Title: Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1996-1997 Lecture Series.
Authors: James Q. Wilson, Peter Reuter, Mark H. Moore, Cathy
Spatz Widom, and Norval Morris
Series: NIJ Research Report
Published: November 1997
Subject: media, crime patterns and future needs
117 pages
286,000 bytes

Figures, charts, forms, and tables are not included in this ASCII
plain-text file. To view this document in its entirety, download the
Adobe Acrobat graphic file available from this Web site or order a
print copy from NCJRS at 800-851-3420.

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice

Perspectives on 
Crime and Justice:
1996-1997 Lecture Series

Volume  I 

Research Report

November 
1997

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

About the National Institute of Justice

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), a component of the Office
of Justice Programs, is the research agency of the U.S. Department
of Justice. Created by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets
Act of 1968, as amended, NIJ is authorized to support research,
evaluation, and demonstration programs, development of
technology, and both national and international information
dissemination. Specific mandates of the Act direct NIJ to: 

o Sponsor special projects, and research and development
programs, that will improve and strengthen the criminal justice
system and reduce or prevent crime. 

o Conduct national demonstration projects that employ innovative
or promising approaches for improving criminal justice. 

o Develop new technologies to fight crime and improve criminal
justice. 

o Evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice programs and
identify programs that promise to be successful if continued or
repeated. 

o Recommend actions that can be taken by Federal, State, and local
governments as well as by private organizations to improve
criminal justice. 

o Carry out research on criminal behavior. 

o Develop new methods of crime prevention and reduction of
crime and delinquency. 

In recent years, NIJ has greatly expanded its initiatives, the result
of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
(the Crime Act), partnerships with other Federal agencies and
private foundations, advances in technology, and a new
international focus. Some examples of these new initiatives: 

o New research and evaluation is exploring key issues in
community policing, violence against women, sentencing reforms,
and specialized courts such as drug courts. 

o Dual-use technologies are being developed to support national
defense and local law enforcement needs. 

o Six regional National Law Enforcement and Corrections
Technology Centers and a Border Research and Technology Center
have joined the National Center in Rockville, Maryland.

o The causes, treatment, and prevention of violence against women
and violence within the family are being investigated in
cooperation with several agencies of the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services. 

o NIJ's links with the international community are being
strengthened through membership in the United Nations network
of criminological institutes; participation in developing the U.N.
Criminal Justice Information Network; initiation of UNOJUST
(U.N. Online Justice Clearinghouse), which electronically links the
institutes to the U.N. network; and establishment of an NIJ
International Center. 

o The NIJ-administered criminal justice information clearinghouse,
the world's largest, has improved its online capability. 

o The Institute's Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program has been
expanded and enhanced. Renamed ADAM (Arrestee Drug Abuse
Monitoring), the program will increase the number of drug-testing
sites, and its role as a "platform" for studying drug-related crime
will grow. 

o NIJ's new Crime Mapping Research Center will provide training
in computer mapping technology, collect and archive geocoded
crime data, and develop analytic software. 

o The Institute's program of intramural research has been expanded
and enhanced. 

The Institute Director, who is appointed by the President and
confirmed by the Senate, establishes the Institute's objectives,
guided by the priorities of the Office of Justice Programs, the
Department of Justice, and the needs of the criminal justice field.
The Institute actively solicits the views of criminal justice
professionals and researchers in the continuing search for answers
that inform public policymaking in crime and justice.

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

National Institute of Justice
Perspectives on 
Crime and Justice:
1996-1997 Lecture Series

James Q. Wilson
Peter Reuter
Mark H. Moore
Cathy Spatz Widom
Norval Morris

Foreword by Alfred Blumstein

November 1997

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

Janet Reno
Attorney General

U.S. Department of Justice 

John C. Dwyer
Acting Associate Attorney General 

Laurie Robinson
Assistant Attorney General 

Jeremy Travis
Director, National Institute of Justice 

Justice Information Center
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ncjrs.org 

NIJ acknowledges with thanks the support of the Edna McConnell
Clark 

Foundation for the implementation of the Perspectives on Crime
and Justice: 

1996-1997 Lecture Series. 

 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. 

NCJ 166609

Foreword

In organizing the lecture series recorded in this volume, Jeremy
Travis, Director of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), pulled
together a "dream team" of speakers. They cover a rich diversity of
disciplinary perspectives and span a broad range of personal
ideologies; in addition, each possesses an excellent research record
and the ability to link research to policy implications. 

James Q. Wilson, a political scientist and the leadoff speaker, has
probably been the most influential voice on crime policy from
academia in recent decades. His 1975 classic, Thinking about
Crime, effectively articulated the deterrence argument and
challenged many of the prevailing liberal views. And his book with
Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature, broadly probed
many of the biological and developmental factors associated with
individual criminality. 

Norval Morris, a leading scholar in criminal law, has been a
dominant contributor on the other side of the ideological spectrum.
His very influential An Honest Politician's Guide to Crime Control
was an early attempt to counter the rapidly growing "get tough"
sound-bite epidemic that has so dominated public discussion of
crime control policy. His Future of Imprisonment reported on a
classic experiment in randomized assignment to treatment
programs. As the longtime leader of the Center for Studies in
Crime and Justice at the University of Chicago Law School,
Norval Morris has also been the mentor to an important group of
scholars in crime and criminal justice, including James Jacobs,
Michael Tonry, and Franklin Zimring. 

These two more senior scholars have been joined by excellent
contributors one short generation behind. Peter Reuter is an
economist who has been a leading scholar of drug markets and
their interaction with drug-war enforcement. Cathy Spatz Widom
is a psychologist who has become widely recognized for her work
on the cycles of violence, showing that people who experience
violence as children are more likely to engage in violence as adults.
Mark Moore is a policy analyst who has done important research
on many aspects of crime and the criminal justice system, and he
has been a most influential teacher of managers in policing,
prosecution, and other areas of criminal justice through innovative
management seminars at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of
Government. 

Even with authors so diverse in their perspectives and interests,
some important common themes emerge from their lectures.
Perhaps the most important is the difficulty of addressing the "what
works" question. The difficulties are manifold: some derive from
the extremely limited level of funding available, some from the
technical difficulty of carrying out careful testing in an operational
environment, and some from a generalized suspicion about social
science research. But greater flexibility in research budgets seems
to be emerging in recent years. This has been aided by the
allocation of funds to NIJ from the various Crime Act programs to
perform research and evaluation studies. 

Another important common theme is the continuing need for
evaluation of various kinds of intervention programs. One can
hardly argue against such evaluations; it is critical that we learn
which efforts are most effective and which are futile. One problem
that has plagued evaluations in the past has been the prevalence of
"null effect" findings, i.e., results showing that the intervention
being evaluated does no better than a control or the status quo. Too
often, this happens because the intervention being tested is too
narrow a "technology," i.e., a strictly defined approach that is
presumed to be broadly applicable. Given this narrowness of
approach, the diversity of individuals being dealt with, and the
varying skills of those implementing the intervention, it is not
surprising that most technologies would fail to produce resonance
among all three. It is thus important to recognize that any treatment
of phenomena as complex as criminal behavior must involve a
portfolio of interventions, one or more of which is applied--
perhaps at different times--according to the individual
circumstances, and followup with the individuals being treated.
Only with this array of interventions and their extended duration
can we expect to bring about the changes needed for effective
management of crime-prone situations and individuals. 

We still need greater readiness to carry out the same kind of
probing evaluations of programs that have political support as we
do with programs that raise more skepticism. For example, I would
be prepared to bet on the incremental crime-control benefit per
dollar of cost associated with providing greater support services to
high-risk young people--as Cathy Spatz Widom argues for--
compared to extending already long sentences. It would be
desirable to provide those support services broadly, especially to
avoid any stigmatizing effects. But there will inevitably have to be
a triage of focusing the limited resources available where they can
do the most good. We all recognize that such choices are extremely
difficult in so political an arena as that surrounding crime and
criminal justice. 

The bet is especially secure when an extension of sentence occurs
through sledgehammer approaches like mandatory-minimum or
"three strikes" sentencing laws that put very disparate cases into
the same legislated box and preclude the exercise of judicial
discretion that is needed to differentiate the most serious cases
from those that are marginal. 

These gross approaches have been most evident in the "drug war."
About one-quarter of the Nation's incarcerated population--and
about two-thirds of those in Federal prisons--are imprisoned on a
drug sales or possession charge. This is a consequence of the
incessant pursuit of the supply side of the drug market, even
though students of the subject as well as practitioners in the field
widely acknowledge that it is demand that drives the market:
suppliers somehow find a way to respond to the demand. As Peter
Reuter points out, many thought that the escalation of incarceration
for drug offending over the past 15 to 20 years would raise the
price of the drugs to compensate sellers for the greater risk implied.
But we have seen just the opposite trend: the marketplace has been
swamped with cheaper, higher quality drugs. Ironically, the
increase in availability has been accompanied by a decrease in the
demand for cocaine, the most serious drug in terms of violence
associated with its use and with its markets. Other factors in the
society have been at work in a much more powerful way. 

Driven strongly by the drug war, intervention by the criminal
justice system has been considerable. By 1996, the incarceration
rate reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics had surged to 440
per 100,000 population--quadruple the rate that had prevailed for
the 50 years from the early 1920s to the early 1970s. The
Sentencing Project has estimated that one-third of
African-American males in their twenties are today under the
control of the criminal justice system; the rate is even higher in
urban centers. Mark Moore raises the question of whether we have
come to overrely on the criminal justice system for addressing too
many of our society's problems. Such a greatly broadened scope of
intervention may diminish the impact of deterrence--arguably the
system's greatest leveraging point. It is difficult to use the threat of
conviction or even incarceration as a stigmatizing menace when it
is happening to so many in the neighborhood. 

Another major thrust of the lectures was the problems of juveniles,
especially minority juveniles trapped in urban ghettos and deprived
of many of the influences that would facilitate their entry into the
legitimate economy. This was particularly emphasized by James Q.
Wilson, who pointed to the growth in juvenile violence, much of it
attributed to the recruitment of predominantly minority kids into
the drug markets--and thus, into the world of handgun violence--
both of which dramatically raised their homicide rates as victims
and offenders. 

The problems these kids pose to the larger society will
undoubtedly be exacerbated by welfare reform as their mothers
scramble to replace welfare checks with jobs that will diminish
their child-care time and attention--or with criminal activity if they
can't find jobs. This calls attention to a point raised by a number of
the authors about the need to be concerned with the unintended
consequences of what we do. The intensity of political rhetoric
driving crime policy makes it all the more important that research
feed information on unintended consequences into the debate. 

I would also like to extend Norval Morris's reference to "the most
corrupting lie is the truth poorly told." While his comment focused
on the presentation of overly simplified information by the press, I
think his point is applicable to almost everyone who comments on
issues of crime or criminal justice. The phenomena are so
multifaceted--in terms of type of crime, demographic group, and
geographical location--that aggregate statements miss many of the
important distinctions. Disaggregation on these various dimensions
is critical to assess meaningful conclusions. 

Indeed, one can anticipate that the same broad and disaggregated
perspective is needed in pursuing a program of research on crime.
One needs a rich mixture of disciplines and continual challenge to
any intermediate findings, which must always be seen as
potentially refuted or, more likely, modified in terms of the scope
of coverage of any particular finding. This process may seem to be
expensive, but it is far less expensive than the cost of the wasted
effort spent on ineffective programs and is necessary in order to
develop the solid body of knowledge and technique that will
enable us to get beyond Wilson's enumeration of dubious findings. 

NIJ has made an important contribution by bringing speakers of
such quality and diversity to Washington. These scholars clearly
felt free to challenge existing policy and to raise questions that
should be addressed. NIJ's research program and the public policy
debate are very much helped thereby. It is encouraging that this
process will continue in a new series of lectures in the coming
year. 

Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D. 
J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of Urban Systems and
Operations Research 
H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management
Carnegie Mellon University

Introduction

Public opinion surveys show that crime is the number one issue on
the minds of Americans. Crime dominates evening news
broadcasts, demands large shares of governmental budgets,
influences our decisions about where to live, and plays a role in our
choices on election day. Crime also inflicts enormous losses on
youths, families, and the Nation's sense of security. 

Yet there is no consensus about what we should do to meet the
challenge of crime and the demand for justice. The National
Institute of Justice (NIJ) has initiated this lecture series to broaden
the reach of research conducted under its sponsorship and
contribute to the national debate on criminal justice policy. 

This volume presents the first of NIJ's Perspectives on Crime and
Justice Lecture Series--for 1996-1997. Some of the most
distinguished academics in our field were invited to offer their
thoughts on the topic of their choice. They were expected to
challenge conventional thinking, offer candid recommendations,
and lead a robust debate. They did not disappoint. 

On behalf of NIJ, I wish to express my appreciation to the Edna
McConnell Clark Foundation for its support of the lecture series.
Their funding provided the planning and coordination assistance
needed to implement each lecture. 

We are pleased to announce that the Perspectives on Crime and
Justice Lecture Series will continue; the 1997-1998 series will
begin in December 1997. NIJ has asked other scholars to examine
new issues through the lens of public policy as a way to bring the
results and implications of current research to the attention of
decisionmakers at the local, State, and national levels. 

Jeremy Travis
Director
National Institute of Justice

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Lecture 1: What, If Anything, Can the Federal Government Do
About Crime?
James Q. Wilson, Ph.D.

Lecture 2: Why Can't We Make Prohibition Work Better? Some
Consequences of Ignoring the Unattractive
Peter Reuter, Ph.D

Lecture 3: The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and
Practices
Mark H. Moore, Ph.D

Lecture 4: Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for Breaking
the Cycle of Violence
Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D

Lecture 5: Crime, the Media, and Our Public Discourse
Norval Morris, LL.M., Ph.D.

Notes

What, If Anything, Can the Federal 
Government Do About Crime? 

Presentation by 
James Q. Wilson, Ph.D.
University of California at Los Angeles 

December 10, 1996
Washington, D.C. 

Politically, Washington must pretend it can do a lot about crime.
Practically, it can do very little. The President is not a police chief,
a warden, or a probation officer, and he can issue few commands to
anyone who is. The size of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) has grown, but it is, at best, only one-fortieth the size of local
law enforcement in the country. By contrast, the Home Office in
England has a great deal of influence over policing because it
provides half or more of the budgets of local constables. Here, of
course, Congress also spends money on crime, but the Federal
Government outlay is but a small fraction of what local
governments, communities, States, and private agencies spend. We
sometimes think that however small the Federal proportion is, it
can influence the rest of the system. But in my view--and the view
of many others--this small tail will not wag this very large dog.
Ideas and local political pressures drive local law enforcement in
this country. The role of the Federal Government is, at best, to try
to shape the direction in which those movements occur. The vast
majority of all offenders are tried before State-appointed judges,
sent to State-run prisons, and released into the custody of
State-directed parole officers. 

The gap between what is possible and what is politically desirable
has not prevented Washington from trying to do a lot. It has made
over 3,000 offenses into Federal crimes, even though most of the
important offenses have been State crimes for decades. The slow
movement toward the Federalization of law enforcement is
worrisome to many Americans for reasons I fully share. If we have
3,000 Federal criminal charges and if this is more than purely
symbolic politics, then a Federal officer must investigate their
violation. 

Federal investigations play a very important part with respect to
some matters. But for the most part, having this many Federal
crimes means that we ought to have a Federal--that is, a thoroughly
national--police force. No one devoted to our Constitution could
embrace such a prospect cheerfully, and I do not. Even creating the
FBI many decades ago--an organization which soon became a
small elite unit--was greeted with skepticism when it first occurred.
The passage of the Mann Act in 1910 was a profoundly
contentious issue because it, for the first time, set up a Federal
criminal standard. It deeply divided Congress. On what grounds,
people argued, should prostitution become a Federal crime? The
answer given, of course, was that it could become one if
prostitution affected interstate commerce. And so was created an
odd Federal task--assigning a few FBI agents, mostly rookies, to
the task of trying to follow suspected prostitutes across State lines.
In short order, the Federal courts, including the Supreme Court,
began to brood over the vague language embodied by Congress in
this statute--words like "debauchery" or "other immoral purposes"-
-that are undefined. The courts began to expand the Mann Act so it
would now be a Federal offense for a woman voluntarily to cross a
State line to have sex whether paid or not, or to move to a location
where debauchery might occur, or to accompany a vacationing
Mormon family who happened to be polygamous.[1] When a State
court gets carried away in this respect, one can do something about
it--if only by moving to a different a State. When Washington does
it, the only alternative is Canada.

Federal criminal laws now imply the creation of a Federal police
force. No one wants to do it, of course, but we have a way of
drifting into situations that no one intends. Even if we hold back
from a drift in that direction, the effort at federally managing the
crime problem cannot, so far as I can tell, help us solve many of
our real problems. Despite Federal involvement, crimes are getting
harder, not easier, to solve. Clearance rates are not going up, and
many are going down. Most offenders commit crimes in or near
their own back yards, creating local neighborhood, not national,
problems. An increasing proportion of serious juvenile offenders
are heavily armed and contemptuous of the juvenile court system.
Many neighborhoods have critical problems even in cities that
have modest or declining crime rates. 

An alternative to creating a Federal police force is to improve the
strength of local ones. I think that is what the program to place
100,000 officers on our city streets has in mind. Though I am
devoted to policing, and though I am convinced that good cops
well deployed make a difference, I am struck by the absolute
inability of Washington to send these officers to the places where
they are needed. The problem is very simple. There are 435
congressional districts and 50 States in this Union, and each and
every one wants its share of the 100,000 officers. Half the officers,
by law, must go to smaller cities. Our 14 largest cities have only 12
percent of the Nation's population but account for 36 percent of all
homicides and nearly half of all robberies. These places could use
all 100,000 officers by themselves. Yet, many of the officers go to
small towns like Midvale, Texas. 

In Los Angeles during 1960, there were three violent crimes
reported to the police for every uniformed officer. By 1990, there
were 10 violent offenses for every uniformed officer. Using this
rough, admittedly simplistic measure, Los Angeles needs a police
force of 25,000 today instead of the 8,000 or so it has. My city, in
short, might be able to catch up with where it was 30 years ago if it
had one-sixth of the 100,000 new officers--and if we could
persuade our local constituents to pay for their retention when the 6
federally funded years have expired. 

Naturally, Washington has an important duty to investigate real
interstate crimes, both blue-collar and white-collar, all crimes
involving interstate conspiracies, and all international crimes that
touch our borders. And there are Federal reservations and buildings
it must guard. But it seems to me its key role ought to be to do the
one thing local authorities cannot and will not do on their own.
That is to design and test new crime-control strategies. Cities and
States will not do this, not simply because it costs money--money
that they, by and large, do not think they have--but because they
would be providing a free good to other cities and States. Good
demonstration projects are expensive and take a lot of time. How
does a mayor or Governor justify spending that money and taking
that time when one or the other of two bad things will happen:
Either the new program won't work, thus embarrassing the city or
the State and the mayor or the Governor; or it will work, but the
benefits will go without charge to every other city and State in the
country? 

The Federal Government has a unique opportunity to be the
research and development (R&D) arm for law enforcement. It is a
task that no city or State will undertake in any meaningful way,
and it is also one that with a few exceptions private foundations
will not support. I have spent many years trying to raise money for
this cause from private sources, including foundations for police
and criminal justice research. I have had, on occasion, some good
allies, but generally to no avail. Foundations support causes not
evaluations, at least in this area. 

When I speak of a Federal R&D effort, I trust everyone here
understands that I am not talking about pure or academic research.
There is a need for that, too, but it often gets funded by Federal
assistance through entities such as the National Science
Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the various
National Institutes of Health. I am speaking of the real-world
testing of new ideas, especially those developed by practitioners in
the field--ideas that cannot, I am sorry to say, be tested by the
practitioner who developed them. No good idea will be seriously
evaluated by anyone who has a patent on it. A test requires
objectivity, technical skills, and a long time horizon. A practitioner
is subjective (he or she must struggle to get the idea launched in an
often hostile environment), is skilled at creating ideas but not
necessarily at testing them, and has a time horizon shaped by
tomorrow's newspaper story or next month's budget hearing, not by
the 2 or 3 years that an adequate testing in the field involves. 

Happily, there have long been a few people in Washington who
have understood this view, such as James "Chips" Stewart in the
Reagan administration and Jeremy Travis in the Clinton
administration. Of late, largely as a result of the 1994 Crime Act,
the Department of Justice has said, I hope with congressional
support, that it will spend a significant fraction of its new
crime-control money on demonstration projects. I would think it
would be even better if Congress, in reauthorizing this agency,
placed in that reauthorization a mandate that set aside for research
a fixed percentage of the money that Congress would later
appropriate for law enforcement. While I am committed to a
Federal demonstration role, I am well aware of how hard it will be
to get meaningful results. 

People sometimes compare the low level of funding for crime or
violence research with the high level of such funding for cancer,
stroke, or AIDS. This difference is very large--indeed it is vast, but
this is not simply the result of unequal interest groups besieging
Congress. Doctors, in fact, tend to do better work than
criminologists. And for good reason: Doctors are more likely to
learn useful things that their own profession can put into practice
than are criminal justice researchers. There is both a demand
problem--what should the Federal Government ask for?--and a
supply problem--what are competent social scientists willing to
produce? 

Health research may lead down many blind alleys, but treatments
and even cures often emerge. And when they emerge, they enter
into a well-organized market of eager producers and consumers.
Compare that record with the history--a long and generally sad
one--of much criminal justice research. These are ideas that have
had their brief place in the sun. I think we can all remember
random preventive patrol? Claims made on behalf of "scared
straight?" Remember the arguments used for boot camps? And
shock incarceration? And intensive probation? And remedial
education? And job training and supported work projects? And
making police response time faster? To be sure, some of these
things, done by a few gifted people, may have made a difference,
but by and large, the research has failed to provide adequate
support for their general applicability. 

We now are committed to a new wave of good ideas, of which
community-oriented policing leads the list. I am a believer in it. I
support it, but I have to confess that my belief rests at present more
on faith than on fact. We hear of many cities engaging in
promising starts, and then retreats, cutbacks, and hostility. For
every San Diego or New Haven where it seems to have been a
success, we recall a Cincinnati or a Houston where it fell apart. For
every patrol officer who fell in love with community policing there
is a lieutenant who thinks it is just the fad of the day. The famous
100,000 police officers to be paid for by the Federal Government
are supposed to support community policing, but that is like saying
they are supposed to walk to Europe. A good idea, maybe, but we
lack a clear road, and, in any event, 100,000 officers aren't enough
to make a difference even if they get there. 

Despite all of these reservations, I think the Federal R&D role is
the right one. Go back to community policing for a moment. Why
did it begin to command our attention? It began to command our
attention because the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) supported a
project in Newark, New Jersey, to test the efficacy of foot patrol.
Most police chiefs at the time believed that foot patrol would not
have an effect on the crime rate. The NIJ study found out that they
were exactly right: It did not have an effect on the crime rate. It
just made the people in Newark feel better. Out of the contrast
between a crime rate that was stable and an improving public
morale came an insight. How people feel about their city may be as
important as what the city in fact does. If people feel better about
their city, they will be encouraged to use public spaces in ways
which, in the long run, may actually drive down the crime rate but
in the meantime allow them to enjoy what is in fact the right of
every citizen: to walk peacefully with some degree of comfort and
confidence around the streets of their own cities. 

We have, after all, learned about a lot of things that don't work, and
we wouldn't have done that if somebody had not been doing an
evaluation. We used to think that random preventive patrol
deterred crimes and that quick police responses prevented crime.
We now know those ideas are not correct. As a result, the police
have been encouraged to look in new directions. Good police
around the country are using specialized preventive patrol, and
undercover operations, and they are dealing with police responses
more by evoking from the community a definition of problems to
be resolved rather than waiting for citizens to dial 911. 

To me, the critical issues are two: If you think as I do that R&D is
the central role the Federal Government should play in this area--
nearly to the exclusion of many other things it now tries to do--
how should this work be financed and directed? And, what should
it study? I do not think this study should be directed from the U.S.
Department of Justice. There are many people in this room from
the Department of Justice, but I don't think the work should be
directed from that agency. I admit that today we have an excellent
NIJ director. There have been a few good ones before him, but
counting on that continuing is like expecting flowers to bloom
through asphalt pavement. Occasionally it happens, but it is not the
best way to grow a garden. DOJ is an organization of lawyers, and
lawyers do what lawyers are supposed to do: They investigate, sue,
and prosecute. If anyone doubts the gap that exists between
empirical science and legal research, he has never set foot on a
university campus. I have served on the campuses of three great
universities, and in each and every case the gap between law
school research and empirical social sciences was a vast and
unbridgeable divide. The best social scientists--there are a few
good ones--operate on campus in almost compete isolation from
law schools, and the best law professors--and there are many of
them--return the compliment. And if you think universities are an
odd exception to a general pattern of compatibility, you have not
understood how most judges treat empirical science when it is
introduced into their courtrooms. Scientific nonsense acquires
evidentiary standing in ways that satisfy nobody but the appeals
court judges who later rule on the matter. 

NIJ ought to be part of a federally supported larger whole, which is
generally committed to scientific alliances and the maintenance of
rigorous analysis. I leave it to Washington insiders to select that
spot, but I do not think the Justice Department is that spot. As to
the second question: It is a very difficult problem to prescribe in
advance what the research agenda should be. There are many
important issues--for example, can anyone show that community
policing, somehow defined, really works? Can anyone show that if
it works it can be made to continue to work? That research area
will persist for years. There are other important technological areas
that are being researched for the first time in recent years. 

But one issue especially concerns me, and I would like to raise it to
the top of the agenda if I can. That is the problem of juvenile
criminals. Criminal justice and social science know about adult
offenders. Adult crime rates, including adult homicide rates, seem
to have declined in the 1980s, and we have tried to study why. But
the rate at which juveniles commit crimes, especially homicide,
went up, and we are not sure why. The rate of offenses is higher on
the average for young people than it is for older people. Many
people are being sent to prison--for perfectly good reasons--at a
time when their own crime rate is beginning to decline. In every
society, the crime rate peaks in the teenage years among males. We
send the people to prison 10 years later. 

This gap indicates that something is not working. We know that
today juveniles have become a smaller fraction of the whole
population. We expected that their crime rate would go down as
the adult rate generally went down, but it didn't. That has become
for many years the most worrisome feature of local society. Most
of what we know about the effects of punishment on offenders,
whether in terms of deterring them or incapacitating them, we
know only about adults. We have interviewed them constantly. Our
sense of adult behavior has been elaborated by everything from
general discussion to sophisticated quantitative models. We don't
know anything of the sort about juveniles. Some people think that
juveniles are immune to the criminal justice system because they
are so impulsive as to give no thought to the consequences of their
actions and so reckless as not to care what society or the larger
community thinks of them. Scholars have argued that imprisoning
a juvenile only makes matters worse because he becomes
indoctrinated to gang activity or a criminal lifestyle. 

