Title: What Can the Federal Government Do To
Decrease Crime and Revitalize Communities?.

Series: Research Forum

Author: NIJ/EOWS

Published: October 1998

Subject: crime prevention, community policing  

176 pages

321,000 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
Executive Office for Weed and Seed

What Can the Federal Government Do To Decrease
Crime and Revitalize Communities?

January 5-7, 1998  

Panel Papers

Research Forum

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

A Message From the Assistant Attorney General

"What can the Federal Government do to decrease
crime and revitalize communities?" This is a
question policymakers, practitioners, and
researchers have debated for more than 30 years.
Over the past few years, the Justice Department's
Office of Justice Programs (OJP) has brought
together former administrators of OJP and its
predecessor agencies and a broad range of other
criminal justice experts to examine Federal
criminal justice assistance over the past three
decades and what lessons this experience holds as
we move to shape criminal justice policy for the
future. 

In January 1998, OJP posed this question to a
group of practitioners and researchers at a
symposium sponsored by two OJP components--the
Executive Office for Weed and Seed (EOWS) and the
National Institute of Justice (NIJ). This session
brought together those who are thinking and
writing about crime from a practice or research
perspective. It was a result of ongoing
collaboration between NIJ, our research agency,
and Weed and Seed, one of the Department's
premiere community-based initiatives. It marked
the first time these two OJP components have come
together to focus on the issue of crime and its
impact on communities, and I commend EOWS Director
Stephen Rickman and NIJ Director Jeremy Travis for
their vision and energy in designing this
symposium.

I also want to thank the symposium participants
for taking the time to ponder and discuss this
critical question--and for their recommendations
on how we should be setting priorities, what role
the Federal Government should play, how OJP can
best provide leadership and demonstrate new
programs, what approaches are proving successful,
what factors we need to learn more about, and what
questions our research should be trying to answer.

It is so important for those of us at the Federal
level to listen to those of you in the field--to
see programs in action, to talk to people on the
frontlines, and to get a better understanding of
what's working, what's not, and what's needed. The
Attorney General strongly believes that this kind
of engagement is critical if we are going to keep
our Federal programs responsive to the communities
they serve, and I have yet to meet anyone "beyond
the Beltway" who disagrees.

These are critical and complex issues we must
continue to assess if criminal justice is to be
prepared to meet the challenges of the future. I
hope you will find that the products of our
EOWS/NIJ symposium can help make a contribution to
this ongoing debate.

Laurie Robinson
Assistant Attorney General

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

What Can the Federal Government Do To Decrease
Crime and Revitalize Communities?

January 5-7, 1998  

Panel Papers

A joint publication of the National Institute of
Justice and the Executive Office for Weed and Seed

October 1998

NCJ 172210

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

Jeremy Travis
NIJ Director

Stephen Rickman
EOWS Director

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

Opinions expressed are those of the authors and
not necessarily those 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.

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

Introduction

We are pleased to present this volume of panel
papers from the January 1998 Department of Justice
symposium, "What Can the Federal Government Do To
Decrease Crime and Revitalize Communities," which
was jointly sponsored by the National Institute of
Justice (NIJ) and the Executive Office for Weed
and Seed (EOWS). While NIJ and EOWS often
collaborate, this partnership was a unique
opportunity for us to highlight important
research, discuss problems facing the Nation's
communities, and share some of the imaginative
solutions to address them that are being
implemented by cities and towns across the
country. Conference participants discussed various
ways to effectively address the needs of changing
communities and initiated dialogues that we hope
will continue.

We were delighted to host the speakers whose
papers are included here. We were equally pleased
with the active involvement of program
participants who listened, questioned, and made
observations about the speakers' presentations.

Teaming with EOWS to achieve the goal of reducing
crime and revitalizing communities is a natural
extension of NIJ's research, evaluation, and
development mission and activities. It also
reflects one of NIJ's strategic challenges that
focuses on understanding the nexus between crime
and its social context. The Weed and Seed strategy
is essentially a coordination effort, making a
wide range of public- and private-sector resources
more accessible to communities. With the
assistance of the U.S. Attorneys, the strategy
brings together Federal, State, and local
crimefighting agencies, social services providers,
representatives of the public and private sectors,
prosecutors, businessowners, and neighborhood
residents--linking them in a shared goal of
"weeding" out violent crime and gang activity
while "seeding" the target area with social
services and economic revitalization. The strategy
combines law enforcement; community policing;
prevention, intervention, and treatment; and
neighborhood restoration. EOWS also provides a
range of training and technical assistance
activities to help communities plan, develop, and
implement their programs. Combining EOWS'
community focus with NIJ's research and
development expertise made this symposium
exceptionally productive.

This volume is intended to share the beneficial
outcomes resulting from the symposium. It is our
belief that discussions begun between participants
at this conference will lead to action at the
community level. It is our hope that these actions
will provide new, creative, and effective
approaches to address the issues of crime
prevention and community revitalization that
concern all of us.

Jeremy Travis
NIJ Director

Stephen Rickman
EOWS Director 

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

Contents

Introduction

Jeremy Travis and Stephen Rickman

Panel One: The Context

The Context

Bailus Walker, Jr.

Economic Shifts That Will Impact Crime Control and
Community Revitalization
Cicero Wilson

The Context of Recent Changes in Crime Rates
Alfred Blumstein

Luncheon Speaker

Community Watch 
Amitai Etzioni

Panel Two: The Roles of Federal, State, and Local
Governments and Communities in Revitalizing
Neighborhoods and in Addressing Local Public
Safety Problems

Revitalizing Communities and Reducing Crime
Robert L. Woodson, Sr.

Cooling the Hot Spots of Homicide: A Plan for
Action
Lawrence W. Sherman

Communities and Crime: Reflections on Strategies
for Crime Control
Jack R. Greene

Panel Three: Promising Programs and Approaches

Crime Prevention as Crime Deterrence
David Kennedy

Revitalizing Communities: Public Health Strategies
for Violence Prevention
Deborah Prothrow-Stith

Lawyers Meet Community. Neighbors Go to School.
Tough Meets Love: Promising Approaches to
Neighborhood Safety, Community Revitalization, and
Crime Control
Roger L. Conner

Panel Four: What Do We Do Next? Research Questions
and Implications for Evaluation Design

Dynamic Strategic Assessment and Feedback: An
Integrated Approach to Promoting Community
Revitalization
Terence Dunworth 

Community Crime Analysis
John P. O'Connell

What Do We Do Next? Research Questions and
Implications for Evaluation Design
Jan Roehl

Appendix A: Author Biographies

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

Panel One: 

The Context

Bailus Walker, Jr.

This brief discussion will review, in broad
outline, selected health parameters of the context
within which efforts to reduce crime and
revitalize communities must be pursued.

My principal underlying thesis is that health
conditions, the health status of populations, and
the services available to address them are among
the key determinants of community stability,
economic viability, and the incidence of crime.
Indeed, when the history of the 1990s is written,
health status and access to health care for large
segments of the population in the Nation's urban
centers will appear repeatedly in many chronicles.
Along with pictures of the homeless, the charts
and tables of the rates of acute and chronic
diseases and premature death among the poor and
disadvantaged will illustrate many texts about
crime, community instability, and family
disruption. These data will also illustrate that
the lack of access to comprehensive physical and
mental health care, including health promotion and
disease prevention, has a broad range of social
and economic ramifications that lacerate the civic
fabric and drive people from shared institutions--
subways, buses, parks, schools, and neighborhoods.

Even to casual observers, a discussion of the
prevention and control of crime and the
revitalization of communities raises many issues
that do not have a single or unambiguous solution
because both crime and community development are
affected by economic, health, social, behavioral,
political, and scientific factors. Many of these
factors are changing at an unprecedented pace,
both in the United States and abroad. "Abroad"
must be emphasized here because economic, health,
and social systems have become increasingly
interconnected and globalized.

As competition and trade have increased, people in
virtually every country have benefited, and a
remarkable degree of mutual interdependence has
emerged. These changes have also brought risks
that frequently cannot be adequately addressed
within traditional national, State, or
neighborhood borders and have created
quality-of-life problems that have spread among
nations at an accelerating pace. Indeed, the
movement of more than 2 million people each day
across national borders and the growth of
international commerce are inevitably associated
with the transfer of health risks, including such
obvious examples as infectious diseases,
contaminated foodstuffs, and terrorism, which have
multiple dimensions and a broad spectrum of
impacts--some subtle, some overt.

Transnational connections in health imply that
health threats, including violence, can no longer
be contained by national frontiers; most diseases
do not require passports to travel. Due to the
ease of rapid travel, emerging diseases in one
country represent a threat to the health and
economies of all countries. In the United States,
local community leaders are now seeing clear
evidence that the suburbs, which sprang up as an
"escape" from the stress of urban decay, are
themselves feeling the impact of "city ills." This
was clearly delineated in a recent Wall Street
Journal article headed, "More Suburbs Find City
Ills Don't Respect City Limits."[1]

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

Demographics

At the same time, the demographic picture is
changing. Demography is the study of the size,
composition, and distribution of human
populations. Although quantitative methods are
employed, demography is also centrally concerned
with the quality of human populations, such as
their health status. It should be noted that
demographic trends are already causing an increase
in the demand for health services and altering the
character of the demand.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census estimates that the
United States population increased by 2.4 million
people in 1997 to 268,921,733 as of January 1,
1998. The projection is based on the number of
births (3.9 million), the number of deaths (2.3
million), and the number of people returning or
immigrating to the United States (867,600) during
the previous year.[2] As the population grows, it
will increasingly become more diverse along many
socioeconomic dimensions. The increasing diversity
will create challenges and opportunities for both
the public and private sectors. In addition to
population size, the age structure will be
important in planning for community redevelopment
and crime prevention.

Changes in the Age and Racial Makeup of the U.S.
Population

Today, much attention is being focused on the
"aging" of the U.S. population. Citizens 65 and
older doubled in number between the 1950s and the
1980s. The fastest growing age group is between 55
and 65--now at 21.5 million but expected to
increase to 30 million by 2000 as baby boomers
approach retirement age.[3] This trend raises
concerns about the economic and social aspects of
care for the elderly and the ratio of elderly
dependents to productive adults, whose caring
responsibilities will shift increasingly from
children to the elderly.

Another trend on the demographic landscape is the
growth of the population share of nonwhite
citizens. The minority population numbered nearly
70 million in 1996, about one in four Americans.
By the middle of the 21st century, however, the
size of the minority population should just about
equal that of the non-Hispanic white population.
In 1996, African-Americans made up the largest
segment of the minority population--32 million
people, about 12 percent of all Americans.
Hispanics followed closely with 27 million (10
percent).[4]

Moreover, because of differential birth rates, a
disproportionate fraction of the country's
children, adolescents, and young adults will be
nonwhite. Think of the economic and social
implications of an aged population mostly white,
combined with a youth population mostly minority.

New Health Stresses on Women in the Workplace

Another demographic trend is the large-scale
movement of women from the home into the
workplace, particularly into jobs that subject
them to health risks of the kind previously
prevalent among men. In addition to traditional
industrial hazards and workplace pollution, both
men and women now suffer the putative side effects
of a range of new technologies. But our
considerations must include the less overt but
long-term impact of job stress on women's health
along with the psychological and economic burden
of single parenthood.

Women who work outside the home still do most of
the housework as well. Added to the pressures of
long hours of work inside and outside the home are
the time conflicts that emerge when one is both a
homemaker--and usually family caretaker--and a
wage earner. Sick children, school holidays, and
ill elderly relatives all contribute to stress and
frustration in the context of inadequate health
and social services and employers support for
working women. Additional problems include
inflexible work schedules, the trend among
employers to "do more with fewer employees," and
the lack of high-quality, accessible, and
affordable child and elder care.

Each of these demographic trends has serious
ramifications for social policy, economic
planning, and health care reform. For example, the
aging of Americans clearly implies a need for
increased attention to a broad spectrum of
geriatric health and social services. The age
group between 55 and 65 is losing health benefits
at a faster rate than any other group except
children. Many in this age group cannot qualify
for health insurance because of the preexisting
health condition criterion imposed by a number of
insurance plans. Another segment of this
population no longer has health coverage because
when they were in early retirement their former
employers canceled their benefits to reduce costs.
Unfortunately, women have a greater chance than
men of being uninsured.

"Social Diseases" and the Growth of Economic
Inequality

The growth in the nonwhite share of the population
is distressingly bound up with the persistence of,
and even increases in, certain familiar
pathologies of disenfranchisement--substance
abuse, teenage pregnancy, family disintegration--
as well as more recent challenges to the health
services system, such as that of devising,
supporting, and delivering culturally appropriate
services to new immigrants (both legal and
illegal) and refugees.

Within this matrix, there is another subset of
problems that might be characterized as new
"social diseases." By social disease, we mean a
mixed bag of pathologies--some physical, some
psychological, some both. They range from
homelessness among veterans and others to child
abuse (every 11 seconds a child is reported abused
or neglected), with its long-term
neuropsychological impacts from substance
dependency to obesity. Some of these are
pathologies of poverty due to changes in the
distribution and location of jobs and in the level
of education and training required to obtain
employment.[[5]

Let me hasten to insert here that there have
always been homeless people in the United States.
As economic circumstances have fluctuated, so have
the size and composition of the homeless
population. The homelessness problem has
increasingly captured public attention. Take, for
example, Washington, D.C. Evidence of the problem
is not hard to find in the Nation's capital.
Twenty-five families spent the Christmas holidays
in an emergency shelter. Many others were housed
elsewhere. The population at the shelter has been
growing since it opened last November. Similar
trends have been identified in other cities,
according to a telephone survey of community
leaders conducted in late 1997 by the Joint Center
for Political and Economic Studies.

