations. We have to make the system more visible and
publicly accountable for the quality of life men and women have in these
institutions. Only then can they be made "child-friendly." 

Notes

1. Earls, Felton, "The Fathers (Not the Mothers): Their Importance and
Influence with Infants and Young Children," Psychiatry 39 (1976):
209-226.

2. Hernandez, Donald J., "Child Development and the Social
Demography of Childhood," Child Development 68 (1997): 149-169.

3. Ehrenhalt, Alan, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community
in America, New York: Basic Books, 1995: 124-125.

4. Ibid., 233.

5. Ibid., 281.

6. Canada, Geoffrey, Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives
of Boys in America, Boston: Beacon Press, 1998: 47.

7. Ibid., 37.

8. Parke, Ross D., and Armin A. Brott, Throwaway Dads: The Myths and
Barriers That Keep Men from Being the Fathers They Want To Be, New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999: 3-13.

9. Tuck, Samuel, "Working with Black Fathers," American Journal of
Orthopsychiatry 31 (1971): 465-472.

10. National Research Council, America's Fathers and Public Policy:
Report of a Workshop from the Board of Children and Families,
Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1994: 38.

11. Bly, Robert, Iron John: A Book About Men, Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1990.

12. Visit the Web site of the National Center on Fathers and Families at
the University of Pennsylvania for additional information:
http://fatherfamilylink.gse.upenn.edu/.

13. Human Rights Watch, Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect
in Russian Orphanages, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998. 

-------------------------------

Violence, Free Speech, and the Media

Presentation by 

Sissela Bok, Ph.D.
Distinguished Fellow
Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies 

April 12, 1999

Washington, D.C. 

I want to consider how public perspectives on violent crime can skew and 
vitiate the administration and the exercise of justice and ask about the
role that the media play in forming such perspectives. I shall speak of
"perspectives" on violent crime both in the general sense of how we
perceive and understand it and in the more particular sense, taken from
optics, of how we can visualize what is three-dimensional when it is
presented on two-dimensional surfaces such as paintings, printed pages, or
TV screens. 

Using examples taken from media coverage of the "copycat" school
shootings in recent years, I shall ask: What does it mean for our
perspectives on violent crime that we should be more exposed than any
previous generation and any other society to media violence so massively,
graphically, and often alluringly conveyed from early childhood on? How
can we best respond to the risks from such exposure--risks not only of
higher levels of aggression but also of misguided policies resulting from
biased, uninformed, or misinformed perspectives on violent crime? What
options exist for policymaking with respect to media violence that do not
move in the direction of government controls and censorship--something
that would do violence of a different sort to our democratic traditions,
including freedom of speech? And what might it mean for journalists and
media executives to exercise their roles with respect to media violence
more responsibly without compromising their duty to safeguard free
speech?[1]

In considering such options for individuals and communities, for public
policy, and for the media, I will suggest areas where research continues to
be needed and others where sensible precautionary choices are needed
before all the evidence is in. 

Violence Brought Home by Television

I want to begin with a quotation from the writer E.B. White about the
future of television--words that he spoke, amazingly, already in 1938: 

I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and in this
new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover
either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving
radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television--of that I am quite
sure.[2]

The ability to expand our perspective so extraordinarily--to see beyond the
range of our vision (tele and vision) and to do so in our own homes,
having at our fingertips the power to extend our vision into territories we
never knew existed--this ability, which seemed so astounding at the time,
is now so commonplace to all of us that we hardly realize what a change it
has brought. Has it allowed us to discover either "a new and unbearable
disturbance of the general peace" or "a saving radiance in the sky"? My
view is that it has in fact done both: It has not only expanded our
perspective in astounding ways far beyond the range of our vision but in
the process often altered that perspective in ways that are so hard to
fathom as to be at times paradoxical--and rarely more so than when it
comes to violence. 

The idea that violence should be fun, alluring, glamorous has long seemed
paradoxical to many, much like that of a "kindly rapist" or a "two-sided
triangle," even as others have seen this idea as unproblematic and simply
confirming the perennial human delight in mayhem. But until our time, it
has never been possible for viewers to tune in for the enjoyment of violent
programming in their own homes at all hours of the day and night; nor in
the past have up-close graphic scenes of violence, often sexual in nature,
become part of the experience of viewers of all ages and been marketed so
relentlessly to young people. The sense of paradox is especially striking
the younger the children acculturated to finding violence pleasurable.
Neither children nor adults take to such enjoyment without being taught
new perspectives, new ways of perceiving violence, whether by the media
or in their communities. We have to ask, therefore, whether these changed
perspectives on violence affect beliefs or conduct outside of the viewing
experience: What do these new perspectives do to viewers as moral agents
in their dealings with others? 

Four Phases of Moral Response

"Perspective"--on crime as on any other human problem--concerns, in the
most general sense of the term, how we perceive something. Such
perception is the indispensable beginning of the four phases of moral
response: perceiving a problem, thinking it over or deliberating about it,
arriving at a choice, and carrying it out. Of course there are times when we
need not go through these phases in a conscious way--as when, seeing a
child about to fall into a manhole, we respond intuitively with no need to
think through what is best to do. But when we confront a conflict that
pulls us in different directions, the process of responding has the four
distinguishable phases of perception, deliberation, choice, and
implementation. 

True, the four phases of moral response can never be neatly disentangled
in practice, nor do they always occur in the same sequence. Each of the
four, moreover, can be skewed, short circuited, or altogether absent in a
situation of moral conflict. In each phase, the temptation is strong to opt
for premature closure: for bypassing efforts at the fullest perception and
the fairest, most careful deliberation, and settling for uncritical acceptance
of simplistic choices and clumsy, inappropriate forms of implementation.

Of the four phases, perception is primary and utterly indispensable. To the
extent that our perception of a problem is biased, fragmentary, or
compartmentalized, the deliberation about alternative courses of response
is vitiated from the outset. These deficiencies in turn affect our choices,
including policy choices we arrive at collectively, as well as their
implementation. 

The Screen as a Lens

A more specific sense of the word "perspective" refers to optics and
concerns how we can visualize objects and persons as three-dimensional
on something as flat as a television, movie, or computer screen. The screen
allows us to do so in unprecedented ways. It both mediates our experience
of what we perceive and renders it more immediate, making it possible for
us to cross the boundary between being near to and at a great distance
from screen images. 

When it comes to violent crime, the screen is today the primary conduit
for perception: it acts as a lens for all the different kinds of violence in
society, whether "real" or not, whether intended as entertainment or not,
and whether meant to be artistic or not. It is on screens that most
Americans witness all forms of violence--in news programs,
"infotainment," or entertainment violence, including interactive video
games and virtual reality programs. 

For today's children in particular the screen has become the lens through
which they learn about violence. Their perception of and perspective on
violence is affected long before they have had the opportunity to consent
to being acculturated to violence in this way. It is through the magnifying
and often distorting power of this lens that the everyday life of America's
children becomes filled with guns, drugs, family violence, gang warfare,
kidnapings, and all that contributes to violence in our society. 

The shift to such an overwhelming role for the screen as conveyor of all
the world's violence is surprisingly recent in most societies. In America, it
is only in the past 10 years that viewers, including children, have had
access to the present variety and amount of violent programming on their
home screens. And it is only since the mid-1990s that video rentals and
computer-based games have made it possible to view and take part in
violent programming over and over again. 

Today's screen violence is often glamorized and meant not just to intrigue
viewers but to invite them to relish the infliction of injury and suffering.
Youngsters are familiar with films portraying the murder of classmates,
parents, police, and teachers as thrilling. "First-person shooter" games
reward players for shooting and eviscerating victims in gory and
photorealistic detail. In the video game Carmageddon, players can choose
from more than 25 vehicles with which to run down as many animals and
people as possible: to "Waste contestants, pedestrians, and farm animals
for points and credits!" The rules suggest that players try "to think of new
and humorous ways of pulping pedestrians!" In the words of a reviewer
for Wired magazine, "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how many
innocent bystanders you smear down the sidewalk in the process."[3]

Familiar and once-shocking figures from the early 1990s warned us that
the average child leaving elementary school has watched 8,000 murders
and more than 100,000 acts of violence. Now that violence in films,
television, and interactive entertainment has reached new levels, those
statistics have easily been surpassed, especially because technology makes
it possible to replay video sequences at will on the computer or the VCR.