We actually know next to nothing about whether any of these
arguments are true. We have interviewed adult prison inmates but
not, to the same degree, juvenile ones. We can construct the
criminal careers of thousands of adult offenders but of far fewer
juvenile ones. One of the very few efforts to find out what
difference incarceration made on juvenile offenders was done in
Chicago in the 1970s.[2] The authors followed the careers of a few
hundred serious delinquents and found that the more serious the
penalty imposed by the court system, the lower the rate of their
subsequent offending. This finding was strikingly similar to that of
two other studies done in the preceding decade, using very
different institutional treatments in quite different
communities.[3,4]Questions can be raised about such findings:
Why did their crime rate go down? Did they just get smarter? Did
they evade police detection or adopt forms of crime that were
harder to detect? As near as I can tell, in the intervening 20 years
virtually nothing has been done to try to answer these questions. 

We know that States and counties differ in how they handle
juveniles, but we have almost no idea as to whether those
differences in treatment make a difference in crime rates. The chief
of the Family Court Division of the New York City Law
Department has recently published a troubling and unhappy
account of how that city handles juveniles.[5] The family courts
have faced an exploding caseload since the late 1980s, but the
penalties imposed even on the most vicious hoodlums rarely have
exceeded 18 months. That is because New York State law limits
penalties for persons under the age of 16 to 18 months. The law
governing investigations is even more restrictive. The police
cannot ordinarily search a home occupied by a young offender
without either a warrant or the parents' consent, but the family
court cannot issue warrants. When a youngster turns 16, a different
set of rules apply. They can be tried as adults, but the courts can,
and often do, make these persons into "youthful offenders," a status
that keeps the potential sentence very low. 

Now contrast this with what the Los Angeles Times has reported
about juvenile offenders in the State of California. The newspaper
surveyed young inmates of the California Youth Authority and
came to the conclusion that juveniles were actually serving longer
terms than adults sent to prison for similar offenses. Juveniles, for
example, served 60 months in California for homicide, while adults
served only 41 months.[6] Let us assume that New York and
California do in fact differ that dramatically. Does this difference
make a difference? Will one system produce more or less crime
than the other system? Are the people in either State safer or more
at risk because of what appear to be great differences in how these
systems work? We do not know. As far as I know no one is trying
to find out. As the population once again becomes younger--the
elementary schools of Los Angeles are filled to capacity with
persons eagerly awaiting the junior high school years in which the
legendary 6 percent of them will become hopeless offenders--we
know that crime rates are very likely to go up, and we ought to
care. 

There are many obstacles to doing research of this sort--some are
legal, some are technical. These obstacles are serious, but scholars
have had to cope with serious matters in the past dealing with adult
offenders. I believe that, with good will and adequate support and
direction, they can do the same with juveniles. 

An equally important evaluative effort is needed for the causes of
juvenile crime, which are not well understood. Criminological
research has cited almost any defect that a social scientist can find
in American society as a cause for juvenile crime. In all societies,
juveniles commit more crimes than adults. And in all societies, as
near as we can tell, the juvenile crime rate has been going up.
Whatever the cause is, it may not be a uniquely American
phenomenon. 

The new welfare reform bill has created a splendid opportunity to
investigate what suspect is the most serious cause of juvenile
crime, and that is the weakness in the family structure. The new
welfare reform bill requires underage, single-parent mothers either
to live with their own parents or under adequate adult supervision
as a condition of receiving Federal aid. No one knows what
"adequate adult supervision" means. It must be supposed to mean
something other than supervision by her own parents. Often the
young woman's predicament is the result of the failure of her
parent or two parents to supervise her adequately. 

A wonderful opportunity exists for cities, counties, and States to
provide a variety of new mechanisms as alternative "families" for
such persons. Single-parent moms would have to live in alternative
homes or shelters as a condition of receiving aid. They and their
newborn children would experience true adult supervision from
caring adults, who worry about the future of those children. Such
efforts should be run by private organizations. Various church and
synagogue organizations could take on the task of supplying
alternative homes if the Federal Government were willing to direct
its welfare money in that direction. It would then be up to NIJ and
other bodies to find out what works. Can we change things for the
children of young unmarried teenage moms in such a way that we
reduce the rate at which these young people grow up on the mean
streets of our cities with only guns as their friends? 

To me, the hardest task is not to create the agencies, encourage the
practitioner links, or design the research. The core problem is to
persuade members of Congress and their constituents that they are
doing something about crime by spending money on R&D
evaluation. People believe they know what should be done about
crime, just as they believe they know what plays the Washington
Redskins should call. It is very hard to persuade them that, in fact,
they don't know and ought to find out. Maybe the only way to do it
is to smuggle an evaluation program, written in very small type,
into the next bill that increases the number of Federal offenses to
6,000, imposes the death penalty on 50 more crimes, closes the
border to illegal immigrants, and promises an end to wife abuse.

Question-and-Answer Session 

Patrick Murphy, U.S. Conference of Mayors, Washington, D.C.: I
certainly agree that we need to have much more research, and yet
the problem is the "non-system" of policing we have--17,000-plus
local police departments. I describe this to foreign police
administrators, and they say, "But of course they are coordinated
by your State police agencies." Federal police are coordinated by
the FBI, but that does not occur locally. We are all devoted to our
system of local police, but it seems to me that the Federal
Government and the States could do more, in addition to research,
to coordinate the work of these agencies for criminal intelligence,
support of planning, and better exchange of knowledge. Would you
comment on the system problem? 

JQW: I certainly would encourage dissemination of intelligence, a
real improvement in suspect identification, and dissemination of
information. But, I am not encouraged among what I see abroad as
"systems." Since 1980, the adult crime rate has been dropping
more or less systematically in all cities across the United States.
During this same period, in countries that have a unified system
like England and Sweden, for example, crime rates have been
going up dramatically. Today, the robbery rate in England is as
high as ours, and the auto theft rate is twice as high; in the
Netherlands, the burglary rate is twice as high. The advantage of a
unified system is that you get coordination. The disadvantage of
the coordinated system is that you may coordinate it around a bad
idea. 

To me, the desirable consequence of the American system, messy
as it is, is in what we have learned about how to improve the
criminal justice system. Rogue police chiefs, backed up by brave
or indifferent mayors, have tried new ideas against the advice of
other police officers and have made them work. So we have to try
to strike a balance between a nonsystem and risk of bad action if
we have a full system. With the American genius for making
something out of nothing in our Constitutional order, we can do
that. I would resist, as a matter of principle, converting our
nonsystem into anything that looks like a European system. 

Questioner (not named): Professor Wilson, for the purposes of this
question, place yourself on the Supreme Court. Last week you
heard arguments on the Brady Act. How would you vote and why? 

JQW: As a Justice on the Supreme Court I would try to vote on the
basis of what the statute requires and what the Constitution
mandates. In Congress, I would have probably voted for the Brady
Bill with little hope that it would make a significant difference.
Gun control is a serious matter that cannot adequately be handled
by Washington policies directing the way in which guns are sold in
federally licensed gun stores. The problem is to figure out ways to
keep guns out of public places; they are usually stolen in the first
place. 

With respect to the Supreme Court question and arguments and
briefs, I haven't thought of it as a constitutional matter--I have been
too preoccupied with its limitations as a practical matter. I would
prefer that you asked me what I would do in Congress rather than
what I would do in the Supreme Court. 

Roger Conner, American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities,
Washington, D.C.: I was discouraged to hear intensive supervision
probation in your list of things that, while useful, have not
necessarily reduced or prevented crime. As a way to address
juvenile crime, what do you think of more intensive and close
supervision of probation to reduce reoffending in this group? 

JQW: I think that's a possibility. To me, one of the things that
explains juvenile crime is that many youthful offenders lack any
involvement with a mature adult who might give a kind of
guidance. What they most need is to have a mature adult inserted
into their lives on a continuing basis. One way for that to happen is
to be born into a two-parent family that is reasonably successful.
Failing that, and we are increasingly failing that, perhaps we can
design and apply an ad hoc parent. 

I am open to the possibility of using intensive probation for
first-time or early juvenile offenders; this may well avoid their
repeated involvement in crime. The experiment in intensive
supervision probation that I was referring to, as evaluated by the
RAND Corporation, was focused on adults. At that stage, it didn't
seem to make much of a difference. A different story might be true
if we focused on early juvenile offenders, where there is some
reason to expect to alter, by the presence of a mature adult in their
lives, the prospects of their continued offending. 

This is being tried in the country. Many things are being tried that I
don't know about. I haven't seen an evaluation of it and I would
very much like to. 

Samuel Dash, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington,
D.C.: Professor Wilson, in your address you did not make any
mention of the criminal drug problem in the United States, its
relationship to crime, and whether you think that the Federal
Government plays a more effective law enforcement role than the
local and State organizations. Since drug offenses are covered
under Federal law enforcement and the Federal Government claims
a greater and greater role in this area, do you think Federal efforts
are more effective, at least there, than local and State prosecution? 

JQW: I do think the Federal Government has a major role in drug
enforcement. I had that in mind when I referred to interstate
commerce and international trafficking. The Federal Government
has become deeply involved in the drug problem. I think that
making better use of Federal resources to deal with the drug
problem is a critical need. Even so, the critical problem in drug
abuse is the demand for drugs. Demand reduction is fundamentally
a local matter. (Yes, I strenuously defend the illegality of drugs.) 

Who is using drugs? We know from many studies that a very high
proportion of the people arrested have been using drugs in the
preceding 72 hours, as revealed by the customary drug tests. Most
of these people will be placed on probation or sentenced to
confinement and after that possibly given parole. This is a
readymade group of people, already under the authority of the
criminal justice system, who can be told that their permission to be
on probation or parole is contingent upon their subjecting
themselves to frequent (meaning several times a week) random
drug testing, and that the failure to satisfy these tests would bring
them back into the criminal justice system for increasingly longer
periods of time. That is a local responsibility--something that local
police and probation authorities have to do. They are often
financially underequipped to do it, although some promising starts
have been made with respect to drug courts. 

Although I believe the Federal Government has a crucial role to
play, and it is largely on the supply side, I think the key to the drug
problem is on the demand side. If we can make it extremely
difficult for those who are already in the criminal justice system to
gain access to drugs, I think demand will be reduced. People will, I
hope, be driven into treatment programs, and the supply of drugs
will fall correspondingly. 

Questioner (not named): Dr. Wilson, you mentioned the disparity
between medical research and crime research. There is a perception
in the medical and legislative communities that the research on
violent crime is being intimidated or suppressed by certain groups.
In your perception, is that the case? 

JQW: Yes, if you want to think about the research on violent crime
generally, in all aspects, there is a substantial degree of
suppression. If you wish to discuss the genetic bases behind crime-
-which we know to a certainty exist, because males always commit
5 to 20 times as much violent crime as females (and not as a result
of particular childrearing practices)--mention this fact, especially in
this city, and you will discover that you are the object of an
intimidating drive, launched by a small number of people, who will
either silence you or prevent the Federal Government from funding
you. Most of the available research that bears on genetic,
biological, or early childhood effects on crime is from abroad.
Even abroad, it is increasingly difficult to pursue such questions. 

Other aspects of the causes of violence (and there are in fact many
aspects to the causes of violence) are encouraged to be researched,
and therefore there is a kind of imbalance in our body of
knowledge. Politically acceptable causes attract research support;
politically unacceptable causes do not attract interest. That is, in
my view, gravely unfortunate. 

Adrian Curtis, Justice Management Division, U.S. Department of
Justice, Washington, D.C.: The Attorney General always says that
youthful offenders should be reached before they become youthful
offenders. Everyone would prefer not to be mugged or to deal with
the consequences afterwards. Crime legislation has provided
authorization to fund crime prevention. It hasn't been very strongly
supported by the Congress or by the public. Do you think it would
be a good move to put more money into prevention efforts? Or
demonstration programs? Or do you think it is an issue to be dealt
with locally? 

JQW: I think the Federal Government has a major role to play in
prevention. I think the problem is with what has been described in
the past as a prevention program. It is, of course, a caricature to
describe prevention programs as those involving "midnight
basketball," but that slogan has caught on because it is not refuted
by any evidence that we know of for any better prevention practice.
We have had a lot of efforts at supported work projects, many of
them using very rigorous evaluation methods. If you place juvenile
offenders in job training and supportive work environments and,
after 18 months, compare their offending rates to those of youths
who did not experience this, no difference exists. 

Although remedial education programs are sometimes reported to
be successful, the body of research suggests that they don't make a
difference. To me, the critical years in a child's life are zero to five.
If you have a prevention effort, that's where you have to aim it. The
government and the public understand this. Everyone who has
been a parent and has watched his or her children grow up in such
remarkably different ways--begin to express their character and
interact with their parents--knows how critical that period is. If we
are going to have an effective prevention program, I think we have
to say that those are the critical years, and we have to focus our
imagination on those years. We have to develop, with Federal
support and evaluation, programs that will provide differing ways
of managing that period of life. We don't really know what the best
programs are, but there are lots of experiments out there (none of
them really being evaluated by anyone). So we have something to
build on. 

If we focused our prevention efforts around the core issue of the
family, and took advantage of the great popular and political
support for family issues, we could move the prevention program
ahead. But if we just talk about "prevention," people will think we
mean supported work projects, remedial education, or midnight
basketball, and it won't succeed. 

Janie Jeffers, President's Crime Prevention Council, Washington,
D.C.: Professor Wilson, through your lens, you paint a bleak
picture for juveniles. What you saw as perhaps a glimmer of hope,
as a result of the Crime Act legislation, was the group homes, etc.
Where do you see the support for the family, to shore up the
family--not to replace the family in what would be at best an
artificial and short-lived kind of activity? You spoke about
prevention related to children between 0 and 5, but I'd like to hear
where you see the family needing support, what interventions you
think are appropriate, and what kinds of research in those areas
should be done to avoid supplanting the purpose and need for
families. 

JQW: I wish I knew the answer to your question, but I do not. The
growth in single-parent families cuts across all the Western
industrial nations. The rate is highest in the United States, but it is
very large in Western Europe, England, France, and Japan. It is
being driven by profound changes in Western culture. It is, in my
view, the final working out of the 18th century enlightenment. If
you really believe in the emancipation of the individual, there will
come a time when men will feel themselves freed from the
responsibility of maintaining families. Men are a difficult species.
It has taken many years of hectoring, bloodshed, religious
indoctrination, cultural pressure, etc., to get them to take care of
the women they made pregnant and the children to whom the
women have given birth. 

If you really believe in emancipating the individual right down to
the grassroots, and we have seen this in Western cultures, you will
see the removal of the man from this family role. The best idea I
can come up with is to change the way we raise at-risk children so
that they will grow up in an environment during their formative
years in which they value a family experience and see men and
women working together to help raise them. As they get that
formative experience, it will guide them into a desire to repeat that
experience in their adult lives. Whether that will work or not, I
don't know. Relative to the pressures that are working against the
family, I don't think there are any simple policy remedies. I don't
think tax rate changes, or forced financial support, or even
tightening the divorce laws (although there are worthwhile ideas in
some of these initiatives for change) will make a big difference.
They are like small handfuls of sand thrown in the face of a gale
wind. 

Unless we face the fact that we are dealing with a profound cultural
transformation throughout the West and attempt to change the
influences on young people so that they will attempt to stand
against that force, then I don't think we will succeed. 

Ted Gest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C.: Could
you give us some idea of the scale you are talking about when you
say "more research?" Everybody in this room thinks we need more
research on crime. Are you saying that we need as much research
as we have for various diseases? But other people would point out
that we already are doing more research through the 1994 Crime
Bill and the National Science Foundation. Are you recommending
a massive increase--a sort of modern day "Manhattan Project" on
crime, or are you speaking about targeted modest increases in
specific areas? 

JQW: My remarks this morning would have had greater force
before the passage of the 1994 Crime Act. I think there has been a
significant increase in research. The National Institute of Justice
now has resources and commitment that it has never enjoyed in the
past. That is all good. I'm not confident that we need a dramatic
increase in funding. We don't have that many good researchers in
this field. The few we have are very busy. More will be recruited,
just as in the aftermath of the passage of the Law Enforcement
Assistance Act. That opened up Federal research efforts. The
criminological effort was revitalized when operations research,
industrial micro-economics, etc., elbowed into this area with a new
way of looking at things. 

I would like to see Congress make permanent, if nothing else, the
present commitment to research and demonstration efforts, by
authorizing programs that set aside a given fraction of however
much money Congress may choose to appropriate for the purpose
of aiding significant Federal or local programs. 

I don't call for a Manhattan Project. I would be satisfied with the
present level of resources if we could make it permanent so that the
next administration, whatever it is, would not find it so easy to
change. 

Morris Thigpen, National Institute of Corrections, U.S. Department
of Justice, Washington, D.C.: Would you mind commenting on the
sentencing practices that we are seeing across the country today?
What do you think of those in your own State of California--the
"three strikes and you're out" laws and the whole
truth-in-sentencing push that is occurring? 

JQW: It's difficult to comment on sentencing policies without
taking into account the enormous public frustration with what is
perceived to be our current sentencing policy. In California, the
sentencing policies before "three strikes" were lamentable. If you
illegally kill another human being in the State of California--not as
an accident--from manslaughter to first-degree murder, your
average time in prison would have been less than 4 years. The
public may not understand certain details, but they don't like that.
So when someone came along with three-strikes legislation, people
wanted the legislators to vote for it. 

We have had a lot of problems with this three-strikes bill. It
focuses heavily on adult offenders. It reserves serious penalties for
the second and third strike. It is somewhat unclear as to what prior
offenses should count as a strike. Local district attorneys are
displaying a considerable amount of unstudied variance in how
they define a prior strike and therefore in the proportion of people
that they send to prison. 

Our problem is not simply to defeat these measures; it is to come
up with something that is better. California hadn't done that.
California didn't take the killing of another human being very
seriously except in very high-profile cases--freeway strangling or
whatever. If we do that (and many large States in the country do),
we have a problem. 

I don't know how to put that genie back in the bottle. Rather than
modifying the three-strikes bill, I would prefer if something other
than it had been passed in the first place. I would strongly prefer
that people mobilize their answers on how we handle juvenile
offenders, who are eventually going to turn into those persons who
are eligible for three-strikes. The only way to do that is to show the
public that we know enough about the subject so that we can direct
their attention effectively. 

Misguided in some aspects as these laws are, we have to realize
that we didn't give the people any alternative to choose. 

Betty Chemers, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: The
juvenile justice system is clearly under great stress, with more and
more juveniles being waived to the adult court. Do you think the
juvenile court has outlived its usefulness? 

JQW: I wish I knew the answer to whether the juvenile court has
outlived its usefulness. My sense is that the juvenile court is many
different things in many different States. In California it is in
serious trouble. I believe in New York State it is approaching total
collapse. In Indiana, as a matter of fact, it is working rather well. 

We don't know what juvenile courts are doing. I believe that the
essential premise of the juvenile court deserves serious
reexamination. The central premise of the juvenile court is that the
court would stand in loco parentis. It would replace the parents for
children who were runaways, truants, shoplifters, or engaging in
activities indicating a failure of parental supervision. It was not
invented at a time when 13-year-olds carrying Uzis were mowing
down innocent babies on street corners. 

How should the juvenile court be reshaped, if that is its role? Some
of its functions should be split perhaps into several parts. It should
be a State agency that acts in loco parentis, and it should not limit
its attention to youngsters who have already shot, or mugged, or
stolen at large. It should turn its attention at the first sign of
difficulty to people who begin to experience problems, where
parents are doing a poor job. But other functions of the juvenile
court should be shifted to a different kind of entity. Not necessarily
the court, but a different kind of entity that has the task of
identifying early on who the repeat offenders are. Not after their
first arrest or conviction, but after a second time or a third time.
Once you pass that transition--the third standard deviation--you are
very likely to become a chronic serious offender. We need to
identify those people as early as possible and to deal with them by
increasing the magnitude of penalties they face from at least the
second offense on. Every time they do something again, the
penalty gets worse. 

I don't think the juvenile courts are doing this. I think they waive
juveniles out of the system for the first, second, or third serious
offense. Then finally, they unload on them and put them in
incarceration until they are 25. That's not the way we raise our
children. We don't ignore their misdeeds until finally they burn
down the house. In our daily lives, we use moderate rewards and
penalties in raising our children so that they become habituated to a
life of decency. The juvenile court does not follow the principles of
decent family life. 

The court was founded on the principle of acting in loco parentis.
We need juvenile courts that will be much more heavily funded
than the present ones are, will take very seriously the first signs of
repeat offending among juveniles, and will be very serious about
the penalties they impose.

Why Can't We Make 
Prohibition Work Better? 
Some Consequences of Ignoring the Unattractive* 

Presentation by 
Peter Reuter, Ph.D.
University of Maryland 

 February 11, 1997
Washington, D.C.

*This paper is derived from a lecture at the April 1992 American
Philosophical Society 1992 meeting, which was originally
published as "Hawks Ascendant," Daedalus 1992. That paper was
updated and delivered as a lecture at the National Institute of
Justice (NIJ) series Perspectives on Crime and Justice in February
1997. The paper based on the NIJ lecture was published in the
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 141, No.
3, September 1997, and is reproduced here with minor stylistic
changes. The research reported here was supported by a grant from
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to RAND's Drug Policy Research
Center. It draws heavily on work done jointly with Robert
MacCoun, who provided valuable comments on the paper.

United States drug policies are punitive (in both rhetoric and
reality), divisive (certainly by race, probably by age, and perhaps
by class), intrusive (in small ways for many individuals and in
large ways for some groups), and expensive ($30 billion annually).
Even more distressing, the Nation has a drug problem more severe
than that of any other rich Western society, whether measured in
terms of the extent of drug use, dependence on expensive drugs,
drug-related AIDS cases, or the level of violence and corruption
associated with these drugs.

Many contend that the problems are a consequence of our policies.
Either it is the harshness of those policies that has generated the
disease and violent crime that surround drug use (the standard
liberal critique),[1] or it is the lack of effective stringency that
explains why drugs are so widely used and available (the hawks'
critique).[2] Yet this may give too much credit to the role of
policy, a common fallacy in modern American discussions,
particularly in the Nation's Capital, whose business is precisely
policy. Whether or not there is an epidemic of experimentation
with a particular drug, what fraction of experimenters goes on to
become dependent, and the severity of health and crime
consequences of dependence may be much more shaped by factors
other than policy. Certainly when comparing America's drug
problems with those of other nations, most of the relevant
differences appear to be rooted in broader features of societies. For
example, the United States is characterized by greater hedonism,
weak informal social control, a higher propensity for risk taking,
inadequate provision of health care for the poor, unequal income
distribution, and a high level of criminal violence generally. It is
also more intimately connected with cocaine- and opium- growing
regions such as Colombia and Mexico. All these factors promote
use of illicit psychoactive drugs and/or worsen the problems
associated with that use. If policy is only moderately important in
controlling drug use, then perhaps we can mitigate the harshness of
our policies with little risk of seeing an expansion of drug use and
related problems. Reducing our drug policy problems (i.e., the
adverse consequences of the policies themselves) is worth a good
deal, though it would obviously be even more desirable if we could
also reduce our drug problem. 

It is hard to be highly prescriptive, to say what good drug policy
would look like, because one consequence of politicians' treating
drug control as a moral crusade has been an absolute lack of
interest, bordering on gross negligence, in assessing the
consequences, good or bad, of the emphasis on punishment. We
cannot say, even approximately, whether locking up more
drugdealers or seizing lots of assets has any substantial effect on
drug prices or whether higher prices would have much effect on
American drug usage or related violence. There is no credible basis
for describing a policy that would reduce, in any important
dimension, the extent of America's drug problems by, say,
one-third in the next 5 years. 

What I will offer is a set of reasonable conjectures, but a central
message of this paper is that without systematic evaluation of the
consequences of drug enforcement and punishment, the current
stagnation of drug policies will almost certainly continue. 

Characterizing American Drug Policies and Problems 

Policies. The most striking characteristics of the U.S. response to
illicit drugs in the last decade have been its scale and punitiveness.
The Federal Government spends about $15 billion annually on
drug control. State and local governments probably spend at least
as much.[3] Thus drug control is a $30-35 billion government
program in the mid-1990s, massively up from about $6-7 billion in
1985. By comparison, the figure for all public law enforcement
expenditures was about $110 billion in 1996. 

The intended punitiveness is reflected in budgets. About
three-quarters of the national drug control budget is spent on
apprehending and punishing drug dealers and users, with treatment
getting about two-thirds of the remainder. State and local
governments are even more enforcement oriented than the Federal
Government. Budgetarily they exhibit a disdain for prevention,
even though this is primarily a school-based activity, which seems
naturally to flow from local governments. 

The total punishment levied for drug control purposes has
increased massively since 1981, when the concern with cocaine
became prominent. The number of commitments to State and
Federal prison have risen approximately tenfold over the same
period. By 1994, there were almost 400,000 people in prison or jail
serving time for selling or using drugs. The comparable figure for
1980 was about 31,000 (see exhibit 1). 

At the State level, one striking feature is the large number of
persons being imprisoned for drug possession felonies. This does
not include possession with intent to distribute, which is classified
as a distribution offense. Approximately 50,000 were sentenced to
State prison in 1992 for nondistribution offenses, mostly simple
possession; some may have been plea bargained down from
distribution charges. 

Sentencing figures are of themselves insufficient to show that
enforcement has become more stringent. That depends on the ratio
of sentences (or years of prison time) to offenses. Imprisonment
may hardly have kept up with the growth of drug markets. The
number of offenses might have risen as rapidly as arrests,
sentences, and years of prison time between 1980 and 1985, when
cocaine consumption was still expanding rapidly. But from 1985 to
1995 it is very likely that the number of offenses (transactions) and
buyers and sellers was essentially flat. The risk of being
imprisoned for a cocaine or heroin user or seller went up very
sharply, perhaps nearly tenfold. 

How risky is drugselling or drug possession? The aggregate data
suggest that in 1994 a cocaine user had an 8-percent risk of being
arrested; for a heroin user the figure may have been 10 percent. For
drugselling, Robert MacCoun and I estimated in a study of the
District of Columbia, that in 1988, street dealers of drugs faced
about a 22-percent probability of imprisonment in the course of a
year's selling and that, given expected time served, they spent
about one-third of their selling career in prison.[4] These figures on
sellers are somewhat higher than crude calculations at the national
level for more recent years. 