Of particular relevance to the present discussion
is the fact that many homeless individuals,
particularly single young men, have histories of
encounters with the criminal justice system and a
glaring lack of experience with the health care
system. Most disheartening are the cases of
adolescents and post-adolescents who grow out of
foster care or child mental health and mental
retardation facilities because they are no longer
eligible for residentially based services for
their age group, yet they have nowhere to live.
They then resort to illegal means to get food and
shelter.

Unfortunately, the otherwise robust economy of
today has helped create the illusion that everyone
is prospering, but that is not the case. Indeed,
there is a rapidly widening gap between rich and
poor. 

Although it is tempting to add the influence of
the historic legacy of racial segregation and
discrimination, that would only be assigning
blame--which is not a productive exercise--and
would blur the challenges and opportunities to
recognize and address the underlying forces that
have provoked economic stress for many Americans.

In this direction, William Julius Wilson, a
long-time student of economic and social problems
of urban America, writes:

Many of today's problems in the inner-city
neighborhoods--crime, family dissolution, welfare-
-are fundamentally a consequence of the
disappearance of work. Work is not simply a way of
making a living and supporting your family. It
also constitutes a framework for daily behavior
because it imposes discipline.[6]

The Troubling Issue of Mental Health

Then there is the deeply troubling issue of mental
health, a problem so serious that it must be
considered separately. It cuts across boundaries
of race, class, and neighborhood. If it differs
from group to group or community to community, it
is in complexity, not in fundamentals. The
relevance of mental health to our discussion today
was underscored three decades ago in a 1967 paper
of the American Bar Association (ABA). It is worth
quoting at length:

If one observes both persons who crowd our
criminal courts and the population of our mental
hospitals, one is struck not by differences
between the two but by similarities. Our
pre-occupation with trying to separate the
"mentally ill" from the "criminals" may have led
us to overlook a more central reality; both mental
illness and criminality are tributaries of some
deeper mysterious channels. Certainly, there are
differences between "criminals" and the "mentally
ill," but it seems possible that the problems of
mental illness and crime lend themselves to
identical methods of handling.[7]

The ABA report goes on to state that there is a
limited supply of mental health resources and
inefficient use of those that exist.

This resource issue has been brought into much
sharper focus by a recent study that shows that
under the pressure of competition and managed
care, two-thirds of the Nation's private hospitals
that are equipped to take in mentally ill patients
dump them on hard-pressed, financially weak public
hospitals. The study also reports that hospitals
discharge mental patients prematurely, either when
their health insurance runs out or when the cost
of their coverage exceeds the reimbursement rate
that their insurance companies pay hospitals.
Among adolescent psychiatric patients, it is more
difficult for those without health insurance than
those with insurance to obtain needed behavioral
health services. How many of those who cannot get
care become "students" in the juvenile justice
system is not clear.

Added to this is the shortage of mental health
care professionals. For example, in 1997, the
Department of Health and Human Services--which
recognizes areas with a paucity of mental health
care services--designated 536 mental health care
professional shortage areas in the United States.
This trend could get worse if the organizational
landscape of health care delivery continues to be
rearranged (i.e., by mergers, consolidations, and
alignments of health care organizations and
institutions).[8]

Health Care to Meet the Nation's Changing Needs

The demographic trend pertaining to women raises
basic questions about what health services are
most critical for female heads-of-household and
their children as well as about how, when, in what
setting, and at what cost such services should be
provided. Each of the other demographic trends
previously cited expands or lends weight to a
group with new or greater needs or with needs that
have so far been inadequately addressed in the
health and social services system. These needs
have not been met for a number of reasons. One of
the most prominent reasons is that many members of
the group lack a regular source of health care
with an emphasis on preventive health services.
They lack these services because they do not have
health insurance or other means to pay for care.
In a recent study by the National Center for
Health Statistics, it was found that
African-American persons were four times more
likely than whites to report "no insurance/can't
afford" as their main reason for poor health.

I will close by underscoring the fact that near
the top of any agenda for revitalizing communities
and reducing crime must be a health care system
that successfully addresses the issue of equity
between the young and aged and among social and
ethnic groups. The health care system must have
the capacity, commitment, and community
orientation to be an active part of efforts to
address health care needs of adolescents,
including behavioral disorders and related
dysfunctions. It must also address past
inattention to women's health issues that have
created serious gaps in knowledge about the cause,
treatment, and prevention of disease in women.
Unfortunately, the health care system that exists
today in the United States is not fully prepared
to meet these and other challenges of the 21st
century, as we are constantly reminded by the
media, advocates for the poor and medically
underserved, policymakers, and participants in
forums and workshops.

As managed care has emerged as a principal system
for health care and evidence indicates that the
profit margins of health maintenance organizations
are falling and services may be reduced, it is
becoming increasingly clear that more health care
reform is needed. These organizations are also
confronted with angry consumers demanding better
services and hospitals and physicians determined
to resist further cutbacks in fees.[9]

Clearly, health care must be substantially
reformed to meet the changing needs of all
stakeholders in a system so essential to community
revitalization and to a reduction in the incidence
of crime and related social problems.

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

Notes

1. "More Suburbs Find City Ills Don't Respect City
Limits," Wall Street Journal, January 2, 1998, B1.

2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, "U.S. Population
Nears 269 Million as 1998 Begins," Press Release,
Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S.
Bureau of the Census, December 24, 1997.

3. Day, J.C., "Population Projections of the
United States: 1995-2050," Current Population
Survey, Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census,
1995.

4. U.S. Bureau of the Census, March 1994
Supplement, Current Population Survey, Washington,
DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1995.

5. See The Commonwealth Fund, "Survey Finds Missed
Opportunities to Improve Girls' Health," The
Commonwealth Fund Quarterly 3 (3)(Fall 1997);
Mushinski, M., "Teenagers' View of Violence and
Social Tensions in U.S. Public Schools,"
Statistical Bulletin, Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company (July-September 1996); Children's Defense
Fund, "Key Facts About Children," CDF Report,
Washington, DC: Children's Defense Fund, 1995; and
Cropper, C.M., "10 Heroin Deaths in Texas Reflect
Rising Use by Young," New York Times, November 18,
1997, 28.

6. Wilson, W.J., "Work," New York Times Magazine,
August 18, 1996, 28.

7. Matthew, A.R., "Mental Health and the Criminal
Law: Is Community Health an Answer?" American
Journal of Public Health 57 (September 1997):
1571.

8. See U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, Mental Health, United States, Rockville,
MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
1996; National Advisory Mental Health Council,
Health Care Reform for Americans With Severe
Mental Illness: Report of the National Advisory
Mental Health Council, Rockville, MD: National
Advisory Mental Health Council, 1993; and Kilborn,
P.T., "Mentally Ill Called Victims of
Cost-Cutting," New York Times, December 10, 1997,
A20.

9. See General Accounting Office, Medicaid Managed
Care: Challenge of Holding Plans Accountable
Requires Greater State Effort, Washington, DC:
General Accounting Office, May 1997; United
Hospital Fund, Primary Care Capacity and Medicaid
Managed Care, New York: United Hospital Fund,
1998; and Knickman, J.R., R.G. Hughes, H. Taylor,
K. Binns, and M.P. Lyons, "Tracking Consumers'
Reactions to the Changing Health Care System:
Early Indicators," Health Affairs 15 (Summer
1996): 22-32.

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

Economic Shifts That Will Impact Crime Control and
Community Revitalization

Cicero Wilson

As we approach the year 2000, the United States is
nearing the end of a prolonged period of prison
construction. The growth of violent crime and
sentencing reforms in the 1980s and 1990s have led
to record numbers of incarcerated adults and
juveniles. Although crime rates declined in 1995
and 1996, it is not clear what the long-term crime
and incarceration trends will be during the next
20 years. If crime rates do not continue to
decline, local officials may divert government
resources away from schools, community
development, parks, and other public amenities for
prison construction. Two important priorities for
our Nation are to reduce the rate of crime and to
minimize the impact of crime on children,
families, and communities.

Despite improvements in the criminal justice
system, such as community policing, drug courts,
and increases in prison beds for violent
offenders, the incidence of crime remains high in
the United States. The focus of our attention in
the criminal justice system is on improvements in
how we deal with crime after it is committed. The
criminal justice system must begin to monitor more
carefully economic and community trends that
influence the rate and depth of poverty. The
efforts of policymakers and practitioners to
achieve crime reduction goals in the next 20 years
will require greater attention to the reduction of
poverty. Rates of crime may be influenced more by
rates of persistent poverty than by criminal
justice interventions. Poverty, not race, sex, or
age, still has the highest correlation with crime
and violence.

Poverty helps create and maintain the behaviors
and attitudes that contribute to crime, violence,
and the onset of criminal careers by youths. Few
criminal justice reforms and innovations directly
address poverty or the systems charged with
addressing poverty--housing, education, welfare,
and employment and training. In the future, the
criminal justice system must be more proactive in
influencing antipoverty, community revitalization,
family, and educational programs and policies. To
have a stronger voice in the design of these
programs and policies, economic trends need to be
monitored and analyzed from a crime control and
community revitalization perspective.

Three of the general trends that will influence
the American economic landscape in the 21st
century will have a special impact on crime rates
and the success of efforts to revitalize
distressed communities. These three trends are:

--Increases in populations with
higher-than-average risk of participating in
crime, including long-term unemployed adults and
youths, unemployed ex-offenders, school dropouts,
and children reared in fatherless homes.

--Increases in the number of high-poverty
communities because of failing schools,
unemployment, underemployment, and community
abandonment strategies.

--The continued reliance on ineffective programs
and policies to promote family self-sufficiency
and revitalize distressed communities, including
"deconcentration of poverty" approaches and the
emphasis on income maintenance rather than on
asset-building strategies.

Population Trends

Trend One: For Dropouts and Unskilled Workers,
Finding Family Wage Jobs With Benefits Will Become
More Difficult

It will be difficult for unskilled and uneducated
labor to find family wage work in the 21st
century. The globalization of the economy and
technology are producing greater productivity,
greater competition, larger profits, and fewer
family wage jobs. Although foreign competition and
lower overseas wages in some countries have cost
the United States jobs, most of our job losses
were because of competition from high-wage,
high-technology countries such as Germany and
Japan. Technology will have a greater impact than
foreign competition on job loss and disruption of
career paths. Technology will not only eliminate
some jobs in industries such as banking and
manufacturing, it will also change the educational
skills needed for the new jobs.

Another major source of labor market problems is
the corporate culture that promotes maximizing
profits by downsizing, or converting full-time
jobs with benefits into part-time jobs with no
benefits. Jeremy Rifkin, in his book The End of
Work,[1] predicts technology and corporate culture
will determine unemployment levels in the 21st
century. If unemployment grows to levels of 20-25
percent nationally as Rifkin and other authors
predict, then the pressure on all of our social
systems will be enormous. While such dire
predictions are far from guaranteed, these trends
must be carefully monitored by agencies and
advocates concerned about reducing crime and
revitalizing economically and socially distressed
communities.

Trend Two: The Number of Youths Failing School
Will Continue to Escalate Without Changes in
School Policies, Tutorial Support Systems, and
Parental Involvement

Youth crime prevention is often deemed synonymous
with school failure prevention. Unfortunately,
school failure is a growing trend in poor urban
and rural areas. Two sources of school failure are
extremely important to criminal justice and
community development advocates: unaddressed
learning difficulties and school suspension and
expulsion policies.

Unaddressed learning difficulties. Students who
fall behind two grades in school are more likely
to drop out or become involved with drugs,
alcohol, or the courts. Despite the emphasis on
education standards, our schools are still
struggling to help students master basic reading,
math, and communications skills. Many students who
are experiencing learning difficulties have
nowhere to go for help. Working parents,
especially single working parents, have limited
time to check homework or tutor their children.
Teachers are overburdened. Most churches do not
offer latchkey or tutorial programs. The absence
of adequate rural transportation is a major
impediment to getting students to programs, if
programs exist.

Without tutorial assistance for students in
schools and juvenile institutions to supplement
classroom instruction, many students will continue
to fail and either drop out or graduate
functionally illiterate. These youths lack the
skills needed to succeed in the 21st-century
working world and are at high risk of becoming
involved in criminal activities to support
themselves.

School expulsion and suspension policies. In
response to student disruptive behavior, violence,
weapons, and illegal substances, most schools have
adopted zero-tolerance rules to quickly expel
offending students. Schools penalize minor
misbehavior with suspensions. However, unlike
suspensions of two decades ago, some schools have
added procedures to automatically fail students in
courses in which they have five unexcused
absences. A student who is suspended for 5 days
fails all of his/her classes for the entire
semester. Old policies would require students to
attend afterschool detention and do more work and
suspended students to make up all assigned work.
Today, schools expel students without adequate
provision for alternative schools. Schools also
suspend students so frequently that they fail
enough classes to fall more than 1 year behind
their graduating classes. These students usually
drop out of school. These policies remove the most
troublesome students, but they also push out
students who could be helped. These policies are
at odds with everything we know about school
absence, dropouts, school failure, and
delinquency. These school policies are filling
communities with teenagers who are unsupervised
most of the day. These out-of-school youths are at
high risk for substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and
criminal activity.