Blurring the Line Between Fantasy and Reality

The sense of paradox is heightened for many who have never been
acculturated to experiencing violence as fun or exciting or glamorous in
the first place: How do individuals get to the point of enjoying it so
vividly, so often, and at such length in such realistic forms of
entertainment? What has happened to their perspective? Is their enjoyment
of violence always confined to their role as consumers of entertainment
violence?

The line between consuming violence and engaging in it in real life is not
always easy to maintain. For young people who are disturbed, neglected,
or abused, media violence contributes powerfully to blurring that line.
They may play and replay video games that reward them for devising and
executing strategies for torture, rape, and murder or model themselves on
movie actors showing such violence as thrilling. If they also have access to
semiautomatic weapons, the temptation to put similar plans into effect in
their own lives may overwhelm them. Immaturity, anger, fierce enjoyment
of media violence, and access to deadly weapons make for a combustible
mix. 

The copycat school shootings of the past 2 years have focused attention on
young people, sometimes children, who have crossed the line from
imagined to real-life violence. The public's grief and anguish after each
new school shooting is heightened by the thrill and lack of pity that the
young killers evince in carrying out their scheme of mass murder. How
could they not only delight in so many forms of violence on the screen and
off but also manage to cross the line between real-life violence and
fantasy, sometimes even finding incitement and instruction from media
violence? 

Few imagine that media violence makes the young perpetrators of these
shootings act out their aggressions. At issue is a convergence of factors,
not all present in any one case: depression, drugs, anxiety, parental abuse
or neglect, and access to lethal weapons and Internet instructions on
constructing bombs. For the most disturbed and psychologically
vulnerable young people, glamorized media violence contributes
especially powerfully to blurring the line between fantasy and reality. 

Earlier, many representatives of the entertainment industry had dismissed
all talk of such interaction between risk factors as baseless or cited
conflicting studies about precise levels and forms of interaction, much as
representatives of the tobacco industry have long insisted that links
between smoking and lung cancer and other diseases have not been
definitively proved. It now seems less far-fetched to journalists and
members of the entertainment industry that a minority of already troubled
youngsters, exposed to so much inducement to regard murder and torture
as thrilling, could take the step to actual killing. The same turns out to be
the case in countries such as Japan with its profusion of extremely graphic
media violence but with strict gun control laws, where school killings
according to some studies are becoming more common than in the United
States.[4]

Is There a Link Between Media Violence and Societal Violence?

Of all the possible effects of entertainment violence, the one most on the
public's mind is that it creates greater aggressiveness among viewers.
Polls show that about 80 percent of Americans believe that media violence
is linked to the high levels of homicide, gang violence, rape, child abuse,
and other violence in our society.[5] This is also borne out by the vast
majority of studies on the subject, which agree that media violence can
have both short- and long-term debilitating effects in lowering barriers to
aggression among some viewers.[6]

There is no consensus, however, about the degree to which exposure to
media violence contributes to societal violence, although all researchers
reject the view of 21 percent of Americans in one 1995 poll who blamed
television more than any other factor for teenage violence.[7] Even the
more common lower estimates that correlate 5 to 10 percent of societal
violence with television violence point to the infliction of a substantial
amount of suffering and death in a society with levels of aggression as 
high as America's.[8]

Americans have special reasons to inquire into any factor that may be
contributing to societal violence. While we are in no sense a uniquely
violent society, we need to ask about the many reasons our levels of
violent crime are higher than in all other stable industrialized democracies.
Our homicide rate would be higher still if we did not imprison more of our
citizens than any society in the world, and if emergency medical care had
not improved so greatly in recent decades that a larger proportion of
shooting victims survives than in the past. And although our homicide rate
has declined in the 1990s, the rates for suicide, rape, and murder involving
children and adolescents in many regions have rarely followed suit.

The sharp media focus on recent copycat school shootings is
understandable, given that the perpetrators and most of the victims are so
young and that schools are considered havens from the violence that
permeates much of the rest of society. But too often, the very sharpness of
the media focus also contributes to a narrowing of perspectives on the
victims of violent crime. Children are often safer by far in schools than in
their own families and communities, where vastly more common acts of
brutality and homicide take place daily across the country. It is hardly
surprising that many in the public wrongly imagine that school killings
represent the main problem with youth violence, given the
disproportionate media attention to such crimes compared with the more
numerous homicides committed by and inflicted upon children in society
at large.

Censorship Versus Free Speech

The continuing focus on school shootings has also brought new calls for
censorship of the violent material available on television, in movies and
interactive video games, and on the Internet. Staunch defenders of free
speech oppose any controls whatsoever, regardless of any societal harm
that violent material can be shown to inflict. In between these positions, a
number of Americans sense an insuperable dilemma. To them, it seems
impossible to protect society, and especially children, against media
exploitation of violence and the glamorization that can raise levels of
aggression, while safeguarding our traditions of free speech. They see the
two goals as irreconcilable, with no way of "going between the horns" of
the dilemma.

In my book Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment I argue that
censorship is even more dangerous than the ills it is designed to remedy.
Censorship is not only unacceptable in its own right, as shown by the harm
done to free speech and democracy in countries the world over by
governments engaging in it, but it also will be increasingly difficult to
impose as new technologies offer more and more ways to circumvent
censors.[9] With the advent of the Internet, even the most coercive
societies find it difficult to maintain strict controls over communication. 

There is a further reason censorship is not only the wrong way to go but
also unlikely to have an effect on harm stemming from media violence.
Censorship of violent material is primarily focused on the risks of
additional aggression, as in the case of copycat murders and serial killings.
But apart from whether or not someone heavily exposed to media mayhem
turns out to be more aggressive in real life, the fear about the effects of
such exposure goes deeper. It concerns injury to viewers themselves. Were
censorship deployed to reduce the fearfulness and desensitization to which
media violence also contributes, it would have to cast a far wider net. In
the long run, it would fail even more spectacularly to achieve the desired
blockage of all that might contribute to such effects. 

The late British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch has written that the
damage done to the inner life of viewers "through the imposition of banal
or pornographic or violent images by television is a considerable
wound."[10] For her, what is at stake is damage to the spirit: to resilience
and to the capacity to feel for others and to respect them. Lessened
resilience and corresponding heightened fearfulness can lead to choices
about self-protection that are more "risk-averse" than would otherwise be
the case.

Results of Increased Fear and Reduced Pity

Studies show that the sense that threats abound in the outside world is
common among TV viewers of all ages who watch a lot of television.
Media expert George Gerbner describes this effect as the "mean world"
syndrome.[11] He and his colleagues have found that viewers who watch
television more than 3 hours a day are more likely than viewers exposed to
2 hours or less to feel at high risk of victimization from violence, to
perceive their neighborhoods as unsafe, and to regard the world as "mean
and gloomy."

News coverage plays a strong role in generating such attitudes. You would
not know, from watching local television news in many American
communities, that crime rates have been going down in the 1990s. What
the Rocky Mountain Media Watch calls the "Mayhem Index," or
proportion of media time devoted to crime, disaster, war, and terrorism,
has remained as high as ever--averaging around 40 percent in 1998 and
more than 80 percent for some stations. At times, as with each new school
shooting, the percentage skyrockets in a great many more locales, and
television viewers see scenes of mayhem or grief incessantly replayed on
their screens every day. The media attention to these crimes intensifies the
fear of parents and school children about safety at school, even though a
minute proportion of children killed are actually killed at school.

We need to ask to what extent heavy exposure to media violence relates to
the rising levels of depression that now affect a far greater proportion of
persons of all ages, including children and young people, than in the past.
There is as yet very little research on this score, but as clinical depression
moves to the forefront of illnesses affecting people worldwide, it will be
important to sort out what forms of psychological stress lie behind such
changes. We know that depression among adolescents has increased
tenfold since the 1950s and that suicide rates for adolescents have tripled
in the past three decades. Clinical depression is sharply on the rise in
America and throughout the world. In America more than 23 million
people suffer from anxiety illnesses. Many factors clearly contribute to
these conditions, but daily exposure to media violence cannot be ignored
as one such factor. Even before we have adequate data concerning the
influence of heavy exposure to media violence in the development and
persistence of depression, it would seem reasonable for parents to try to
reduce its impact before turning to psychotherapy and medication. 