Does this make drugselling appropriately risky? One-third of a
career in prison seems quite a lot. On the other hand, the risk per
sale is very small indeed. In our Washington, D.C., study a seller
who worked 2 days a week at this trade made about 1,000
transactions in the course of a year. His imprisonment risk per
transaction was about 1 in 4,500; by that metric, drugselling is a
great deal less risky than, say, a burglary or robbery. Another way
to assess the risk is to look at aggregate figures. It is estimated that
American users consume 300 tons of cocaine per annum. If these
are sold in 1-gram units, this represents 300 million transactions,
which result in fewer than 100,000 prison sentences. This
generates a prison risk for a single cocaine sales transaction of
about 1 in 3,000. 

The punitiveness of American drug policy is not simply captured
in numbers. It is also an element of rhetoric and other programs.
The 1996 Presidential candidates competed, albeit briefly and
unconvincingly, in efforts to demonstrate their toughness; no other
aspect of drug policy merited a mention. Senator Dole accused the
administration of failing to make adequate use of the military,
particularly in the interdiction campaign. President Clinton
responded by proposing that teenagers be drug tested when they
apply for a driver's license. More recently, House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, in what was billed as a major address on domestic policy
initiatives, proposed life sentences for those trafficking across State
boundaries and death sentences for the second offense. 

Even the new Federal welfare reform package includes its very
own antidrug clause. Unless a State affirmatively opts out, it must
deny Federal benefits to any applicant who has been convicted of a
post-1996 drug felony. As a deterrent, it presumes a peculiar
long-sightedness on the part of offenders. It can reasonably be
called spiteful, though it is not as mean-spirited as Senator
Gramm's original version, which imposed loss of a wide range of
public benefits for any drug conviction. It certainly serves no
welfare goal to cut off those convicted at age 18 for simple
possession of small amounts of crack, as in California, from a right
to welfare at age 35. 

What Has Toughness Accomplished? 

Toughness should raise prices, make drugs less accessible, and
reinforce messages that drugs are disapproved of and harmful. This
should lead to less drug use and eventually fewer drug-related
problems. In fact, illegal drugs are remarkably expensive, not
universally accessible, and generally feared. Nevertheless, it is
striking that, notwithstanding sharply increased stringency, prices
are declining, many of the young see drugs as quite easy to get, and
the fear of the most widely used drug (marijuana) is declining.[5] 

Illicit drugs are very expensive by most measures. Marijuana is a
cultivated weed like tobacco, but while a cigarette costs, even with
excise taxes, hardly 10 cents, an equivalent amount of marijuana
costs $5 or more. Heroin, a processed agricultural good like sugar,
is vastly more expensive than gold, costing about $5,000 per ounce
(wholesale), compared to gold's $400. 

All the same, cocaine and heroin prices have fallen steadily since
1981. By 1995, after adjusting for inflation, they were only about
one-third of their 1981 levels. For marijuana, prices rose steadily
and substantially from 1981 to 1992 and then fell in the next 4
years back to their 1981 level. Even more surprising is Jon
Caulkins' finding that crack cocaine, singled out for tough
sentencing both at the national level and in some major States (e.g.,
California), is no more expensive at the retail level than powder
cocaine in terms of price per pure milligram. 

This failure of cocaine and heroin prices to rise with tougher
enforcement is a major analytic and policy puzzle. Declining
demand, reduced labor market opportunities for aging drug
user/sellers, a decline in violence engendered by few new entrants
and lower margins, and the locking up of criminal users are just
some of the possible factors contributing to this. None of these has
been subject to systematic examination. 

If enforcement did not raise prices for the drugs, then it might still
have been successful if it lowered availability. The only long-term
data come from the annual survey of high school seniors and
suggest otherwise. For example, 80 to 90 percent of the students
reported that marijuana is available or very available to them--
figures that have been stable for two decades. The percentage of
seniors reporting that cocaine was available or readily available
was 46 percent in 1995, compared to 30 percent in 1980, though
down somewhat from its 1989 high of 55 percent. The finding that
marijuana is perceived as more available to high school students
than alcohol or cigarettes has been widely reported. 

Drug use was estimated to be half as prevalent in 1995 as in the
early 1980s, but it is now growing, albeit very slowly. In 1995 the
percentage of those over twelve who reported using an illicit drug
in the previous month was 6 percent, compared to 14 percent in
1981.[6] The numbers dependent on cocaine and heroin have been
fairly stable over a long period of time--at about 2.5 million. It
seems likely that the severity of the Nation's drug problem as
measured by the related violence and health costs has also been
fairly stable over that period of time, though declining somewhat
since about 1990. 

In some cities it appears that local enforcement has driven open-air
markets indoors. Driving around with police in Washington, D.C.,
one certainly observes much more circumspect behavior than was
true in the late 1980s. This may be a major accomplishment.
Open-air markets not only ease access for users moving from
experimentation to regular consumption, they also breed violence
and disorder.[7] 

In summary, increasing toughness has not accomplished its
immediate objectives of raising prices and reducing availability.
Drug use has declined, but the most proximate cause, as reported in
the high school senior survey, seems to be a shift in attitudes as to
the risks and approval of use of specific drugs. Though
enforcement might influence those perceptions, there is no
correlation between crude measures of toughness and those
perceptions.

But toughness clearly has had other consequences as well. 

Divisiveness. It is hard to analyze drug enforcement in
contemporary America without reference to race.[8] In 1992 blacks
(12 percent of the general population) constituted two-thirds of
admissions to State prison for drug offenses, compared to slightly
less than one-half for all nondrug offenses. A similar disproportion
existed for Hispanics; 10 percent of the population, they
constituted 25 percent of all those sent to prison for drug offenses. 

The origins of this disproportion are a matter of controversy. The
standard critique is that the population of drug users is
predominantly white; differences in prevalence rates for drug use
(even crack) are far too modest to overcome the vastly larger white
population. Therefore, drugdealers should be primarily white. This
argument is at best incomplete. Sellers are a select group of users;
they are likely to be poorer and more deviant than users generally,
since selling is risky and widely condemned. The urban poor are
disproportionately minority. 

Racism may play a role, but a lot is driven by the police
responsiveness to concerns about drugselling and the violence and
disorder around inner-city markets. Focusing on those involved in
the street selling of expensive drugs (essentially anything other
than marijuana) is likely to generate disproportionate numbers of
arrests among poor, young, central-city males, who are tempted
into this business both by the unattractiveness of their legitimate
economic opportunities and the accessibility of these selling
opportunities.[9] These populations are again disproportionately
minority. 

Drugselling has indeed become a common activity among poor and
minority urban males. For Washington, D.C., my colleagues and I
estimated that over one-quarter of African-American males born in
the 1960s were charged with drugselling between the ages of 18
and 24.[10] Most were charged with a drug felony, and most will
be convicted of that offense. 

But it is what happens after arrest that generates much of the
controversy. In particular, the disproportion in sentences for crack
offenses, for which arrests are overwhelmingly of blacks and
Hispanics, has been a major political issue. This, together with the
difficulty of articulating any credible grounds for maintaining the
current Federal disparity, has increased suspicion in the black
community that drug enforcement is an instrument of continuing
white oppression. Tom and Mary Edsall report that focus groups in
the early 1990s found that many blacks believed that drug
enforcement was part of an effort by the white community to
oppress blacks.[11] 

Nor is this the only division in society arising from tough drug
policies. For the young, the growing harshness of rhetoric and
policy regarding marijuana--arrests for simple possession having
doubled in the last 5 years--reduces the credibility of government
generally. The claims about marijuana's dangers in both public
rhetoric and school prevention programs seem grossly exaggerated
and indeed lack much scientific basis. For Department of Health
and Human Services (DHHS) Secretary Donna Shalala to say, as
she did in a recent meeting, that marijuana is comparable to crack
in its dangerousness, is to disparage science and reason.[12] 

Marijuana is not good for health but represents less threat in that
respect than do alcohol and cigarettes; no one dies of the acute
effects of marijuana and even the long-term effects are surprisingly
modest. The negative effects of marijuana use on adolescent
development are clearer but still modest. These are not arguments
for legalization (indeed, they argue more for prohibition of
cigarettes and alcohol), but they create a tension when so much
emphasis is placed on the health effects of the only one of these
substances that is not legally promoted and is disproportionately
consumed by the young. 

Intrusiveness. A whole array of legal innovations has been justified
by the need to end the "scourge of drugs," to use President Bush's
memorable 1989 phrase. Drug-dealer "profiling" by police has
allowed them to undertake numerous searches with barely
plausible cause; most of those searched are again either minority or
young or both.[13] Drug testing of Federal employees (such as
those in the Executive Office of the President) for purely symbolic
purposes has demeaned public service. Some States require that
candidates for State offices be tested for drugs for symbolic
purposes; the Supreme Court in 1997 unanimously ruled against
this requirement for Georgia. Preventive detention, a particularly
chilling power, has been extended in the context of the Controlled
Substances Act. 

Drug policy is clearly getting harsher in this respect. Some
jurisdictions are contemplating testing welfare recipients for drug
use and disqualifying those who cannot remain drug-free. Abe
Rosenthal of The New York Times, the most prominent of the
columnist drug hawks, quickly pounced on President Clinton's
proposal that all teenage applicants for driver's licenses be subject
to a drug test, suggesting that this was not nearly enough, and that
the logic and facts spoke to the need to do random tests of young
adults as well, since they are the highest risk group.[14] 

The Punitive Cycle. The response to emerging drug problems in
this country is invariably punitive: the first twitch is to raise the
statutory penalty for some offense. This was true in 1996 when
methamphetamine showed signs of moving out of its
long-established western base in San Diego, Dallas, etc. It has not
yet happened for marijuana at the Federal level, somewhat
surprisingly, but various States are moving in that direction. For
example, the Virginia Senate recently passed an increase in
maximum sentences for marijuana possession offenses; a second
conviction can result in a 4-year prison sentence. 

This is truly a vicious cycle, since the argument for raising the
sentence for offenses involving a particular drug are mostly that the
current sentence is less than that for other drugs, which encourages
sellers to pick that drug. This systematically generates sentence
inflation. Indeed, many in Congress responded to the claim of
imbalance between crack and powder cocaine by suggesting
dramatically increasing penalties for powder. In May 1997 the U.S.
Sentencing Commission, defeated in its previous effort at reducing
the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine by
lowering the crack penalties, made recommendations that would
increase the powder penalties, while trying again to lower the
disparity. 

The intrusive and divisive elements of our policies are not inherent
in prohibition. Even harsh punishment is not inherent in
prohibition; consider how lightly we enforce laws against
prostitution.[15] However, they arise remorselessly out of the logic
of drug scares, under the assumption that tougher policies will
make a difference. There is some understanding that racial
disparity and the loss of civil liberties are not trivial harms but this
rubs up against the unquestioned assumption that another major
goal is importantly served by these measures, namely reductions in
drug problems. 

Comparing the U.S. and Western Europe 

Perhaps we suffer no more from illicit drugs and clumsy drug
policies than other developed countries with more wealth than
self-control. Rob MacCoun and I have been studying the
experiences of 10 Western European countries, all of which have
had significant problems with heroin and marijuana; some have
also experienced cocaine or methamphetamine problems.[16] 

European innovations in tolerant drug policy, such as the Dutch
coffee shops and the Swiss heroin maintenance trials, attract a fair
amount of attention in the United States. But most Western
European drug policy is firmly in the prohibitionist legal
framework and, with respect to drugselling, these countries are, by
their standards, aggressive both in enforcing the laws and in the
length of sentences served by traffickers. They are, with Sweden
and France as interesting exceptions, very much less aggressive
towards drug users than is the United States. They are, again with
the exception of Sweden and France, strong supporters of needle
exchange programs and other efforts to reduce HIV risk behaviors
among intravenous drug users. As the British Advisory Council on
the Misuse of Drugs famously said in 1987, "Drugs are an
important problem. AIDS is a more important problem."[17] 

None of these countries has a problem with illicit drugs
comparable to that in the United States, mostly because they have
not experienced a major epidemic of cocaine use. The highest
reported figure we have been able to find for lifetime marijuana
use among high school seniors is 36 percent in Spain, compared to
more than 50 percent in the United States in recent years; for most
European countries the figure is closer to one-quarter. Heroin
addiction in some countries, notably Italy, Spain, and Switzerland,
approaches the U.S. rate of about 2-3 per 1,000 population. But if
one adds in cocaine, the U.S. figures for the prevalence of
addiction are at least twice that of any European country. 

Even starker is the difference in violence, though this is all
impressionistic. I interviewed a senior Zurich police official during
the period when the city allowed drugsellers and buyers to operate
openly in a park, called the Platzspitz, near the train station. The
official was complaining about how bad the crime situation had
become because of the drug market. He showed me a list of the 31
major crime incidents in the park in 1990. The list included a fight
with a policeman and precisely one homicide. This for a park in
which many hundreds of drug dealers and buyers, using heroin and
some cocaine, congregated every day! Similarly, in other European
cities the drug market generates theft and disorder but not high
levels of violence. 

AIDS related to intravenous drug use has been a significant
problem in some European countries, with France, Italy, and
Switzerland the most badly affected. But neither in terms of the
fraction of intravenous drug users who are HIV-positive, nor in the
fraction of the population that is HIV-positive, as the result of drug
use, do the figures for any European country approach those for the
United States. 

Should we attribute the smaller drug problems in Europe to their
policies? Rob MacCoun and I see little basis for this. Take the
violence for example. The low level of violence in crime generally,
perhaps itself the result of the small number of guns, is more
plausible a factor than any policy action by police or the criminal
justice system. The absence of a significant cocaine epidemic can
hardly be attributed to enforcement; prices are now down near to
U.S. levels despite increasing seizures. The greater strength of
families in Southern Europe, the better safety net for those who are
long-term unemployed, and the smaller fraction of young males
growing up in poor female-headed households, are plausibly more
important. It is hard to do any formal testing with the available
data, but this seems to us a reasonable interpretation. 

Interestingly, the choice of drug policy by nations is more
influenced by views about the role of government, as well as by
views about what constitutes the drug problem. For example, the
Swedish population accepts a paternalistic state and will tolerate
highly intrusive rules, including compulsory drug treatment even
without an arrest. In Spain there are no criminal penalties for the
possession of small amounts of any psychoactive drug; this
represents less a decision about drug policy than a response to the
long experience with the authoritarian Franco regime, which has
created a strong suspicion of any laws that allow the government to
regulate private conduct. Europeans generally see illicit drugs as
primarily a personal and health problem, a position consistent with
the lower levels of drug-related violence. The U.S. public sees
illegal drugs as a crime problem; almost all speeches and most
newspaper articles refer to "drugs and crime." For a nation that
sees crime as something to be solved by punishment, that is
enough to sustain a set of laws and programs that make toughness
their centerpiece. 

A Role for Research 

Clearly there are policy alternatives to our current regime, even if
we stick with prohibition. For any proposal involving less
harshness the central issue is assessing the consequences of a
highly punitive approach. At a minimum it would be useful to say
whether longer prison sentences, more drug seizures, or more
intensive money-laundering investigations can increase prices or
reduce availability, and what effect these changes would have on
drug use by current or prospective users and on drug-related
problems. Not a single empirical paper attempts to answer that
question. The closest one gets is a paper of 25 years ago, which
found that higher prices for heroin increased property crimes in
Detroit.[18] There has been a little progress lately in estimating the
price elasticity of demand for various drugs and various
populations[19] but that is just a small first step. 

Oddly enough, we can say a great deal more about the effects of
treatment and prevention, which account for no more than 20
percent of this Nation's public expenditures on drug control, than
about the consequences of enforcement.[20] Even more oddly, that
is the result of the dedication to punishment; any other program
that is not punishment has to justify itself against the suspicion that
it is kind to criminals (treatment) or is too diffuse (prevention).
Since punishment is what drug users and drugsellers deserve, there
is little need (in the eyes of politicians and perhaps the public) for
these programs to demonstrate their effectiveness. Thus, the
National Institute on Drug Abuse has a research budget of $450
million; research on drug enforcement has to fight for its share of
the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ's) paltry $30 million annual
budget, albeit that money is tripled by various evaluations and
earmarks. Twenty million dollars is certainly far too generous an
estimate of the funding for research related to drug enforcement. 

One can usefully adapt a complaint of the public health research
world to explain this situation. Prevention advocates object that
whereas surgical procedures only have to be safe and medicines
safe and effective, prevention programs have to be demonstrated
safe, effective, and cost-effective. The corollary for drug
enforcement is that it doesn't even have to be safe, let alone
effective or cost-effective. Drug enforcement has become a
crusade, and crusaders scarcely need a map, let alone evaluation. 

The Federal enforcement agencies sponsor no research themselves,
notwithstanding Federal program expenditures of about $10
billion. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may generously be called
nonanalytic; more accurately, they are anti-analytic. Not only do
they lack any capacity for internal policy analysis, they seem to
lack even the ability to contract with external research
organizations. The DEA's inability to report price data in a
meaningful way, despite gathering about 5,000 observations each
year, is symptomatic of this. Surely no other Federal agency in the
1990s would report the highest and lowest figures as a range,
without any measure of central tendency. To report that the price
for marijuana went from a range of $25-$450 in 1993 to a range of
$40-$450 in 1994 is to simply inform the world that these data are
irrelevant. 

Clearly a large research and analysis program is needed that has
the depth and durability to develop more credible measures of the
intensity of treatment and the size of the drug problem in a
particular community. We need to take account of the enormous
variation in the intensity of enforcement and severity of sentencing
that seems to exist across cities and States. For example, in Texas
in 1992 the median prison sentence for those convicted of drug
trafficking was 10 years, compared to only 2 years for those in
Washington State. It should be possible to build on the
improvements in the drug data indicators being developed by
various Federal agencies. 

Why is there so little research on drug enforcement? Surely part of
the answer is simply that there is, as James Q. Wilson noted in a
recent lecture,[21] shockingly little research on crime control
generally. But another factor, I conjecture, is a curious confluence
of liberal and conservative interests. Those who support tough drug
enforcement see no gain in evaluation; Peter Rossi's oft-cited
comment, "If you don't like a program, evaluate it," is highly
relevant. Liberals find the whole effort distasteful enough that they
simply want nothing to do with it; in particular, they don't want to
evaluate it for the purposes of making it work better. They would
much rather focus on the programs in which they have faith and in
which they passionately believe, namely prevention and treatment. 

Conclusion 

But a society that deliberately averts its eyes from an honest
assessment of a massive and frequently cruel intervention that
sacrifices so many other goals for the one desideratum of drug
abstinence can scarcely expect to find a well-grounded alternative.
I am struck by the lack of any nuanced debate about drug policy,
beyond the ungrounded and polarizing legalization shouting match
and the banal and marginal discussion of how the Federal drug
budget should be spent. Welfare reform, public housing policies,
and income support generally may do more to affect drug abuse
and related problems than those programs that claim to explicitly
target them, yet there is rarely any serious discussion of their role
in drug policy. 

In John LeCarr's The Honourable Schoolboy, George Smiley
finds some evidence that a prominent Chinese businessman in
Hong Kong may be a Communist spy. Launching an investigation
in Hong Kong is both politically sensitive and expensive, so he has
to convene a meeting of the Foreign Office, Treasury, and other
agencies to get authorization and funds. The Foreign Office is
aghast; if the investigation were to become public and the
businessman were innocent, it would be a major political
embarrassment. On the other hand, the Governor in Hong Kong
entertains and trusts this businessman, and indeed may recommend
him for knighthood; it would be equally embarrassing if it turned
out that he was a spy! They become increasingly panicked and
press Smiley for a judgment; is he a spy? Smiley inscrutably says
he cannot answer without doing the investigation. The end of the
story is of course that they give him the money and the authority,
because the answer must be found. 

That is the situation we face with respect to drug policy. If we want
to know the answer as to whether we can make prohibition less
expensive, divisive, and intrusive--and maybe reduce the American
drug problem--then we can't expect anyone to give a persuasive
answer who is not provided the money and authority to find out
what our tough enforcement actually accomplishes. 

Doing less rarely attracts much support for dealing with a problem
that still concerns large parts of the community. But this may be
the only responsible recommendation that can be made now.
Locking up drug offenders for shorter terms, worrying more about
the racial disparities in sentencing policies, and giving up fewer of
our civil liberties for unlikely reductions in drug problems may be
the best one can do at the moment. That would mean less intrusive,
divisive, and expensive policies and perhaps little increase in drug
problems. 

Researchers are always inclined to think that learning and
understanding are important for policy. The failure of the repeated
findings that drug treatment has a very high benefit-cost ratio to
make a policy impact[22] is a sober reminder that the political
decisionmaking here is driven by other considerations. But we
might actually see something approximating a reasonable
discussion of the alternatives in front of the Nation if a more
credible base of empirical analysis was available. In its absence we
are doomed to rhetorical debate.

Question-and-Answer Session 

Adrian Curtis, Justice Management Division, U.S. Department of
Justice, Washington, D.C.: Based on the Maryland State
Legislature's consideration of the same kind of legislation that
Virginia has passed and your testimony to Congress, what kind of
reaction do you get from elected officials when you talk to them
about "less may be better?" 

P. R.: I don't have enough one-on-one contact with elected officials
to answer that. Because the Nation still believes that drug crime is
near the top of the list of domestic problems and because of the
ease with which people can be persuaded that being less tough is a
danger to the Nation in terms of worsening the problem, I think
that the political gains associated with this are very slight. I make
no claims that this is a politically feasible path. I am a policy
analyst more than a political analyst. 

In terms of policy, one can make a case that we punish beyond
reason. You asked me whether that is sellable; I can't say much to
that. 

That unreasonable disparities in sentencing exist is something that
many officials accept as a problem. And that was the one issue on
which a real leadership for reform could be found in Congress. But
it is striking how hard it is to identify leaders in either the Senate or
the House who support anything more than marginal shifts in drug
policy. Most of the debate is about whether we should spend more
on treatment and less on enforcement, which is not the right way to
think about this problem. Each program should be evaluated on its
own merits. 

Beyond that, it is striking how little high-level nuanced discussion
takes place about drug policy in Congress. I have that sense about
State Houses too, although I don't track them closely. 

Samuel Dash, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington,
D.C.: In your talk, you touched from time to time on violence
related to severe and aggressive drug enforcement, and you made
some comparison briefly between Europe and the United States.
Other than our being known as a violent community, to what
extent have the studies shown what people often believe, as you
do, namely that aggressive drug enforcement has increased street
crime like burglaries and other types of theft offenses with
violence? Do you have evidence of that? 

P. R.: The answer is no; I do not have evidence. But I don't quite
believe the proposition you attribute to me. I want to be careful
about what it is that policy accomplishes. Three kinds of violence
are related to drugs: 1) the psychopharmacological effects of the
drugs themselves, 2) economic compulsive violence (some of
which has to do with crime by users who commit crimes to earn
the money to purchase expensive drugs), and 3) the violence that
occurs in the course of drug distribution. 

Some years ago, I wrote that because of our very intense
enforcement, we have generated more violence in the markets,
particularly on the dealer side. That is, by being very tough, we
create lots of uncertainty in the market. We move people around a
lot, so that market-sharing arrangements are very transient. Just the
fact that lots of dealers go off to prison from time to time means
that every-body's "looking for new connections" all the time
because the old connections may be lost. 

The FBI puts out a figure each year on the percentage of homicides
that are drug related. I don't think that figure ever reached as high
as 10 percent. It is now down around 5 percent. It is a figure that
has little credibility, in part because the process that generates it
only allows one "cause" per homicide. 

It's unclear to me whether enforcement is in fact an important part
of the source of violence, as opposed to the fact that a unique
confluence of criminogenic forces affect American drug markets: 
Young, poorly educated males with lethal weapons, enormously
valuable commodities, and large quantities of cash. It's the fact that
one can hold in his hand something that's worth many thousands of
dollars that really makes this market different. It may be that the
extent to which the police "churn" this market or shape it is really
much less important than the confluence of those factors. But we
are now in the area of conjecture in the absence of data beyond a
couple of studies in two cities, I think in New York and the
surrounding areas, for just 1 or 2 years. 

James Austin, National Council on Crime and Delinquency,
Washington, D.C.: There is a policy that has been floating around
that I would call "coerced treatment" for probationers and parolees.
If they fail drug tests, they are jailed for a certain period of time.
What is your opinion of that policy, and is there any evidence that
it would work? 

P. R.: You are talking about Mark Kleiman's proposal of "coerced
abstinence." Kleiman, a close collaborator of mine over many
years, has been advocating for some years (with increasing success
in terms of catching public policy interest) the notion that a very
large share of all the heroin and cocaine in this country is
consumed by people who are in the hands of the criminal justice
system--whether on pretrial release, probation, or parole. They are
on conditional liberty. The public assumes that a condition of that
liberty is that they are drug tested from time to time since their
criminal activity is presumed to be related to the use of expensive
drugs. In fact, the criminal justice system does a great deal of drug
testing. What it doesn't do much is something consistent based on
testing positive. 

Kleiman believes that graduated sanctions are a way to provide a
structured and efficient set of incentives to staying drug-free. The
first time an offender tests positive he spends overnight in jail; the
second time he spends two nights in jail, etc. An argument can be
made that if this were universally applied the consumption of
heroin and cocaine could soon be substantially reduced. I think it is
a very insightful idea. 

NIJ has funded an evaluation of something close to this in the
Washington, D.C., court system. Preliminary results suggest that a
substantial number of people on pretrial release respond to those
incentives, either seeking treatment on their own or without
treatment. They can substantially cut back on their consumption of
heroin and cocaine. 

How universally that may work in the quagmire that makes up the
U.S. criminal justice system I don't know. But it is certainly worth
testing, and it is something that could arguably make a big
difference to our drug problems in the next 5 years. That would be
high on the list of such alternatives, but it is speculation at this
stage. 

Eric Sterling, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Washington,
D.C.: Peter, I was wondering if your proposal for research and
investigation is one that also might be directed to foundations.
Most of this audience is a public sector audience. In thinking about
all the possible research proposals to test the questions that you
have raised, it might be useful if your remarks were reprinted in the
Chronicle of Philanthropy, because the question so often asked is,
"What works?" You are asking the question what works in the area
of enforcement, and the answer is, "We don't know." What body of
research proposals and questions have been put together that could
be presented to a grants administrator saying, "Here's a whole
group of tests that we think ought to be made." 

P. R.: First, let me again go back to the comment Jim Wilson made
in December, which is how little foundations are interested in
crime control generally. Jim Wilson, of course, sits on many
boards and can talk to any foundation president that he cares to
call. He said, however, "I have many allies, but I have never been
able to get a substantial body of continuing support for research
related to crime control out of foundations." 

The foundations are, in general, a liberal wing of the American
community, and they also find drug enforcement distasteful. I think
that there is very little interest in funding research. It's also fair to
say that this is the kind of research that more appropriately should
be done under government auspices. There is frequently need for
access to data that can only be obtained in our current policy
regime if there is Federal sponsorship. 