Whatever the sources of school failure, more than
1,100 youths drop out of school every day in the
United States. Many students will graduate without
the basic skills needed to succeed in the rapidly
changing working world. Unabated, this school
failure trend intensifies the problems of
unemployment and poverty, which are primary
contributors to crime rates.

Trend Three: The High Incarceration Rates of the
1990s Will Result in a Flood of Unemployed
Releasees From Prisons and Jails in the Next Two
Decades

The efforts of economic and community development
programs, work force development projects, and
welfare reformers erode when adult and juvenile
parolees return to the community unemployed. They
attempt to make money through street crime, drug
sales, and extortion from women on welfare. The
current lack of sufficient reintegration programs,
high recidivism rates, and the number of persons
to be released from jails and prisons during the
next 25 years should alarm everyone. Furthermore,
large numbers of these releasees are returning to
the communities we are trying to revitalize.

The criminal activities of unrepentant parolees
make the neighborhoods inhospitable to efforts to
revitalize the family, community, and local
economy. Crimes such as carjacking, school
violence, and random shootings have fueled the
move of many families and businesses to
communities perceived as safe. Business tax
incentives, business retention strategies, and
community development efforts such as Empowerment
Zones are severely diminished as development tools
when businesses and residents perceive a community
or city as crime ridden. Controlling community
crime and violence is an important prerequisite to
community revitalization.

Trend Four: There is an Increase in the Number of
Fatherless Children, Who Are More Prone to
Delinquency and Other Social Pathologies

As the incidence of father absence grows,
community disintegration and crime, especially
youth crime, will continue to grow. Between 1960
and 1990, the percentage of children living apart
from their biological fathers increased from 17 to
36 percent. By the year 2000, half of the Nation's
children may not have their fathers at home. While
the heroic efforts of single women to raise their
children alone are laudable, the economic and
social requirements for raising healthy and
productive children are hard to achieve by poor
single parents alone. Reengaging fathers in the
economic and social life of their children is an
important but overlooked aspect of addressing
poverty, community revitalization, and crime.

Many of our problems in crime control and
community revitalization are strongly related to
father absence. For example:

--Sixty-three percent of youth suicides are from
fatherless homes. 

--Ninety percent of all homeless and runaway
youths are from fatherless homes. 

--Eighty-five percent of children who exhibit
behavioral disorders are from fatherless homes. 

--Seventy-one percent of high school dropouts are
from fatherless homes. 

--Seventy percent of youths in State institutions
are from fatherless homes. 

--Seventy-five percent of adolescent patients in
substance abuse centers are from fatherless homes. 

--Eighty-five percent of rapists motivated by
displaced anger are from fatherless homes. 

Without fathers as social and economic role
models, many boys try to establish their manhood
through sexually predatory behavior,
aggressiveness, or violence. These behaviors
interfere with schooling, the development of work
experience, and self-discipline. Many poor
children who live apart from their fathers are
prone to becoming court involved. Once these
children become court involved, their records of
arrest and conviction often block access to
employment and training opportunities. Criminal
histories often lock these young persons into the
underground or illegal economies.

Behaviors related to father absence that directly
contribute to the growth of welfare and the
difficulties in creating jobs in communities
include:

--Sexually predatory behavior that results in
out-of-wedlock births. (Most teen mothers are
impregnated by older men, not teen boys.)

--Domestic violence that occurs as a result of
arguments over enforcement of child support
payments.

--Welfare pimping, which is the practice of men
collecting part of the welfare check from
girlfriends or the mothers of their out-of-wedlock
children. Some pimps collect from five or six
mothers on welfare per month.

Innovative father engagement programs have had an
impact on child rearing, family economic
stability, and gang involvement. Unless community
revitalization and crime reduction programs begin
to address the need for father engagement programs
and services, the cycle of poverty and crime could
continue virtually unabated.

Community Revitalization Trends

Trend Five: There is an Increase in the Number of
High-Poverty Areas

Socially and economically distressed communities
tend to promote behaviors and attitudes conducive
to crime and dependency. High levels of crime also
help to maintain and increase high-poverty
communities. The 1990 census indicated that the
number of high-poverty census tracts had increased
since the 1980 census. The proportion of poor
persons living in extreme poverty census tracts in
the 100 largest U.S. cities tripled between 1970
and 1990, from 12.6 percent to 36.2 percent.[2]

Apparently, approaches to law enforcement and
income maintenance in extremely poor communities
had limited impact on poverty and crime during the
last two decades. Although current welfare reform
and broken windows approaches to law enforcement
appear to have some impact, the underlying poverty
and propensity for crime have been suppressed, not
reduced. If recessionary economic conditions
reappear with high levels of unemployment, the
rates of poverty and crime could rise
significantly. Federal programs and policies that
have an impact on employment and education in poor
communities are very important components of an
effective crime reduction and community
revitalization strategy.

Federal criminal justice and antipoverty policies
need to consider more effective resource targeting
to reduce the number of high-poverty communities.
However, these policies and programs to combat the
concentration of poverty should not rely on
"deconcentration" or "dilution" approaches. These
dilution approaches deconcentrate poverty by
moving poor families into mixed-income
communities. Generally, these programs do not help
families improve their family income, gain
economic literacy, or reduce or eliminate such
problems as drug addiction before moving the
family. Dilution programs should not be "problem
export" programs. Simply moving to a better
neighborhood will not automatically change
destructive attitudes and behaviors.

Trend Six: Community Abandonment

Frustrated criminal justice, housing, and economic
development officials often view communities with
very high rates of crime, housing abandonment,
substance abuse, and gangs as beyond help.
Investing police and economic development
resources in these communities is deemed a waste
of limited resources. This approach is called a
"community abandonment" strategy. The problems
with this approach are numerous. First, these
communities often spread their misery to
neighboring communities. Second, crime and
barriers to economic development extend far beyond
the particular abandoned community. The presence
of such a community adversely affects the
reputation of entire segments of towns and cities.
Third, these abandoned communities also serve as
safe havens for criminals who prey on other
communities. Fourth, most of what we have learned
about successful community revitalization has been
learned from the efforts of local residents and
their partners in distressed communities. The
transformation of the Kenilworth Parkside Public
Housing Development in Washington, D.C., is one of
many successful transformations.

The frustration and failure associated with
revitalization efforts in very distressed areas is
the result of weak strategies that do not engage
the support of local residents. These strategies
also fail to focus on asset building and lack
strong criminal justice responses to crime. An
example of a good strategy is the Weed and Seed
program. The Weed and Seed program has a major
positive impact on economic development and
revitalization when a coalition of community and
law enforcement agencies work together to
eliminate local crack houses. This strong law
enforcement response, with media coverage of local
residents cheering, boosts community development
efforts. This program says to the public that
something can be done about crime and that
residents of poor neighborhoods want crime
eliminated. Without such efforts, community
abandonment is viewed as a logical response.

Trend Seven: Without Policies to Correct Asset
Deficiencies, an Increasing Percentage of Families
Will Not Achieve Self-Sufficiency and Efforts to
Revitalize Poor Communities Will Continue to Have
Limited Success

Until recently, our approaches to poverty and
community development have been focused on
deficits, problems, and income security programs.
Programs that do not focus on teaching and asset
building consistently fail to reduce poverty and
revitalize distressed communities on a large
scale. Asset building has been the primary vehicle
for lifting individuals and families out of
poverty. Assets such as savings, homeownership,
property ownership, business ownership, and
postsecondary education and training are the
resources most Americans use to become
self-sufficient and decrease the likelihood of
poverty for themselves and their children.

Asset-building programs increase family income
rather than supplement inadequate income and also
create local jobs and local stakeholders in
communities. Poor families that rise out of
poverty through education and employment often
leave poor communities because of crime, poor
schools for their children, and lack of business
ownership and home-ownership opportunities. When
these successful families leave, they take their
disposable income, civic involvement, and examples
of positive achievements with them, leaving the
familiar concentration of poor families and
problems behind.

Asset-building programs also create a positive
economic future for youths. Many youths join gangs
or engage in street crime because they feel they
have no other economic options. Programs that
provide youth enterprise skills or education trust
funds influence their view of themselves and their
risk-taking behavior. Crime prevention and
treatment programs as well as community
revitalization strategies need to include asset
building to be effective. Poor and working poor
families and individuals can effectively build
assets when provided with specialized programs to
help them. By increasing the availability of these
programs and promoting asset building for the
poor, families and communities can be
strengthened. Policymakers and practitioners
should explore the expanded use of the following
programs and policies in reducing poverty and
crime:

Economic literacy programs. Economic literacy
programs provide basic budgeting and banking and
savings skills for low- and moderate-income
individuals and families.

Microenterprise and youth enterprise programs.
Microenterprise and youth enterprise programs
provide entrepreneurial training for low-income
individuals. After assessing their talents and
interests, each trainee is taught how to develop a
real business plan by program staff. The program
then makes small amounts of capital available to
the trainees to launch their businesses.

Homeownership programs for low-income families.
Homeownership programs provide counseling on the
homeownership process and assistance with
budgeting, savings, and the downpayment. These
services create community stakeholders.

Individual Development Accounts. Individual
Development Accounts (IDAs) are restricted savings
accounts that can be used for buying a home,
starting or expanding a business, or postsecondary
education and training. Individuals or families
are required to save for their dream, and their
savings are matched by the private, nonprofit, and
public sectors. For example, a family saves $20 a
month, and those savings leverage $80 in matching
contributions. IDAs are included in the new
welfare law. The law also allows recipients of
income maintenance benefits to have these accounts
without affecting their eligibility to receive
benefits. Legislation is pending in Congress to
provide $100 million for IDA demonstrations.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Our real crime reduction and community
revitalization challenges involve finding ways to
reduce poverty, the number of high-poverty
communities, family disintegration, and the number
of young people entering criminal careers.
Community development and crime reduction agencies
must not sit by while employment, welfare, child
support, and school agencies institute rules and
guidelines that increase the difficulty of
controlling crime and reversing community decline.
For example:

--Local employment agencies have always put
ex-offenders and youths at the bottom of priority
lists for employment and training services. The
willingness of noncustodial fathers to support
their children is not considered when selecting
participants for training programs. The importance
of employment for noncustodial fathers, especially
ex-offenders, will not become a priority without
Federal guidance.

--New child support and paternity establishment
rules have great potential to increase violence
against women and children. State and local
agencies need guidance in considering how to
reduce these risks.

--Schools not only institute expulsion and
suspension policies that push too many children
out, they also are initially inept at addressing
the emergence of gangs in schools. Information on
best practices to prevent and control gangs and
violence in schools is available at the Federal
level, but few school administrators use it.
Federal incentives to get schools to use this
information are needed.

The U.S. Department of Justice has developed
accessible databases on best practices in violence
prevention, gang control, victim assistance
procedures, and other important areas. In
addition, the Department of Justice has funded
demonstrations and evaluations of important
innovations such as drug courts, community
policing, Weed and Seed, and prison industries.
These programs are having an important impact at
the community level. Greater attention should be
given to these databases and to innovations by
other Federal, State, and local agencies.

Federal agencies with mandates to reduce crime and
rebuild communities need to focus more attention
on asset building, reshaping school suspension
policies, and designing programs and policies to
engage fathers as positive economic and social
agents in families. Without these changes in our
approaches, poverty, employment, school failure,
and family trends will block efforts to reduce
crime and revitalize communities.

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

Notes

1. Rifkin, Jeremy, The End of Work: The Decline of
the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the
Post-Market Era, New York: Putnam Publishing
Group, 1995.

2. Kasarda, John D., "Urban Industrial Transition
and the Underclass," Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 501
(1990): 26-47. Also see Wilson, William Julius,
When Work Disappears, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., 1996.

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

The Context of Recent Changes in Crime Rates

Alfred Blumstein

The late 1980s saw a dramatic growth in U.S.
homicide rates, particularly in homicides
committed by young people. Between 1985 and 1992,
the homicide arrest rate for youths and children
age 18 and under more than doubled. This gave rise
to considerable rhetoric about the "bloodbath"
that was coming and the new generation of
"superpredators" who had to be dealt with in harsh
new ways. Fortunately, that growth peaked in the
early 1990s and has declined appreciably since
then. Aggregate homicide rates are now lower than
they have been for more than 25 years, but the
rate of homicides by young people is still well
above the stable rates that prevailed from 1970
through 1985.

In this paper, I would like to address some of the
contextual issues behind the growth in violence of
the late 1980s, examine the decline since 1991,
and explore some of the speculations about the
factors that contributed to that decline. I will
then follow with some suggestions for potential
Federal roles in helping to decrease crime and
revitalize communities.

Growth in Violence in the Late 1980s

In a recent paper,[1] I examined the time trends
in three measures--youth homicides, handgun
homicides by youths, and arrests of nonwhite
juveniles for drug offenses. Each of these rose
dramatically beginning in about 1985 and had more
than doubled by 1992. Similar changes were not
displayed in adult homicides, nongun homicides,
and arrests of white juveniles for drug offenses.