Given the stress on such coverage in local news reports, questions
affecting policy choices of great importance for communities and the
Nation inevitably receive correspondingly short shrift. The media's
disproportionate emphasis on violence and mayhem contributes to
skewing the perspective of unsuspecting viewers. And their skewed
perspective may in turn lead to faulty reasoning and deliberation about
choices in their own lives and in their communities, as well as in their
views about collective policymaking with respect to crime and justice.
Many are influenced by such a perspective to entertain views on
prevention and punishment and on the severity of punishment criminals
deserve, views that are not fully thought through in light of existing
evidence. 

This skewing of perspectives and the corresponding effects on attitudes
toward crime and justice are increased still further by another commonly
noted effect of exposure to media violence: that of numbing, or
desensitization. Like fearfulness, desensitization affects a far larger
proportion of the public than risks of increased aggression. The effects on
policymaking can be severe when widespread fearfulness and
desensitization interact: when many in the public have developed
heightened risk-aversion for themselves and their families, alongside
lowered concern for injustices done to others. 

By itself, desensitization in the face of terrifying experiences is an utterly
natural form of self-shielding. From infancy on, our reflexes guard us
against being overwhelmed by the sensory impressions and images that
surround us. Had we no such protection, we would be exposed to far more
stimulation than we can cope with even at the most primitive sensory
basis: it would be like having no skin. Gradually we learn to shield our
emotions more selectively from the full impact of scenes or knowledge
that might otherwise be too painful.

A degree of numbing is a natural response and need not be problematic,
unless it involves suppressing any impulse to empathy--the crucial ability
to feel with and for others and to respond to their suffering. This numbing
is especially likely to occur once enjoyment of the violence begins. For
example, to enjoy running down farm animals and pedestrians in the game
Carmageddon, players have to suppress empathy and any sense of trying
to understand what their victims might be going through and learn not
only pitilessness but the vicarious pleasure of maiming and killing. 

Such learned pitilessness presents great risks from a moral point of view.
Empathy and fellow-feeling form the very basis of morality and of the first
phase of moral response--that of perception. Without some rudimentary
perception of the needs and feelings of others, there can be no beginnings
of felt responsibility toward them. Because empathy is so basic to the
capacity for moral growth, I believe that its erosion is the most
far-reaching of the risks from entertainment violence and one that not only
parents but all of us have every reason to take seriously. To be sure, many
different influences promote or delay such moral growth. The trouble is,
we hardly have an oversupply of empathy and fellow feeling. As a result,
it is worth asking about any influence at all that wears away at empathy. 

As empathy wears down, those most strongly attracted by media violence
find that they need higher and higher levels of violence on the screen to
provide the stimulation they seek. They have developed a tolerance for
violence and suffering that they once found intolerable. Does this
tolerance carry over into daily life as well? According to the American
Psychological Association, "Viewing violence increases desensitization to
violence, resulting in calloused attitudes toward violence directed at others
and a decreased likelihood to take action on behalf of the victim when
violence occurs (behavioral apathy)."[12]

More research is needed to learn about the extent of such changes in
perception. We know that it can affect persons of all ages suffering from
posttraumatic stress disorder and that more callous attitudes have been
found among young males exposed to films containing sexual violence.
Many experience "compassion fatigue" with respect to news reports about
worldwide suffering. Is there a link between the two effects of media
violence--increased fearfulness and desensitization--so that people become
more concerned about risks to themselves and family and friends, even as
they grow less concerned about risks to outsiders, foreigners, and other
people they cannot bring themselves to care about in the same way?

If so, what is at issue is an ominous combination: learned fearfulness with
respect to self and learned pitilessness with respect to others. This leads
me to a more speculative set of questions: Can these learned responses
also influence perspectives on crime and justice? To what extent are they
related to America's place in the world as first in the proportion of people
it imprisons and alone among advanced industrial democracies in
accepting capital punishment as a legitimate exercise in retributive
justice--even, in some States, when applied to minors and the retarded?
And might there not be a relationship between learned tolerance of media
violence and the acceptance, in the richest country in the world, of
homelessness and hunger that less affluent societies do not tolerate?

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo has spoken of the paradox of
finding such inequity in one of the richest societies in the world. He has
pointed to a "second city" of Americans who have not benefited from this
country's prosperity, where the glitter does not show--the many Americans
who live in poverty and have no health insurance. The disconcerting
question for him, he has explained, is why there is not more of a public
reaction to this state of affairs.

There are surely many factors that contribute to the lack of public response
to all the human misery of that second city--misery that would cause an
outcry in all other advanced democracies and generate more forceful
public policies in response. But might the public tolerance of such inequity
be strengthened by a relentless media focus on violence and mayhem of all
kinds? Might learned fearfulness for ourselves and learned pitilessness
toward others help to skew our perspectives on justice in this regard as
well as when it comes to crime? 

Promoting Reasoned Debate and Solutions

In writing about violence, free speech, and censorship, I have been struck
by the role of unexamined and often skewed perspectives in blurring
perception and obstructing reasoned debate. I am reminded of the remark
attributed to Winston Churchill in 1939 likening the Soviet Union to "a
riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." In the controversies about
media violence, I have come to think that we confront a somewhat
different configuration: a conceptual paradox over how to view violence,
wrapped in a tangle of factual conflicts about the effects of media
violence, locked between the horns of an apparently insuperable policy
dilemma regarding free speech. 

Once we examine the reasons for that sense of paradox and work to
resolve the factual conflicts, we shall find that the policy dilemma is far
from insuperable. Without infringing on our traditions of free speech, it is
possible to undertake responses at every level, beginning with what we do
in our own homes, and linking such measures to communitywide and
societywide efforts. The media have a central role to play in these efforts
and in asking how to avoid helping people become accustomed to violence
and losing the capacity for pity. As yet there is nothing like the
interconnected efforts at all levels, including in the media, currently under
way to cope with the health threats posed by smoking and drunk driving.
We are only beginning to have the nationwide debate that we need on this
score and that other societies, such as Canada and Norway, have
encouraged in their antiviolence campaigns.[13]

As we seek alternatives to the dilemma without sliding into passivity, we
can learn from initiatives already under way here and abroad. Examples
abound of what individuals, families, schools, communities, and
governments can do without infringing upon free speech, much less
emulating authoritarian societies. These steps range from initiatives at the
personal level to societal policies and international agreements. They may
involve presenting families with more choice in quality television
programs; organizing efforts by consumers, including PTAs and other
parent organizations; wide-ranging press inquiries; and collective actions
by screenwriters, actors, health professionals, and many others.

The 1990s have seen a sharp increase in studies of media violence and
self-help literature for persons who want to break out of burdensome
viewing habits. During this period, many citizen campaigns have been
undertaken, along with consumer boycotts and publicity directed at the
producers and commercial sponsors of violent programming. There have
been numerous legislative proposals for regulations concerning ratings,
filtering devices, and "watershed hours," before which violent
programming is controlled. The most effective responses to media
violence increasingly make imaginative use of the new media.
Technologies such as browsers and filters make it possible for consumers
to be selective and to shut out unwanted programming. Many domestic
and international groups distribute videos and other audiovisual materials
concerning media literacy programs and other responses to media
violence; a number have Web sites and e-mail addresses to exchange
views and provide information. Just as those who produce and market
media violence have long operated on a global scale, so consumers and
concerned organizations now have the benefit of worldwide dialogue and
collaboration.