To bring up a case of acute interest to me, DEA collects data on
drug prices; it is called STRIDE [System to Retrieve Information
From Drug Evidence] and is a very large and interesting dataset for
analytic purposes. It is now available only to Federal grantees.
With a foundation grant, one cannot access those data. I think that
STRIDE should be a public dataset, but other data exist that are
appropriately unavailable to anyone other than Federal grantees. 

James Boden, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office
of the President, Washington, D.C.: I'd like you to comment on
allowing the medicinal use of marijuana in California. It seems to
me you indicated one of the few opportunities to generate some
agreement on prevention rather than enforcement may be in the
marijuana area. Marijuana has been to some extent de-vilified. 

P. R.: Marijuana is the "cutting edge" drug for policy reform. One
could almost imagine this country 5 years from now with a
different set of laws on marijuana. It takes a lot of imagination, but
it is possible. This is inconceivable with heroin, cocaine, and other
drugs. Proposal 215 was significant in that it signaled general
discontent with marijuana policy as it now stands. About half of
those who voted for it voted on the basis that they wanted more
general reform with respect to marijuana, and about half believed it
was medicine. 

Marijuana may or may not have medicinal uses. It is, in fact, a
question for biomedical research, and it is a question that has been
on the table for a long time. There has been a real reluctance to do
this, in part I think, because it represents biomedical research's
unease with the notion that smoking a naturally occurring weed
could possibly be the best therapy that modern U.S. science could
come up with. That's a very important factor, but obviously there
was a real disinclination on the part of the policy world to allow
research that would make a centerpiece of the drug war look as
though it had some potentially good effects. The unwillingness to
do research about the possible medicinal uses of marijuana is one
of the minor casualties of the drug war. I have no idea whether
research on this topic would produce a positive result. But I think
that doing credible research in the near future may do something to
move the issue of medicinal use of marijuana away from drug
policy. They are really not related. Cocaine is a Schedule II drug
and is used as a topical anesthetic in a few operations; that is not a
matter of controversy. The notion that marijuana might have
medicinal purposes, precisely because it is this stage in history,
generates a great deal of controversy. I think it should probably be
separated from the issue of drug policy reform.

The Legitimation of Criminal
Justice Policies and Practices 

Presentation by 
Mark H. Moore, Ph.D.
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University 

 March 11, 1997
Washington, D.C.

My subject is the legitimation of the criminal justice system in the
United States. It is a subject that I take extremely seriously because
it is easily taken for granted that the system will be seen as
legitimate, and, as a consequence, fail to do the work that is
necessary to legitimate the system in the eyes of the citizens who
observe it, are subject to it, and seek to use it. 

We citizens ask a great deal from criminal justice agencies. We ask
them to protect us from criminal attack--and not just from the
reality but also from the fear. When criminal attacks occur, we
want criminal justice authorities to soothe our indignation by
catching the crooks and giving them their just deserts (at the same
time according them the full protection of their constitutional
rights). We expect them to achieve these ambitious goals without
reaching too deeply into our pockets for money or intruding too
deeply into our privacy and freedom. We also want reassurance
that whatever money and authority is entrusted to them will be
used fairly, that they will allocate effort toward those in need rather
than those with ability to pay, and that they will enforce the law
without fear or favor. Increasingly, we ask them to take a step
further and, in the words of Attorney General Janet Reno, "help to
reweave the fabric of community." 

My purpose today is to discuss how criminal justice agencies--the
police, the prosecutors, the public defenders, the courts, and
correctional agencies--can meet these ambitious goals. In
discussing this topic, I'll adopt a managerial perspective. That is,
I'll adopt the point of view of those who manage these agencies
and look for some concrete ways to use the resources entrusted to
them to accomplish their broad and diverse goals. But my focus
will not be on the common concerns of management: the
downward and inward management of personnel policies and
procedures. It will instead be on the efforts criminal justice
agencies can and must make to legitimate themselves in the eyes of
the citizens they serve. This includes a focused effort on the
particular set of encounters that criminal justice agencies have with
citizens, in particular: 

1. Ensuring quality in their individual encounters with citizens, not
only when they are providing "service encounters" to "clients" who
appeal to them for help, but also when they engage in what I would
describe as an "obligation encounter"--when they ask clients to
stand still for the orderly processes of justice to be visited upon
them.

2. Rendering their organizations transparent and accountable to
citizen "overseers" and their representatives, who demand
assurances that the agencies are achieving their complex purposes
in an appropriate way.

3. Engaging citizens as "coproducers" of crime control and justice
in operations designed to help criminal justice agencies achieve
goals that they cannot achieve by themselves alone but which must
include citizens in a variety of different capacities.

Finally, and most important, is the effort to extend the effect of all
three of these kinds of citizen contacts by offering a kind of moral
leadership that teaches people what it is that justice requires in a
democracy and, through that device, "to help reweave the fabric of
community" that is gradually becoming tattered.

In short, I am going to be much more interested in how managers
of criminal justice agencies engage external actors through political
and legal processes than in how efficiently they give direction and
control to their employees. My argument is that in the past the goal
of enhancing the legitimacy of criminal justice agencies and the
specific efforts that are required to accomplish this goal have been
badly neglected and to some degree misdirected. I will also argue
that this failure has weakened not only the standing of the criminal
justice system in the eyes of the community but also, as a
consequence, the real performance of the criminal justice system.
Finally, I will argue that much of the increased focus on
community justice should be understood as increased efforts to
legitimate criminal justice agencies and capture the substantive
operational benefits that come from such efforts. 

Let me start, however, by recalling the important work that the
1968 President's Crime Commission did in framing society's
understanding of the operations of criminal justice agencies and in
setting an agenda for reform. One of the most enduring products of
the Crime Commission's work was the image of the criminal
justice system as a large funnel that channeled criminal justice
cases through a tangle of institutional complexity and local
variability to their ultimate disposition. This image exemplified
how criminal justice agencies were supposed to operate. 

Everyone understood, of course, that this was not a "system" in the
sense that the agencies were being explicitly directed toward a
particular objective by some coherent centralized authority. It was
only a system in the far more limited sense that the different
agencies were linked together through a process in which one
agency's "outputs" became the next agency's "inputs." Thus, police
had as an output the arrest of offenders. This, in turn, became input
for prosecutors and public defenders. They then developed cases as
their output, which went on to become the input to courts and so
on. This operational interdependence was thought to require some
coordinated planning, if not central direction and control. 

This so-called system of criminal justice was judged to be valuable
to society in two broadly different ways. First, the system was an
instrument of practical purposes, thought to be accountable for the
efficient and effective reduction of crime largely through four
distinct mechanisms: deterrence (both general and specific),
incapacitation, and rehabilitation. That practical goal and those
practical means were what the system as a whole seemed to be
designed to do, and that was what the citizens who paid to support
the system wanted as a result. That's frame one, the practical frame. 

But the criminal justice system was also considered important in a
wholly different way, not only as a practical instrument for
achieving specific results, but also as an instrument of justice--a
way of holding offenders accountable for their crimes and also
protecting their constitutional rights. It is important to understand
that the second idea, the criminal justice system is in place to
produce justice, not just to control crime, could constitute a
stand-alone justification for criminal justice system processing.
From this point of view, the system did not have to show that it
was producing any practical effect, such as reducing crime; it was
enough that it produce justice. Views about what constitutes justice
vary widely of course, both in general and in individual cases, but
the point is that creating justice is a different idea than that of
controlling crime. Further, the production of justice could
constitute a separate and complete justification for the operations
of the system. 

Now these two evaluative frames defined two different ways in
which the individual agencies in the criminal justice system (and
the system as a whole) could legitimate and justify itself in the
eyes of the citizenry. The system could legitimate itself as an
effective and efficient means of reducing crime. Or, it could
establish itself as an important instrument of justice, a means for
ensuring that citizens lived up to their responsibilities to one
another and to the society. Since both were important, the goals of
reform were to advance on both fronts simultaneously: to make the
criminal justice system more efficient and effective and to make it
fairer and more just. 

Like all useful social conceptions, the paradigm constructed by the
President's Crime Commission highlighted some important
features (such as society's response to crime) at the expense of
others that were equally or more important parts of a more
complex, underlying reality. Such simplification is inevitable in a
democratic policymaking process, of course. It may even be
helpful insofar as the simplification does not emphasize everything
that exists, but instead focuses on those areas needing
improvement. And it is entirely possible that the Crime
Commission focused society's attention on the problems that were
most important to attend to at the time its members did their work.
There certainly was then, as there is now, a great deal to be done in
improving the efficiency, effectiveness, fairness, and justice of
America's criminal justice system. 

Still, hindsight can be used to see what particular features of
society's response to crime were underemphasized in the Crime
Commission's conception and are candidates for special emphasis
today in current efforts to reform and legitimate the criminal
justice system. 

First, the central drama evoked by the funnel image was whether a
particular case and an associated offender would make it all the
way through to the end of the process--that is, to prison. This
diagram thus suggests that the whole point of the exercise was to
incarcerate offenders. That was the event at the end of the line
toward which everything else was proceeding. This orientation
ignored two important facts, however. One is that most cases do
not make it all the way through the system. Consequently, an
important, overlooked issue is what is to be done with cases that
remain unsolved or offenders who are not convicted? The second
fact is that most of the criminal justice system's concrete work or
cost occurs both before and after the moment of adjudication. The
community must cope with the fact that many cases cannot be
resolved and that most offenders are returned to the community
sooner or later. That important reality--that we live with crime and
with offenders--was obscured. 

Second, because the funnel image made the processing of cases to
imprisonment so important, it naturally tended to focus attention
on serious criminal cases--primarily adult felonies. These are the
kinds of cases that are worth elaborate scrutiny. Lesser cases such
as misdemeanors or juvenile offenses are judged not worth the
trouble of such elaborate processing or the expense of a prison
sentence. Besides, a sharp focus on serious offenses and offenders
seems closely allied to the goals of producing an efficient and fair
criminal justice system. After all, efficiency and effectiveness
demand that scarce resources be reserved for the most serious
offenses and offenders. Fairness demands that the aggressive use of
state authority be limited to crimes that are not only prohibited but
intrinsically bad. That leaves little room for discretionary decisions
by officials of whether and how to press charges. Thus, the focus
on serious crime ensures consistency and integrity, as well as
economy, in the enforcement of laws. 

Third, the image presented a fundamentally reactive view of crime
control and thereby underemphasized some potentially important
preventive opportunities. Of course, the Crime Commission did not
entirely ignore prevention. Deterrence, after all, is a preventive
concept that seeks to dissuade people from committing crimes by
threatening them with bad consequences if they do. Incapacitation
and rehabilitation, too, can be seen as preventive ideas. They may
not prevent a potential offender's first crime, but they may well
have an effect on future offending. And given the importance of
criminal recidivism and overall patterns of crime, preventing future
crimes by those who have already committed one is an important
preventive contribution. The Crime Commission also insisted that
the root causes of crime include poverty, economic inequality, and
racism, and that crime can only be reduced significantly by
alleviating these broad social conditions--the ultimate preventive
argument.

Still, in retrospect it seems that the Crime Commission could have
noted more prominently some important opportunities for
preventing crime that lie between the limited reactions of the
criminal justice system, on one hand, and broad social actions
directed at the root causes of crime, on the other. Worth
mentioning are some interventions that now go under the label of
"situational crime prevention" and focus on reducing opportunities
for criminal offending; others, now called problem-solving or order
maintenance, focus on intervening in the circumstances that tend to
spawn crime. And there are some important interventions that the
criminal justice system can make that might alter the trajectories of
youthful offenders, such as more effective enforcement against
domestic violence and child abuse and neglect, or more determined
and sustained responses to early juvenile offending, which were
mentioned but not emphasized in the Crime Commission report.

Perhaps the most important omission of the Crime Commission
however was that, in focusing attention on the publicly supported
agencies of the criminal justice system, it necessarily
deemphasized the role that private individuals and institutions of
civil society--families, community groups, churches, merchant
associations--play in controlling crime, both by themselves and as
adjuncts to the criminal justice system. The funnel diagram did not
emphasize the central role played by victims and witnesses in
activating and focusing the attention of criminal justice agencies on
particular crimes, nor did it point to the important role played by
citizens who make individual and collective efforts to guard their
own property and intervene with fellow citizens who are behaving
badly. Similarly, the Crime Commission did not draw attention to
the role that local merchants play in seeking to enforce orderly
conditions on the streets that front their stores or in providing jobs
to neighborhood kids. It did not emphasize the role of church
groups in giving support to single parents struggling to supervise
and raise their children. Such private efforts were viewed as
beyond the boundaries of the criminal justice system--efforts that
might be having an effect on levels of crime and disorder but were
largely independent and beyond the reach of the agencies of the
criminal justice system. This omission was, in my view,
particularly important given the points made above--that the fate of
many offenders is not to be taken from the community and that
eventually offenders are returned to the community for handling
there.

The last omission of the Crime Commission and the one most
closely related to the subject of this talk is its outright dismissal of
the notion that important sources of legitimacy for the criminal
justice system exist beyond the pursuit of efficiency and
lawfulness. To the Crime Commission, a kind of legitimacy rooted
in moral passion and political responsiveness was viewed with
great caution. Behind moral passion, they saw the lynch mob.
Behind political responsiveness, they saw the threat of political
control by the powerful against the weak. Thus establishing
important links between criminal justice processing and moral
passion and politics was viewed not as a way to anchor and
legitimate the system but instead as a way to expose the operations
of the criminal justice system to powerful tides of ignorance and
bias. It was something to be avoided rather than sought out. To do
its work, the Crime Commission believed it was better that the
agencies of the criminal justice system be insulated from both
moral passion and politics. Their legitimacy was to be established
in law and professional competence rather than in responding to
the moral passions of individuals and politicians. 

The paradigm constructed by the Crime Commission proved to be
powerful. Over the next two decades, agencies of the criminal
justice system pursued the agenda laid out for them with great
enthusiasm. They made significant progress in increasing their
professionalism and technical knowledge and in reducing racial
and class biases in system operations. By rights, this progress
should have increased the standing and overall effectiveness of the
system. Instead, they decreased. The popular legitimacy of the
system faded even as the system was becoming fairer and more
effective. Legislatures took discretion back from the hands of
sentencing judges. Community groups demanded the establishment
of civilian review boards and the removal of civil service
protections of police chiefs. Increasingly, citizens turned to private
security arrangements to meet their desires for security. The
criminal justice system, even as it became fairer and more
professionally competent, was becoming increasingly irrelevant to
citizens' efforts to guarantee their own security and satisfy their
appetites for justice. The system's role in producing social justice
seemed less and less important. So the question that faces us now
30 years after the Crime Commission's report is this: "How can we
restore the standing and effectiveness of the criminal justice system
as a social institution that can both guarantee our safety and help us
understand our obligations to one another in a conception of
justice?" 

The loss of popular legitimacy for the criminal justice system
produces disastrous consequences for the system's performance. If
citizens do not trust the system, they will not use it. If citizens do
not use the system, the expensive apparatus we have constructed
will be largely useless because the system depends fundamentally
on citizen mobilization. Moreover, to the extent that confidence in
the system is maldistributed, with poor minorities more suspicious
of the system than the wealthier majority, the capacity of the
system to act fairly is undermined, and with that, its future
legitimacy, effectiveness, and capacity to teach what we owe to
one another. To the extent that the system is viewed as inefficient
or unjust, its ability to mobilize citizens to comply with laws
voluntarily will be undermined. Without popular legitimacy
supporting criminal justice operations, instead of having a
collectively established criminal justice system helping to enforce
a widely shared conception of a just moral order, we will live in a
world of gated communities, each with its own conception of right
conduct, and each enthusiastically excluding citizens of other
communities. To avoid this result, we must find a way to restore
the popular legitimacy of the Nation's criminal justice system.

Legitimacy can be viewed as an abstract value, an ideal to be
achieved. From this vantage point, what particular individuals and
groups actually think about the system and its operations is
irrelevant. Of importance is the extent to which the system can
realize a particular set of values such as fairness or efficiency. Its
success in doing so would be registered through technical
professional evaluations, not in popular sentiment. Alternatively,
one can think of legitimacy as something that exists in the minds of
citizens. From this vantage point, legitimacy resides in people's
views of the criminal justice system, not in performance or
comparison to an ideal. 

From an operational and managerial perspective, the kind of
legitimacy that is important, I would argue, is the second--the kind
that exists in the minds of citizens the system is supposed to serve.
That may be very different from the first kind of legitimacy and
may require different kinds of performance. Indeed, the big worry
is that the ideals that many think should define legitimacy are not
embraced by ordinary citizens. In that case, of course, one would
face a stark choice between legitimating the system through
political responsiveness (which threatens the ideals of justice), on
one hand, and trying to make the system meet the ideal standards
of efficiency and fairness, on the other. However, the fact is that
many of the system's most important ideals are embraced by the
populace. Citizens, too, like procedural fairness. They like a sense
of proportionality. They like efficiency and economy. And even if
they didn't like those things (which give us an enormous
advantage), we as leaders and managers of criminal justice
agencies would need to help citizens learn to love them because, in
the end, the system cannot operate without the support of the
citizenry for its fundamental values. 

This, then, is the problem to be addressed. How can we enhance
the popular and moral legitimacy of the system while enhancing
the legitimacy that comes from being technically proficient and
aligned with important legal virtues such as fairness and restraint. 

My answer to this is simple: As managers of criminal justice
agencies, we must pay attention to the quality of the interactions
we have with citizens as clients, as overseers, and as coproducers
of justice. In managing these interactions, we must stand for the
important democratic values of fairness and restraint. This seems
to be consistent with the challenge of establishing community
justice and using the Nation's criminal justice institutions to
reweave the fabric of community. 

Let me explain why. Gary Abrecht, writing to America's corporate
executives about how to improve the performance of their
organizations, develops the idea that success lies in paying
attention to the quality of what he calls "moments of truth"--the
particular moments when customers encounter an organization's
operation and begin forming impressions about the company and
its product. From my point of view, labeling such mundane events
as being put "on hold" when one calls to order a product as a
moment of truth seems a little grandiose. But even in the
commercial world, this grandiosity helps to focus attention on the
details of these all-important customer contacts. 

The "moments of truth" concept to me seems more appropriate
when we are talking about the ways the Nation's criminal justice
agencies might legitimate themselves in the eyes of the citizens
they serve. There really are important moments of truth--i.e., when,
as clients, citizens encounter the criminal justice agencies asking
for help or being obliged to stand still; when, as citizens, they
contemplate the work of the criminal justice agency and decide
whether it is performing well or badly; and when, either as part of a
community-based patrol or as a part of a jury, they are asked to
participate in the production of justice. Those three moments of
truth are what we have to pay attention to.

The most obvious points of contact between citizens and criminal
justice agencies consist of those moments when citizens call the
system for help. We imagine victims and witnesses calling the
police for emergency aid or demanding justice from prosecutors.
This is, of course, an important client group that criminal justice
agencies must serve. If anyone is a "retail customer" of a criminal
justice agency, it must be these individuals. And it doesn't take
much experience in a radio patrol car or even in a prosecutor's
office to learn that many citizens want things from criminal justice
agencies other than the prosecution of criminal cases. We all know
that citizens call the police for many things other than the response
to serious crime. One of the most important ideas associated with
community-oriented policing is to view these noncrime calls for
services as worthy of response, rather than as distracting nuisances.
The idea is that these calls may represent opportunities to intervene
early in situations that have become criminal matters. Or even if
they are not that, they may present an opportunity to establish a
relationship with a citizen that can become a "bankable asset" in
the future. Similarly, prosecutors have figured out that they must
attend carefully to victims and witnesses to maintain their cases
through the long process of adjudication in felony cases, and they
must give close attention to less serious crimes adjudicated in
misdemeanor courts.

Agencies of the criminal justice system have important "retail"
contacts with another group of clients as well: Those who become
the focus of enforcement efforts. This group includes alleged
criminal offenders, as well as those who have been stopped for
traffic offenses or asked to cooperate in some kind of crowd
control. It has long been accepted that there is little chance of
pleasing these clients of the system and little prospect that they
could become supporters. Unlike the clients identified above who
need help from criminal justice agencies, these individuals are
obligated to do something they did not choose to do or are being
punished for doing something they ought not to have done. As
recipients of obligations and penalties rather than services, these
clients are unlikely to be satisfied. In any case, it is doubtful that
satisfying them should be the goal of the enterprise. Consequently,
with respect to these encounters, the only goal is to satisfy others
that the encounter proceeded properly--that there was in fact
reasonable suspicion, that the stop was made in accord with the
law, or that a sentence was handed down without fear or favor. 

More recently, however, this pessimistic view of how we ought to
interact even with our "obligatees" has changed. Some believe that
arrestees, defendants, and prisoners can tell the difference between
being treated badly and well, fairly and unfairly, and that this
difference ought to matter to those who manage criminal justice
agencies. There was a remarkable moment in my life about 10
years ago in New South Wales. We were talking about how to use
surveys to measure the quality of police service that the New South
Wales Police was delivering to the citizens of Sydney. We talked
about doing both a general population survey and a survey of those
who called the police. Then someone in the group asked whether
we should survey arrestees. Everyone laughed, and conversation
moved on to another topic. But about 10 minutes later one of the
hardest-nosed cops in the room said, "You know, I've been
thinking about that question of whether we should survey arrestees.
At first I thought it was really a dumb idea. But I've got guys in my
command who, no matter whom they arrest and under what
circumstances, the suspect comes into the station house bloody and
mad. With other guys, no matter whom they arrest, the suspect is
clean and calm. I think the difference matters. I'd like to know
what arrestees experience as well as the people who call us." So, it
may be important to try to satisfy those we obligate as well as
those we serve. After all, most of those we arrest, prosecute, and
imprison will spend the bulk of their lives as citizens, not as
arrestees, defendants, or inmates. And we may need their support
as well as the support of those who are victims and witnesses. 

It is also worth noting that citizens want things from criminal
justice agencies both as groups and as discrete individuals.
Particularly important are groups that form around residential
communities. Sometimes there are particular interest groups that
become important as well, such as small business associations or
women who fear domestic violence or parents of teenagers who
fear drugs and gangs. One can easily imagine that it might be
important to think of such groups as having "accounts" with
criminal justice agencies and that it would be important for those
who manage criminal justice agencies to attend to the character and
quality of the relationships they are maintaining through those
accounts. 

From my perspective, what is important about these encounters
with clients, both those receiving aid and those receiving
obligations (and individuals as well as groups), is that all such
encounters leave a residue of experience and feelings and that these
in turn become the bases for enhanced or diminished legitimacy of
the system. Citizens, like customers in commercial transactions,
remember when they have been treated well and badly, and they
respond with more or less loyalty and interest. They may even
come to identify and value the aims of those who treated them well
and learn to suspect and despise the aims of those who treated
them badly. Their interactions with the criminal justice system are
opportunities for communicating values as well as for building
support and legitimacy for criminal justice agencies. 

While the most intense moments of truth between citizens and
criminal justice agencies may occur when citizens have discrete
transactions with the system that involve their particular interests,
the most common moments of truth may be when citizens hear
something about the performance of the system and form a view of
whether it is performing well or badly. These are the moments
when they interact with the system as overseers, not as clients or
coproducers. The views of citizen overseers are important not only
because they affect their willingness to support the criminal justice
system with taxes and grants of authority, but also because their
views about whether the system is just may affect their willingness
to obey the law. Citizens want to know that the system has written
rules that are fair, that the laws are enforced fairly, that the system
can respond to some important differences among individuals, and
that the whole system is designed to operate to good effect. 

The views of citizen overseers may be profoundly influenced by
concrete experiences they have had as clients of the system.
Citizen overseers may also base their views on the experience of
their friends and family. For this reason client contacts are very
important. When we were doing some work with the Mollen
Commission on controlling police corruption, I remember meeting
and interviewing one of the most corrupt and brutal cops that the
Commission had encountered. I interviewed him knowing that the
New York City Police Department was working very hard to
develop community policing and establish better working relations
with poor communities in New York. I had the sense that this one
cop could single-handedly wipe out the day-to-day diligent efforts
of hundreds of officers trying to establish better working
relationships in communities. My heart sank as I realized how
vulnerable the overall legitimacy of the system was to the
destructive influence of a relatively small number of bad
encounters between officers and citizens. 

The point I want to make is that if we wish to engage citizens as
effective overseers of criminal justice systems, it is important for
us to find ways to make our operations transparent and to present
them in a comprehensive, consistent, and reliable way. Many in the
criminal justice world have been reluctant to take on such a
responsibility for fear that their operations would become too
exposed and too vulnerable to political interference. However, I
think that a lot of people have had the opposite experience: When
they've made the effort to expose and be open about their
operations, they win support and enthusiasm from the citizens.
This can then stand them in good stead on occasions when the
system fails. It takes a certain amount of courage to decide to make
one's organization's workings visible and accountable to citizens,
but that openness is crucial to getting the most from the particular
moment of truth when a criminal justice agency interacts with a
citizen-overseer rather than a client. 

The third way that citizens make contacts with criminal justice
agencies is through their important role as coproducers of justice.
Victims and witnesses are important coproducers as well as clients
and customers of the system, and their efforts are essential to
making the system work. (One can even imagine that some
offenders are coproducers in the sense that they must work
diligently on their own if rehabilitation is to succeed.) Here are
some of the many other ways in which citizens can become
coproducers: They serve on juries; they organize themselves in
block groups; or they serve in sentencing councils to provide
mentoring to kids or to help monitor offenders released in
communities. Indeed, families of offenders might turn out to be
important allies in efforts to reduce future offending, and not only
in juvenile cases. The notion of people in the communities as
coproducers is being advanced currently by those concerned about
community justice. People are inventing new ways to engage
citizens in the concrete operations of the system; in doing so, they
not only increase the power and impact of the system but also its
standing with communities. 

These contacts with citizens as coproducers, if managed well,
provide an opportunity to increase the legitimacy of the system.
Each contact forms an impression; each contact provides an
opportunity to express and advocate for a particular set of values
through the operations of the system. When the police arrest a
suspect and read him his rights in front of victims and witnesses,
when prosecutors explain how a particular case will be handled and
why, when defense attorneys explain the case against their client,
or when citizen-jurors are given their instructions by a judge,
certain lessons about the basic values of the criminal justice system
are taught: Measured indignation about criminal offending
tempered by respect for the rights of citizens, the need to share
responsibility in the exercise of social control, and the ambition to
be fair. It is from this material that a constituency for justice and a
criminal justice system can be constructed. 

Aristotle observed that the first virtue of a state was the quality of
justice it could produce among its citizens. Justice has a large
meaning in that idea: Right relationships among individuals and
among individuals, society, and the state. Within this broad notion
of justice, right reactions to criminal offending are only one small
topic. But in many ways the handling of criminal justice issues
provides the most exacting test of justice, the hottest crucible, the
place where our commitments and understanding to one another
are tested most severely. An important base for all other
interactions may be established based on the quality we can
produce in these particularly demanding relationships. 