My hypothesized link among these three trends is
that crack arrived in the mid-1980s, initially in
the larger cities, and spread from there to the
smaller cities. Because crack required many more
sellers to meet the increased demand (composed of
many more buyers and with more transactions per
buyer), there was major recruitment of young
minorities to serve in that role. They were
carrying valuable property--drugs or the proceeds
from the sale of those drugs--and so they had to
take steps to protect themselves from robbery.
Because they were dealing in an illegal market,
they could not call the police if someone tried to
steal their valuables. Their self-protection
involved carrying handguns. Because young men are
tightly networked and highly imitative, their
colleagues--even those not involved in selling
drugs--armed themselves also, at least in part as
a matter of self-protection against those who were
armed. That led to an arms race in many inner-city
neighborhoods.

It is widely recognized that violence has always
been part of teenage males' dispute-resolution
repertoire, but that has typically involved
fights, the consequences of which were usually no
more serious than a bloody nose. The lethality of
the ubiquitous guns contributed in a major way to
the doubling of the homicide rate by (and of)
those 18 and under.

The emphasis on the presence of guns as a critical
instrument in this process is reflected in the
fact that gun suicide rates by young people,
especially young African-Americans, escalated at
the same time as homicide rates.[2] There were no
comparable trends in nongun homicides or suicides.

At the same time, the homicide rate for older ages
diminished. For those 30 and older, the reduction
was about 20-25 percent. The growth in the prison
population during that time (a doubling in the
incarceration rate between 1985 and 1996) has
undoubtedly contributed to that reduction,
although no one has isolated that incapacitation
effect from other factors (e.g., a general decline
in intimate partner homicides) that may have
contributed to the decline in the homicide rate by
older offenders.

Shifts During the 1990s

The number of homicides by young people leveled
off in the early 1990s and did not begin a
significant decline until 1994. With the growth in
the homicide rate among young people stopped, the
continuing decline in the homicide rate by older
offenders resulted in a peak national homicide
rate in 1991 and a subsequent decline. That
decline was dominated by the changes in the
largest cities--New York in particular--which
displayed very sharp declines, beginning in 1994.

One explanation that has been offered for the
decline in crime rates is "demographic change."
This probably harks back to the last time we saw a
significant decline in crime rates, in the early
1980s, when demographic change--the aging of the
baby-boom generation out of the high-crime ages of
the late teens and early 20s--was indeed a major
contributor to the crime rate decline.[3] Today,
however, demographic change is working in the
other direction--to increase crime rates. As can
be seen in exhibit 1, which shows the number of
people at each age in the United States in 1998,
the smallest age cohort in the Nation under age 40
is now about 23. These are the people who were
born in 1975 following the baby boom, which peaked
in about 1960.

Thus, we are seeing a growing number of
individuals entering the high-crime ages of the
late teens and early 20s, and that will continue
for at least the next 10 years. But we should also
note that those changes are not dramatic, with the
cohort sizes expected to grow by about 15 percent
in 15 years, or roughly 1 percent per year. Even
when one partitions this analysis by race (see
exhibit 2, which shows the white and black male
populations separately by age), we see that the
young black male population (which is multiplied
by a factor of seven to show the comparative
growth, since the U.S. white population is about
seven times the black population) follows a
pattern very similar to the white male population,
but with a somewhat faster rate of growth.
Nevertheless, the growth rate of the black male
population is only about 30 percent in 15 years,
or about 2 percent per year.

These demographic shifts represent but one factor
contributing to changes in crime rates. If crime
rates within each demographic group stay constant,
then an increase in the size of the demographic
groups with the highest rates contributes to an
increase in the aggregate crime rate. But other
factors are contributing to changes in
demographic-specific crime rates well in excess of
even 2 percent per year. During the late 1980s,
for example, homicide rates by young people were
growing by 10-20 percent per year. Declines in
recent years, especially in the largest cities,
have also been of that magnitude.

An important avenue to pursue is finding an
explanation for the recent decline in homicides by
young people. Possible explanations include:

--Changes in the nature of drug markets (crack
markets in particular), induced by changes in the
nature of the demand, that has led to less
violence associated with those markets.

--Vigorous police and community efforts in at
least some cities to get guns out of the hands of
young people.

--Police and community efforts to resolve gang
conflicts and encourage disarmament.

--Improvement in the economy that not only has
provided jobs to young people but also has been a
source of improved hope for succeeding in the
legitimate economy.

--Increased incarceration of potentially violent
offenders.

--Improvement in the largest cities that may be
masking a situation that could be very different
in many smaller cities.

These explanations certainly are not mutually
exclusive, and different explanations could apply
to different cities. We still need more effort to
sort out these and possibly other contributors to
the decline.

Even though the decline in the homicide rate by
young people is encouraging news, it is important
to note that the homicide rate by juveniles is
still at least 60-80 percent above the rate that
had prevailed for the 15 years from 1970 to 1985.
Thus, we still have a long way to go in bringing
that rate down.

Incarceration has been the Nation's dominant
strategy against crime over the past 25 years.
That has led to an incarceration rate (prisoners
per capita) that is more than four times the rate
that prevailed with remarkable stability for the
previous 50 years. Incarceration with reasonable
sentences is likely to have an important
incapacitation effect on older offenders (ages 25
and older), whose lengthy criminal careers may
reasonably predict future offending.

Such predictions are far more difficult with
younger offenders, so it is important to address
opportunities for investment in crime-prevention
efforts targeting individuals in high-risk
situations at an early age. Even though the payoff
from such investments will take several years to
be realized, it is likely to exceed the fiscal
cost--let alone the social cost to the society and
the economy--of widespread use of long-term
incarceration of young people. But no one can make
that assessment definitively because the evidence
on the comparative payoffs is still poorly known
and the payoffs will vary with different kinds of
interventions with different target groups. A
major national challenge lies in finding what
approaches can be most effective with each of the
different kinds of young offenders. We still do
not have definitive solutions, but it is extremely
important to invest in the research that will
enable us to develop and identify them.

Windows on the Future

As we look to the future, there is little we can
say with certainty. One strong predictor is the
demographic composition of the Nation. It has
already been indicated that demographic trends
will contribute to making matters worse, but only
at the rate of about 1-2 percent per year. The
other matter of concern is the greater number of
people who will be unemployed or without reliable
sources of income if the economy turns down--a
likely eventuality--but few people can say with
any confidence just when that will occur. When
that happens, we might see more people resorting
to criminal activity to offset their displacement
from the legitimate economy. One group in
particular for whom that is an important issue is
the people who will be displaced from welfare
support when their time of eligibility expires. So
far, we have seen an important reduction in the
welfare rolls by those best able to move into the
legitimate economy, while those without such
opportunities have stayed on welfare. Within the
next few years, more of that latter group will
find themselves without welfare support, and--
especially if there is concurrently a significant
growth in unemployment--there is a serious risk
that they will pursue illegitimate means for their
sustenance.

Another important cloud on the horizon is the
concern about the arrival of new drug epidemics in
our major cities. We have seen an ebbing of
serious drug abuse in recent years as young people
have eschewed the crack cocaine that so often did
serious damage to the lives of their parents and
siblings. As that awareness fades in coming
cohorts of young people, or if new drugs without
the comparable stigma arrive, we might well see a
reignition of some of the serious crime epidemics
that characterized the late 1980s. The data to be
collected in 75 cities by NIJ's Arrestee Drug
Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program, involving
urinalysis of booked arrestees, should provide
some early warning of the arrival of those
problems.

The Federal Role

As one builds on this background to identify an
appropriate Federal role for dealing with these
problems, one is first faced with the complexity
of the division of labor between the Federal
Government and State and local governments. It is
widely accepted that the primary operational
responsibility for local crime control is
inherently State and local. But there are
important aspects of the crime problem for which
the primary responsibility is Federal.

One relates to interdiction of criminal activity
in which interstate transactions are particularly
important. The most evident of these is the area
in which there is already widespread Federal
involvement--interstate trafficking in drugs. But
it is also important to focus on another
crime-related product, which is much more directly
associated with violence and one in which the
Federal role is still poorly developed. That
relates to the illegal trafficking in firearms,
particularly the semiautomatic handguns that have
been implicated as a major factor in the rise of
juvenile violence over the past decade. Crime-gun
tracing by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (ATF) through its National Gun Tracing
Center has seen some important growth over the
past several years, but the capability and the
effort applied are still far less than is needed
to become effective in interdicting that illicit
traffic. Better collaboration between local police
and ATF could result in more effective
interdiction of that traffic.

The other general role of the Federal Government
relates to "public goods" that States or
localities need but whose creation is expensive
and is broadly beneficial, so the Federal
Government appropriately becomes the agent to
serve the combined interests of States and
localities. These public goods include creation
and maintenance of shared operational databases
such as the National Crime Information Center
(NCIC); fostering and evaluating a wide range of
innovations and disseminating the results of
evaluations of those innovations so that the
successful ones can be replicated elsewhere; and
organizing and sponsoring research and statistical
projects and disseminating the information and new
insights they generate. This last--the research
and statistics function--is the critical one, and
it is not likely to occur without major Federal
involvement. These activities are the province of
the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Justice
Programs--NIJ, the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Office of
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and
the Office for Victims of Crime.

Most people see these functions as merely a
transfer of Federal money to alleviate local
costs. The agencies' participation in providing
the knowledge to enhance the overall effectiveness
of the agencies of the criminal justice system is
a far more critical Federal role because the
functions could not be performed without that
participation. In view of their importance, it is
astonishing how little money the Federal
Government invests in those functions.

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

Notes

1. Blumstein, Alfred, "Youth Violence, Guns, and
the Illicit-Drug Industry," Journal of Criminal
Law and Criminology 86 (1) (Fall 1995): 10-36.

2. See Blumstein, Alfred, and Daniel Cork,
"Linking Gun Availability to Youth Gun Violence,"
Law and Contemporary Problems 59 (1) (Winter
1996): 5-24.

3. See Blumstein, Alfred, Jacqueline Cohen, and
Harold Miller, "Demographically Disaggregated
Projections of Prison Populations," Journal of
Criminal Justice 8 (1) (January-February 1980): 1-
25.

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

Community Watch

Amitai Etzioni*

The way one thinks about and deals with crime
depends on one's assumptions about human nature.
If one assumes that people are good by nature, as
many liberals do, then one blames conditions in
society on ill conduct. Giving people jobs--
well-paying jobs and not dead-end ones--is the
most obvious treatment for anti-social behaviour.
Education, rehabilitation, and psychotherapy are
close seconds.

But if one shares the assumption of social
conservatives (from the religious right to Michael
Howard) that people have strong aggressive and
sexual impulses, then one seeks ever stronger
measures of law and order. In the U.S., Steve
Forbes campaigned in favour of one strike and
you're out. Yet there is a mountain of
social-science evidence to support a third,
communitarian position; infants are born without
values (there are no altruistic genes) but, given
the proper moral infrastructure, they can acquire
values.

The building blocks of such an infrastructure are
well known. Historically they have included
families, schools, and communities (which
encompass places of worship and voluntary
associations). From this viewpoint, the sharp rise
in crime in western societies is due to the
weakening of all these moral elements. The family
has clearly declined, and no new social agency has
taken its place. Whatever one thinks about
child-care centres, their focus is on custodial
care, perhaps learning, but hardly on moral
education. Schools in Britain still do a fair job
of character-building, but as pluralism rises they
are under increasing pressure to be value-neutral.

The sad fact is that even when families and
schools are functioning to perfection as
values-transmitters, as the moral agents of
society they do not suffice. This takes us back to
the pesky question of human nature. It is
impossible to expunge all anti-social urges: we
all occasionally experience aggressive feelings,
inappropriate sexual desires and selfish
inclinations. The best families and schools can
do--and this is crucial for our understanding of
crime and how to deal with it--is to develop a
conscience that serves as a counterweight. Human
nature is condemned to an eternal struggle between
theses urges (which make us offend mores and often
laws) and our conscience.

Most important, how law-abiding (and good) we are
as adults is very much determined by the extent to
which the conscience we acquired as children
receives external reinforcement. This is
particularly effective when it comes from those in
whom we have an emotional investment: members of
our communities. The stronger the communal bonds
and the more they support pro-social behaviour,
the more we are able to curb our urges, and the
lower the level of crime. This is why we are all
so surprised at crime in a small, tight-knit
community, such as Dunblane.

The crimes I am talking about include not merely
street violence, but also child and spousal abuse,
white-collar crimes (embezzlement), corporate
crime and political corruption. 

Crime occurs in all social classes, not only in
inner cities. While communities can curb even the
most serious violent crimes, they are particularly
effective in minimising most other crimes,
releasing resources to fight the hard core.

Tony Blair's anti-crime programme, as drafted
before his election, was successful in deflecting
Tory accusations that Labour was soft on crime.
Its focus on moving police from behind desks to
the streets, "zero tolerance" for petty crimes,
and fast-track punishment for persistent youth
offenders, leaves plenty of room to make it more
communitarian. The government programme could now
take into account that crime is best prevented
from the beginning rather than deterred by
punishment after the fact. And that if one simply
arrests most kinds of criminals (for instance,
drug dealers), other people soon take their place.
Both issues are best addressed when members of
communities censure anti-social behaviour.