E.B. White was right to point, 60 years ago, to the remarkable changes
likely to occur once TV brought the ability to see beyond the range of our
vision. But he might now wish to revise his prediction that we would stand
or fall with television. He might envisage, not so much an either/or
contrast as a dynamic relation between the serious risks and the
extraordinary opportunities that modern media have made possible. It is up
to all of us to strike a better balance between the two than the one that
burdens our society at present. Violence is taught, promoted, and
glamorized; it can be unlearned, resisted, and deglamorized. Doing so will
require strong leadership at all levels and resistance to all that contributes
to skewing and narrowing our perspectives on crime and justice. 

Question-and-Answer Session

Bernard S. Arons, Center for Mental Health Services, U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C.: I am the director of a
Federal agency that tries to address some of these issues, including a
program we are starting on youth violence prevention with a mental health
twist. Your comments were quite sobering and appropriate. And you
mentioned a number of things that we need to do research on. 

When thinking about what we as a Nation might do regarding youth
violence we decided to examine the other side of the issue, the remarkable
resilience of our youth. In the face of this barrage of exposure to violent
situations, most of our youth have a positive attitude. We might want to do
some research to look at the reasons for that resilience. How can most
people be exposed to violence and still come out with a fairly positive,
empathetic view of others? We are looking at doing more research in that
area. I invite your comments.

The kind of work that has gone into creating the Carmageddon game taps
into something in young people and excites and engages them. We ought
to study and develop a video game that explores alternatives to violence,
presents positive solutions to difficult situations, and makes it exciting for
the kids and profitable for the video companies.

S.B.: You are absolutely right. Resilience is probably the most important
factor and there has been some research in this area. I like your idea that
games can add resilience by providing some alternative. I think of the
American philosopher William James and his fascinating article (circa
1910) on the "moral equivalent to war." He was reflecting on the Civil
War in this country and the excitement that people felt about wars,
however great the suffering they generate. He wondered if we could train
young people instead to undertake something that would have the same
moral (he meant by that both psychological and moral) impact. He was
talking about sending young people to do what we would now call the
work of the Peace Corps--helping to rebuild villages, teach people skills,
and many other things. 

We have come a long way in finding alternatives that give that kind of
psychological and moral excitement. Your idea of games that might play
such a role is important to think about; I would like to hear more about it.

Jeff MacIntyre, American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C.:
Thank you for using so much of our research during your presentation
today. You seem to summarize this almost Cartesian dualism in terms of
risk aversion and other factors that a child encounters or learns--what you
call "learned pitilessness." I wonder what you see as consequences to a
child's concept of self from the increased use of interactive games and
videos in today's technology. In addition, how does that affect a child's
psychological and moral development?

S.B.: This question about the increased use of interactivity is connected
with the earlier question in the sense that interactivity is part of shooter
games such as Carmageddon. I do think that it makes it harder for some
children to have the psychological strength and resilience to recognize that
this is only a game. On the other hand, we could and do have interactive
games of a very different kind. If more of them could provide the same
kind of excitement, I think that would be very important. But the
interactivity in itself is not problematic. It is what the interactivity can lead
to that may be a problem for some--not all.

Ted Gest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C.: I am a media
person, and I would like to take issue with your characterization of the
coverage of the school shootings. While there certainly was a large volume
of it and it certainly was graphic, I'm not sure there is any scientific
evidence that the news coverage had, overall, a bad impact. You could
argue that it may have had a beneficial impact in some ways because it
focused the attention of the public and policymakers on issues of school
safety. There may have been bad and good impacts, but I think we would
all agree that there has been a great discussion in this country in the last
year on school safety. Do you have any scientific evidence that the media
coverage of the school shootings had a bad impact?

S.B.: Yes, the coverage has had both bad and good effects. There were
some young people who read about school shootings and felt tempted to
carry out similar shootings: copycat crimes. Another negative effect of the
media coverage is that it made people more fearful of schools than they
need to be. We should know (and many do not) that the vast majority of
slain children are not killed in schools. Schools are among the safest of all
environments for children. Some in the media contributed to the false
impression by using phrases like "increasing trend to greater and greater
danger at school." There has been more violence in schools in past decades
than in the 1990s. On the other hand, there were definitely beneficial
effects of the media coverage. The discussion of violence in the schools,
insofar as it did not contribute to a false image of how terrifying they
were, was very good. I noticed how many in the media said, "there are
many different contributing factors--it is not just one thing or another." It's
not just the guns, it's not just the media, it's not just the families, it's not
just other things in a child's background, but these things can interact to
cause school violence. 

Responsible members of the press have long dealt with problems such as
heart disease in this way. We all know that it is not just lack of exercise or
high cholesterol that are the problem but that many factors can work
together. When I was working on my book, Mayhem: Violence As Public
Entertainment, often someone in the press would ask, Why are you talking
about the media, why aren't you talking about guns? Or representatives of
the gun industry would ask, Why are you talking about guns; why aren't
you talking about families that are crumbling? By now (the school
shooting discussions have contributed to this), we have a more
sophisticated view of the interaction, and that is very important.

I am a very strong believer that we can find both the best and the worst
about the media in America. When I was a member of the Pulitzer Prize
board, I saw much extraordinary writing and coverage, but also
tremendous differences. If you live in a small community or a large city,
where 80 percent of the TV news coverage is on the "mayhem" index, that
is a real problem. The best informed among us know how to find
information and newspapers on the Internet, even from other countries. A
lot of other people are not so fortunate.

Victor Stone, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: I have one
brief observation and also a question on which I would like to hear your
views. I believe posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and exposure to
violence have been around a long time and may be less prevalent among
the current generation of children who have not, at least in the United
States, been exposed to a war on the ground. Was there ever a time in the
past when U.S. and Western European families did not have a war close to
them--among their parents or grandparents--or did not think about being
drafted? No matter how far you go back, it has always been a part of the
culture to play "soldiers" or "cowboys and Indians" or to see James Bond
movies or have guns and do things that are very violent. 

I wonder if video games are just the way today's children fill the void
because toy soldiers or cowboys and Indians are not as popular as in the
past.

Looking at the idea that at-risk populations might be harmed by certain
levels of violence and hearing your suggestions about rating systems and
Internet filters lead me to question whether censorship is appropriate with
at-risk, immature populations of children (my interest is in prisoners). If
you look at media markets with many cable TV channels or at wide
searches on the Internet, you will find a tremendous number of very
violent, sexual, and sometimes deviant images. Are you suggesting that
parents should use the ratings and filters to censor the exposure of their
children and criminal justice administrators should use these devices to
limit what inmates are allowed to see?

S.B.: It is generally accepted now that wartime is one time when soldiers
can develop PTSD. But, unfortunately, rape, child abuse, and other
traumatic experiences can bring about the same syndrome as well. As a
result, even when we are not at war, many suffer from that syndrome.

With respect to fairy tales and playing with toy soldiers, these have always
existed, I agree. People have loved violence in the past and have attended
executions and other events. But I think there is something special about
seeing violence in our own homes, seeing it when we are 1, 2, or 3 years
old, long before we can make careful distinctions between what happens to
others and what happens to ourselves, that makes it affect us more. Some
psychologists say (again, we need more research) that young children who
are exposed to violence on the screen cannot tell it apart from real-life
violence. They risk being more affected than older children. It is a quite
different thing from playing with toy soldiers as children did in the past. 

You mentioned censorship by parents. I don't regard what parents do as
censorship, as when they decide which magazines and which TV programs
they want to have in their home or whether they want cable television. I
take the view that censorship is a government activity. Censorship (by the
government) is especially dangerous; what parents decide when children
are young is an entirely different thing. When the children get older, they
will be capable of tapping into all kinds of things, and that's why we need
to help them develop the resilience we have been talking about.

Whether prisoners should have television is the government's decision.
Clearly, there are many views about the kinds of entertainment to which
prisoners should have access. Certainly, it would be the government that
makes these decisions, as it already does in censoring the correspondence
of prisoners.

Notes

1. I draw, in this discussion, on my book Mayhem: Violence as Public
Entertainment, Bok, Sissela, Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1998.

2. White, E.B., 1938, quoted by Jill E. Sternberg in "Violence in the
Media," AMA Alliance Today (Winter 1998): 14.

3. Hudak, Chris, "I Can't Drive 55," Wired (December 1997): 260.

4. Zielenziger, Michael, "Juvenile Crime Jumps to Record High in
Japan," Boston Globe, April 19, 1998.

5. Bok, Mayhem, Part Two.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Bok, Mayhem, Part Three.

10. Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, New York:
Penguin Press, 1992: 337.