Rightly understood, I believe it is the task of criminal justice
agencies to take on the burden of producing quality justice in
society's response to crime and criminal offending. It falls to the
Nation's criminal justice agencies to teach two of the hardest
lessons that citizens in democracies must learn. The first lesson is
the most obvious: It is wrong to give offense to other citizens, that
one has to be restrained and respect other people's lives and
properties. The second lesson is far less obvious but potentially as
important: Namely, it is wrong to take offense too easily or to
respond to offense disproportionately. The second lesson requires
of us that we be tolerant. In many ways it is much more difficult to
be tolerant than to be offended when we are attacked. However, by
building a constituency for these values of neither giving offense
nor taking offense easily, we increase the legitimacy of criminal
justice institutions and enhance their efficiency. We also
accomplish the broader goal of reweaving the fabric of a liberal
community--"liberal" in the old-fashioned sense. We can come to
understand what we most fundamentally owe to one another. After
all, it is in the interstices of social interaction created by the
restraint we impose on ourselves and the wide latitude we give to
others that the maximum of liberty and security is found. And it is
this maximum we seek through the various initiatives of the
community justice movement. If we are to produce justice, we
must learn to love it and teach it. That is what the movement to
create community justice is all about.

Question-and-Answer Session 

Jenni Gainsborough, National Prison Project of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU), Washington, D.C.: I enjoyed everything
that you said and agreed with it. The importance of establishing
legitimacy is fundamental to the criminal justice system. I wonder
how you deal with two groups that seem to me to be largely
responsible for undermining legitimacy of the system: Politicians
and the media. It seems to me that most people's contact with the
system is not through the everyday meeting with the police officer,
being arrested, or any of the other things you talked about. What
they know about crime is what they see on the 6-o'clock news and
what their politician tells them. That certainly is completely
contrasted to what you were saying about tolerance and
understanding of the necessity for justice. Is there anything we can
do at that level? 

M. M.: This has to do with how criminal justice agencies manage
their relations with citizens as overseers, both through elected
politicians and through the media. You and I could both do a very
discouraging analysis. (Norval Morris will complain probably
about the way politicians have shamelessly exploited the crime
issue for electoral advantage and how inadequate the media
coverage of crime and the criminal justice system turns out to be
with its emphasis on individual lurid cases and official misconduct,
rather than trying to present to the citizens an accurate picture of
what happens in society.) I share your diagnosis. The question is,
Do I have anything useful to say about what can be done to
improve the quality of those interactions? 

I think the first idea is that one may be able to crash through some
of the false impressions created by the media by doing a better job
in all of the thousands of individual encounters with citizens as
clients and as coproducers. Instead of trying directly to build a
constituency for justice at the wholesale level through the media, it
may be possible to do it at the retail level by trying to get people to
understand and benefit from each individual transaction in the
criminal justice system. That would be statement number one. 

Statement number two would be that if the criminal justice system
organizes itself to be responsive to groups as well as individuals, it
might be able to find another important point of contact between
itself and the citizens--a separate channel of communication
between its operations and citizens. That contact may build support
for the agency and establish a basis for communicating appropriate
values. So far, I'm arguing for the idea that we actually try to use
these encounters that occur between criminal justice agencies and
citizens to get our message through the welter of noise and
falseness that is out there.

I think many police organizations were quite startled to discover
the success of the citizen academies. It turned out that if a police
agency invited citizens to come and ride in police cars and see
what was going on, they responded with an enormous amount of
intelligent interest and reason. I think a lot of other agencies are
beginning to take a lesson from that particular "book." So my first
answer is "Don't do it at the wholesale level, do it at the retail
level."

The next statement is this: "To the extent that you are going to do
it at the wholesale level, I think it's very important for criminal
justice agencies to take leadership roles in getting their message
out. I would advocate that police chiefs, corrections officials, chief
justices, and others engage more actively in political discussions
about the purposes of the system and back up their ideas about how
the system ought to operate with relatively accurate and faithful
accounting of what their organizations are doing. We might find an
initial reluctance among citizens to have their public officials--
particularly officials from criminal justice agencies--being as
prominent as I'm recommending, but this might gradually yield to
appreciation for the leadership that they can provide. 

I think that the substantive values to which leaders of the criminal
justice agencies commit themselves are very important. It is very
tempting for leaders of criminal justice agencies, particularly
police and corrections, to commit themselves to what one might
think of as technical, instrumental goals associated with reducing
crime rather than justice goals that are associated with structuring
relationships properly throughout the society and delivering
high-quality services to citizens. So I hope that the people who
lead police and correctional agencies will commit themselves to a
set of values that is associated with the production of quality
justice rather than with mere crime control. 

Jim Boden, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office
of the President, Washington, D.C.: You talked a little bit about the
decrease of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system in recent
years. Would you address briefly what effect the role of drug
policies and our emphasis on drug control has had on that? 

M. M.: This is a good question. I think 2 or 3 weeks ago you had a
speech from my colleague, Peter Reuter, on drug control policy.
I'm in favor of laws against cocaine and heroin use, and I'm
perfectly willing to commit the authority and resources of the
Nation's criminal justice system to trying to reduce the easy
availability of these drugs in our Nation's communities. 

Having said that, I want to acknowledge that this is a very, very
expensive use of the criminal justice system in the sense that it
chews up a great deal of authority and money as a means of
preventing an increase in the rate of drug use and abuse. We have a
particular responsibility in this area to use the authority of the state,
which I think of as a scarce and valuable commodity, with effect
and fairly. I think we have been a bit indiscriminate in the way that
we have used authority in the drug war. I don't want to eliminate
our efforts altogether, but I would like to see us make a more
sustained effort to focus on the places where it would do a lot of
good and not cost us so much--and where we can be relatively
sure, not only in our eyes but in the eyes of the citizenry, that the
laws are being brought to bear with effect and fairness. What I
worry about is that we have used authority a little too
indiscriminately in drug policy. 

Ted Gest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C.: I won't
use this forum to try to rebut the criticism of the news media, but I
will ask a question to try to make some of your comments a little
more specific. Referring to former Police Commissioner Bratton of
New York, who essentially has expressed the thesis (you can
rephrase it if I haven't expressed it correctly) that over the years
law enforcement got into a syndrome where it said, "We can't do
much about crime so we won't try to take a leading role." How
much of that do you agree with, and how much would you apply
that thesis (to the extent that you agree with it) to the rest of the
justice system? Are there any models that Mr. Bratton and his
supporters have put out that might be appropriate for the courts,
corrections, etc., to try to be more aggressive in their roles in the
justice system and in reducing crime? 

M. M.: Let me say a couple of things to that. First, I would be
pretty satisfied with a criminal justice system that only delivered
justice, and I would hope that whatever crime control benefits that
I got from that happened as a residual effect. In my view, the
principal justification for the system lies in the quality of the
justice we produced, rather than in the crime control effect. That's
the first statement I'd make.

The second statement is that I believe (and spend a lot of my
working life) in trying to help the criminal justice system achieve
crime-reduction and fear-reduction effects as well as produce
justice. I don't think I would have spent as much of my life on this
subject if I didn't think that criminal justice agencies could have a
very important effect on levels of crime and fear in the society. So,
yes, I do believe that criminal justice agencies can make an
important difference, even in so difficult an area as drug abuse--but
perhaps equally in the areas of crime control and fear reduction. 

I think that Commissioner Bratton's bold statement--reacceptance
of responsibility for controlling crime--was a very important
moment in leadership of the criminal justice system. I think it was
quite a heroic individual stance--one that exposed him and his
agency to a real prospect of failure and ridicule. This bold
commitment is what I like about it in some ways. It is an
interesting example of the way in which one can crash through the
political debate at some level. Bratton in some sense made himself
and his organization transparent. He nominated the terms in which
he was prepared to be held accountable by the public. In doing that,
he staked himself out (and with him the rest of his organization) on
the accomplishment of that goal. I think the pressures that he
unleashed actually helped him to run the organization and to
increase its performance and effectiveness. 

A lot of public-sector managers, and particularly criminal justice
agency managers, don't really understand that accountability is
their friend rather than their enemy. The only chance they have of
focusing the attention of the large organizations they lead is to
make themselves accountable and use that attention to get
improved performance. I think Bratton showed us a managerial
style and stance as well as a particular set of programmatic
activities that can plausibly be effective in controlling crime.

Yes, I believe that the criminal justice system can control crime; I
believe it should accept crime control as one of its important
responsibilities. But I would add to the important responsibilities
that it should accept the responsibility to guarantee the quality of
justice and reduce fear as well. Third on the list would be giving
quality service to individuals as a way of legitimating all the other
responsibilities. 

Ruth Davis, The Pymatuning Group, Inc., Alexandria, Virginia:
I've been impressed with the answers you have made to the
questions. I'd like to get down to what I call the street aspects of
the criminal justice system. To me, the criminal justice system is a
process--it has an infrastructure and the attributes of an
organization. When one is involved in it, leadership, salesmanship,
and management are needed. Most of what we talk about is
leadership and salesmanship. Management is the hard part; that's
where one has to put the product or service in the market. If one
accepts the fact that management not only has requirements but it
has some rights--such as the ability to select employees (using the
word loosely in this regard), the ability to decide which services
can or should be provided, the ability to charge for those services,
and the ability to measure performance and to do something about
it--it's very difficult for me to see what it is that we are allowing
the management of the criminal justice system to manage. It has
the attributes of management in the school system and everything
else. We know a lot more about how to manage schools, but
anything that has to do with the public--the public makes its own
opinion--is very difficult. I have difficulty seeing what we are
providing to the system that allows for good management, and
what it is that we can really manage in the system as we see it
today. 

M. M.: That is right up my alley. I like to think a lot about the
successful management of criminal justice agencies. Three
comments come to mind. First, my very first experience in
managing a criminal justice agency was working for the Drug
Enforcement Administration in 1974 and 1975 here in Washington.
I remember testifying with my boss on the Hill at one stage, and
one of the congressional representatives said to him, "Mr. Bartels,
how many people work for you?" And he said, "About half." It was
a wonderful remark, got the same laugh there as he got here. But
there was hell to pay when he went back to the office. 

Jack Maples who worked with Bratton said to me, "I have an
enormous advantage over you in understanding how to manage
criminal justice agencies. I know something you don't know." I
said, "Well, what's that?" And he said, "Most cops don't work most
of the time." That was Maples' (not my) view. I take the point that
there is a sense out there that officials in criminal justice agencies
are not working hard and are shielded by civil service and union
protections. 

Let me say three things about the possibility of managing even in
those circumstances. First, it is important to remember that the
civil service and union protections arose because of pretty sloppy
and miserable management in those agencies. It was perfectly
appropriate for employees who were being asked to do hard jobs or
were being badly treated by their organizations to get both civil
service and union protections. So I don't begrudge them that
protection--I understand at least some of its sources. 

It has always been my view--I realize it is an ideal view--that
authority is a crutch in management--the thing that bad managers
rather than good managers use. Good managers (like good cops)
are people who learn how to accomplish things with minimum use
of authority. So one hardly even notices that they are in positions
of authority. Everything seems so right or it seems so inevitable
that things be done this way that one just goes ahead and does it.
And the mailed fist of real authority never has to be shown. What
I'm saying is that managers are "copping out" when they say, "We
can't get the job done because we don't have authority." 

Having said all that, let me make the last statement, which I think
is important in relation to the point I was making earlier about
Bratton. I've spent 25 years of my life not only doing criminal
justice stuff, but also studying public-sector management. In
school, I learned, like everybody else, that the important and
powerful instruments of management were things like
organizational structure, human resource policies, management
information systems, and control systems. I learned a lot about
those things. What I gradually came to realize, however, is that
those things weren't worth a damn without a powerful external
pressure. All those things could do was distribute voltage through
an organizational system. What made an organizational system run
was a voltage generator that existed someplace else. In the world of
private-sector management, that voltage generator is the desire for
survival, to find a market niche and beat the competition and to
supply goods and services that consumers want. That desire turns
out to produce a lot of voltage going through organizations, which
the managers can then effectively deploy, getting the people to
work without having to use authority. 

In the public sector, what is the analog? My only answer to that is
that I think political accountability is to the public sector what
customer accountability and competition are to private-sector
organizations. If I had to choose between trying to fix a
public-sector organization by fixing its internal control systems, on
the one hand, or making it accountable to a powerful outside body
that is insistently demanding a change, on the other, I would pick
the second every time. In fact, the second is so much more
powerful, that if I found myself running an organization that was
going in direction A and there wasn't any pressure forcing it to go
back in direction B (which I thought was the right direction), I'd
probably work hard to build an outside pressure to move it toward
direction B. That would be a more effective way of getting the job
done than trying to fix the internal system. The reason is that
without that outside pressure, when I go to ask my troops to do
something different, they look past me and say, "Why?"

Let me make this very concrete. This was a hard lesson for me. I
was working with the Philadelphia Police Task Force. We were
doing a review of the Philadelphia Police Department in the
aftermath of two terrible events. One was the MOVE investigation,
in which the police had dropped a smoke bomb on a house to roust
a radical group and the bomb caught on fire and destroyed a city
block. About 20 people were killed. The other was a corruption
scandal that reached just below the commissioner level inside the
organization. You might have thought that this organization would
be on its knees with this kind of dramatic performance failure. So
we were trying to fix the police department and work out a basis on
which it could reconstitute itself. 

We sent out a survey to the citizens of Philadelphia and asked them
the following question (fully expecting the survey to come back
and tell us that the police department was bad, which would give
us leverage for making important changes): "On a scale of one to
five, what do you think of the Philadelphia Police Department?" It
came back about 4.5. Pretty good, right? Teaching ratings I'd be
glad to have. Then it asked a whole series of discrete questions:
"Do you think the cops are rude?" [Oh yeah, terrible, awful.] "Do
you think they sleep on the job?" [Yeah, sure. We see them
sleeping on the job all the time.] "Do you think they take bribes?"
[Yes--a lot of people thought they did.] "Do you think they
sexually harass defendants?" [One-third of the people thought the
cops did that often.] And yet, they rated the department at 4.5! 

I was discussing these results with a room full of captains from the
Philadelphia Police Department, and they were all kind of looking
down at their shoes, embarrassed that I didn't understand. Finally,
one guy was goaded beyond endurance by my ignorance. He
looked up at me and he said, "Look, Doc, you gotta understand;
when you're shoveling shit, you gotta be indulged a little bit."
People in the room relaxed a little, and everyone sort of agreed.
This was his understanding--and that of everyone in the room--of
the relationship the agency had to the citizens of Philadelphia. And
what's more, the citizens of Philadelphia agreed. I suddenly
understood. That deal that had been struck between the citizens of
Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Police Department could have
been struck (maybe had been struck) in cities throughout the
country. 

Now if the above is true, there is no leverage for change in that
police department. And the only way that the leverage can come
for changing the police department is to have somebody step
forward and say, "How about this as an alternative deal?" When
that person steps forward and asks that, it will work only if he or
she is met with a resounding chorus that says, "Yeah, we like that!"
That chorus had better come from outside the department as well
as inside the department, or nothing is going to happen. That's the
moment when the opportunity for leadership is there. 

Bill Burnham, Visiting Fellow, National Institute of Justice, U.S.
Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: To encourage you a
little, a story first about my former employer: When I was in a
group saying how many people worked for the Secretary General
of the United Nations, the answer was 10 percent. So you're batting
pretty well! 

A point in your main presentation that wasn't picked up was the
enormous amount of damage a few bad individuals in a system can
do. Would you therefore agree that any effort and any investment
of resources by senior management on finding such people is, in
the long run, one of the best uses of resources? (I speak as a former
member of the British Prison Service.) 

M. M.: Yes; I believe it's important to focus attention on people
who are persistent and dangerous offenders both in the citizen
population and in our own organizations. I think it's terribly
important to be able to root them out. We could go on at great
length about controlling corruption in criminal justice agencies,
which is a subject of great interest to me. 

As you know, there is an image out there that there are a few
"rotten apples in the barrel" and that we need to control them. The
other notion is that there is a system of corruption that supports not
only those few bad apples at the tail of the distribution, but also the
large number of people interior to the right tail of the distribution,
but still pretty bad actors. You either hear the story that, "We go
after the people at the right tail (rotten apple theory)" or "We go
after the average performance of the organization (the cultural
change model)." 

I think it is almost silly to have that debate because I think the
answer is that you have to do both of those things simultaneously.
Each one helps to reinforce the other. I think it is very dangerous to
concentrate exclusively on the bad guys, because when they get
taken out of the system the rest of the organization doesn't quite
understand why. That is, they will react against the authority. You
can be running a class as a teacher, and there may be somebody in
the class who is driving everybody else in the class wild by talking
too much and being a jerk. You will let this go on for a long time
hoping that the class will discipline the miscreant, but the class
won't do it. Then one day you think, "I'll be a hero as a teacher and
discipline this student so that the other students can benefit."
Right? I'm always astonished that, in the next 5 seconds, that first
student has become everybody's best friend, and you've become the
biggest jerk in the world. I think that this is a rather common thing
that happens inside organizations. The organization will routinely
close ranks around people who have been singled out for
misconduct if one hasn't built an organizational climate in which
the authority is allied with the people in the organization and a
cultural commitment has been made. That conduct is something no
one wants inside their organization. 

Again, making that point more concrete and with more evidence
from within policing (rather than from the weird world of
academia): Patrick Murphy, when he was talking about dealing
with police corruption in New York City always told a wonderful
story. Murphy, as you know, had developed a system. He rejected
the advice to concentrate on controlling corruption by setting up a
powerful Internal Affairs Department (IAD) that would investigate
the worst offenders. Instead, he used the centralized IAD as a
general staff operation to monitor "ambient levels" of corruption in
a precinct. These reports would then be used as a basis for
discussion with the precinct commanders on what they were doing
to control corruption. He gave the resources for controlling the
corruption to the decentralized precinct commanders rather than
leaving it sequestered in IAD. 

When asked why it was that he did that, he would give a very
eloquent speech. He said, "Well, in the old days in the New York
City Police Department there would be some corrupt cops, and the
people from IAD would come down, walk into the precinct house,
put handcuffs on the officers, and lead them away. Right after they
led them away, the precinct captain would get all the troops
together in the precinct (because morale was now slipping), and the
precinct commander would say, `Those bastards from downtown
just took Joe and Willie, two of the finest cops I've ever known.' "
In that moment, the culture that was supportive of corruption was
being advantaged. Authority was aligning itself with the support of
corruption and marginalizing the effort at corruption control.
Murphy said he wasn't going to stand for that. He was going to
make the precinct captain put the cuffs on the corrupt cops. 

As soon as Murphy's program was in place inside the New York
City Police Department, things changed fast. The reason they
changed fast is that the people at the captain level, who couldn't
find it in their stomach to control corruption, left. And that made
room for people who thought "thank God, somebody has finally
seen the value of someone like me who is hostile to corruption,"
and those people began coming up through the ranks and taking the
captain positions. Once you have 70 captains focusing on this
problem rather than a few people in IAD trying to make
investigations against a "wall of silence," you've got a lot more
social control inside the department than you had before. 

So, you don't always want to go just after the bad guys; you want
to go after the supporting infrastructure as well.

Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for Breaking the Cycle
of Violence 

Presentation by 
Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D.
University of New York at Albany 

April 8, 1997
Washington, D.C.

We have all read newspaper reports about the deaths of young
children due to child abuse or neglect: Lisa Steinberg, Jessica
Cortez, Emily Hernandez, Joey Wallace, Nadine Lockwood, and
most recently, Elisa Izquierdo. But what happens to the children
who survive? The babies abandoned on streets or in hospitals,
children left unattended for days without food in filthy
roach-infested apartments, or children brutally abused. These
children may not be well known. Indeed in New York City, no one
in the city's child welfare administration or the school system
noticed the disappearance of 8-year-old Justina Morales for 15
months, although she was known to child welfare officials. As we
now know, Justina Morales was murdered in December 1995 and
her body disposed of in a trash can.[1] 

The names of these children appear in distressing newspaper
stories like the case of 16-year-old David Newbury and Mark Rea
in Milwaukee, who sexually assaulted and clubbed to death a
classmate. David's court record revealed a childhood history of
beatings, cruel words, and indifference. Before being sentenced to
life in prison, David told a probation officer, "I lived like I was
treated."[2] 

Today, I have three goals: to briefly describe how childhood
victimization and violent criminal behavior are related, to illustrate
promising strategies and opportunities to intervene, and to suggest
some important principles to guide interventions prior to
formulating or proposing new policy. This talk is an attempt to
bridge the world of research with that of policy. You should know
that I do not pretend to be exhaustive here in describing programs,
but rather to illustrate with a few examples. 

Over 10 years ago, as Jeremy Travis mentioned, with initial
funding from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), I began
research to address the relationship between early childhood abuse
and neglect and later delinquent and violent criminal behavior.
This is a study of 1,575 children from a metropolitan area in the
Midwest who were followed for a 25-year period after the abuse or
neglect incident. These were substantiated cases of physical and
sexual abuse and neglect, which occurred early in the lives of these
children (before age 12).[3] Using official criminal records of
arrests, we found that childhood victimization increases the
likelihood of delinquency, adult criminality, and violent criminal
behavior. At the same time, however, we found that the
relationship is not inevitable, suggesting an opportunity for
long-range violence prevention through appropriate intervention. 

I want to call your attention briefly to five major points.[4] 

First, the risk of arrest: Childhood victimization clearly increases a
person's risk of arrest. To place this in perspective, the odds are
almost two times higher that an abused or neglected child will be
arrested as a juvenile for a violent crime than a control group child. 

Our research was conducted in a metropolitan county area in the
Midwest, using court cases from the years 1967 to 1971. But others
have found similar results. In New York, for example, as part of
the Rochester Youth Development study, Thornberry and his
colleagues collected information on child abuse and neglect for the
children who were part of their study.[5] They also found that child
maltreatment was a significant risk factor for delinquency.
Similarly, another evaluation by Matt Zingraff and his colleagues,
using maltreated children and two nonmaltreated comparison
samples from another geographic area of the country, Mecklenburg
County, North Carolina, found that maltreated children had higher
rates of delinquency as well.[6] Thus, in three quite different
prospective studies from different parts of the country using cases
from different time periods, childhood abuse and neglect have been
found to increase a person's risk of delinquency. 

Second, we have also learned that abused and neglected children
are arrested at an earlier age, have more arrests, and are more likely
to be repeat violent offenders.[7] Abused and neglected children
are involved in criminal behavior almost a year earlier than the
control group children. This is important because we know that age
of onset is often negatively correlated with the severity of the
disorder.[8] 

Third, there is a cycle of violence. And violence does beget
violence. That is, being physically abused as a child leads to an
increased risk of an arrest for violence. However, our findings
indicate that being neglected as a child also increases the risk of
arrest for violence. I'll come back to this. 

Fourth, there are differential patterns for population subgroups.
Childhood victimization seems to have pervasive consequences for
criminal behavior and violence in some respects, that is, it affects
females as well as males--and as you know, females are at low risk
for being arrested, particularly for being arrested for a violent
crime. On the other hand, there seems to be a differential impact of
childhood victimization on the criminal consequences for
African-American children as compared with white children.[9]
This we do not yet understand. 

Fifth and finally, other findings suggest that childhood
victimization also has the potential to affect other domains of
functioning. We've conducted in-person followup interviews with a
subset of the original sample (work supported by the National
Institute of Justice, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and
Alcoholism (NIAAA), the National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH), and now the National Institute on Drug Abuse
(NIDA)).[10] We have found that abused and neglected children
are also likely to manifest cognitive and intellectual
deficiencies;[11] mental health consequences including antisocial
personality disorder,[12] posttraumatic stress disorder,[13] and
higher rates of suicide attempts;[14] alcohol abuse for women;[15]
unemployment; and lower rates of marital stability.[16] These
outcomes reported so far most likely represent only the tip of the
iceberg of areas potentially affected in a negative way by
childhood victimization. 

Enough of the bad news. The good news is that there is an
emerging "science of prevention"[17] and that there are some
programs that have been shown to be effective. 

For the most part, our current system of interventions is highly
reactive in nature, geared toward treatment, rather than proactive
with preventive efforts aimed at reducing vulnerability and risk. In
the case of child victims, the justice system gets the failures of
other systems. By the time these children are treated or seen, it is
often after referral by court personnel, when they are typically
manifesting a long history of antisocial behavior. 

However, at numerous points in a child's life and environment
there are opportunities to intervene. This is particularly true for
abused and neglected children and especially those who come to
the attention of public officials.[18] I have selected a typical case
to illustrate such opportunities for intervention. 

This is the case of a male child who was brought to the attention of
the courts through a neglect petition when he was 6 years old. His
mother was unemployed and his father's whereabouts was
unknown at the time. He had eight siblings, born during an 8-year
time period. He was the fifth child. For some time before the
neglect petition, he had been cared for by his maternal grandfather.
By the time of his petition, he had been abandoned for some years.
At the age of 7, he was made a ward of the county. During this
time, his mother showed only sporadic interest in him, and indeed,
many of the other children in the family were cared for by other
people scattered throughout the city. Eventually, some of the other
siblings were adopted. At age 9, he was picked up by the police for
running away on two separate occasions. He was held overnight,
and the incident was recorded. Then, he was sent to a foster home.
During this time, his mother would take him away from the foster
home, take him out of school, and return him to the foster mother
with only the clothes on his back. At that time, the public school
system referred him to the Children's Bureau because of the
constant disruption of his school attendance due to his mother's
moving from place to place. At age 12 and again at age 13 he was
picked up and charged with being ungovernable. The first time, he
was sent to a group home for a short stay. The second time, he was
placed on probation. By age 20 he was well on his way to
becoming a repeat violent offender. By age 32 he had 13 separate
arrests for violence, and by all accounts he might be considered a
dysfunctional young adult. By that time he had spent several years
in correctional facilities. 

What promising strategies or programs might have made a
difference in his life? Before his birth, home visitors might have
worked with his mother to improve her parenting skills through
public health and family support system services. Home visitation
is one type of program that involves several models. Some rely on
public health nurses who establish contact with mothers during
their pregnancy and provide frequent visits after birth, whereas
others rely on paraprofessionals who meet with the mother after
discharge from the hospital. One reason for using home visitation
is to reach families who might not otherwise have access to
services, such as rural families living in isolated areas, urban poor
isolated families, or families who might be unwilling to travel to
service providers, such as abusive or neglectful families. 