To mobilise communities to censure crime strongly,
they must be treated as true partners with the
police. Community policing does not quite cut it.
While it is helpful to move more police on to the
beat, it is also necessary to change the
demographic composition of local police forces so
they will not differ too much from the communities
they are supposed to co-operate with. Community
leaders must be involved in setting police
priorities. Should the police concentrate on
drug-dealers or on school safety? Should they
focus on outsiders or entrap kerb-crawlers?

Some communities cannot be reached because they
are hostile in general and to the police in
particular. Yet in some instances, for example in
Los Angeles, even gangs have been won over to help
curb violence. Many disadvantaged communities
already realise that they bear the brunt of crime.
If they could be convinced that the police would
deal fairly with them, they would be more likely
to collaborate. Recently we learned that the
curbing of quality-of-life offences--minor crimes
such as playing cassette players loudly in public
places, graffiti, and aggressive begging--is
surprisingly effective in reducing more serious
offences. Such drives re-establish community mores
and mobilise the community to back crime-fighting.

Stigma is a useful device for addressing criminal
behaviour; unfortunately it ruffles the feathers
of liberals. They speak of returning to putting
people in stocks. But while most everyone would
agree that it would be a better world if one could
prevent crime only by positive incentives,
realistically, negative sanctions are unavoidable.
Stigma is the least costly and the most--yes, the
most--humane.

A young accountant is caught for the second time
having embezzled money from a pension fund. Send
him to jail, and he is most likely to graduate
with even less respect for the law, be subject to
punitive conditions, and carry the stigma of a
criminal conviction, all at a high public cost.
Make him carry a sign in his neighborhood (as a
judge recently did in the U.S.) and he will be
deterred from repeating his offence--at minimal
public cost.

Another way for communities to prevent crime is
for them to wall themselves in--troubling, because
communities sometimes employ these gates to keep
out those of a different class or race. One notes
that affluent communities and public institutions
already have stringent entry controls. I cannot
get into Parliament, the BBC, the High Court, and
well-off people's residences, without identifying
myself and explaining my business. Working-class
neighbourhoods should be allowed the same
protection, given that they are the likely victims
of violent crime and that the state has not
succeeded in keeping crime at bay. Gates and other
methods of shielding target areas have proven
surprisingly effective.

Gates have another constructive effect. They can
help build community. When a neighbourhood in
Dayton, Ohio, was flooded with drug-related
crimes, gates--only to cars, not to pedestrians--
blocked the traffic from the highway and divided
the neighbourhood into six cul-de-sacs. Each of
the six areas developed its own identity and
social web. Children were heard to comment on the
way to school that they must behave themselves
because throwing stones or yelling aloud was not
welcome in these parts. The undesirable effects of
gated communities can be avoided by ensuring that
neighbourhoods treat all who seek entry in the
same manner. One still would prefer open
communities, but gates seem necessary until crime,
including terrorism, is better controlled.

Some pundits insist that the real issue is the
exaggerated fear of crime, rather than crime
itself. Fear is more pervasive in communities
where crime rates are relatively lower. (A recent
survey--which relies on self-reporting--found that
in England more people reported themselves to have
been a victim of crime last year than in the US,
although crime rates in the US are several times
higher.) This fear has barely declined even as
crime has been reduced.

Many liberals draw from this the somewhat
presumptuous conclusion that the members of such
communities are irrational (the term "hysterical"
is sometimes used) and need reassurance, rather
than more protection. But communities are sensible
to worry about crime, even if after rising
drastically (by more than five times between 1960
and 1990 in England and Wales) crime rates have
now levelled off or been curtailed.

Crime has such devastating and lasting effects
that limited changes in statistics do not much
matter. Parents who yearn for a day when their
children will be able to play outside unsupervised
derive little comfort from a fall in crime of 11
percent. People won't walk at night in the "wrong"
parts of a town simply because the murder rate is
not as high as it used to be.

Among the more innovative ideas is an approach
highlighted during the first Talk to Tony town
meeting: restorative justice. It calls for
offenders to meet their victims in the presence of
other community members. The offenders are
expected to apologise as well as perform community
service that will help compensate the victim--for
instance, restoring their vandalised property. The
community determines the nature and scope of the
compensatory service.

Untested so far is an idea from the Communitarian
Network, which advocates sharing with communities
savings that result from falling crime. The plan,
"it takes a village to prevent a crime", offers
communities a deal: it gives the community an
estimate of the public cost caused by crimes
committed on its turf. If the community agrees to
fight crime, and if as a result crime falls in the
following year, the community is awarded half the
savings. These can be used for shared purposes,
from building a playground to a swimming pool, but
not for projects for the benefit of individuals.
This further enhances the communal bonds, which in
turn enables the community to combat crime.

These measures are not meant to supplant the
conservatives' law-and-order measures or the
liberals' job-creation. Communities are partners
which can shoulder an important part of
maintaining public safety, but they can hardly
combat it single-handedly. One should note that
for many crime-fighting purposes, police are
over-skilled and expensive. It is best to draw as
much as possible on alternative sources, and
sentence first offenders to community work rather
than jail.

When it comes to policing, a certainty of
punishment is more effective than extensive
punishment, and communities would be better off if
the numbers of cops and courts were increased,
rather than the number of jail cells. Jails should
accommodate more people, for shorter sentences, to
better effect. Providing the right jobs can
significantly reduce crime; unfortunately such
jobs are difficult for governments to produce,
especially for the areas in which violent crime is
most common. Yet law-and-order and socio-economic
cures have long been the focus of the debate over
the best ways to deal with crime. These have
overshadowed the importance of community as a
reinforcer of pro-social mores. Whatever portion
of crime community-based methods can prevent, they
eliminate it in ways that are low in cost and
humane.

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

Panel Two: 
The Roles of Federal, State, and Local Governments
and Communities in Revitalizing Neighborhoods and
in Addressing Local Public Safety Problems

Revitalizing Communities and Reducing Crime

Robert L. Woodson, Sr.

To reduce crime and revitalize communities, it is
necessary to develop a strategy that can
effectively intervene in the cycle of violence
before it claims the next generation. A primary
focus of our efforts, therefore, should be to
reach and guide our Nation's youths who now, by
the age of 18, confront more crucial moral
decisions than their parents' generation faced in
an entire lifetime.

A model of effective youth intervention does
exist. There are hundreds of men and women
throughout the country who have the proven
capacity to provide the guidance and example that
have the power to redirect at-risk youths to
productive and positive activities. The importance
and unique power of these dedicated community
leaders can be appreciated best in light of the
scope of the problems experienced by today's
youths and the dismal track record of many
conventional, professionally designed programs for
at-risk youths.[1]

A Generation in Jeopardy

Throughout the Nation, crimes committed by
juveniles, who often express a haunting sense of
indifference, have created a public perception
that a portion of the upcoming generation is
already lost--beyond help. Reports and statistical
analyses also reveal that the epidemic of
spiritual malaise and violence is not an isolated
"inner-city" problem and that it is affecting
families of every income level. Throughout the
Nation, youths from suburban neighborhoods and
rural communities, like inner-city youths, are
wasting, losing, and taking their lives. Five
thousand children die each year as a result of
assaults, illness, or suicide.[2] It is projected
that 1 in 7 youths who are now between the ages of
10 and 18 will run away from home. Each year, 1.5
million young people are living on the streets.[3]
Many of these children turn to the drug trade or
prostitution as a source of money.

Trends in behavioral choices among adolescents
indicate that the crisis will grow worse if
effective intervention and support are not
provided. In a recent survey of eighth graders,
one-third of the respondents said they use illicit
drugs and 15 percent said they had drunk more than
five alcoholic beverages in a row in the preceding
2 weeks.[4] In 1996, the greatest increase in
birth to adolescents was to girls younger than 15
years old. The firearms homicide rate among 10-
through 14-year-olds more than doubled between
1985 and 1992, and suicide rates for these youths
increased by 120 percent from 1980 to 1992.[5]

Clearly, our Nation's conventional responses to
the problems of youth violence have not been
effective in spite of the millions of dollars that
have been invested in them. Researchers project
that juvenile arrests for violent crime will more
than double by 2010. A recent nationwide survey
reported that gang membership in the United States
has grown to more than 650,000 youths who are
involved in 25,000 gangs. In response, a massive
crackdown was launched by the FBI, which created
133 task forces that resulted in 92,000 arrests
and 35,000 convictions nationwide throughout a
4-year period.[6] Yet in many cases, these arrests
did no more than move a "bubble" of crime to a new
location. In the words of one corrections officer
in a State where half of a 38,000-person prison
population has been identified as gang members,
"The problem does not go away. When the community
gets rid of its gang problem, that problem is then
transferred to the correctional institution. In
fact, it becomes more intensified."[7]

To date, most resources and efforts to rescue our
Nation's children have been targeted to inner-city
populations. Young people in low-income
neighborhoods have felt the most severe impact of
the moral free-fall that is afflicting the next
generation because their communities lack the
economic stability that has provided a temporary
buffer for middle- and upper-income youths. Yet,
although millions of dollars have been invested in
programs for inner-city at-risk youths, many of
these projects have had little impact on the
crisis.

Consider, for example, the case of a teenager in
Washington, D.C., who murdered a taxi driver. The
youth was sent to a psychiatric treatment center
in a resort town in upstate New York where he
received $100,000-a-year therapy. After several
months of therapy, he simply walked away from the
facility, returned to the District, and committed
a second murder at a convenience store just blocks
away from the first homicide. Psychiatrists who
had treated the youth argued they had made
progress because he reportedly expressed regret
regarding the second murder.

Pitfalls of Conventional Approaches

The failures of a number of professional programs
that have been launched for at-risk youths will
show us that there is a need for a fundamental
change in our approach to the problem, not that
the situation is hopeless. There are at least four
reasons why many conventional approaches have not
been effective.

--Many conventional programs have been designed on
the mistaken premise that the source of the
problems faced by young people is external and
that the root causes of the current youth crisis
are economic and financial. It is assumed that if
young people are simply offered employment and
adequate educational opportunities, the crisis
will eventually be resolved.

The spread of the youth problems across all income
brackets provides evidence that the problem is not
the result of economic and social disadvantage
alone. Even when the economy of our Nation hit
bottom in the Great Depression, families and
communities remained strong, and young people did
not suffer the alienation and anxiety they suffer
today.

The problems affecting our Nation's youth are
fundamentally spiritual and moral in nature.
Community leaders who have addressed the crisis as
a spiritual problem have been remarkably effective
in changing the lives of the young people they
serve. The most powerful agents of transformation
are grassroots leaders whose outreach rests on
principles of personal responsibility and
reciprocity. Most of their efforts are faith-based
and are guided by a steadfast conviction in the
God-given potential of every human being. These
neighborhood-based initiatives stand in sharp
contrast to the conventional social service
industry that, in essence, rewards deviance. The
clients of conventional social services are
identified only in terms of their deficiencies. If
you are unwed and pregnant, there is a program for
you. If you are addicted to drugs or alcohol,
there is a program.

Effective community outreach, on the other hand,
is aligned with the principles implied in the
parable of the prodigal son. In order to be
rewarded, young people are first expected to
fundamentally change their attitude, values, and
behavior. In the parable, a young man demands his
share of his father's household, only to waste it
away through a life of debauchery and immediate
gratification. The father's heart may have been
broken as he witnessed his son reaching his lowest
point in life, lonely and impoverished. Yet, he
could not embrace his son unless he first "came to
himself" and underwent an internal transformation
through repentance and resolve. Otherwise, the
father's embrace could have been perceived as
sanctioning his son's debauchery.

In the same way, grassroots leaders first lead the
youths they work with to a point of conversion,
where they personally accept responsibility for
their wrongdoings and determine to change.
Conventional programs for youths apply therapy and
environmental modifications to produce a change in
behavior, but the change is often temporary. When
many "rehabilitated" youths reenter their old
environments, they adapt to them and revert to
their previous behavior. In contrast, faith-based
neighborhood programs have the power to produce a
lasting, substantial, internal transformation.
This conversion then results in a long-lasting,
consistent change in behavior. When "transformed"
youths go back to their old environments, many are
not only able to resist their influence but often
bring about a major transformation in their
communities.

--Academic degrees and professional credentials
have been considered necessary prerequisites of
"experts" who should be entrusted to solve
societal problems.

In the arena of social policy, firsthand
experience and personal commitment are not
considered to be an essential part of a credible
resume. Many authors who have reaped profits from
books on the crisis of today's young people did
not even talk with their subjects before
pontificating on their problems. Professional
sociologists, psychologists, and academicians who
have negligible personal experience of, and have
had no impact on the problems they talk about,
have dominated lecture circuits and television
shows. Meanwhile, the true experts--those who have
proven track records of success in solving the
problems--have been ignored.

In arenas including gang activity, unwed teen
parenting, and substance abuse, many of the most
effective agents of change are individuals who
have personally experienced and overcome the
problems they encourage others to overcome. Their
daily lives provide a practical example of the
values and standards they promote, and their
unwavering, long-term commitment to the young
people they serve has won the confidence, trust,
and respect of youths, even those who had been
considered incorrigible by the social service
system. In spite of their effectiveness, in many
cases regulations have prohibited such grassroots
volunteers from providing services in their
neighborhoods because they lack academic degrees
or professional certification.

--"Rescuing" a young person from his or her
environment may not be the solution.