11. Gerbner, George, "The Politics of Media Violence: Some
Reflections," in Mass Communication Research: On Problems and
Policies, ed. Cees Hamelink and Olga Linne, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993:
Ch. 9.

12. American Psychological Association Commission on Youth and
Violence, Violence and Youth: Psychology's Response, Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association, 1993.

13. Bok, Mayhem, Part Four. 

-------------------------------

Dilemmas of Corruption Control

Presentation by 

James B. Jacobs, J.D., Ph.D.
Professor

New York University School of Law 

May 18, 1999

Washington, D.C. 

Attempting to suppress official corruption presents extraordinary,
perhaps unique, dilemmas for crime controllers, including law
enforcement personnel and executive branch officials at all levels of
government. This presentation outlines some of these dilemmas.[1]

First, our ambitions in the area of corruption control are increasing. Over
the past half century, and especially since the Watergate scandal, the
concept and definition of corruption have steadily expanded. More types
of official conduct are labeled "corrupt" (e.g., conflicts of interest), more
corruption-type offenses are on the books (e.g., illicit campaign finance),
traditional corruption-type crimes are expansively interpreted (e.g.,
bribery), and sweeping definitions of new offenses have been formulated
(e.g., violation of an existential right to honest government under the
Federal mail fraud statute). Anticorruption law, both criminal and
administrative, is ahead of day-to-day routines: the law seeks to change
mores rather than reinforce them. There is a large gap between the ideal
conception of how public officers should conduct themselves and
day-to-day reality. Thus, it is not surprising that we find special problems
in implementing the law.

Corruption is a political and public administration problem as well as a
crime problem. A corruption scandal can trigger a political and
governmental crisis. Good-government groups, the media, and the political
opposition demand that public officials and governmental units do all in
their power to prevent corruption, and they hold high officials responsible
for corruption that occurs on their watch. Unlike most other crimes,
government is expected to prevent corruption as well as punish it.
Corruption is seen not only as a proper target for law enforcement
investigation and criminal sanctions but also as a proper target for
administrative sanctions and prevention strategies. Hence, the emergence
of a panoply of prevention strategies, including conflict-of-interest codes,
procurement and contracting regimes, the inspector general "movement,"
rigorous accounting systems, and corruption vulnerability audits. 

Any amount of corruption is considered unacceptable, a blight on the
record of the administration, the agency, and managers up and down the
chain of command. Recently, "zero tolerance" has become a slogan
associated with quality-of-life policing in New York City and elsewhere. It
indicates increased attention to minor offenses that previously might have
escaped much, if any, attention. But no one really expects that disorderly
street behavior will be reduced to zero. No one will hold the police
department responsible if some disorderly street behavior occurs; nor will
the police department have to go though a public hand wringing when
street prostitution, public drunkenness, and vandalism occur. For example,
the police department and the department of transportation may launch a
multifaceted campaign to stop drunk driving, but they will not be
excoriated when some drunk driving continues even if the drunk driving
rate is unaffected by the campaign. More likely, it will be the drunk
drivers who are excoriated and whose antisocial personalities and
"pathological drinking" will be blamed for the failure of governmental
countermeasures. 

Compared with other crime control initiatives, anticorruption control is far
more extravagant in its public goals. In moments of high public
indignation, any amount of corruption--or even the appearance of
corruption--is considered intolerable. Thus, policymakers must promise far
more than can be delivered, thereby making themselves vulnerable to
powerful criticism if any corruption is exposed. 

More and better prevention is expected for official corruption than for
other categories of crime. It would be political suicide for a mayor, county
executive, or governor to announce that the level of corruption in his or
her administration is acceptable. Publicly, at least, the chief executive has
to be committed to zero tolerance. It is not enough to promise to punish
corruption when it comes to light (although that is very important); it is
necessary to demonstrate a strong effort to prevent corruption from
occurring. In public, we are committed to corruption-free government. 

Ironically, greater commitment to preventing and punishing corruption has
not been accompanied by greater public confidence in government
integrity--quite the contrary. Expansion of the concept of corruption,
greater sensitivity to ethics in government, and more hearings,
investigations, and prosecutions have been accompanied by declining
public confidence in the integrity of governmental officials.

Because the political costs of corruption can be so high, a great deal of
attention is paid to prevention--or at least to the appearance of prevention.
The ratio of resources spent on prevention to resources spent on
punishment is probably higher for corruption control than for other crimes.
This is the thesis of a book I coauthored with Frank Anechiarico, The
Pursuit of Absolute Integrity: How Corruption Control Makes
Government Ineffective. The structure and operation of government at the
Federal, State, and local levels can be significantly accounted for by layers
of anticorruption reforms usually put in place after corruption scandals.
Such staples of government and governing are known as civil service,
procurement and contracting rules, conflict-of-interest codes, inspector
general systems, accounting and auditing programs, and whistle-blower
protections, and such short-term strategies are called agency
reorganizations, multiple signoffs, and personnel assignment policies. 

Lack of Measures of Corruption

Unlike for most other crimes, there are no official data on the corruption
rate. How much corruption is there? Is the rate rising or falling? Is there
more corruption now than in previous decades? Is there more corruption in
one city than another, in one government department than another? Has
corruption decreased after passage of a law, announcement of an
investigation or arrests, or implementation of managerial reforms?
Corruption cannot be estimated by examining the Uniform Crime Reports
or the National Crime Victimization Survey. Thus, it cannot be determined
whether any particular anticorruption strategy or spate of strategies is
working. We are data deprived.

It is hard to think of any other crime that so lacks an indicator of
prevalence. For example, estimates of the level of illicit drug trafficking
can be obtained by surveys of high school students and others, drug testing
of arrestees, drug seizures by customs officials and police, and changes in
retail prices. There are no comparable indices of corruption. 

Little thought seems to have been given to measuring corruption or
constructing a corruption rate. Should corruption be measured by the
percentage of officials who have engaged in any corrupt act in a year, a
decade, or over their careers? Would a better measure be the percentage of
official transactions involving corruption or the amount of money involved
in corrupt events compared with the total budget of the agency or
government? Despite a lack of agreement over what is meant by a
corruption rate, there appears to be a widespread belief among
criminologists and other academics that there is far more integrity in
government these days than in previous generations. 

Unclear Definition of Corruption 

Obviously the incidence of corruption cannot be measured without a
definition. While the definitions of all offenses are ambiguous at the
margins, corruption seems to be ambiguous almost to the core. First, does
corruption include just formal crimes, or does it also include dishonest and
immoral behavior that has not been criminalized (e.g., politicians lying to
voters, rewarding big campaign supporters with desirable appointments,
and bouncing checks on their bank accounts)? Which formal crimes
should be included in the corruption category? Obviously bribery and
attempted bribery (a very slippery concept) would be included, but which
others? Should the violation of antigratuity laws be folded into the bribery
category? What about election fraud and violations of campaign finance
statutes? Obviously, embezzlement and theft of services count as corrupt,
but should misappropriation of office supplies, personal phone calls, and
misuse of sick leave be counted? Should there not be some de minimis
cutoff?

Should the definition of corruption include violation of conflict-of-interest
laws, misstatements and omissions on financial disclosure forms, and
violation of campaign finance laws? Should violation of these
"prophylactic" laws, meant to prevent corruption and the appearance of
corruption, count as acts of corruption? If defrauding the public of its right
to honest government is a crime (which it is, because the Federal mail
fraud statute has been stretched to cover instances of official favoritism
and duplicity falling short of the violation of any specific criminal
statutes), there will be great confusion and debate about what is corrupt
and what is not.