Another advantage of the home visitation program is that, after
having developed a relationship with the parent, home visitors can
provide services and models for effective parenting. One program,
developed by David Olds and his colleagues,[19] uses prenatal and
infancy home visitation by nurses to prevent a wide range of health
and development problems, including prevention of child abuse.
The program was based on the premise that nurse home visitors
were in an optimal position to identify and help change factors in
the family environment that interfere with maternal health habits,
infant caregiving, and parental personal accomplishment in the
areas of work, education, and family planning. This intervention
was assessed through a randomized trial with 400 first-time
high-risk mothers. Compared with families without these services,
home-visited clients had fewer low-birth-weight babies, fewer
reported cases of child abuse and neglect, higher rates of child
immunizations, and more age-appropriate child development. 

Now our young man also might have been enrolled in a program
for pre-schoolers at risk for impairment of intellectual functioning
and eventual school failure, such as the Perry preschool
project.[20] In this project, low-income, black, 3- and 4-year-olds
were randomly assigned to preschool and control conditions.
Children in the experimental group attended high-quality,
cognitively oriented early childhood education for 1 to 2 academic
years. Teachers made weekly home visits, and monthly parent
meetings were held. Longitudinal followup data to age 19 indicate
that the Perry preschool children showed lower rates of placement
in special education classes, lower grade retention, better
performance on standardized measures of achievement, better high
school graduation rates, and lower rates of welfare assistance than
the children with no preschool. Further followup at approximately
age 27 showed that the preschool program had dramatically
reduced the rate of arrests and chronic offending.[21] 

Another opportunity that we missed for our young man was when
the public school system, recognizing this child's inschool
problems, complained about the disruptive influence of the child's
mother. Truancy has been increasingly recognized as a major
problem in our country. A number of communities have begun to
design truancy-reduction programs that often involve schools, law
enforcement, families, businesses, judicial and social service
agencies, and community and youth service organizations. Such
programs involve intensive monitoring, counseling, and other
family-strengthening services that are offered to truants and their
families. And in these cases, there is at least preliminary evidence
to suggest that these programs may be effective.[22] 

Although too late for our young man, a series of community-based
interventions with children and adolescents, aimed at violence
prevention, was initiated in 1992 at various sites across the
country.[23] Now, these programs are not designed to intervene
with abused and neglected children, yet we hope that the
information obtained from the evaluations of these promising
interventions will be helpful. 

But for all of these promising strategies (and others not
mentioned), we will need to use caution in moving from small pilot
tests such as these to large-scale prevention trials. It is very
tempting to generalize from programs that have shown promising
results. However, it is very important to resist the temptation since
there may be features of experimental projects that are difficult or
even impossible to reproduce in a large-scale social program. 

What have we learned from these promising strategies or
interventions to help guide the development of further programs to
break the cycle of violence? I'd like to mention six principles very
briefly: 

1. The earlier the intervention, the better. Interventions need to be
instituted early--before the behaviors have stabilized and become
less amenable to change.[24] Early childhood is a period during
which the central nervous system is changing rapidly and
profoundly and the attitudes and habits of children are formed.[25]
Without interventions, deficits or dysfunctional behaviors at one
age lay the groundwork for subsequent dysfunctional
behaviors.[26] For example, severe malnutrition in infancy or brain
damage from physical abuse may lead to impaired cognitive and
intellectual functioning, which in turn affects IQ and obviously
affects school performance, which in turn affects that child's ability
to function adequately as an adolescent and young adult. Services
should begin early, preferably during the prenatal period or shortly
after birth, and should extend through the early years of a child's
life. Early interventions should focus on eliminating factors that
decrease a child's capacity for normal cognitive and neurological
maturation. Aiming early intervention efforts at childhood victims
has the potential to influence their behavior before their first
offense. 

This is not to say that all childhood victims should automatically
become suspects. But given the increased risks associated with
early childhood victimization, police, teachers, and health workers
need to recognize the signs of abuse and neglect and take action to
intervene early. Later intervention should not be ignored, but later
interventions are more labor intensive and more difficult since they
must deal simultaneously with the existence of problem behaviors
and the prevention of further additional problem behaviors. If
earlier identification of abuse and neglect leads to positive
interventions then this should reduce the risk of future violent
behavior. 

2. Don't neglect neglected children. Increased attention needs to be
paid to neglected children. Although neglect cases have not
received as much attention as cases of physical or sexual abuse,
some researchers have suggested that children who experience
neglect may be as vulnerable to long-term problems and to
dysfunctional behavior as are victims of physical or sexual
abuse.[27] Our research demonstrated a clear link between neglect
and later violent criminal behavior. These findings are of particular
concern since the incidence of neglect is more than twice that of
physical abuse, and neglect cases represent the majority of the
cases taxing the child protection system. In contrast to the episodic
and explosive nature of physical abuse, neglect is a chronic
condition which, in some ways, may be more amenable to
intervention strategies. 

Few justice programs address the needs of neglected children. The
disproportionate number of these cases has at least two
consequences for public officials: First, they will be called upon to
deal with more cases of abuse and neglect, and second, since
childhood victimization in the form of neglect is linked to later
criminal behavior, a larger share of tomorrow's offenders will be
today's victims of neglect. 

3. One size does not fit all. It is also important to recognize that
one size does not fit all, for families or children. What works for
one child in one context may not work for a different child in the
same setting, the same child in another setting, or the same child in
another period in his or her development. Characteristics of the
child will influence the extent to which interventions may be
effective. For example, temperament exacerbates in some cases or
minimizes in other cases a child's level of risk to develop problem
behavior.[28] We have found that there is a small group of
children, less than 7 percent, within the larger group of abused and
neglected children in our sample who have indications of severe
behavior problems at an early age.[29] These children with
behavior problems made more placement moves than children
without such indication. And these children with behavior
problems are seven times more likely to be arrested as a juvenile
and four times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime than
children without those indications. Now, whether frequent moves
reflect an early predisposition of the child to antisocial behavior or
whether they reflect a response to it, children with numerous
placements are in need of special services and are not well served
by routine responses. Rather than waiting until after multiple
placement failures, better identification of these children prior to
placement would permit assignment to specialized treatment
programs based on an assessment of the child's needs, which
includes taking into consideration the child's developmental status
at the time. 

To be effective, interventions need also to recognize that children
do not develop in a vacuum but, rather, in a social context.
Characteristics of parents or caretakers and of the neighborhood
and the community in which the child lives also exert potent
influences on the child's development. While the first important
influence on the child is the family, children and families are
interacting members of a larger social system including schools
and communities. There is growing evidence that the long-term
impact of childhood trauma, whether it is direct victimization as in
child abuse and neglect or witnessing violence in one's family or
community, may depend on characteristics or practices of the
family or the community in which the child lives.[30] This takes
me to the next point. 

4. Surveillance is a double-edged sword. One advantage of home
visitation programs is that they can provide a watchful eye in the
home. Unusual bruises, signs of spousal abuse, or indications of
drug abuse can be noted by an individual with a trained eye.
Similarly, an advantage of better training for police officers and
school teachers to identify child abuse and neglect is the potential
for the provision of services to these children and their families.
On the other hand, surveillance is a double-edged sword associated
with potentially serious negative consequences, particularly when
some segments of the population are at risk for different levels of
surveillance. Families who, because of certain demographic
characteristics such as poverty, unemployment, or single
parenthood, have frequent contact with public service agencies are
more often exposed to closer scrutiny. Special care needs to be
taken, then, in responding to and handling cases of childhood
victims to prevent damage from the destructive edge of the
double-edged sword. Our differential findings regarding the
long-term criminal consequences of abuse and neglect by ethnicity
cannot be ignored. If there are differences in the community's or
system's response to abused and neglected children as a function of
differences in ethnic or racial backgrounds, then it is important to
identify these differences, particularly if they relate to subsequent
levels of violence in these children. At a minimum, intervention
agents need to be sensitive to the possibilities of differential
treatment on the basis of race or ethnic background and take steps
to avoid such practices. 

5. Interventions are not one-time efforts. Many intervention efforts
involve a single dose of relatively short duration. However, we
have learned that programs such as home visitation, the Perry
preschool, and Head Start cannot be viewed as a "single shot in the
arm" or a one-time inoculation procedure. Rather, interventions
may require periodic "booster shots" and perhaps more long-term
followup. The original Elmira study, continued through the child's
second birthday, was associated with definite benefits.[31, 32]
However, the effects disappeared when the children were
reevaluated at 25 and 50 months of age.[33] Perhaps we need to
view early childhood intervention programs in the same way that
we view other services to children, such as fluoride treatments.
They may need to be continued with varying intensities at various
points in childhood and adolescence. 

6. Resources should be accessible. It is not enough just to increase
resources, because accessibility is as important as the resources
themselves. Concrete barriers--such as transportation, language
problems, and fragmented services --may prevent children at risk
or their families from taking advantage of existing resources. But
barriers can be psychological as well. According to one
researcher,[34] schools that provide free meals for low-income
children have found that these children will not eat the meals if
other children or teachers know they are free. Max Frankel,[35] in
a column entitled, "Less Medicare, More Magic," argued to
preserve the universality of social security to avoid the
stigmatization of the elderly poor. Likewise, the potential for
stigma associated with early child and parent intervention
programs would be minimized by universal coverage. Abusive and
neglectful families may be more likely to accept parenting and
child intervention programs that are offered to all in the
community rather than targeted ones that might embarrass or
stigmatize. This may be particularly important for intrusive
interventions in family life, such as home visitation programs.
Programs offered to all children and all families would also avoid
implications of discrimination as well. Service providers could
determine the intensity of services required depending on the
particular needs of the child, the particular family, and the
resources of the community. 

So, what do I conclude? Comprehensive parent and early
childhood intervention programs are clearly the option of choice.
Estimates of the cost of home visiting for 1 year are between
$1,500 to $3,500 per family. Consider that the total number of
newborns born in Washington, D.C., in 1992 was 10,960.[36] If
early parent and child intervention services were provided to all
mothers of newborns in the District, the total cost per year would
be roughly $38.3 million, using the higher cost estimate. Assuming
that such a program were to begin in 1998 and continue for 5 years,
at the end of that time we would expect that the entering
kindergarten class in the District in the fall of 2003 would show
dramatically improved health and academic preparedness. Even
though $38.3 million per year sounds like a lot for a social
experiment, such a program would probably pay for itself. At least
in the original Elmira project, the cost of this early prevention
project for high-risk families was equivalent to government
savings associated with lower utilization of Aid to Families with
Dependent Children, food stamps, Medicaid, child protection
services, as well as tax revenues due to maternal employment.[37]
Furthermore, these cost savings do not take into account the costs
associated with services for older children and adolescents
involving special education, foster care, court expenses, and
juvenile detention and incarceration.[38] John Leventhal,[39] a
pediatrician at Yale, has suggested that home visiting for high-risk
newborns and their families might be covered by medical
insurance or managed care plans similar to the cost of medical
care. He cites one report that estimated the total costs for each form
of transplant--kidney, bone marrow, or liver--in the United States
to be about $1 billion per year.[40] Home visiting, which clearly
has the same potential to be lifesaving for some children and to
improve markedly the development of many others, is relatively
inexpensive per family compared with transplantation. Leventhal
suggests that in the course of a child's lifetime, a successful
preventive service should be viewed as a modest investment to
ensure that the child's first few years of life are spent in a safe and
nurturing environment.[41] 

Universal parent and child intervention programs beginning during
pregnancy are clearly preferable. However, if policymakers are not
persuaded by the substantial benefits likely to come from the kinds
of intervention efforts suggested here, then the criminal justice
literature indicates that interventions targeted at abused and
neglected children at a minimum are critical since these children
clearly are at high risk for hurting themselves and hurting others. 

Problems with attempts to predict future delinquency or adult
offending often complicate proposals for early intervention. The
situation for victims of child abuse and neglect is different. Abuse
and neglect cases are those in which a decision to intervene has
already been made and where public officials are already involved.
Nonetheless, one important unresolved issue for me is whether
targeted intervention strategies can be developed that protect the
privacy of the children and their families and guard against the
potentially negative outcomes associated with increased
surveillance. 

I have two simple take-home messages. First, there are promising
programs that we should evaluate and build upon. Second, children
are able to change given the chance and a little help. Not all abused
and neglected children grow up to become violent offenders. And
while we do not yet fully understand the factors that make the
difference in their lives, we need to intervene early--and the earlier,
the better. This is consistent with other social goals: reducing
crime, increasing educational achievement, and preventive health
care. The cycle of violence hypothesis proposes that yesterday's
and today's childhood victims will become tomorrow's offenders
and perpetrators of violence. Rather than focusing on responses to
child abuse or neglect in court proceedings that "treat" offenders,
prevention efforts should target childhood victims to reduce their
risk of becoming offenders in the future.

Question-and-Answer Session

Duane Ragan, Office for Victims of Crime, U.S. Department of
Justice, Washington, D.C.: Did you include any of the children
who had been in Head Start? 

C.S.W.: I did not include Head Start evaluations in this talk, but
certainly some of the children not in the Perry preschool program
would have been in Head Start. I know there is controversy about
the long-term effects of Head Start, but in some of the work that
I've seen, the effects have been quite powerful. I didn't include
them here because I simply didn't have the most up-to-date
followups. Also, I really wanted to tie in the connection to the
criminal justice community, the issue of reduced arrests and
chronic offending. 

Christopher Stone, Vera Institute of Justice, New York, New York:
Do you know if there are any child welfare agencies in the country
that have held themselves or are held accountable/responsible for
the future development of the kids who are currently their wards? 

C.S.W.: Remember, I'm a researcher; I don't work in child welfare.
There are child welfare people here. Certainly, Nicholas Scoppetta
in New York City now is trying to take a position, saying that "I'm
going to be held accountable for this." I suspect that there are
people who are doing that. Whether they are taking as public a
stance as Scoppetta, I don't know. He is certainly getting heat. 

Nicholas Scoppetta, Administration for Children's Services, New
York, New York: The question was directed more toward holding
us accountable for the future consequences of abuse and neglect.
What I've been talking about is holding the system accountable for
delivering what we are supposed to be doing, not simply the
nobility of our intentions. 

C.S.W.: Well, you see, I think that, if you don't have the kinds of
slippages that you are having in the agency, if you are able to
accomplish what you would like to do and do it early enough in the
process when you have these definite cases of child abuse and
neglect, you will see a reduction of problems in the future. So, if
you will be held accountable for dealing properly and responsibly
with those kids, then I think the rest will fall into place. 

Edward Cotton, Illinois Department of Children and Family
Services, Springfield, Illinois: I wondered whether, in the early
intervention programs, particularly some of the models that are
used nationally, you looked at strategies to use with dropouts.
Since these programs are voluntary, the ones we looked at had
extremely high dropout rates--whether at-risk families were
identified in the hospital and said "no" or said "yes" and were
never available after that. I guess I want to put things in
perspective. These programs are voluntary, the dropout rate seems
to be very high, and I wondered if you could discuss any strategies
to address that. Because it doesn't matter if a program is great if
people are not going to come to it or if they drop out of it. 

C.S.W.: That's a good question. One of the things that I cut out of
my presentation (but is in the paper) is a talk about some of these
barriers. A woman named Karol Kumpfer[42] has done some work
on parent-training programs that I think is creative. One thing that
she has been able to do is to get very high parental attendance rates
at her program meetings. One way she has done that is by really
paying attention to some of the nitty-gritty issues like
transportation, daycare, and all these other things that will actually
enable parents to attend. That doesn't get at your issue, which is
parents who simply don't want to or are not themselves "together"
enough. I think (this is the caution that you heard here in this talk)
we need to solve--we need to do some preliminary work to figure
out what is the best way to get parents to enroll, to commit to being
in these programs, and then to be kept involved in these programs.
Because, clearly, if only a very small fraction of the families who
are offered these services are taking the services, most likely those
avoiding them are going to be the families who are most in need of
the services (the most dysfunctional). Before we plunge into major
programming--I guess I shouldn't have said 1998, then, for the
newborns in the District--I think we need some preliminary work
to deal with these very practical issues. But I don't know, other
than Kumpfer's work, whether there is other literature that talks
about that. 

Donald Murray, National Association of Counties, Washington,
D.C.: Dr. Widom, I was very interested in your highlighting the
problems of accessibility to services. In so many of our
communities we see a lot of fragmentation where the community
doesn't have a strategy. In terms of holding the community
accountable, making sure all the players are at the table, we're
excited by what Governor Hunt in North Carolina is doing. I'm
sure you've heard about it. At the county level, half the counties in
the State (shooting for the whole State) have set up boards just to
focus on children 0-to-3 years of age. He has put in a little less than
$100 million, but so far the results have been spectacular. 

C.S.W.: I certainly hope that someone is evaluating from when the
program began to 5 years from now, so we can learn what were the
good things that were done--what were the things that made a
difference--so we can then take them to another community. 

Donald Murray, National Association of Counties, Washington,
D.C.: The central thing is getting the community to come up with a
collaborative strategy based on the thinking of all segments of the
community. That's usually not done. It's just a very simple idea. 

David Lloyd, Family Advocacy Program, U.S. Department of
Defense, Arlington, Virginia: I'm afraid that you picked a poor
example: A child that's the fifth of eight children with umpteen
different fathers already is in a family that is probably not going to
be one that participates in any type of voluntary early intervention
program. It kind of reminds me of Richard Gelles's call for
removing those children from their families permanently, thinking
about terminating parental rights early, and moving them into
adoption (with the caveat of ensuring that they receive the
treatment services to deal with what has already happened to
them). Too many of those children do not receive this either in
foster families or in adopted families. 

But my larger concern has to do with the conflict that we have in
child welfare philosophy. The good news, I guess, is that child
abuse and neglect is a low base-rate phenomenon. Even if we
double or triple the estimates of how frequently it occurs, it is still
a relatively (thank goodness) infrequent phenomenon. Combined
with that, we have kind of unitary terms to describe very discrete
things happening. Neglect is not a unitary phenomenon. There are
children neglected for their medical needs, which tend to be rather
one-time-only issues. There are children whose educational needs
have been neglected, and it is difficult to differentiate these
children from truants when they hit a certain age level. Then there
is neglect that is clearly poverty related; this probably should not
be considered parental neglect but rather economic neglect or
American society neglect. Then there is parental disinterest, which
is, I think, the hardest one to deal with. It is the lack of attachment.
Because we treat all forms of neglect the same, we don't really
understand the phenomenon very well. Perhaps we would do better
to really study the neglect cases, to really learn from those parents
in the same way that we have interviews with serial killers, to try
to learn what motivates them and to devise better strategies. 

The evaluation of Hawaii Healthy Start over a longer time and
some other early intervention programs leads me to a great deal of
concern about whether we will get the payoff for the amount of
money that it takes to do this with the hard-to-reach families,
where the propensity for later delinquency and criminal behavior is
the highest. I'm not at all convinced that having paraprofessionals
work in a home where there are eight children of umpteen different
fathers is really going to pay off when we have a low base-rate
phenomenon--whether we are going to see that much change.
There are a whole lot of other benefits from early intervention in
addition to reduction of abuse and neglect and dealing with the
consequences of abuse and neglect. But I think until we get our
minds wrapped around what it is we are really trying to do in child
welfare philosophy, we are going to continue to have a lot of
problems in terms of preventing further delinquency and adult
criminal behavior. 

C.S.W.: Well, let me respond to that. First of all, although many of
my cases do have multiple fathers for the children in the family,
that wasn't one of the characteristics of the family that I described
here. There were eight children; you're probably right--they
probably could have been sired by different people. This case
illustrates why I am arguing that it is not enough just to focus on
the child. Successful interventions do not simply focus on a child.
If one reads this literature, if one thinks about child development, it
becomes apparent that the child is very much affected by the
complicated dysfunctions of these parents as well as the
communities. I think that it is a very important point. Also, we
know a lot more about neglect than we did many years ago. There
are many forms of neglect that the child welfare/child protection
system does talk about. In my own work, however, I'm talking
about a simple kind of neglect--it's a very powerful one, though.
I'm talking about early neglect. We have eliminated the educational
neglect that comes at a later point in time, especially if that's the
only evidence of neglect. But these are cases of life-threatening
failure to provide services to children: severe lack of food,
clothing, shelter, and medical attention. I'm not talking about
psychological maltreatment. My cases are from almost 30 years
ago, now. 

I think what is important is to recognize the effects of deprivation
of these fundamental needs in early childhood. There was a
psychologist by the name of Abraham Maslow who talked about a
hierarchy of needs. At the very bottom of that hierarchy is the need
for security, sustenance, the basic things in life. If we don't have
that, if a child doesn't have food, clothing, shelter, or medical
attention, how can that child go to school and be a well-functioning
child? How can such children pay attention or keep their heads up
in school? 

We don't know enough about the linkages and effects because the
field of child maltreatment, in terms of research, is relatively new
and vastly underfunded. But I think that in the case of my research,
which connects neglect of this sort with violent criminal behavior
at a later point, we can't dismiss the connection. 

Marc Mauer, The Sentencing Project, Washington, D.C.: Could
you elaborate on what you spoke about as the potential negative
consequences of increased surveillance? Wouldn't people make the
argument that if more problems are found, the response should be
more services? What is the problem with doing that? 

C.S.W.: This is something that troubles me a lot. Although I really
want to argue that we need to intervene in the lives of abused and
neglected children, what stops me from endorsing that 100 percent
(I don't know if you picked that up in my talk) is that we have
these very troubling race-specific findings. Specifically, we find
that for the African-American children in our sample (compared
with the (control) African-American children--those are kids who
grew up in the same neighborhoods, the only difference (at least on
paper) is that one group was abused and one group doesn't have an
official record of abuse), we find that the effects of childhood
victimization are really enormous, very powerful, and much larger
than the effects for white children in our sample who were
similarly abused and neglected. We have been trying to find an
explanation for this seeming difference in what should be a general
phenomenon. It even seems to affect males and females. So why
should it affect one group? 

One of the things that we think about is relevant to something Janet
Reno talks about--seeing a 3-year-old child or a 6-year-old child on
the street at the wrong point in time. The community needs to
respond to that child--take him or her home or whatever needs to
be done. That is clearly a child in the wrong place. One hypothesis
is that if we have a neglected child, it means that somebody's not
paying attention to that child. That child may be out on the streets
at the wrong time. If one has a child that is out on the streets, that
child has more opportunities to get into trouble and to be picked up
by the cops. And if that child happens to be an African-American,
once that child gets connected to the juvenile justice system, it is
very difficult to get out of the system. The child's attitudes may
change, the child may develop hostilities, all kinds of things. So we
are concerned that somehow, by following these children and their
families, we may not be responding to them and giving them
services in the same way. 

That's why I say if we can find a way to target these children with
full appreciation of the delicate balance between making things
better or worse for them, then targeting would be the most
effective. But I think we need to do a lot more creative work to
figure out how to do that. 

Marsha Renwanz, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: I've
heard you speak several times and am always struck by the
importance of your findings about neglect for the reasons that you
mentioned, number of cases, etc. Given that we're now embarking
on this nationwide experiment with welfare reform in the different
States, do you have plans to look at several States in terms of risks
of early neglect--catastrophic neglect for infants and toddlers--that
you have identified? Will those risks be assessed by you or other
researchers? 

C.S.W.: There is a project that some people are working on in the
District of Columbia to develop a proposal to provide services for
abused and neglected children. The notion is that there will be an
evaluation component to it, and I've been asked to help them with
the evaluation component. I am way behind on all the other things
that I was supposed to be doing when I was preparing this talk, so
I'm trying to figure out how I can be involved. This is the only
program that I know of, and that is in the infancy stage. But I am
sure that there are lots of people in this room who know of
programs in their communities. The real question is whether, as I
said to the gentleman from North Carolina, there is a serious
evaluation that is planned. And I'm even happy to say, "Let's have
2 years of this program without an evaluation"; get your program
going. Maybe just collect some base-rate information. But let us
evaluate these programs. Let us not simply run programs without
learning something from them in a systematic way. 

Rosemary Chalk, Board on Children, Youth, and Families,
National Research Council, Washington, D.C.: I want to pursue the
whole issue of targeted versus universal interventions. David Lloyd
earlier expressed his skepticism about the home visitation
approach, based on the results of the Hawaii effort. I think it's very
important to distinguish the home visitation model used in Hawaii
from that used in the Olds study. There are different types of skills
involved, differences in terms of the timing of the intervention.
Using the Olds model the intervention seems to have the greatest
impact on adolescent first-time mothers, and the impact may have
been moderated by their ability to delay a second pregnancy. So we
may not be talking about eight children in the household, maybe
now about four. We know that neglect occurs in families that have
very high numbers of children--that's often a family characteristic.
The whole issue of spacing pregnancies becomes a key outcome
measure in looking at the effects of some of the home visitation
interventions. 

I haven't heard you say anything about neighborhoods. It may be
that one strategy to use in trying to balance this question of
targeting families versus universal interventions is to look at the
kinds of neighborhoods in which cases of abuse and neglect tend to
concentrate and see whether we can think of some selection
criteria. If we have a neighborhood context, we might want to
target the intervention on any first-time mothers in that
neighborhood, regardless of their family situation or individual
characteristics. We could use geographic criteria and look at the
role of unrelated adults within that neighborhood as support
systems and as support resources who may be helpful in
maintaining the quality, timing, and dosage of the intervention that
would be offered through some type of organizational approach in
its initial stages. 

C.S.W.: I'm glad you brought up the issue. I appreciate the point
about the Hawaii program. One of the programs that I didn't
mention follows a model that uses paraprofessionals versus the
public health nurse model--they are very different. You can
imagine different costs associated with them. One thing I think we
need to do is to examine the extent to which these two models may
have different effectiveness. If one were to engage in a larger scale
intervention, I would like to see both models tried and pitted
against one another. 

I did mention neighborhoods though, and I think that
neighborhoods and communities are terribly important. There is a
difficulty in targeting neighborhoods. I thought about saying,
"Let's take six cities: D.C., Detroit, Gary, etc.," cities with big
crime problems. The difficulty is that, if we target by
neighborhood, we are essentially picking African-American and
minority communities. I have a real problem with the issue of
stigmatization. 

James Comer, for example, in his work and programs on schools,
specifically chose to do his work in the school system. He worked
with the entire school system, so there would not be these issues of
unwillingness to accept the resources that might be offered. I think
taking a geographic area that does have a high crime problem (like
D.C.), taking these kids and starting with the pregnant mother, one
is going to get those very high-risk families. As long as we keep
track, do a needs assessment at the beginning of such an
experiment, and then follow through, we would be able to
determine whether it is only the most high-risk mothers and
families that are benefiting. 

But in the United States 50 or 75 years ago, there were public
health nurses going into communities and doing exactly what
David Olds' program is doing now, especially in rural or isolated
areas. So it is not drawing from the British or drawing from the
French, it is going back to a historical time in the United States. 