The rescue mode of conventional programs ignores
the value-generating, mediating structures that
exist within the youths' own communities
(families, neighborhood associations, etc.) and
may, in fact, undermine and usurp them. It is
assumed that the solution lies in the beneficence
of those who are outside the community.

This is true even of the much-lauded mentor
programs, which frequently bypass parents and
neighbors. What message does a young person
receive through programs that are built on the
assumption that role models must be imported into
their homes and communities? The lives of young
people can-not be salvaged through outside
intervention that ignores the necessity of
supporting and strengthening their communities.
The key to establishing consistent and sustainable
support lies in using the indigenous, "natural
antibodies" of a community, which have the power
to ward off societal disease.

--Focusing on only one area of a complex of
interrelated problems may not work.

In contrast, personal neighborhood-based outreach
addresses the whole individual and the
interrelated factors that affect a person's life.
For example, one of the most effective substance
abuse programs I have encountered, the San
Antonio-based Victory Fellowship, does not focus
exclusively on eradicating drug and alcohol
addiction but also incorporates programs to
reunite and strengthen families, meet the needs of
the children of addicts, and provide educational
and employment opportunities. Through Victory
Fellowship's impressive Christian version of the
Boy Scouts, the Royal Rangers, young men who have
successfully overcome their addictions function as
role models for boys age 5 and older, guiding them
in projects of community service and civic
responsibility.

Recently, a collaboration of grassroots
initiatives in Washington called Hands Across DC
has created a model comprehensive strategy. Five
groups have joined forces to 'go deep' into
troubled neighborhoods, supporting the survivors
of homicide victims, equipping incarcerated men to
fulfill their responsibilities to their families
and communities, and providing productive
activities and educational opportunities for young
people.

Indigenous, grassroots, youth intervention
programs throughout the Nation have shown us that
solutions to this crisis exist. Neighborhood-based
strategies have been remarkably effective in
eliminating rather than simply displacing youth
violence. Accounts of their efforts show us,
however, that there is no shortcut to engendering
the change in young people's vision and values.
Such internal transformations are the harvest of
long-term consistent effort, around-the-clock
availability, and the personal example of adults
who have committed themselves to a calling to
salvage young lives.

Effective, Community-Based Youth Intervention

Two men, Leon Watkins in south central Los Angeles
and Carl Hardrick in Hartford, Connecticut, live
hundreds of miles apart but are linked by a common
commitment to salvage the lives of young people
from the lures of gangs and street violence. Both
of these men have been active for more than 20
years and have worked tirelessly with minimal
financial resources. Both have recognized that the
most effective way to influence gang members is
through existing youth leadership structures,
working with the leaders to establish peace and to
redirect activities of the group toward a positive
end. This is not an easy or safe venture. In the
volatile world of gang violence, street-savvy
youths demand authenticity and proven commitment
before they will enter a relationship of mutual
trust. Through consistent investment,
perseverance, and in spite of great personal risk,
both men have been able to have a significant
impact on the incidence of gang violence in their
communities.

Leon Watkins: Los Angeles, California

In 1979, Leon Watkins launched his effort to stop
the waste of young lives in senseless violence in
south central Los Angeles. He created the San
Pedro Business Association to develop alternative
activities and employment opportunities for
youths. In a door-to-door campaign to business
owners in the community, Leon enlisted support for
the jobs-creation project. In return for their
participation, Leon worked to protect store owners
who were often the targets of theft and extortion.
He posted reward notices throughout the community,
asking that any tips regarding crimes in the
neighborhood be reported to what he dubbed the
"Family Helpline." In time, this helpline would
become an anchor of information exchange and
crisis counseling for the community, but in the
beginning, the hotline was simply one man, Leon,
and a telephone booth.

Fearless, Watkins began his antiviolence efforts
by seeking out the leader of one of the city's
most notorious gangs, a youth whose street name
was Quake. Leon recalls:

I just put the word out on the streets that I was
looking for Quake, and then one day as I was
walking through an alley, a car pulled alongside
and one guy stepped out and was flanked by four of
his friends. He said he heard I was looking for
him and asked what I wanted to talk about. I just
answered, "about what you are doing with your
life." We talked that day, and then many other
times when I found him on the street. A
relationship began to build, and he could see that
what I was saying made sense. Gang life was a
one-way street to prison or a coffin. He was ready
to change, and he was willing to help me reach the
kids that were under his control.

The majority of Quake's gang members did respond
and followed his lead in participating in the
first graffiti removal project in the
neighborhood. There were some who didn't want to
stop "gang banging," but most, like Quake, were
ready to change. The graffiti was a constant
reminder of the lives that had been claimed in
turf wars. It was a powerful statement for the
gang members to paint over the graffiti. Since the
day of that historic cleanup project, Leon has
continued to reach and change the lives of young
people. In the following statement, he describes
an attitude that is necessary to win the response
of gang members:

Before you come into a young person's life,
telling him to change, you must understand the
vital role that gang membership plays in his life.
You have to recognize the value that the gang has
in the eyes of these young people, and you have to
give their reality its due respect. Many gang
members would literally rather die than renounce
this life, because it is the only place in their
entire lives where they have found respect. It is
the only culture that has embraced them. They have
been rejected by the larger society. Here in their
gangs, young people who have been abused in their
own homes have found a place to go where they will
not only be accepted but respected and where it is
possible for them to receive a rank of
accomplishment [different levels of leadership and
standing within the gang]. You cannot just walk in
and tell them to drop what they have found. If you
understand this, and respect it, you will have
some foundation to begin to talk with these kids,
and you can establish a level of communication
where they can hear what you have to say.

Some people just come in and criticize the gangs
and tell the kids how bad it is to be in a gang.
What are they offering as an alternative? What are
they telling those kids that they can do if they
leave their gangs? The kids already know what
society considers to be right or wrong. What we
fail to understand is the far-reaching impact of
despair. How can you measure the pain a person
feels when he is hurt and shut out from society?
When there is no trustable alternative, when they
have seen other lifestyles filled with hypocrisy,
all young people are susceptible to the call of
the gang. Recruitment begins in elementary
schools, and it knows no racial or economic
boundaries. Even a young boy singing in a choir
can be drawn to affiliate with this culture. All
the kids know about it. It is always there,
pulling them, and the first time they get into a
serious crisis, they will enter that culture.

I try to get to the most practical level. I work
with an individual until he can verbalize his own
personal goal. I try to uncover what his own dream
for his life is. I very seldom talk about negative
things when I talk with them about what they are
doing. I work on the premise that, deep inside,
they have a vision for what they could be, and I
work to pull out what they have inside and to make
them aware of the intelligence and talent they
possess. In most cases, I can sense that these
young people are in pain, deep pain. That pain
turns to anger, and it erupts in situations where
they lash out and begin killing each other. And a
cycle of violence begins. You have to cut through
all of this and get down to the individual. You
have to get him to the point where he can look at
himself and the overall picture. He has to believe
that he has a future and that he is worth
something.

Carl Hardrick: Hartford, Connecticut

Like Leon Watkins, Carl Hardrick began his youth
intervention efforts in the 1970s. Residents of
the Belleview Square community of Hartford were
being held in a virtual state of siege by warring
gangs. The elderly locked themselves inside their
homes and were afraid to come out. Only three
residents dared to come out to a public meeting in
the neighborhood about the rampant violence. Carl
describes the strategy he adopted to reach the
gangs. Similar to Leon Watkins' strategy, it
involved working through the gang structure and
its leader.

One of the most notorious gangs in Hartford in
1975 was the "Magnificent Twenties." Its leader
represented a huge population of nearly 1,100
youths who came from all over the city. Senior
citizens and other residents of the Belleview
Square community couldn't function. They locked
themselves in the house when they came home, and
they were afraid to come out. We had a meeting in
Belleview Square and only about two or three
people showed up. They told me that they were very
concerned about the gang and the violence that was
going down in the community.

At that point, I went out to seek the leadership
of the gang. The name that kept coming up was
Steven Holter. Steven was a young man who was
labeled as 'learning disabled,' yet he controlled
1,100 young men and was pretty much responsible
for their actions. I began to work with Steve and
talk about what he was doing.

There was another gang at that time that wasn't as
strong as Steve's but was pretty big, with a
membership of about 500. The two gangs were having
feuds and going at each other. What I attempted to
do with Steve was to talk about the things that he
was doing that were negative and to begin to work
with him to turn around to do positive things. As
I worked with the leadership, Steve, in turn,
worked with the youths who were directly under
him. The strategy I developed to work with the
gangs and my discovery of the things that work
started back then.

At that time, we were invited to attend a gang
workshop at the Urban League to talk about our
successes and to see what other people were doing.
That is where I first met Bob Woodson, who was
coordinating that first gang workshop. Sister
Falaka Fattah was there from the House of Umoja, a
gang intervention effort that reached thousands of
youths in Philadelphia. We also met "Fat Rob," a
former gang member who had played an important
role in addressing the problem of gang violence in
Philadelphia, and we began to exchange
information. We were able to dialogue with people
who were working with young people throughout the
Nation, and at that time Philadelphia had the
biggest gang problem. As the youths interacted,
they began to talk about what could be done to
stop the violence.

After that time, we established a good
relationship with the people in Philadelphia, and
Fat Rob would come to Hartford whenever there was
difficulty. Fat Rob was committed to making peace.
He was responsible for bringing all those brothers
to the table.

So that was the beginning of my work. We took a
negative situation, in a very explosive
environment, and we turned it into a positive.
Steven and his followers went from gang banging to
hosting dances in the community, providing escorts
for senior citizens, and sponsoring a youth day
and a community day. They served in every aspect
where there was a way for them to fit in. We found
out that when you give kids positive things to do,
you get positive results. It's difficult to
dismantle a gang. But you can change the attitude
and behavior of a gang, and once you do that, they
will change themselves.

As the years went on, these kids grew up. Some of
them went to school. Some went to college. Some of
them remained out there and went to jail. But the
majority of them got jobs and married and are
doing fine today.

In that process, we learned that Steve Holter and
Fat Rob had much in common and that they were
natural leaders. But we couldn't give them the
tools or the expertise that they needed to diffuse
a lot of what they saw was happening on the
streets. In a sense, they predicted what would be
happening now. Back in the '70s and '80s they
said, "If you think that we are tough, watch what
our little brothers will be like. They will be
much harder, much crueler, and much deadlier."

When we sought the reason that young people were
involved in gangs, we learned that the gangs
filled a gap that was left in the absence of solid
family and community structures. The gang
fulfilled the role of an extended family. The need
for this kind of relationship was natural, though
the gangs themselves turned to negative
activities.

The gang became an essential part of the lives of
many young people and we could not just step in
and tell them to leave those relationships behind.
Instead, our task was to work through the
leadership structures and network of influence to
lead the youths to positive behavior. Our first
challenge was to convince them to bring their
differences to the table--where they could talk
them out--rather than the streets where they
fought them out.

There are times when I am criticized for meeting
with gang members by people who would rather
address the problem through officials and
community representatives. But I know of a meeting
called by those officials that was organized with
3-months notice yet had only 8 participants.
Compare that with 1,300 who came to a meeting with
1-day notice. Compare the responses to those two
meetings and you will see who is controlling that
community.

To turn the situation around, you had to deal with
the leadership. In some cases, kids were being
forced into gang activity. When Steve Holter and I
visited schools and talked about making the right
decisions, kids would come up and ask, "What do
you do when someone comes up to you and puts a gun
to the side of your head and asks, 'Who are you
down with?' You would say 'I'm going with you.'"
You have to show the kids that what they are doing
is damaging to the community. You have to be there
for them and sacrifice for them until they believe
in you. And once you approach them, you have to be
in there for the long haul and offer solutions.

In Hartford, we were able to convince a number of
gang leaders, who had street names such as "Bird"
and "Bookman," that there is another way. They
were ready to change. They didn't want to continue
down a pathway to destruction. Yet, there was no
one to tell them how they could make that change.
When they did, the turnaround was remarkable. They
went from being enforcers to being peacemakers.
They knew that it was better to solve their
problems at the table than on the streets. I
believe that there were more people who wanted
peace than war, but no one was talking to these
young people. When you get them to the table and
clear up the confusion and find out what the real
issues are, you will get a sense that they all
want the same things. Then you can work together
to address those issues.

First, you have to establish yourself and show
your sincerity and commitment over time if the
young people are to respond. There is no shortcut
to that. It takes time and investment. It doesn't
happen overnight, but once there is visible
progress, the whole community will begin to
change. Once the young people declare, "This is
what we want to do," you can hold them to that. In
a sense, they will force themselves into doing the
right thing.

Often, when grassroots leaders approach government
agencies, they are questioned--not about their
outcomes and strategies but about their
credentials. When a city launches a program to do
gang mediation, the people who are successful with
the kids on the streets seldom apply for the job.
If these programs are to be effective, they should
value effective experience as much as certificates
and diplomas, and they should enlist the people
who can reach the youths who are making decisions.

The value of an intervention strategy is
determined by its fruits, its results. One of the
first gang leaders I worked with, Steve Holter, is
now the owner of a bonded construction company and
has currently been contracted for a $4-million
project. From a position of success, he is now
able to reach back and hire former gang members
and at-risk youths. He understands where they are
coming from. He sets down the rules, and then he
trusts them and assigns them the work. He knows
that someone once took the time and made the
investment to give him a break. I just wish that I
had more Steves, and that he had more work.