Is there any crime about which we know as little as official corruption?
While in recent decades Federal law enforcement has launched some
extensive proactive investigations into corruption, including the famous
(or infamous) Abscam investigation and Operation Greylord, usually the
exposure of corruption is fortuitous. Information about corruption reaches
the public's attention from investigative journalists, whistle-blowers,
legislative hearings, or law enforcement investigators and prosecutors,
rarely from agency officials. Corruption may continue for years without
attracting attention and may then be exposed by chance or by dint of a
single individual's determination. Sometimes the exposure causes barely a
stir; other times it hits a responsive chord and triggers a full-blown
scandal. The scandal may lead the media and the public to conclude that
corruption is rampant. When time passes without scandal, the media and
the public may conclude that corruption is under control. For example, it is
often noted that police corruption in New York City "erupts" every 20
years and is suppressed during the intervening years. But such inferential
reasoning is unsatisfactory. The occurrence or absence of scandal tells us
little. The rate of corruption may be constant, and the appetite of the media
and the public for corruption scandals may oscillate. 

Making Anticorruption Policy in the Dark

Because we have no data on the corruption rate or any accepted way to
define the corruption rate, we must make anticorruption policy in the dark.
New anticorruption measures are typically adopted as a political response
to scandal. Such measures may sound good and provide political cover,
but they are not (and cannot be) evaluated. We do not know, for example,
to what extent certain personnel assignment strategies (e.g., frequent
rotation of personnel through assignments), accounting procedures,
contracting rules, and whistle-blower protections have succeeded or failed
to prevent corruption. For generations anticorruption strategies have been
implemented without any effort to determine success. Perhaps the whole
point of the exercise is to assuage public resentment, provide political
cover, and demonstrate that public officials have commendable values. If
no further scandal occurs in the short term, the political elite implementing
the reforms can take credit. If another scandal occurs, the political elite can
at least claim that previous anticorruption recommendations had been
followed and that everything possible was done to prevent a recurrence.

Every major corruption scandal results in new anticorruption mechanisms
and procedures. At the time, these "reforms" are devised and implemented
to satisfy the political demands of scandal politics without much, if any,
regard for their impact on public administration. Wide-ranging rules on
conflicts of interest, financial disclosure, and "revolving doorism" are
good examples. They may provide political cover but at the cost of
discouraging good people from entering or remaining in government
service.

Indeterminate and Cumulative Nature of Anticorruption Reforms 

Unlike other types of anticrime crackdowns--for example, drunk-driving
roadblocks, police decoys in the subways, or sting operations aimed at
apprehending burglars--the strategies put in place to prevent corruption
have no conclusion, no end point. They are not disassembled or
discontinued when the experiment succeeds or fails or when funding is
exhausted. We do not declare victory over corruption and dismantle the
anticorruption apparatus. To do so would make politicians and
decisionmakers highly vulnerable to charges of being soft on corruption.
Thus, anticorruption controls are always cumulative, layered one upon the
other. They are embodied in the structure and operation of government;
after a time, their anticorruption origins may no longer be remembered.
They are assumed to be compatible with, and even necessary for, good
government. 

Costs of Corruption Controls

In our book, Professor Anechiarico and I question the assumption that
anticorruption controls are always compatible with governmental
efficiency. We attempt to demonstrate the substantial costs of corruption
controls. We argue that corruption controls are at best a drag on
government efficiency and at worst significantly displace service goals (a
successful administration is a scandal-free administration). 

Most anticrime strategies do not cause huge dysfunctions. A crackdown on
muggings or car thefts, for example, probably will not entail big costs
other than the displacement of resources from other law enforcement
priorities. Drunk-driving roadblocks might slow traffic on a particular road
or on a few roads for a short time, but the cost is readily apparent and
easily fixed. 

Not so with corruption controls. They are embedded in public
administration, the way government is organized, and the way it operates.
Practically every facet of bureaucratic public administration bears the
weight of anticorruption reforms--thus the subtitle of our book, How
Corruption Control Makes Government Ineffective. Many of the basic
features of American public administration were originally instituted to
prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption. Yet these reforms
now entail heavy costs for public administration, while having an
unknown impact on the corruption rate. 

Civil Service

Consider civil service. It was originally touted as a remedy for nepotism,
patronage, and the buying and selling of public offices. Supporters
assumed that civil service was compatible with, if not a requirement for,
governmental efficiency. No tradeoffs between corruption and efficiency
were recognized. Over the years civil service became a general
anticorruption palliative. If some civil service protection was good, more
was better. Non-civil-service appointments (stigmatized as patronage)
were likely to be considered corrupt. (A big scandal broke out in New
York City during the Koch administration when the media discovered a
city hall "patronage mill" that promoted the job candidacy of individuals
recommended by various Democratic Party politicians.) In addition, civil
service protections have been extended beyond hiring decisions to
promotions and demotions.

Only recently have the dysfunctions of civil service been taken seriously.
In many governmental units, agency heads cannot recruit, promote, or
demote, at least not easily. They lack both punishments and rewards to
motivate their subordinates. Excellent performance cannot be rewarded;
mediocre performance cannot be penalized. This contributes to
inefficiency. 

Government Contracting 

Local and State government contracting provides another example. The
lowest responsible bidding (LRB) system is meant to prevent government
officials from awarding contracts on the basis of favoritism, including
personal financial interests. Any other procurement system is considered
suspect and potentially corrupt. But the consequence of a slavish
adherence to the LRB system is a dysfunctional procurement system that
neither saves money nor prevents crime. Under a strict version of the LRB
system, the government procurer cannot take into account the contractor's
past performance on public or private contracts in awarding a contract; the
only question is whether the contractor's bid is lowest. (In Federal
contracting, past performance has been a factor since 1993--based on the
Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, National Partnership
for Reinventing Government, and National Performance Review.) It does
not matter that the contractor did an excellent job in the past; no favoritism
can be shown. True, a hideous previous performance may be enough to
label the contractor irresponsible, but it takes fortitude to trigger the
procedures that might produce such a determination. The LRB system puts
government agencies at arm's length from their contractors. The
government agency does not enjoy a long-term relationship of confidence
with its contractors as private-sector companies frequently do. Such cozy
relationships would be considered suspect and potentially corrupt in the
public sector.

Unfortunately, the LRB system has stimulated a different kind of
corruption. For example, in New York City contractors tend to bid low
and then increase the value of the contract by sometimes fraudulently
manipulating change orders from harried government contract managers.
The final cost of the contract may greatly exceed the bid price. Professor
Anechiarico and I found that many New York City government officials
suspect some private contractors of being criminals or potential criminals.
Obviously, such a situation undermines effective and responsive
government. 

Whistle-blowing 

Whistle-blowing protections that came into vogue after the Watergate
scandal also illustrate how the anticorruption project imposes costs on
public administration. Perhaps the encouragement provided to
whistle-blowers by protecting them from negative personnel actions
stimulates reporting of agency corruption and thereby deters such
corruption, but only "perhaps"; I know of no evidence. A proper
evaluation of whistle-blowing reforms would have to consider costs to
public administration. For example, some whistle-blower protection laws
appear to presume that government managers will not handle corruption
charges properly and, worse, will punish employees who make such
charges. This certainly does not enhance the status or morale of public
managers. In addition, whistle-blowing encouragement and protection
provide a weapon for disgruntled and poorly performing employees. An
employee with a grudge against a supervisor or an apprehension of being
fired may file a bogus corruption charge and thereby trigger
whistle-blower protections for himself. Once recognized as a
whistle-blower, an employee is untouchable. Whistle-blowers may remain
on the job for months and even years while the case is investigated. The
whistle-blower's continued presence in an agency whose director wishes
to fire him or her illustrates the impotence of the agency head. Should the
outside investigators conclude that a negative personnel action against a
whistle-blower was improper and must be reversed, the authority of the
government manager may be seriously undermined.

Inspector General

The inspector general (IG) is one of the most interesting anticorruption
innovations of the contemporary period. The IG's mission is to prevent
fraud, waste, and abuse but the IG's role (like the auditor's) is hard to
contain. In the name of preventing fraud, waste, and abuse, the IG may
legitimately claim the need for wide-ranging authority over an agency's
entire operations. There is no obvious limit to the IG's purview. Any and
all agency structures and operations need to be scrutinized for corruption
vulnerability. Furthermore, it takes fortitude for an agency head to reject
the IG's recommendations, especially when the IG is independent or
quasi-independent and reports to a person or body outside the agency. The
IG constitutes an alternative line of authority and decisionmaking inside
the agency. 