Rebecca Burkhalter, Burkhalter Associates, Inc., Washington,
D.C.: My question relates to the fact that many of these children
we are talking about as preschoolers or infants are going to be in
the hands of daycare workers more than anyone else. I was
involved in that for many years. One thing that disturbed me, and I
am wondering if it has changed, was the absence of required skills
and training in daycare workers. We really said, "Well, if she is a
nice person. . . ." It didn't matter if she was qualified in early
childhood development. If these people are going to be dealing
with high-risk infants, they need to know something about
children. Are we going to require more? And are we, as a Nation,
going to feel that they are regular teachers and not just daycare
workers and babysitters? 

C.S.W.: I have no particular expertise to answer the question you're
asking me. I would rather turn it back on the audience. 

Shay Bilchik, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: To
build upon a couple of points that were made about the Hawaii
Healthy Start model versus home visitation through nurses (and
targeting), right now we are in the middle of a project with David
Olds in which we are replicating some of his work in six different
communities, using that model in a targeted way through the Weed
and Seed Office (partnering with Health and Human Services, the
Weed and Seed Office, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention). We are finding 100 first-time mothers in
those communities to show how we could interrupt that pathway
with delayed subsequent births and less welfare dependency. I
know that David Olds is about to come out with a 15-year update
on his original study that hopefully will show even more promising
results. 

C.S.W.: I'm very excited about that. I can't wait to see the results.
But one thing that I think we have to remember, getting back to
Rosemary's comment and others', is that anything that we can do to
help the development of these children from a very early point is
going to have positive benefits. So if we can have fewer
low-birth-weight babies for these high-risk mothers, if we can have
better health care--all of these things that one would think we
would be able to do routinely--in turn are going to lead to healthier
children, children who can perform better academically, and that is
such a critical life point for these children. It is a time when they
become so susceptible to delinquent peer groups and all the other
bad things. Once they are in that risk category, it is simply a
playing-out of problem behaviors. 

Shay Bilchik, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: Cathy,
the most promising part of your talk and of the work in this area is
that it highlights the gap that exists between the ideal that you're
talking about and what we are presently providing to these
families. For policymakers it is critical to know that the gap is
significant and that there needs to be a substantial investment just
to get us to ground zero in doing this kind of work.

Crime, the Media, and Our
Public Discourse

Presentation by
Norval Morris, LL.M., Ph.D.
University of Chicago Law School

May 13, 1997
Washington, D.C.

For 17 years after the end of World War II, I wandered the prisons
of England, Australia, the United States, and a variety of Asian
countries. I then found a degree of residential stability, and for the
past 35 years from an excellent base in Chicago, I have done my
best to understand the phenomena of the treatment and prevention
of crime. Now, stimulated by the invitation to participate in this
series of lectures, I am obliged to give a partial accounting, an
apologia. If it proves a disastrous effort, blame Jeremy Travis; if it
attracts your interest, praise Jeremy Travis. 

My plan is to reflect upon the current public and political dialogue
concerning crime and its treatment, to consider the relationship
between knowledge and practice on that topic, to discuss the extent
to which our problems are unique to this country, and to discuss
why it is that we know so much better than we do.

It is not easy to try to speak truth to power. Those with power grow
confident that truth is an adjunct of power; they do not welcome
the naysayer who propounds a different truth. Power nowadays
resides in Washington, and Washington purports to know what to
do about crime and drugs and sentencing convicted criminals--and
uses its power of the purse to try to impose its ideas on the rest of
the country.

Likewise, the national media purport to know the citizenry's
prejudices about crime and profit by catering to and reinforcing
those prejudices. The naysayer gets rare and brief mention. 

So one who risks playing that naysayer cannot expect a rapturous
reception, rather the contrary. Nevertheless it seems to me clear
that the policies of both political parties about crime and drugs and
sentencing are profoundly misguided and that it is my miserable
duty to say so. Safer societies are not built on capital punishment,
mandatory minimum punishments, three-strikes rules, and fierce
drug policies that every informed observer knows to be misguided.

Of course, I do not deceive myself that my perspective on truth is
truth, but it is certainly not misled by the temptations of power.

I think it was a French theologian of the Middle Ages who said,
"The most corrupting lie is the truth poorly told."

That text, in my view, precisely captures the mischief of the public
and political dialogue about crime and its treatment. The media and
politicians alike select and sensationalize dramatic and grossly
unrepresentative crimes and criminals so that emotion dominates
reason and social injury overcomes social protection.

The current political and public dialogue about crime is utterly
bereft of sense. On one side are the mindless punishers, confidently
planning to reduce crime by relying on the supposed efficacy of
condign punishment of convicted criminals by larger and larger
doses of imprisonment and increasing use of the death penalty.
"Nothing else works" is their war cry. On the other side are those
who suggest that only a program designed to eliminate social
inequality can be effective in dealing with crime. But for the most
part a malaise compounded of fear, apathy, and inertia prevails,
with being "tough on crime" functioning as a condition precedent
to holding elective office.

If ingenuous utopianism is unhelpful, so also is the posture of
cynical dystopianism, which knows that nothing works, nothing
can change. Not all crime is a natural phenomenon. Crime does not
consist of inevitable episodes which can in no way be foreseen or
guarded against. The histories of this country's prohibition of
alcohol and inept treatment of drugs and guns reveal that the
development of violent crime on a scale far higher than in other
comparably developed countries can be stimulated by legislative
action.

So, let me turn to the relationship between practice and knowledge
in this field.

I served on the Police Board of the City of Chicago for 8 years.
Each month we held a public meeting. At every such meeting the
superintendent (whoever he was for the time being--they came and
went with the political winds) would announce the crime statistics,
district by district, comparing the last month's figures for the
current year with the figures for the same month in the previous
year. If crime had decreased in a district, he would compliment the
district commander and his troops on their efficiency, diligence,
and great value to the community. If crime had increased in a
district, he would castigate the community for their lack of moral
and ethical values and note their need for even more intensive
policing. He never lost; he was always right.

In recent years, legislators advocating increased severity of
punishment bewail the alleged sentimentality of the judiciary and
impose mandatory-sentencing laws, truth-in-sentencing laws, and
three-strikes laws to constrain judicial discretion. Thus excessive
severity flourishes. If crime decreases, the legislators congratulate
themselves loudly on their contribution to social welfare. If crime
increases, they reflect on how much worse things would be had
they not acted and congratulate themselves loudly on their
contribution to social welfare. Like the several superintendents of
Chicago's police, they never lose--they are always right. Their
nostrums are working, and the dosage must therefore be increased;
or their nostrums are not working sufficiently, and the dosage must
therefore be increased.

Recently, the prison population has quadrupled by reason of the
current attitude to punishment and the length of time prisoners are
required to serve. If thereafter crime decreases, prison has
"worked" (as some say in the United States and now in the United
Kingdom). If crime thereafter increases, it is clear that the dosage
must be increased and more and longer imprisonment imposed.
Again, whatever happens, it has succeeded; it is the appropriate
and necessary remedy. To think otherwise is to be a maudlin
sentimentalist, more concerned with the wretched prisoner than the
injured victim.

Where does the discipline of criminology stand in relation to these
police, court, and corrections scenarios that you all recognize? The
answer, I regret, is "on the sidelines." Does this mean that
knowledge is irrelevant to the field of our interests? I think not.
When I came to Chicago 35 years ago, there was an appreciable
gap between knowledge and practice in crime control. In the
intervening three and one-half decades, that gap has grown wider,
not thinner, so that it is now a chasm, a gulf, not merely a gap.
Relevant knowledge has been acquired; practice has degenerated.

What do we know about crime control? Let me make a comparison
with the history of medicine (which is not to suggest that crime is a
disease). I choose the year 1914. In that year a great deal was
known about the prevention of disease: the contributions of pure
water, sewage control, general sanitation, the elimination of rodent
infestation, vaccination, anesthetics, and similar disease-prevention
and pain-reduction methods were known and applied. What was
very much less well known was what to do about a disease or an
injury when one had occurred. 

Now consider crime control in 1997. We know a lot about the soil
in the home and in the community in which crime and delinquency
flourish. I could take any one of you to any city, fly you over it,
drive you through it, have you talk to no one, and then ask you to
mark on a map those areas with high crime and delinquency rates.
You would do it about as well as the chief of police of that city.
We cannot state the etiology of crime and delinquency in a general,
all-embracing theory, but we certainly are well aware of the
environment, associations, and family conditions in which crime
and delinquency flourish. But, given a criminal or delinquent
event, our knowledge of what to do about it remains scant.

Has medicine changed in the intervening 83 years? It certainly has.
Knowledge of interventions for the relief of suffering from disease
and injury has increased dramatically and, subject to the continuing
constraints of inequitable social systems, is applied with skill and
efficacy. 

There are many reasons for this phoenixlike mutation of the barber
into the surgeon, but not the least was the gradual emergence of a
treatment classification system related to reasonably precisely
defined diseases and injuries. This we lack in criminology. A
similar lack in medicine would mean, I believe, that more than one
of every three of us in this room would not be here--we would be
dead.

Lacking serious evaluations of our treatment interventions and
lacking clinical trials, we rely on unreliable, retrospective,
statistical matching techniques and evaluations by partisans
(conscious or self-deceiving) of the outcome of the study. And
recently we have been collecting these unreliable studies into what
we pretentiously call megastudies or meta-analyses, multiplying
error into confusion. This is by no means ideologically one-sided:
meta-analyses can establish that "deterrence works" as well as that
"treatment works"; the trick lies in the spurious belief that adding
together a steady flow of faulty studies obliterates their defects.
And, in any event, all these outcomes are related to definitions of
the group to be treated and by a diversity of treatments, both so
wide as to defy useful outcome analysis.[1]

Two of my ideas have been put to the test of independent clinical
trials. A plan for a prison for repetitively violent offenders was
tested in the Federal correctional center at Butner, North Carolina;
a plan for structured plea bargaining, involving the victims of the
crime should they wish to be involved, was tested in courts in Dade
County, Florida. I had nothing to do with the evaluative processes
for either of these experiments. Neither produced the results I had
both hoped for and predicted. The clinical trial in the prison did not
reduce recidivism. Only one-third of victims attended the plea
bargaining sessions. Were they failures? Not at all. A great deal
was learned from the Butner prison about the role and organization
of prison programs; a great deal about speedy trial and the needs of
crime victims was learned from the Dade County courts. Both were
difficult to run, indeed, in a sense the prison trial broke down early
because the distinctive features of the Butner prison were copied
by other Federal and State prisons (and a few prisons in other
countries) before the clinical trial could be run, so that the
researchers lost the control group rather than the treatment group.
But both contributed to knowledge far more than any philosophic
study by an academic criminologist.

It will take decades to develop even the outline of a prevention and
treatment classification system in criminology equivalent to those
in medicine; nevertheless it is the only rational path to the effective
prevention and treatment of crime.

But in the meantime we already have enough knowledge to do a lot
better than we now do. Setting the future aside, what of the
present? It seems to me that bad crime control policies have driven
out better crime control policies.

Over the half-century of my observations, the police, the courts,
the correctional authorities, and the scholars of criminology have
all greatly improved the quality of their work.

The police have become better trained, less venal, less brutal, less
corrupt, and much more efficient. They have recognized the
limitations of their role and their need for collaboration with the
various communities they serve. And slowly they are coming to
understand the need for the closest collaboration with private
police, who, in most industrial countries, outnumber them and are
the main providers of police services for other persons than the
poor.

The courts handling criminal matters have been increasingly
burdened by swelling caseloads, but they have developed better
case management systems and there is some improvement (though
far from enough) in the appointment of their support personnel. 

The staff of the prisons and probation services are far better
trained, far better led, and clearly more efficient and decent than
their predecessors whom I met 50 years ago.

And finally, in this catalog of virtues, scholarship and research
concerning the criminal justice system and the statistical data on
which policy decisions should be based have improved
dramatically. We now know a great deal more than we did 50 years
ago, not only about the soil in which crime flourishes but also
about what to do about it.

Why, then, given all these advances over the same time period,
have problems of crime in our society grown worse rather than
better? 

Starkly opposing the encouraging positive developments in the
work of the police, the courts, and corrections that I have listed,
one must acknowledge two powerful negative forces. Legislators,
Federal and State, of both parties, have politicized their
interventions on crime control in ways which are almost uniformly
counterproductive and are widely known to be counterproductive.
Cheaply, they buy votes by stimulating the fears of many and
sacrificing the freedom of others. This process continues today,
urged on by distressingly superficial proposals by the leaders of
both political parties. Every informed student of drug policy,
including such tough-on-crime observers as James Q. Wilson and
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, acknowledges that mass arrests of retail
drug sellers, source-country eradication programs, and interdiction
efforts are ineffective. Wilson advanced this opinion in the late
1980s. Yet, inexorably, year by year the budgets for these
initiatives increase, and politicians claim to believe that they
work.[2] 

The politicians, Federal and State, have been abetted in this
mischief by the greatly increased attention that the media (print
and electronic) pay to sensational aspects of criminality. For them
it is cheap and popular, easy to acquire and display, and by
statistical reality there is always plenty to acquire and display.

Hence, Gresham's Law applies: False political promises and the
sensationalism of the media drive out rational policy. As Dean
Pound of the Harvard Law School suggested, if the 18th century
was the century of the Enlightenment, and the 19th century the
century of Empiricism, our century has been the century of
Emotionalism.

For many years I have associated with prison administrators, senior
police, and judges and lawyers involved in the criminal courts. A
leading impression that I am left with is that the public perception
of crime and its treatment is far removed from the realities with
which the wardens and judges and police daily deal. Over the last
20 years, the correctional people--prison and probation
administrators--as well as a substantial number of judicial and
police leaders have been radicalized. They believe, as I do, that
many of our crime control policies do more harm than good. But
talking with them with a drink in hand is an experience far
removed from listening to them speak in public. In public they
avoid criticism; in private there is little else. Radicals they have
become, yes, but publicly silent radicals.

And this is true of many elected officials. In private, they will
admit that much of our crime control policy is cruel, wasteful, and
ineffective. In public, they say otherwise. For example, consider
the 100:1 difference there was between sanctions for crack and for
cocaine in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. It is doubtful that any
member of Congress believed this extreme distinction made sense
and yet virtually none was prepared to vote to support the U.S.
Sentencing Commission's proposed elimination of the differential.

With few exceptions, the functionaries of the media seem to me to
parrot what is said in public and fail to bring to bear on crime and
punishment the cynicism on which they pride themselves.

"Crime does not pay," I am told. The hell it doesn't! It clearly pays
the newspaper publishers and the TV giants. It pays many of us in
this room, even helping my family somehow to survive on an
academic salary. But it pays the publishers extraordinarily well--
and increasingly they rely on it to fill the airwaves and newspapers. 

Crime news is cheap to acquire. For local TV, one camera and one
camera crew led by an inexperienced or about-to-retire reporter
suffice to gather the police handout and have the arrested suspect
led disconsolate across the path of the camera's eye. 

The stereotypes of the criminal and the prisoner in the public's
mind thus become projections of the exceptional and
unrepresentative criminals they have seen or read of in the daily
flood of television and newspaper sensationalism.

Politicians properly caring for their election or reelection, who also
wish responsibly to advance social welfare, require the existence of
a reasonably well-informed public. Here is where the corrupting
half-truths of the media produce the dominating sensationalism of
crime news and the false promises of quick and emotionally
satisfying punitive responses to criminals. "The most corrupting lie
is the truth poorly told." Populism is pressed on the politicians in
this way, and of all the great cities of the United States, the District
of Columbia--followed closely by Los Angeles--seems to have the
disease in its most virulent form.

Let me give some numerical details to this flood of sensationalism
about crime, this corruption of truth poorly told.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs in this city keeps a record
of the number of crime stories on the ABC, CBS, and NBC
evening national television news broadcasts. From 1991 to 1995
inclusive, the frequency of crime stories increased by a factor of
four--four times as many in 1995 as in 1991! For the years 1993
through 1995, crime was at the top of the list of newsstories,
outranking the war in Bosnia, health issues, the economy, and the
Federal budget. In 1996, however, crime fell to second place, being
bumped out of first place by the Presidential campaign. Please note
that over these 6 years, this grossly increasing preoccupation with
crime stories came at a time of steadily declining crime and
violence.[3]

This skewed focus on the sensational aspects of crime is, of course,
even greater in local, as distinct from national, television sound
bites.

Aided and abetted by this flood of misinformation, the politicians--
Federal, State, and local--foster the view that the public demands
our present "get tough" policies. This may be true, but it is difficult
to be sure, because opinion polls on that question give a variety of
answers depending mainly on the form of the questions asked. A
careful study by Professor Katherine Beckett soon to be published
by Oxford University Press establishes that, when one analyzes
political statements and public opinion polls on given issues in this
arena, it becomes clear that the political statements antedate the
opinion polls. They interact, of course, but there is no "chicken and
egg" argument here. It is the political statements and the way that
they are reported that generate changes in the opinion polls, not the
reverse.[4]

Heated argument surrounds the question of whether this
outpouring of media violence increases the actualities of violence,
but there is no argument whatsoever that it shapes the public
stereotype of the criminal and thus leads to unintelligent public
policies concerning the prevention and treatment of crime and
violence.

One quality deeply influencing the political and public dialogue in
this country is the belief that our problems of crime and
punishment are profoundly different from those of other Western
industrialized countries. We have far worse problems, I am
constantly told, because our vast, racially and ethnically
heterogeneous population, dedicated to the protection of individual
freedom, generates crime on a scale far different from those other
countries. This thought is regularly offered to justify the unusual
severity of our system of punishment. 

Until recently there was a pervasive myth that crime in the United
States far exceeded that in other Western industrialized countries,
that it was annually and inexorably increasing, and that its cruel
advance could be met only by unrelenting severity. In the last few
years it has come to be appreciated that since 1990 we have
witnessed a decline in the incidence of most categories of crime,
including homicide, but the public still holds to the view that crime
in these Excited States is far worse than in Western Europe,
Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. This belief is wildly wrong,
but it is held as an article of faith by most people.

We have hard data on this--data gathered by identical means in
those otherwise similar countries by projects in which the
Department of Justice played a leading role. The blunt conclusions
are these: Crime rates in the United States are slightly on the high
side compared with the average of those countries, but in only two
categories of crime are we clearly at the top--homicide and gun
robbery. We do not lead in property crime, theft, robbery, rape, or
burglary. We certainly do lead in homicide and gun robbery--far
ahead of the field.[5] 

As my excellent ex-colleagues Franklin Zimring and Gordon
Hawkins demonstrate in a book soon to be published, crime is not
the problem. Violence is the problem. To confuse the two, as we
do in our sentencing policies and community protection policies, is
a sin against the light, generating inefficiency and producing
cruelty.[6]

This is an essential insight, highly relevant to shaping our crime
prevention and control measures, but it is only the beginning of
what serious, comparative criminological research could supply.
Fifty years ago, from international comparisons of "two and three
strikes and you're out" laws in continental Europe and England in
the last quarter of the 19th century, and in England and this country
in the first half of the 20th century, I learned of the futility and the
inexorable failure of such legislation. Now we seem doomed to
learn that lesson again.[7]

We may also lead other countries in this popular "which is the
worst" competition in the ingestion of prohibited drugs. It is
impossible, however, to make reliable international comparisons
on that topic, because no other country relies to the extent that we
do on the criminal law to reduce the ingestion of drugs. They all
prohibit the usual drugs--no Western country legalizes those drugs,
as some people still seem to believe (and that certainly includes
England and the Netherlands), but none either makes the criminal
conviction the front line of defense. All prefer policies of harm
reduction in which criminal proscriptions play their proper, lesser,
and supportive role.

By international standards, therefore, our crime problem is not
unique; it is quite ordinary and is likely to stay quite ordinary.
What is unique is our problem of violence and our extraordinary
use of imprisonment as a punishment, our imprisonment rate being
over six times that of any of those other countries. 

Until it is better understood that our problem is not crime per se,
but criminal violence, there is little chance of our making headway
toward rational prevention and punishment of crime and violence.
It sounds like a small point, but it is of central importance.

The human animal, particularly the young adult human male, has a
propensity to violence in all cultures and all ethnicities, yet
produces very different rates of violence. Break these diversities
down by categories of crime, age, culture, instrumentalities of
violence, and other relevant distinctions and relate the
disaggregated differences to the role of the criminal justice system,
and knowledge of more effective primary and secondary
prevention efforts will inevitably advance.

The neglect of these comparative opportunities between countries
and between States within our own vast country encourages
emotional rather than rational responses to the genesis and
commission of delinquency and crime. Research on these issues is
urgently needed and requires Federal support. It should take up the
slack of our alleged demonstration projects, which are generally
retrospectively analyzed by their advocates or those close to them
and are widely understood to belong to the skills of Madison
Avenue rather than to social science.

Rudyard Kipling, too often seen as a xenophobe, put the case for
comparative criminological research with poetic power: "And what
should they know of England, who only England know?" Recently,
that astonishing Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, put the same
thought even more sharply: "Get to know other worlds, if only for
comparison."

Comparative criminological research should be pursued, not to
denigrate or emulate foreign practice; rather it should be pursued to
advance knowledge of what we do and what we might do better.
Volume 21 of Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, entitled
"Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration," edited by Michael Tonry,
was subsidized by the U.S. National Institute of Justice and the
governments of five European countries. The book brings together
data on race, ethnicity, and crime in nine countries. It is a model of
what comparative research would produce. It is an opening wedge
to a core of policy-related knowledge.

The public and political discourse to the contrary notwithstanding,
until the United States develops responsible policies about drugs
and guns, there is little likelihood of bringing even relative peace
to our destroyed inner-city areas. I do not mean that drugs and guns
describe the entirety of the problem. They do not, but sensible drug
and gun policies are conditions precedent to change. 

The strident peddlers of cheap and swift solutions to the problems
of crime in this country have become too powerful by far.
Rethinking our policies on guns and drugs is an urgent necessity. I
am told that even rational policies now would take decades to have
significant effect. That may well be so, but the preachments have
been made and ignored for many decades already. 

Let me add a third item to this preachment--we must also join the
rest of the allegedly civilized world in our punishment of homicide.
Capital punishment has no place. This would have no effect on
homicide rates, but it is an important symbol of rationality.

Let me make the case for that also by a comparison with another
country, taken from my storehouse of anecdotage. In October
1958, I was invited by the Governor-General of Ceylon (now Sri
Lanka) to be Chairman of the Commission of Inquiry on Capital
Punishment. Then and now, Ceylon did indeed suffer a high
homicide rate, a rate which tested the beliefs of an abolitionist. But
as we took testimony and visited the courts, prisons, and villages
of that lovely country and came to learn of its culture, economy,
and politics, the reasons for this rate became apparent and seemed
independent of the different likely punishments for killing. 

It became clear that if one action would diminish the rate of these
killings it would have been a precise survey of landholdings.
Lacking this, with a testamentary law that divided land equally
among the male survivors of the deceased owner, brother fought
brother over who owned that coconut tree on or near the border of
their lands. These conflicts were fueled by the liquor laws, which
put high government taxes on alcohol, but did nothing to inhibit
the production of "palmyra toddy," a vicious, homegrown, fiery
beverage. These conflicts found their instrumentalities of violence
in the curved coconut knife. And the whole mixture was fertilized
by racial and religious intolerance between Tamils and Singhalese.
Compared with these pressures, the death penalty was a trivial
factor in the brew that sustained homicide rates in Ceylon.[8]

Let me leave Ceylon and suggest that similar analysis of homicide
in all countries with abnormally high homicide rates is the clue to
an understanding of those rates. In some societies the homicide
numbers inflate--in Ceylon for the reasons suggested above, in
Colombia for reasons of political turmoil and cocaine production
and distribution, in the United States . . . well, why? Could it be the
obvious analogs of the coconut knife, palmyra toddy, and racial
intolerance? 

The unconscionable search for votes in legislatures, Federal and
State, by increasingly expansive and unenforced laws concerning
capital punishment will have no measurable effect on homicide
rates and none on other rates of violence and crime. With well over
3,000 inmates now on death rows and about 60 executions a year,
the present laws relevant to capital punishment are fundamentally
unsatisfactory to retentionists and abolitionists alike. Major and, in
my view, unwise, Federal initiatives may in time somewhat reduce
the delay between the pronouncement of the death sentence and the
execution, but it remains an exercise in hubris to think that we can
distinguish the more wicked homicides from the less wicked
homicides and confine executions to the former. I am told that the
Archangel Gabriel can perform this feat. I know I cannot. I know
the Supreme Court of the United States cannot. While we live in a
constitutional democracy, there is only one way out.

Back to Ceylon to conclude. An eighth-century Buddhist king
solved the capital punishment problem. To increase the symbolic
and deterrent effects of execution, he proclaimed that the heads of
executed murderers would be set on pikestaffs high on the castle
walls for all to see. Suitably gruesome heads were then removed
from citizens who had recently died of natural causes. Bloody and
contorted, they were indistinguishable from the real things. They
were then exposed high on the castle walls to demonstrate the grim
fate of murderers. I can think of no similar ruse available to us.
Again, on this topic we had better join the rest of the civilized
world.

Mine is a traditional preachment. Enact sensible and enforceable
laws about guns, drugs, and the punishment of crime. Learn from
such responsible studies as have been done and from the
experience of other countries. It has taken many decades of
emotional and mindless wars on crime and drugs for us to reach
our present absurd situation. It will take decades to get back on
track, but sometime we must take the first steps, and for drugs,
guns, and sentencing, the first steps are obvious and long, long,
long overdue.

You say I have devoted this talk to demolition rather than to
construction, to carping criticism rather than to creative
suggestions. You are right, but I make no apology. Our
legislatures, Federal and State, have forgotten a primary
obligation--primum non nocere in the first place, don't make the
disease worse. 

I conclude with a sentence of my mentor and friend, Glanville
Williams (who died last month), one of the 20th century's two
greatest English-speaking analysts of the criminal law: "Criminal
law is an instrument to be used to further the well-being of society
and not to diminish that well-being." 

Do we have the integrity, the political will, indeed the courage, to
try so to use it ?

Question-and-Answer Session

Patrick Murphy, U.S. Conference of Mayors, Washington D.C.:
What has happened in gun control in the past 10 years or so, with
the police becoming vocal, has had impact. Recently, police chiefs
have been speaking out more on some of the social issues. Your
superintendent in Chicago, someone I regard very highly, is very
outspoken today on the issue of children. He's become a
spokesman for a new organization, Stop Crime--Invest in Kids. A
number of chiefs across the country have associated with that, and
a smaller number of chiefs with drug reform. I wonder if it is your
view that the opinions and public positions of the police have an
impact on legislators and the public. 