It is important, once the young people are willing
to turn themselves around, that you have
opportunities for them and that you can keep them
busy. In Hartford, the Upper Albany Neighborhood
Collaborative launched a project for youth
enterprises. Young people had entrepreneurial
skills and innovative ideas, but they were selling
the wrong products. This project came as a result
of an assessment we conducted on the
neighborhood's needs and capacities. It was one
example of how, with proper support, young people
can turn their negatives into positives.

The kids responded immediately. They wrote
business plans and even talked of franchising some
services. Former gang members came up with
detailed plans for small enterprises such as
Jeanie's laundromat, Bird's bakery, and Bookman's
barbershop. But now that [entrepreneurial] project
is on hold. The most pressing need was for capital
investment. Conventional lending institutions did
not want to take the risk involved in new
businesses such as these. Even if the project has
come to a halt, the kids are still looking forward
to these enterprises: they still have their
dreams.

The strategies that were successful in Hartford
can work in other cities as well. I wish we could
take a corps of these young people and "go deep"
into other cities, staying there for a year and
setting the foundation for things to turn around.
Kids from other cities will respond to what the
former gang members from Hartford have to say
because they can relate to them, and they
recognize leadership. The ones who have come
through successfully have "been there." They did
it. They know the situation that other kids are
in, and they also know the consequences of not
falling in line.

A transformation could spread in the same way that
destructive behavior spread. When the Crips and
Bloods spread out from Los Angeles, they were
organized around violent gang enforcement. The
same network and organization can apply in a
positive direction.

It's important to reach the kids before they go to
prison or get involved in the kinds of activities
that will take them to prison. Once you have
identified the youths who are ready to change and
you start working with them, they will respond.
They really don't want to live a life on the line.
There is a "ripple" effect from the kids who turn
their lives around. Once Steve Holter made that
change, he was able to reach thousands of other
young people I couldn't reach. As each young
person is helped, they will pass on the baton.
That is why you can anticipate expanding results.
There is power when someone says, "That is where I
was. I used to do that, but I'm not doing it
anymore, and let me tell you why."

Acknowledging Grassroots Victories

In spite of the remarkable success of
neighborhood-based initiatives for at-risk youths,
grassroots outreach has received little public
recognition. Typically, even the most effective
programs have received one of the following
responses: they are ignored, they are dismissed as
chance occurrences of charismatic leadership, or
they are awarded token accolades rather than
substantial support. It is said that, when
compared to the scale of the problem, their
successes are limited.

Rather than dismissing the success of these
grassroots efforts, we should be investing all of
our energy and resources to learn how we can
expand, multiply, and "export" their effective
strategies. We should treat their victories as we
would treat a medical breakthrough. If, for
example, in laboratory experiments, just three out
of hundreds of mice that were exposed to the AIDS
virus were discovered to be immune from the
disease, all resources would be invested in an
effort to understand what factors contributed to
their survival. Their case would inspire hope and
would be on the front pages of newspapers
throughout the world.

The success of grassroots leaders such as Leon
Watkins and Carl Hardrick has precedents in
community-based outreach that has been going on
for more than two decades. One of these precedents
is the effective youth intervention strategy that
was employed in the city of Philadelphia during
the summer of 1973. At that time, the city was
paralyzed with fear as small gangs of marauding
black youths arbitrarily targeted citizens on the
streets and in shopping malls. In what police
termed as "wolf pack" attacks, the victims were
knocked to the ground and stripped of rings,
watches, gold chains, wallets, and purses.

A virtual reign of terror spread as reports of the
attacks were published and other youths joined in
the melee. Because these robberies were not
connected to organized gangs and occurred
sporadically, police and law enforcement officials
found it impossible to predict or contain the rash
of attacks. Neither increased police patrols nor
emergency funding to traditional social service
institutions had any impact on the problem. As the
city was held hostage in this crime wave, movie
theaters closed early, stores and shopping centers
shut down, and many civic events were canceled.
Public officials were at a point of hopelessness
when two grassroots leaders stepped forward with a
unique strategy. Within 1 day of the
implementation of their plan, the attacks ceased
and never again resumed.

Valuable guidelines for addressing the current
epidemic of youth crime and gang violence can be
gained by studying who it was who solved
Philadelphia's crisis and the resources they
enlisted in their solution. The agents of this
successful strategy, David and Falaka Fattah, were
well-known veteran community activists who had
discovered that one of their own six sons was an
active gang member. At that time, Philadelphia was
known as the youth gang capital of the Nation.
Newspapers published statistics of victims of gang
violence weekly next to the death tolls of the
Vietnam war.

In responding to their son's gang activity, the
Fattahs reached out to embrace his circle of
friends rather than trying to isolate him from
them, inviting 13 of the youths to come to live
with them in their small row house in West
Philadelphia. This informal arrangement blossomed
into a gang rescue program called the House of
Umoja.

Word of the safe haven soon spread on the streets,
and the number of young gang members seeking
asylum steadily increased. Within a few years, the
influence of the Fattahs' outreach spread
throughout the entire city, and they were able to
coordinate a citywide peace pact that dramatically
reduced the annual number of gang-related
homicides. The Fattahs brought this established
reputation and foundation of trust and respect
with them when they came to the table to address
the crisis of the wolf-pack attacks. Their first
step was to call in the "experts" with invaluable
street experience, former gang members--the "Old
Heads" or "OGs"--they had worked with. This group
suggested a collaborative effort with their
counterparts who were incarcerated at the local
prison, the "House of Correction."

When the Fattahs sent out a call for help in
stopping the violence, more than 130 inmates
signed up to join a crime-prevention task force.
The prisoners identified young people who were
influential on their "corners" in their
neighborhoods who were invited to a conference at
the prison the following Saturday. The response
was overwhelming. On the day of the conference,
buses ferried more than 300 youths to the prison.
After hearing presentations from the inmates on
personal responsibility and moral obligation, the
group broke up into smaller workshops and
discussion groups focused on ending the violence.
The following day peace prevailed.

Although the Fattahs and their group received
official recognition from the mayor, the
acknowledgment of their unique ability to reach
the city's young people was more ceremonial than
substantive. When funds were later allocated for
crime prevention or youth services, they were
designated for conventional social service
programs and for increased police patrols. The
Fattahs were applauded but then ignored.

Our national strategy, likewise, has failed to
provide substantial support for alternative
grassroots responses to youth crime and gang
activity, in spite of its undeniable
effectiveness. While plaques may be bestowed on
numerous successful neighborhood-based antigang
efforts, there has been no effort to develop
structures that can harness the capacities of
grassroots initiatives to sustain and expand their
impact. Instead, as in the case of the Fattahs,
massive funding has been channeled to conventional
social programs, therapeutic treatment, police
interdiction, and incarceration.

We cannot afford to continue to ignore our most
powerful agents of healing and transformation. The
Nation's attention should be focused on the impact
that these models of excellence have had on the
youths in their communities. All our energies and
resources should be invested in understanding how
successes that have been achieved in low-income
neighborhoods could be adapted and applied
throughout society. Until now, we have been
unwilling to study the strategies of grassroots
leaders who have claimed a beachhead in the battle
against youth crime and gang activity. Men and
women who have reached and changed the lives of
hundreds of young people have accomplished
dramatic results, against the greatest odds, with
meager resources. If we were to invest in them
just a small portion of what we have squandered on
ineffective, top-down programs, we could salvage
the future of the next generation.

Exporting and Adapting a Successful Youth
Intervention Model

Recently, a remarkably effective grassroots youth
intervention effort in one of Washington, D.C.'s,
most crime-ridden areas has alerted policymakers
and law enforcement officials to the power of
neighborhood healing agents.

The Benning Terrace public housing development
appeared a hopeless case to David Gilmore, the
official in charge of Washington, D.C.'s, public
housing, when he conducted his first tour of the
properties that were entrusted to his management.
His driver refused to turn into Benning Terrace
and opted to merely slow down as they passed the
site, which was notorious for its violence: 59
homicides had been reported in a 5-month period.
Gilmore recounts, "I saw the devastated conditions
that have been a day-to-day reality for families
for many, many months, perhaps even years. The
area was filthy, ill-maintained, and ill-equipped.
It was silent and deserted, with one exception.
The stoop of one unit was guarded by a group of
fierce-looking young men. With their caps pulled
down, huddled in big Starter jackets, even in the
sweltering summer heat, their message was clear:
'We dare you to approach us.'" At that time,
Gilmore believed that he had only one option for
dealing with this property. He would tear the
buildings down and disperse their residents to
other locations.

In spite of the hopelessness of the scenario in
the summer of 1997, those buildings were not
razed, and, though they remain, today the site
bears little resemblance to the scene Gilmore
encountered scarcely more than a year ago. The
graffiti that once defaced those buildings is
gone. Well-planned flower beds and lawns have
replaced litter-strewn lots. Neighbors chat on
their front stoops and little children are
everywhere--playing on a once-desolate football
field, riding bicycles, and practicing basketball
shots. The members of youth factions whose turf
wars had once virtually held the residents hostage
still reside in the development, but they, too,
are scarcely recognizable. In Gilmore's words,
"Today, there is not only life and laughter in the
community, but there is light and hope beginning
to shine in the eyes of those young men. Their
dreams and aspirations had always been there, but
now they have been awakened. They have been given
the opportunity to step back from the conflict and
to see who they really are. Recently, two of those
once-calloused young men risked their lives and
suffered injuries to pull babies from a burning
unit in their development. They possess more heart
than you can imagine, and they have a desire to
live."

The agents of this transformation are members of a
grassroots organization, the Alliance of Concerned
Men, which evolved from a common commitment that
five men made to help the next generation of young
men deal with the lures of gangs, drugs, and crime
that had once nearly claimed their own lives. The
Alliance first became affiliated with the National
Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (NCNE) as
members of a project entitled Hands Across DC. The
eight participants in this project are
Washington-based grassroots initiatives ranging
from safehouses and youth intervention programs to
support groups for families of homicide victims.
Hands Across DC provided two types of linkage.
Internally, participants shared ideas, strategies,
and encouragement with one another. Externally,
connections were made with private institutions
and individuals who could provide resources for
their efforts.

The Alliance was aware that NCNE's nationwide
network of community-based programs included a
number of counterparts that had implemented
effective strategies to quell gang warfare. When
youth violence at Benning Terrace climaxed with
the abduction and murder of a 12-year-old boy, the
members of the Alliance made a commitment to go
into that community and devote themselves to
stopping the violence. They requested NCNE's
assistance in coordinating communication with
other youth intervention programs as a first step
in developing their strategy.

NCNE arranged for a conference call between
members of the Alliance and two other grassroots
youth intervention "experts"--Carl Hardrick, who
has worked with youths in Hartford, Connecticut,
for more than 20 years, and Omar Jahwar, a
23-year-old in Dallas, Texas, who established an
antiviolence youth development program that has
instilled a sense of vision and value in hundreds
of young people, both within correctional
institutions and in the community.

The advice given by these grassroots leaders
coincided with the experience and natural
instincts of the Alliance: to reach the youths and
win their trust, they should identify and work
through the established leaders of each of the
youth factions. The men went into the neighborhood
and went to the homes of residents who were
familiar with them and their work. The residents
told the Alliance which youths were influential,
and they arranged for them to meet and talk with
these leaders. After a period of consistent
outreach by the Alliance, the youths admitted that
they wanted the killing to stop but didn't know
how to begin: unilateral disarmament seemed the
equivalent of suicide.

The Alliance convinced representatives from each
faction to meet to discuss the possibility of a
peace pact. The offices of NCNE were neutral
territory where the talks could be held. A series
of closed-door meetings were held in which the
youths worked out terms of a truce. The Alliance
performed the role of facilitator as the young men
described their vision for what the neighborhood
could be and listed the resources that they
thought would be needed to bring revitalization to
their community: Among these were a recreation
center and the means for themselves and their
families to travel beyond the neighborhood
boundaries.

On January 29, 1997, a peace pact was forged, and
NCNE went into swift action to alert the press,
hoping that media coverage of this victory would
elicit private-sector support for the renewal of
the community. The story of Benning Terrace
appeared in news media from the New York Times,
Washington Post, and Washington Times to ABC News.
While the story engendered inspiration and hope,
it evoked little concrete support--with the
exception of the response of public housing
official David Gilmore, who was moved to offer
crucial opportunities for job training and
employment to the young men who were at a
vulnerable point in their transformation. The
youths eagerly embraced jobs such as landscaping,
graffiti removal, and repair work for $6.50 an
hour, dispelling the notion that they would never
give up a lucrative life of crime or drug trade
for low-paying but steady jobs.

One of the greatest skeptics of the truce, a gang
leader named Derrick who had been dubbed by police
as one of the seven most dangerous individuals in
the District, became one of its most faithful
converts. He would rise early to inspect and water
the flower beds his crew had planted before
reporting for work. Another young man who was
inspired by the potential of a job training
opportunity exhibited remarkable determination to
complete his course. When his car broke down, he
rode a bicycle to his classes. When even the bike
broke down, he picked it up and literally carried
it to the job training site.

Through the committed efforts of the Alliance, the
lives of 35 young men and their families have been
changed forever. A newspaper column recently
recounted how one newly employed young man
literally broke into tears as he signed health
insurance papers for his little daughters,
realizing that, for the first time, he could
provide them with security and reliable support.