Financial Disclosure and Revolving Door Restrictions

As previously mentioned, financial disclosure requirements and revolving
door restrictions also may have a negative impact on recruitment and
retention into government service. Both have expanded significantly in
recent years. More government officials now are required to make more
intrusive financial disclosures about their own and their family members'
affairs. In addition, there are more and longer restrictions on moving from
government employment to the private sector. Perhaps the negative
impacts on recruitment and retention are worth the costs, but the tradeoffs
need to be carefully examined. 

Investigative and Prosecutorial Dilemmas

Conflict of Interest

Although politicians and government officials have a strong political
incentive to develop and implement many types of corruption prevention
strategies, they have a disincentive to expose and prosecute corruption.
Agency officials are in a conflict-of-interest position. Obviously, it is
better for them to expose corruption than to have it exposed by a
journalist, investigator, or whistle-blower. But it is better still not to have
it exposed at all. Revelations of corruption may subject the administrator
to criticism for tolerating corruption. Their agency might be engulfed for
weeks or months in a scandal, thereby jeopardizing the agency's provision
of goods or services. Whether he or she could have prevented it or not, the
manager may be held responsible and sacrificed to assuage public anger.
The top government official may therefore conclude or rationalize that it is
better to deal with possible corruption quickly and expeditiously than to
set in motion a penetrating investigation that could cast a deep shadow
over the whole agency or administration. This might result in efforts to
conceal corruption or sweep it under the rug--or in actions that might be
perceived or criticized as such.

Differing Interests

Executive branch officials and law enforcement officials may have
differing interests, especially with regard to investigating and exposing
corruption in high places. Law enforcement officials may want to trace
corruption as far upward into the agency and administration as they can
and, therefore, in some circumstances, may want to leave a corrupt
employee in place to be monitored so that more corruption can be
exposed. Exposing corruption at the top not only would make a greater
contribution to rooting it out of the agency but would also result in
newspaper headlines and benefit law enforcement officials' professional
reputations. On the other hand, law enforcement personnel face
considerable risks in tracing corruption to the top. In any case, the
governor or the mayor has no interest in leaving a corrupt official in place.
That act alone could result in criticism for allowing corruption to continue
in his or her administration. Furthermore, it would be a secure governor or
mayor, indeed, who would happily sit back while law enforcement
officials traced corruption higher and higher.

Whitewashing and Lack of Cooperation

For law enforcement agencies and prosecutors, investigating and
prosecuting corrupt public officials is fraught with problems. The
difficulties of effectively investigating corruption among the police are
well known. If police are relied on to investigate, there will (perhaps
fairly) be accusations of whitewash. If outside investigators are relied on,
the cooperation necessary to complete a thorough and efficient
investigation may not materialize. Likewise, prosecutors, who every day
rely on police officers as investigators and witnesses, may be
compromised in prosecuting police officers' criminality. 

Interfering With Investigation

High government officials may attempt to interfere with law enforcement
investigations of legislators, executive branch officials, and political party
leaders. Incumbents of these positions have clout and ties to the heads of
law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies and may control the
investigating agency's budget. Targets may be able to have the most
experienced investigator and prosecutor transferred or otherwise removed
from the case. The targets of such investigations may label them
"politically motivated" and attempt to turn the tables on the investigators
and prosecutors. Recently, the venerable Pennsylvania Crime Commission
was abolished as the result of a controversy arising out of its investigation
of the State attorney general.

Assigning Responsibility for Investigation

One last dilemma concerns the kind of law enforcement agency best suited
to investigating official corruption. Is State and local corruption control a
job for Federal law enforcement agencies because they are (more)
independent of local political structures? In recent years the U.S.
Department of Justice has become actively involved in investigating State
and local corruption, but it still does not take responsibility for being the
main line of defense. Should the Federal role be enhanced? Should the
Federal Government consider itself the generator of local government
integrity? Would that send the wrong signals to State and local law
enforcement agencies--i.e., that they need not handle the hot potato of
official corruption? 

Should States organize a single anticorruption force at the State level? But
then the question becomes, who will its investigators be? And will this be
seen as a green light for local law enforcement agencies to ignore local
corruption altogether? It seems likely that some special prosecutorial unit
is required, especially to deal with corruption in small towns and cities.

New York City's Department of Investigation, a large agency that
operates under the authority of the mayor, is mandated to prevent and
investigate corruption. It has a complex relationship with the police and
district attorneys. The advantage of such an agency is that it is a
specialized corruption fighter and can help the mayor head off corruption
before it occurs, or at least before it becomes a scandal. The danger is that
it will become a captured regulator that puts the administration's interests
above the interests of justice, while protecting the mayor and the top
administration from being investigated or embarrassed. It is interesting
that the model has not caught on in the rest of the country.

Question-and-Answer Session

Eric Sterling, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Washington, D.C.: I
was struck by the parallels between your analysis of corruption and the
ways in which I think of our current problems with drugs in the United
States. The lack of definition suggests the importance of corruption in the
symbolic sense in our society. The issues you pointed out show how
corruption serves ideas about good and evil, beyond simply
administration. There is something else going on regarding our public
concern about corruption (as there is in the area of drugs). 

Your point about the permanent structural impact of anticorruption
strategies made me think about workplace drug testing and the ways in
which search-and-seizure law has been changed by the way we respond to
drugs. The comments you made about the cumulative effects made me
think about the ever-increasing number of agency task forces involved in
antidrug matters. Of course, with drugs there is no endpoint, as there is no
endpoint in the anticorruption area. It seems at times we have even lost our
service goals; instead of saying at our public schools, "This is an
ignorance-free school," we say, "This is a drug-free zone."

There are probably other areas of anticrime activities where a lot of public
reaction suggests that there are much deeper, more symbolic issues. For
example, the Columbine High School incident instantly became a "shoot
out" between Republicans and Democrats. In our efforts to make the world
"right," there are very important costs. I found it to be a very constructive
analysis.

J.J.: I think that criminal law is often an arena for symbolic conflicts, such
as posturing to be on the right side of the corruption control issue, to be
righteous and stand up for integrity at all costs, come what may. That said,
I think there are a lot of differences between drug control and corruption
control. Maybe the largest one is that corruption control is an
organizational phenomenon involving the control of government agencies
whose main task is providing services to the public. My thesis is that there
can be tradeoffs between corruption prevention and agency efficiency. 

Richard McGahey, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C.: Your
work not only focuses on the law and legal issues but also on the practical
ways that it influences our actions and their unintended consequences. One
of the strategies for anticorruption has been informational--a
"transparency" strategy--the point of all the disclosures and rules for
behavior. Do you think these strategies make sense? Is it possible to
divorce them from the other issues and enforce them? There are clear
inefficiencies in that. The question is about informational strategies: Do
they seem like a sensible way to proceed or do they have the same
dilemmas? 

J.J.: Who would be opposed to transparency and in favor of secrecy?
Maybe it would build greater confidence if government officials' finances
and the finances of their spouses and children are in the public record--but
maybe not. Do we get accurate reporting and, if so, does it also mean a
decrease in corrupt activity? I'm somewhat skeptical of that. Corrupt
officials don't care about the financial disclosure forms; they treat them as
a joke. The disclosure forms mostly affect the people who are obsessively
concerned with integrity and, being good government officials, they worry
that they left something off their financial disclosure form that might cause
them to realize, "Oh, I do have a holding that creates a conflict of interest
so I should recuse myself." It makes a person who is already properly
motivated feel good that he does these things. But I doubt that it has a big
impact on preventing corruption.

Financial disclosure rules could well have a negative effect on public
administration. Some people object to disclosure and don't want to expose
their families to this kind of spotlight. Financial disclosure requirements
have expanded far beyond where they started in terms of the number of
people in government service who have to fill them out. Maybe it made
sense in some areas that are very delicate, but now they are very widely
applicable and deeply intrusive.

Thomas Hay, National Institute of Justice, Washington, D.C.: You are
pointing out all the dilemmas and problems, but maybe we also are doing
something good about corruption control. In other countries where
corruption is so rampant and these protections do not exist, personal
liberty, business development, and every other aspect of society are
impeded.