N.M.: Matt Rodriguez certainly pursues the possibility of
minimizing the number of ill-educated, poor children who have
handguns and automatic weaponry. That would seem obvious and
important and good. It is of course perfectly true that there has
been a great change, particularly in the big-city police forces. I met
with the IACP [International Association of Chiefs of Police]
yesterday, and it is not as enthusiastic nationwide but it is
encouraging. I think the point you are making is that I overstated
the impression about not speaking out. 

Well, perhaps. I talk to lots of people about why they are so silent.
It's true that some of the police chiefs have become less silent and
that's very encouraging and very important. I wish the press took
greater notice of it. Their reply--many of them--is, "Well, it's easy
for you!" They are quite right. It takes no great courage to say what
you think when you have that wonderful thing called tenure. It's a
little harder when your job and your family's health and well-being
turns on the whim of a political superior. But it is encouraging, and
I am encouraged by those changes. I think we should all try to
foster them. In relation to guns, there is an increasing line of good
ideas. Jeremy Travis and James Wilson mentioned that in the first
lecture here, and Jeremy is supporting them. 

Ted Gest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C.: I wanted
to ask you to elaborate a bit on the public opinion polls, if you
could. My reading of them--and I read them pretty carefully too--is
that . . . I think you said that it depends on what question you ask.
When you ask the public if they want higher sentences, they say,
"Yes." When you also ask them (as we at U.S. News and others
have), "Do you favor preventive or rehabilitative approaches, even
in comparison to prison sentences?" They also say they do. So I
wonder if the public opinion is really as one-sided as you make it
out to be and if the problem is that the politicians just don't act on
certain parts of it. 

N.M.: Well, you are, of course, right. I had in mind the central
importance of the form of the question, but I don't think you would
deny that it is seen (at least politically) as a guaranty either of
resignation or non-reelection to be other than "tough on crime."
Part of that, I think, has been fostered by pervasive opinion polls in
one form. What I thought was interesting (and I think you will find
interesting) is Katherine Beckett's book, in which she establishes
that the public statements by politicians seem to antedate what the
opinion polls produce rather than the other way around. Obviously,
I'm not suggesting we not have a First Amendment; it's the great
strength of the country. But I am wishing that there could be an
increase in the number of good reporters (and there are some very
good reporters). But it isn't the stuff that most people read. Most
people read the "tough on crime" stuff, I think. And most
politicians believe that too. I have a storehouse of anecdotage on
that, most of it not capable of being reported.

Vince Schiraldi, Justice Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.: You
talked a little about the need for research, but what struck me was
that you talked about the widening gap between research and
practice. I just wonder if our numbers are not good--if we perhaps
don't already have quite an amount of research at this time, and
what we actually need to do is package and market it better, the
way the folks who want to lock more people up do. I wonder if you
could say a little about that. A lot of good stuff exists in books of
yours and other people's. Most of the public doesn't get a chance to
see it.

N.M.: Let me try and state what I believe more precisely. I think
we have a lot of knowledge concerning the prevention of crime and
delinquency--that is to say, primary prevention. We have a lot of
knowledge relevant to that, and I think we should apply much of it.
But the quite different step of trying to develop a relationship
between treatment interventions and crime/criminal situations has
not yet been taken. That will be very important for the future. So,
we can do better with the storehouse of knowledge we have, but to
do really well, we have to begin clinical trials--and there are very
few. 

In my life, I have been associated with two clinical trials: one in
relation to the Federal prison at Butner, North Carolina, in which a
stratified random sample of inmates sent to a new prison program
was compared with a sample of inmates in a traditional program.
Another was in Dade County in five courts, an experiment
concerning plea bargaining. The prison program broke down as a
clinical trial because other prisons appropriately (and early)
emulated one of the things being tested, which was voluntary
programming. It simply works better than compulsory
programming. Second, the then-Federal parole board started giving
prisoners predicted release dates subject to good behavior. The two
things we were mainly testing at Butner prison were fixed release
dates and voluntary programming. So we lost the control group and
the clinical trial broke down. But a great deal was learned about
running prisons. And much of it has been applied. 

In Dade County, plea bargaining is totally within the control of a
prosecutor. If the prosecutor's office decides it will not do plea
bargaining, plea bargaining won't happen. They can stop it; you
don't need legislation. So for the clinical trial we persuaded five
courts in Dade County to notify the alleged criminal and counsel
that there would be a pretrial meeting under the administration of a
judge (not the trial judge, but a judge), at which the prosecutor
would be present and to which the victim would be invited. At that
one meeting, totally off the record, there would be a decision made
of how to settle this question--by confession, plea, or
compensation--and everyone would be heard, including the victim.
We ran it for quite a protracted period; the outcome was entirely
negative, judged by severity of punishment and disposition of
cases. They came out much the same in the treatment group as they
did in the control group. Only about a third of the victims came. I,
at first, thought that was bad, but if a third of victims want to come
and do come, and are treated respectably, that's fine. The thing that
most changed was speedy trial. If there couldn't be a settlement at
that one meeting, the case was set down for trial. So it was a leap
forward in knowledge. But we ignore this stuff.

So I do believe that the crime/criminal relationship makes up a
treatment entity. Available treatment resources, community-based
or institution-based, make up other entities. We haven't done the
matching.

Samuel Dash, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington,
D.C.: I think the last couple of questions and particularly your
responses touch on this but maybe not sufficiently. You've been
involved enough in empirical research, and there has been so much
empirical research, particularly since the late 1960s and 1970s, on
how to understand crime and how to intervene in crime. But very
little of it called for more than the study and the publishing of the
results. I remember when Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter
went to Cleveland to study the Cleveland crime survey. They wrote
a wonderful book, but in the introduction, Frankfurter said, "Prior
to our coming here, there wasn't an understanding of why the
people in Cleveland couldn't control their crime. Now that we have
been here and given them the answers, there is no excuse." 

Haven't you thought (and perhaps you touched on it) that every
research program, particularly those funded by the National
Institute of Justice or any other major foundation, ought to have as
part of its methodology a requirement that there be an
implementation and evaluation? The books sitting on the shelves
gathering dust don't really communicate to the people as
Frankfurter naively believed.

Now, I agree--you are quite right--that politics, emotionalism, is
the mortal enemy of research facts. But if it can be shown that this
is not only information in a book, but there is an implementation of
it--via a demonstration program and evaluation--and that this is
highly publicized, would this at least be a better way to go? 

N.M.: Sam, there are always such countervailing pressures. The
preoccupation with reducing the incidence of repetition of crime,
which I take it is what people talk about so much in evaluations, is
really quite difficult to do. There are so many other pressures
about. You don't make that same complaint about medical
research. Every serious medical research has some incremental
better understanding about a problem. And mostly, implicitly or
explicitly, about how we can move forward. There aren't "sort-of
solutions" to this "repeating." It seems strange, but you didn't make
man. People have all sorts of complex processes, and crime is
going to continue at varying rates (not very serious rates, actually,
except for violence) no matter what we do. What we have to start
doing is less harm. It is a much harder case to make--much harder! 

I go back to my analogy of the doctor in 1914. Since 1914, first of
all, there was the cataclysm of the 1914-1918 War, with massive
injuries and an extraordinary range of acquisition of knowledge
about what to do and what not to do about them. But second, there
was the beginning of clinical trials. Each month, articles from the
New England Journal of Medicine are featured in the press. . . . I
don't see anything like that in our field. I'm not making the "crime
is a disease" point; I'm simply talking about the fact that if we want
to do better in this field, we have a lot of knowledge (Frankfurter
was right presumably) about how to stop doing harm, and we are
gradually acquiring knowledge about how to do better. But no, I
don't think people who try to find out facts of issues understand the
politics or understand the other pressures that inhibit change.

D. Alan Henry, Pretrial Services Resource Center, Washington,
D.C.: It seems that the most current and popular way for
legislatures to address the problem of violence is evidenced by the
42 States that have, within the past 3 years, expanded their laws to
target children and to charge them as adults. We see currently that
the House has just passed a bill that would expand significantly the
age and the charge groups, which traditionally had been in the
juvenile system, that would be brought into the adult system. I
wonder if you could comment on that, telescope ahead, and tell us
how you see the adult courts and adult correctional systems dealing
with this and whether you think it will address violence. 

N.M.: Well, it seems to me a perfect paradigm, an example of
politics and emotionalism dominating good sense. The movement
you speak of seems to be based in part on the belief that the
juvenile courts of the United States are sentimentally lenient. I go
periodically to visit the first children's court in this country, the
Children's Court in Cook County. It is overcrowded. Its leading
characteristic is the continuance. It doesn't have anything like the
sort of sentimental care for the child that it is supposed to have.
Good people are working in it. It's flooded. So all of this about
controlling violence in children by procedures of their trial is an
irrelevancy. Trying juveniles as adults is not even likely to result in
more severe punishment. It is a little more severe in the duration of
detention prior to trial. Really, I think it is a perfect example of
spinning wheels to no effect whatsoever, except perhaps some
emotional satisfaction for some people. 

Timothy J. Flanagan, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville,
Texas: Professor Morris, could you comment a little bit on who's
leading and who's following in the public debate about life within
prisons? It seems to me the polls show that the American public
still has very strong expectations about the provision of
rehabilitative services within prisons, but the politicians are only
hearing the message of "fewer services" and "tougher prisons."

N.M.: Well, I think that this is one of the problems that has
radicalized the prison administrators. I visit quite a few State
prisons, and the general view that I get from senior people is that
they think that roughly one-quarter of the people in their
institutions--these are the crowded inner-city ones--shouldn't be
there. I think they are probably right. To run the institutions,
activities for prisoners are essential as an administrative matter.
And there is no doubt that some prisoners are assisted as a result of
rehabilitation programs, in terms of cost-benefit. It's not a huge
amount of funds to expend, and the programs do help some
prisoners. The thought that prisons are thus made into country
clubs can only be held by people whose knowledge stops at the
front gate. 

You have all been kind enough to throw up questions that illustrate
my point: in this field, emotion dominates reason.

Notes

Lecture 1: What, If Anything, Can the Federal Government Do
About Crime?

1. Levi, Edward H., An Introduction to Legal Reasoning, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1949.

2. Murray, Charles A., and Louis A. Cox, Jr., Beyond 

Probation, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979.

3. Empey, Lamar T., and Steven G. Lubeck, The Silverlake
Experiment, Chicago: Aldine, 1971.`

4. Empey, Lamar T., and Maynard L. Erickson, The Provo
Experiment, Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1972.

5. Reinharz, Peter, "Why Teen Thugs Get Away with Murder,"
City Journal, Autumn 1996, 43-49.

6. Greenwood, Peter W., "Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice," in
Crime, ed. James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersilia, San Francisco:
ICS Press, 1995:104.

Lecture 2: Why Can't We Make Prohibition Work Better? Some
Consequences of Ignoring the Unattractive

1. See, e.g., Skolnick, J., "Rethinking the Drug Problem," Daedalus
Vol. 121, No. 3, (1992):133-60.

2. The most articulate statement of this position is contained in
William Bennett's introduction to the first National Drug Control
Strategy (Office of National Drug Control Policy, National Drug
Control Strategy, Washington, D.C.: Executive Office of the
President, Office of National Drug Control Policy, 1989).

3. Federal figures are published annually in Office of National
Drug Control Policy, National Drug Control Strategy, Washington,
D.C.: Executive Office of the President, Office of National Drug
Control Policy. State and local figures are available only for 1990
and 1991; see Office of National Drug Control Policy, State and
Local Spending on Drug Control Activities, Washington, D.C.:
Executive Office of the President, Office of National Drug Control
Policy, 1993.

4. Reuter, Peter, Robert MacCoun, and P. Murphy, Money from
Crime, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1990.

5. The best data come from an annual survey of high school seniors
conducted by the Institute of Social Research at the University of
Michigan (Johnston, L., P. O'Malley, and J. Bachman, Monitoring
the Future, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan).

6. Annual data on drug use in the general population are provided
by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, Rockville, MD:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

7. On this and other enforcement effects, see Kleiman, M., Against
Excess: Drug Policy for Results, New York: Basic Books, 1992,
Chapter 6.

8. Tonry, Michael, Malign Neglect, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994.

9. The most compelling description of this world is provided in
Bourgois, P., In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

10. Saner, H., R. MacCoun, and P. Reuter, "On the Ubiquity of
Drug Selling," Journal of Quantitative Criminology Vol. II, No. 4
(1995):337-62.

11. Edsall, Thomas, with Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact
of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics, New York: W.W.
Norton, 1991, 237.

12. This comment was reported by two participants at the meeting
of the National Advisory Council of the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Administration in January 1997.

13. On these matters generally, see Rudovsky, D., "The Impact of
the War on Drugs on Procedural Fairness and Racial Equality,"
University of Chicago Legal Forum (1994):237-74.

14. Rosenthal, A., "Job for a President," The New York Times,
October 22, 1996, A27.

15. On recent prostitution enforcement policies, showing that most
arrestees receive very modest penalties, see Pearl, Julie, "The
Highest Paying Customers: America's Cities and the Costs of
Prostitution Control," Hastings Law Journal 38 (1987):769-90.

16. On the problems of comparison, see MacCoun, R.,A. Saiger, J.
Kahan, and P. Reuter, "Drug Policies and Problems: The Promise
and Pitfalls of Cross-National Comparisons," in Psychoactive
Drugs and Harm Reduction: From Faith to Science, ed. N. Heather,
A. Wodak, E. Nadelmann and P. Ohare, London: Whurr
Publishers, 1993:103-17.

17. Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, AIDS and Drug
Misuse, London: HMSO, 1987.

18. Silverman, L., and N. Spruill, "Urban Crime and the Price of
Heroin," Journal of Urban Economics 4 (1977):80-103.

19. For example, Saffer, Henry, and Frank Chaloupka, "The
Demand for Illicit Drugs," Working Paper No. 5238, Cambridge,
MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1995.

20. For a review, see Anglin, M.D., and Y.-I. Hser, "Treatment of
Drug Abuse," in Drugs and Crime, ed. Michael Tonry and James
Q. Wilson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

21. Wilson, James Q., "What, If Anything, Can the Federal
Government Do to Reduce Crime?" Perspectives on Crime and
Justice Lecture Series, U.S. Department of Justice, National
Institute of Justice, 1996.

22. The most important of these studies, which compares the costs
of reducing cocaine consumption by 1 percent though treatment or
enforcement, is Rydell, C.P., and S. Everingham, Controlling
Cocaine, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1994.

Lecture 4: Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for Breaking
the Cycle of Violence

1. Cooper, M., "Girl's Slaying Spurs Inquiry on City Lapses," The
New York Times, February 16, 1997, B1.

2. Terry, D., "When the Family Heirloom Is Homicide,"

The New York Times, December 12, 1994, B7. 

3. Details of the design and description of the subjects are available
in Widom, C.S., "Child Abuse, Neglect, and Adult Behavior:
Design and Findings on Criminality, Violence and Child Abuse,"
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 59 (1989):355-367.

4. For further information about these findings, see Widom, C.S.,
"The Cycle of Violence," Science 244 (1989):160-166 and
Maxfield, M.G., and C.S. Widom, "The Cycle of Violence:
Revisited Six Years Later," Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent
Medicine 150 (1996):390-395.

5. Smith, C., and T.P. Thornberry, "The Relationship between
Child Maltreatment and Adolescent Involvement in Delinquency,"
Criminology 33 (1995):451-481.

6. Zingraff, M.T., J. Leiter, K.A. Myers, and M.C. Johnsen, "Child
Maltreatment and Youthful Problem Behavior," Criminology 31
(1993):173-202.

7. Of the offenders in this study, abused and neglected children
committed more offenses than controls (the average number of
arrests was 6.9 versus 4.7, respectively). Abused and neglected
children were also more likely to be recidivists (having more than
two arrests) than nonabused and nonneglected individuals (17
percent versus 13 percent, respectively), chronic offenders with 5
or more arrests (20 percent versus 12 percent, respectively), and
repeat violent offenders (9 percent versus 6 percent, respectively).

8. Loeber, R., and M. Stouthamer-Loeber, "Family Factors as
Correlates and Predictors of Juvenile Conduct Problems and
Delinquency," in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of
Research, ed. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987:29-149.

9. Maxfield, M.G., and C.S. Widom, "The Cycle of Violence:
Revisited Six Years Later," Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent
Medicine 150 (1996):390-395.

10. This research was supported in part by grants from the National
Institute of Justice (86-IJ-CX-0033, 89-IJ-CX-0007, and 93-IJ-CX-
0031), the National Institute of Mental Health (MH49467), the
National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (AA09238),
and the National Institute of Drug Abuse (DA10060). Points of
view are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the
position of the U.S. Department of Justice or the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services.

11. Perez, C.M., and C.S. Widom, "Childhood Victimization and
Long-term Intellectual and Academic Outcomes," Child Abuse and
Neglect 18 (1994):617-633.

12. Luntz, B., and C.S. Widom, "Antisocial Personality Disorder in
Abused and Neglected Children Grown Up," American Journal of
Psychiatry 151 (1994):670-674.

13. Widom, C.S., "Exposure to Traumatic Events and
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Abused and Neglected Children
Followed-up, 1997," unpublished report.

14. Widom, C.S., "Childhood Victimization: Early Adversity and
Subsequent Psychopathology," in Adversity, Stress, and
Psychopathology, ed. B. Dohrenwend, New York: Oxford
University Press, in press.

15. Widom, C.S., T. Ireland, and P.J. Glynn, "Alcohol Abuse in
Abused and Neglected Children Followed-up: Are They at
Increased Risk?" Journal of Studies on Alcohol 56 (1995):207-217.

16. Widom, "Childhood Victimization: Early Adversity and
Subsequent Psychopathology."

17. Coie, J., N.F. Watt, S.G. West, J.D. Hawkins, J.R. Asarnow,
H.J. Markman, S.L. Ramey, M.B. Shure, and B. Long, "The
Science of Prevention: A Conceptual Framework and Some
Directions for a National Research Program," American
Psychologist 48 (1993):1013-1022.

18. One report by Meddin and Hansen found that the majority of
abuse cases that were substantiated received no services at all
(Meddin, B., and I. Hansen, "The Services Provided during a Child
Abuse and/or Neglect Case Investigation and the Barriers That
Exist to Service Provision," Child Abuse and Neglect 9
(1985):175-182).

19. Olds, D., C. Henderson, R. Tatelbaum, and R. Chamberlin,
"Improving the Delivery of Prenatal Care and Outcomes of
Pregnancy: A Randomized Trial of Nurse Home Visitation,"
Pediatrics 77 (1986):16-28.

20. Berrueta-Clement, J.R.B., L.J. Schweinhart, W.S. Barnett, A.S.
Epstein, and D.P. Weikart, Changed Lives: The Effects of the
Perry Pre-School Program on Youths Through Age 19, Ypsilanti,
MI: High Scope Press, 1984, Monograph No. 8.

21. Schweinhart, L.J., H.B. Barnes, and D.P. Weikart, Significant
Benefits: The High Scope Perry Preschool Study through Age 27,
Ypsilanti, MI: High Scope Press, 1993.

22. Garry, E.M., Truancy: First Step to a Lifetime of Problems,
Juvenile Justice Bulletin, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,
October 1996, NCJ 161958.

23. Powell, K.E., and D.F. Hawkins, "Youth Violence Prevention:
Descriptions and Baseline Data from 13 Evaluation Projects,"
American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Supplement to Vol. 12,
No. 5 (September/October 1996).

24. Coie et al., "The Science of Prevention: A Conceptual
Framework and Some Directions for a National Research
Program," 1013-1022.

25. Carlson, M., F. Earls, and R.D. Todd, "The Importance of
Regressive Changes in the Development of the Nervous System:
Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Child Development,"
Psychiatric Development 6 (1988):1-22.

26. Widom, C.S. "Understanding the Consequences of Childhood
Victimization," in The Treatment of Child Abuse, ed. R.M. Reese,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, in press.

27. Burgess, R.L., and R.D. Conger, "Family Interaction in
Abusive, Neglectful, and Normal Families," Child Development 49
(1978):1163-1173.

28. Widom, "Understanding the Consequences of Childhood
Victimization."

29. These behavior problems were noted in the juvenile probation
department records or in the original case material and indicated
that the child had engaged in chronic fighting, fire setting,
destructiveness, or defiance of authority; had severe temper
tantrums, uncontrolled anger, or sadistic tendencies (as in
aggressiveness toward weaker children); or was extremely difficult
to control. 

30. Terr, L.A., "Chowchilla Revisited: The Effects of Psychiatric
Trauma Four Years after a School-bus Kidnapping," American
Journal of Psychiatry 140 (1983):1543-1550.

31. Olds, D., C. Henderson, and H. Kitzman, "Does Parental and
Infancy Nurse Home Visitation Have Enduring Effects on
Qualities of Parental Caregiving and Child Health at 25-50 Months
of Life?" Pediatrics 93 (1994):89-98.

32. Olds, Henderson, Tatelbaum, and Chamberlin, "Improving the
Delivery of Prenatal Care and Outcomes of Pregnancy: A
Randomized Trial of Nurse Home Visitation," 16-28. 

33. Olds, Henderson, and Kitzman, "Does Prenatal and Infancy
Nurse Home Visitation Have Enduring Effects on Qualities of
Parental Caregiving and Child Health at 25-50 Months of Life?"
89-98.

34. Masten, A., "Resilience in Individual Development: Successful
Adaptation Despite Risk and Adversity," in Educational Resilience
in Inner-city America: Challenges and Prospects, ed. M.C. Wang
and E.W. Gordon, Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaun Associates,
Inc., 1994: 3-25. 

35. Frankel, M. "Less Medicare, More Magic," The New York
Times, March 9, 1997, sec. 6, p. 30. 

36. United States Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the
United States, 1995, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of
the Census, 1995.

37. The home visitation program in Elmira, New York, was
analyzed and the net cost was determined: $3,173 for 2 years of
intervention (including personnel salaries and benefits, travel
expenses, supplies, staff training, and a modest overhead charge).
By the time the children were age 4, low-income families who had
received a nurse home visitor during pregnancy and through the
second year of the child's life cost the government $3,313 less than
comparison group children. Government savings were estimated as
the difference in utilization of AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid, and
child protection services minus tax revenues due to maternal
employment (Olds, D., C. Henderson, C. Phelps, H. Kitzman, and
C. Hanks, "Effect of Prenatal and Infancy Home Visitation on
Government Spending," Medical Care 31 (1993):155-174).

38. Annual operating expenses per inmate in jails in 1993 were
approximately $15,000 (Perkins, C.A., J.J. Stephan, and A.J. Beck,
Jails and Jail Inmates 1993-1994: Census of Jails and Survey of
Jails, Bulletin, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice,
Bureau of Justice Statistics, April 1995, NCJ 151651) and for State
and Federal inmates they were approximately $18,000, based on
average costs per day (Camp, C.G., and N.G. Camp, The
Correctional Yearbook, South Salem, NY: Criminal Justice
Institute, Inc., 1996).

39. Leventhal, J.M. "Twenty Years Later: We Do Know How to
Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect," Child Abuse and Neglect 20
(1996):647-653.

40. Anders, G. "On Sale Now at Your HMO: Organ Transplants,"
The Wall Street Journal, January 17, 1995, B1 and B5.

41. Leventhal, "Twenty Years Later: We Do Know How to Prevent
Child Abuse and Neglect," 651.

42. Kumpfer, K., V. Molgaard, and R. Spoth, "The Strengthening
Families Program for the Prevention of Delinquency and Drug
Use," in Preventing Childhood Disorders, Substance Abuse and
Delinquency, ed. R. DeV. Peters and R.J. McMahon, Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996.

Lecture 5: Crime, the Media, and Our Public Discourse

1. Andrews, D.A., I. Zinger, R. D. Hoge, J. Bonta, P. Gendreau,
and F. T. Cullen, "Does Correctional Treatment Work? A
Clinically Relevant and Psychologically Informed Meta-Analysis,"
Criminology 28 (1990):369-404; Lab, S.P., and J.T. Whitehead,
"From `Nothing Works' to `The Appropriate Works': The Latest
Stop on the Search for the Secular Grail," Criminology 28
(1990):405-17; Lipsey, M.W., "Juvenile Delinquency Treatment:
A Meta-analytic Inquiry into the Variability of Effects," in
Meta-analysis for Explanation, ed. T.D. Cook, H. Cooper, D.S.
Cordray, H. Hartman, L.V. Hedges, R.J. Light, T.A. Louis, and F.
Mosteller, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992; Lipsey,
Mark W., Juvenile Delinquency Treatment: A Meta-Analytic
Inquiry into the Variability of Effects, New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1991.

2. Wilson, James Q., "Drugs and Crime" in Drugs and Crime, ed.
Michael Tonry and James Q. Wilson, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990; Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, "Iatrogenic
Government--Social Policy and Drug Research," American Scholar
62 (1993):361-62.

3. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization in the
United States--1996, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997; Federal Bureau of
Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports--Crime in the United States-
-1995, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal
Bureau of Investigation, 1996.

4. Beckett, K., Crime and Drugs in Contemporary American
Politics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

5. van Dijk, Jan J.M., Pat Mayhew, and Martin Killias,
Experiences of Crime Across the World-- Key Findings from the
1989 International Crime Survey, Deventer, Netherlands, and
Boston: Kluwer, 1990; van Dijk, Jan J.M., and Pat Mayhew,
Criminal Victimisation in the Industrial World--Key Findings of
the 1989-1992 International Crime Surveys, The Hague: Ministry
of Justice Directorate for Crime Prevention, 1992.

6. Zimring, F.E., and G. Hawkins, Crime Is Not the Problem:
Lethal Violence in America, New York: Oxford University Press,
1997.

7. Morris, Norval, The Habitual Criminal, London: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1951.

8. Commission of Inquiry on Capital Punishment, Report of the
Commission of Inquiry on Capital Punishment, Sessional Papers
XIV--1959, Colombo, Ceylon: Government Publications Bureau,
1959.

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. 

What, If Anything, Can the Federal Government Do About Crime?
James Q. Wilson, Ph.D.
NCJ 164375

Can We Make Prohibition Work Better? An Assessment of
American Drug Policy 
Peter Reuter, Ph.D.
NCJ 164376

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices
Mark H. Moore, Ph.D.
NCJ 164504 

Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for Breaking the Cycle
of Violence
Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D.
NCJ 164505 

Crime, the Media, and Our Public Discourse

Norval Morris, LL.M., Ph.D. 
NCJ 164506 

The cost for each videotape is $29.50 in the United States and $33
in Canada and other countries. Contact NCJRS to order the above
videotapes: 

National Criminal Justice Reference Service
Box 6000
Rockville, MD 20849-6000
800-851-3420
e-mail: askncjrs@ncjrs.org 

Visit the NCJRS Justice Information Center World Wide Web site
to view or obtain an electronic version of this publication. 

To access the World Wide Web site, go to http://www.ncjrs.org