J.J.: Corruption is a problem, and it undermines government and
government effectiveness. In some countries it paralyzes the whole
government apparatus. But I think corruption control also can be a
problem. We could get the worst of both worlds, both a corruption
problem and a corruption control problem.

I wouldn't want to defend the position that it is anticorruption laws that
account for the differences between countries. It may be that the amount of
corruption is really determined by diffuse cultural variables and not so
much by the laws. The laws may reflect cultural variables and moral
entrepreneurship.

Where do we stand vis--vis other countries? Don't we have a higher level
of integrity? I take this business of the difference between countries with a
grain of salt. It makes us feel good to believe that our country isn't as
corrupt as many other countries. Whenever someone scratches beneath the
surface, a lot of corruption is found. At the time I was writing this book, it
seemed like the whole Newark City government was under indictment and
the whole Miami City government under suspicion. When the FBI
conducted a proactive investigation of zoning boards in New York State,
they offered bribes to people on zoning boards to get them to rule in a
certain way. Of 93 bribes proffered, 92 were accepted. Abscam and
Operation Greylord are other examples.

Doris Marie Provine, National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C.: I
am having a little trouble pinning down this argument. At times, it sounds
like it is a "gone overboard" American psychology thing, and there is no
way we are going to nab the people that we want to get. It is only a
feel-good thing.

Then I hear another piece of this argument (or maybe a different
argument): it is a public administration issue that says, "Anticorruption is
good, but there are costs that haven't been measured." Should we look at
an anticorruption measure and say, "What costs are being imposed?" I
didn't hear you talk about those actual costs of anticorruption measures.

Are you arguing both things at once, or is this a psychological dilemma
along the lines that Eric Sterling was talking about that might relate to
some other quirks in the American public personality?

J.J.: The main thesis of our book [see note 1] is the second argument. We
have exposed a deep truth about public administration at the Federal,
State, and local levels. It seems that for the last century public
administration has been shaped around an anticorruption mission that is
connected to scandal politics and value conflicts. 

The core of the book is that the moral entrepreneurs and good-government
groups have assumed that anything put forward in the name of
anticorruption control is compatible with good government. As we come
to the late 20th century and see a lot of problems in governing, it is time to
look at the structure and operations of government and to consider the
costs imposed by layers of anticorruption controls.

James Boden, Office of Management and Budget, Washington, D.C.: I'd
like to follow up on what you said about the cost of anticorruption
controls. I think there is also a cost to the lack of those controls. You
mentioned civil service and procurement in particular. With respect to
civil service, in the absence of anticorruption controls, we had nepotism
and other questionable arrangements. There are ethical costs and
efficiency costs when you do not get the best people in those positions. 

I would like to talk about procurement also. I was instrumental in the
development of the Information Technology Reform Act of 1996, which
reformed the underpinnings of the Federal procurement process. We found
that a lot of the inefficiencies attributed to the procurement laws were in
fact deficiencies in organizations' capabilities to engage in large-scale
information technology acquisition and implementation, which at that time
were relatively new. We were able to reform the procurement laws in a
way that did away with some of the most egregious barriers, while still
maintaining a large measure of the protections. I think you can have both.
Do you agree? 

J.J.: As we say in the book, we have to have hard-headed analyses of costs
and benefits of various corruption controls, asking whether each is worth
keeping or reforming. We do not advocate mindlessly scrapping
everything. Some creative work has been done in the Federal Government
in the procurement area, such as reforming the lowest responsible bidder
system. 

Let me reemphasize some of the major themes. We have continued to
expand our definition of what is corrupt since Watergate. Our ambition to
control government officials in many aspects of their professional and
personal lives has expanded. We have criminalized (or at least
stigmatized) a much broader range of behavior, some of it having been
"basic practice."

Patronage, for example, was the way we once did business in the United
States. Maybe it wasn't perfect or pretty, but that was our system. We
made it unconstitutional, and then we made it a crime. Large campaign
contributions were a hallmark of our politics. Now we are well along the
road to defining the whole system as corrupt. We ought to be concerned
with these "reforms" and their implications.

Roger Conner, National Institute of Justice, Washington, D.C.: Do you
have any doubt that government today is dramatically less corrupt than it
was before the Progressive Era? I urge you to read Eliot Asinof's book
Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series, which is the
story of the Black Sox scandal. Asinof argues that it was commonplace not
only for the government to take bribes, but also for baseball players to
throw games in what was then the national pastime. In private business,
corruption was also common, and there was national revulsion triggered
by the Black Sox scandal. Are you arguing that there is any doubt that, in
government today, we are not substantially less corrupt than in the days of
Boss Shephard?

J.J.: It's only with some temerity that I say "Yes." I remain skeptical about
trying to compare corruption across generations; what do we know about
the corruption of previous generations? Maybe a journalist wrote a
crusading book about a particular situation, but that journalist may have
had an ax to grind. The journalist's accusations then become emblematic
of government all over the United States at that period. Then we compare
it with an image we have of our local, State, and Federal governments,
which may be wildly inaccurate. 

I keep bringing us back to the present period. Look at the figure I gave you
about the FBI's proactive investigation in New York. Ninety-two of
ninety-three people who were offered bribes took them; would you say it
was worse two generations ago--that all 93 would have taken them?
Operation Greylord, which investigated the judiciary in Chicago, revealed
massive corruption. Would you want to bet that Miami or Newark is less
corrupt now than it was in 1945? 

Healthy skepticism can be useful. Shall we just go to bed at night thinking,
"Yes, we are much more honest, we have much greater integrity than our
grandmothers, great grandmothers, and great grandfathers did. This is the 
most honest generation of Americans in history?"

I am skeptical on the question. There were major scandals in previous eras,
and there have been major scandals in this era. One of the things that
would lead you to think that there is more corruption now is that there are
so many more ways to be corrupt. We say, "Look at how corrupt they
were." But some of the things we now consider corrupt were not illegal in
the old days. We have expanded the criminal and administrative laws on
corruption; that alone could produce higher rates of corruption.

Captain Joshua Ederheimer, Metropolitan Police Department, Washington,
D.C.: My question is about local law enforcement's role in investigating
corruption and its relationship to the advent of inspector generals around
the country and here in Washington. Where do you see local law
enforcement's role in investigating corruption in relation to IGs and other
agencies in the years to come?

J.J.: I think that is a real dilemma. It takes a lot of resources to investigate
corruption. Most local police departments don't have the resources to
create and sustain a specialized unit to investigate corruption. Only the
really large police departments can do it. Even then, other priorities may
always leave corruption control underfunded and understaffed. In New
York City, which has the largest police department in the Nation, there
isn't much of a record in investigating corruption. So I doubt that local
law enforcement agencies will be much of a presence in investigating
corruption. We need other kinds of law enforcement mechanisms, whether
they be Federal or State. I don't know what that would mean for the
District of Columbia, but I think we probably need some agency other than
the police force.

Donald Vereen, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Executive Office
of the President, Washington, D.C.: Having served with the Department of
Justice, I wish to commend the department for this seminar. This is one of
the more thought-provoking and "nonpolitically correct" discussions I
have heard in a long time. As my grandfather would have said,
"Coraggio!"

Note

1. This article is based on ideas developed in The Pursuit of Absolute
Integrity: How Corruption Control Makes Government Ineffective, which
I coauthored with Frank Anechiarico (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996). The book includes a comprehensive bibliography and notes
on the research literature in this field.

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Perspectives on Crime and Justice 

Videotape Lectures

Videotapes of the lectures presented in this publication are available
through the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS).
Videotapes are ideal for stimulating productive debate on criminal justice
research and public policy issues and are 60 to 80 minutes in length.

Getting Deterrence Right
Mark A.R. Kleiman
NCJ 173935

Men, Fathers, and Community Capacity
Felton Earls
NCJ 173961

Violence, Free Speech, and the Media
Sissela Bok
NCJ 175713

Dilemmas of Corruption Control
James B. Jacobs
NCJ 175692

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-------------------------------