The courageous intervention of the Alliance of
Concerned Men, supported by the National Center
for Neighborhood Enterprise, has yielded the
following results:

--Thirty-five young men have rejected a lifestyle
that destroyed their neighborhood and have become
productive, contributing members of their
community.

--A cycle of despair and violence has been stopped
and reversed as young fathers take responsibility
for their children and older youths function as
positive role models for youngsters in the
neighborhood.

--A community once considered off-limits for
business ventures or services is now "open for
business."

--To date, the housing authority projects cost
savings of nearly $2 million from this
intervention, at a site that was previously slated
for demolition due to crime that was deemed
uncontrollable. This immediate assistance from the
housing authority provided a "missing link" that
previous grassroots youth crime interventions have
lacked due to bureaucratic indifference to such
efforts in many cities.

--A model of youth intervention has been
established that can be exported and adapted in
other cities and regions throughout the Nation.
The truce between rival youth factions that was
brokered by the Alliance with NCNE support has
become a catalyst for initiation of other youth
peacemaking efforts by the Alliance in 10
crime-ridden Washington, D.C., public housing
sites to date.

Policy Recommendations

The grassroots intervention at Benning Terrace has
received consistent support from Eric Holder, who
offered his offices as a former U.S. Attorney and
as the current Deputy Attorney General to support
law enforcement partnerships with the youth
initiative. A new effort with the Washington,
D.C., Metropolitan Police Department--Operation
Fresh Start--could serve as a model for bringing
formerly delinquent youths through a process of
legal validation as a reward for renouncing
destructive behaviors. Through this program,
youths receive counsel and guidance to deal with
past offenses and outstanding child support
payments.

On May 8, 1997, House Judiciary Committee Chairman
Henry Hyde and Ranking Minority Member John
Conyers convened a full committee hearing to
examine the policy implications of this grassroots
youth intervention success. In addition to the
Alliance of Concerned Men, Carl Hardrick of the
Hartford Youth Peace Initiative, Leon Watkins of
the Los Angeles Family Helpline, and their
counterparts from other cities were invited to
testify. The Judiciary Committee leadership has
committed itself to a partnership with NCNE to
fully examine the national policy implications of
this grassroots youth crime intervention.

With the support of the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD), NCNE has commenced
planning for the Hartford Youth Peace Initiative
and hired a third-party evaluator to document
program results. A "best practices" manual and
tool kit will be developed for use in other
high-crime housing sites around the country.

Among the policy recommendations NCNE is making
are the following:

--A seven-city National Demonstration of
Grassroots Youth Crime Intervention Success should
be established, with the goal of creating
"Violence Free Zones" similar to the Benning
Terrace intervention in Washington, D.C. NCNE is
already planning the intervention in four of the
cities (Hartford, Dallas, Los Angeles, and the
District of Columbia). With appropriate
investment, NCNE is prepared to establish a
3-year, multisite demonstration through a
public-private partnership in support of local
grassroots anticrime initiatives that could be
fully documented in terms of cost savings as well
as its impact in reducing the death rate among
at-risk youths.

--The District of Columbia Housing Authority's
affirmative support for the grassroots youth crime
intervention success at Benning Terrace should be
examined by policymakers as a model for public
housing agencies nationwide. NCNE is in the
process of capturing this process through a best
practices manual supported by HUD.

--Operation Fresh Start should be supported by the
U.S. Department of Justice for replication in
other communities, as a vehicle to "mainstream"
youths who are making the constructive transition
from violent to productive citizens and
"ambassadors of peace" to other communities.

--The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention's antidrug technical assistance voucher
program operated by NCNE can serve as a model of
support to build capacity for grassroots youth
crime initiatives. The procedures and lessons
learned from this national initiative could be
incorporated as an eligible activity within State
juvenile justice block grants.

--The prohibition of effective faith-based drug
treatment programs for juvenile delinquents should
be removed through reform of archaic and
counterproductive licensing and credentialing
requirements. In addition, "Charitable Choice"
provisions, which bar discrimination against
faith-based drug treatment programs, should be
expanded to include all forms of Federal antidrug
assistance.

The biggest hurdle that remains to be overcome is
a prejudice against information and experience
offered by the untutored, the uncredentialed, the
unanointed. For the sake of this Nation, we must
overcome the elitism that is at the core of this
bias. We must have the wisdom to listen and learn
from the men and women who, with quiet tenacity,
have established track records of success and
effectiveness in addressing our Nation's most
critical problems. We must have the humility to
recognize them as our guides and to provide the
support they will need to continue and expand
their efforts.

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

Notes

1. National Network of Runaways and Youth
Services, telephone conversation, March 1995.

2. Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development.

3. National Network of Runaways and Youth
Services, telephone conversation, March 1995.

4. Studies prepared for "Great Transitions:
Preparing Adolescents for a New Century," The
Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1995.

5. Ibid.

6. Greene, Marcia Slacum, "Outside Allegiances
Exert Lethal Force, Even Behind Bars," Washington
Post, September 9, 1996, A01.

7. Ibid.

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

Cooling the Hot Spots of Homicide: A Plan for
Action

Lawrence W. Sherman

The most useful role the Federal Government can
play in decreasing crime is to develop and support
effective methods for reducing gun violence in
national hot spots of homicide. While other goals
are important, this one is by far the most
important. It is also the most challenging. It
requires that we put recent good news into
context, that we understand the geographic
concentrations of gun violence, that we rethink
the current patterns of Federal spending, and that
we focus on learning about what works in the small
number of neighborhoods that suffer most of the
gun violence.

Good News in Context

The good news is that homicide rates are dropping.
The decreases are substantial. They are long term.
And they are concentrated in the inner-city
poverty areas where homicide increased in epidemic
proportions in the late 1960s and late 1980s. New
York City experienced a drop from 2,262 homicides
in 1992 to 767 in 1997, a two-thirds decrease. The
number of homicides in Los Angeles in 1997 dropped
more than 40 percent from 1993, when they hovered
around 1,000. In 1997, Washington, D.C., had the
lowest homicide count in a decade at slightly over
300, down from almost 400 the year before (Roane,
1998; Suro, 1997).

The bad news is that homicide rates in urban areas
of concentrated poverty remain far higher than
they are in the rest of the United States. Our
national homicide rate therefore remains far
higher than it is in any other economically
advanced nation. Although the rates of
white-on-white homicide in the rural United States
remain much higher than national homicide rates in
many other comparable nations (Zimring and
Hawkins, 1997: 80), the extraordinarily high
concentrations of homicide in certain inner-city
areas drive the national homicide rate to a degree
that few Americans appreciate.

The Rocky Mountains and the Prairie

The geographic distribution of homicide can be
compared to the geographic distribution of
elevation in the United States. Consider an
elevation map of the country. Most of us recognize
the familiar bulge of the Eastern mountains in the
Appalachian chain and the high peaks of the Rocky
Mountains in the West. Few are surprised that the
highest mountain in the United States is Mount
McKinley in Alaska at 20,320 feet and that Death
Valley in California is the lowest point at 282
feet below sea level.

What many people find surprising is that the
average elevation of the United States is 2,500
feet, even though most Americans live far below
that average. (For comparison, the average
elevation of Washington, D.C., is 150 feet above
sea level.) Forty-two States have average
elevations lower than the national average, and
only Denver and a few other cities have large
populations at or above the average elevation. It
is safe to assume that 90 percent or more of all
Americans live below the average elevation
(Wright, 1992: 47).

It is equally safe to assume that 90 percent or
more of all Americans live within census tracts or
small geographical neighborhoods where the
homicide rate is well below the national average.
Even in cities like Chicago, the homicide rate in
middle-class neighborhoods such as Hyde Park is
comparable to that of Sweden and is 80 percent
lower than the national average. Yet 100 yards to
the south of Hyde Park lies Woodlawn, where the
homicide rate in 1996 was 12 times the national
average (Crime Prevention Effectiveness Program,
ongoing research).

The cumulative effect of neighborhoods like
Woodlawn on the overall homicide rate is similar
to the effect of the Rocky Mountains on the mean
elevation of the United States. Almost half (44
percent) of all homicides in 1996 occurred in only
47 of approximately 14,000 police jurisdictions in
the United States (Federal Bureau of
Investigation, 1997). The concentration within
those cities is almost as great. A recent
University of Maryland survey of homicides by
census tract in large cities found that less than
1 percent of the U.S. population produced more
than 10 percent of the homicides (Crime Prevention
Effectiveness Program, ongoing research).

Most Americans live at a very low risk of
homicide, by both national and world standards. If
we want to reduce homicide in America, we would be
ill advised to spread our resources equally across
the entire Nation. If we want to lower our average
elevation, we would be ill advised to bulldoze the
prairie simply because more land mass is there.
Knocking down the mountain peaks would lower the
average elevation far more effectively.

The case for focusing on homicide is very strong.
As Zimring and Hawkins (1997) have shown, the
rates of most types of crime in the United States
are as low or lower than they are in other
advanced economies. Even the rate of all violent
crimes is lower in the United States than it is in
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Crime
Prevention Effectiveness Program, ongoing
research). What gives the United States its
reputation as a high-crime country are its
homicides and robberies, which comprise only a
small fraction of all violent crimes. The United
States has a very high rate among the advanced
economies for these crimes and these alone,
although even these rates are lower than in many
developing nations.

Serious injuries from gun violence remain
unmeasured in the national crime data, but such
injuries are believed to closely track homicide
rates. These injuries occur at several times the
rate of homicides and cause far more pain and
suffering through disability and lifetime impact
on quality of life. Economic costs of these
injuries make gun violence among the most
expensive of all crimes (Crime Prevention
Effectiveness Program, ongoing research). Crime
prevention programs could easily pay for
themselves in reduced health and social welfare
expenditures of tax dollars if effective programs
focused on the peaks, or hot spots, of gun
violence. But that is far from how Federal dollars
are focused at present.

The Spending Mismatch

Almost $4 billion per year in Federal crime
prevention assistance is given out primarily on
the basis of population rather than homicide
rates. Put bluntly, the money goes where the votes
are, not where the crime is. If we divide the
number of dollars of Federal aid based on
population by the number of homicides, we see that
four of the lowest homicide States get almost $1
million in Federal aid per homicide, while a city
with an above-average homicide rate like Mobile,
Alabama, gets only $200,000 per homicide, and the
highest homicide rate neighborhood in Chicago gets
only $6,000 per homicide (Crime Prevention
Effectiveness Program, ongoing research).

This distribution does not reflect the
concentration of homicide in America. In 1996,
there were almost as many homicides in Mobile,
Alabama (51), as there were in New Hampshire (20),
Vermont (11), South Dakota (9), and North Dakota
(14) combined. Yet with only 207,000 residents in
Mobile and 3.1 million in these 4 States, a
population-based formula allocates 15 times as
much Federal funding per homicide to the low-crime
areas. Compared to West Garfield Park in Chicago,
these 4 States receive approximately 150 times as
much Federal aid per homicide (Crime Prevention
Effectiveness Program, ongoing research).

Even within States and cities, there is no formula
requirement to put Federal money where the
homicides are. Even the one Federal program (Local
Law Enforcement Block Grants) that takes crime
explicitly into account in allocating funding
makes no attempt to direct funds to the highest
crime neighborhoods (Crime Prevention
Effectiveness Program, ongoing research). It is
entirely legal, although arguably a missed
opportunity, to spend Federal funds outside of the
areas that need them the most--again because those
areas in need may lack sufficient political clout.

Learning What Works

Even if Federal funds were spent in the areas of
greatest need, there is no guarantee that
"throwing money" at the homicide rates will reduce
them. "Throwing knowledge" at the problems,
however, could do more good. The role for which
the Federal Government is uniquely suited is as
the producer of such knowledge, through the proven
methods of trial and error, research, and
development.

Nowhere is the distinction between money and
know-how more apparent than in the Woodlawn area
of Chicago. At a rate of 91 homicides per 100,000
residents (or 21 homicides among its estimated
23,000 people), Woodlawn is not the highest
homicide peak in the Chicago mountain range; that
distinction went to West Garfield Park in 1996, at
217 homicides per 100,000 residents, almost 30
times the national average rate (Crime Prevention
Effectiveness Program, ongoing research). But the
Woodlawn rate is important for what it says about
our capacity to use community organizations and
government intervention to decrease crime and
revitalize communities. If there is any
neighborhood in America that has attempted or
received more efforts of that kind in the past
three decades, I would be surprised.

Despite the resources and the community control
that have been created in Woodlawn, the homicide
rate remains far too high. So what is to be done?
My distinguished former colleague George Kelling
has recently suggested that communities need to do
many things, but they do not need social science
evaluations to guide them in choosing effective
policies (COSSA Washington Update, 1997). Offered
by the leader of one of the most important social
science evaluations in history, the Kansas City
Preventive Patrol Experiment (Kelling et al.,
1974), Kelling's opinion on this question is very
important, although I disagree with it.

The reasons we have failed to see a good return on
Federal investment in many hot spots of homicide
are complex and manifold. One reason is that we
have failed to approach the process
systematically, in a way that allows us to learn
from our mistakes. It is often said that a nation
capable of putting people on the moon ought to be
able to solve its homicide problem. Yet it is
rarely said that we have failed to use careful
methods of controlled testing in our attempts to
deal with homicide. Had we used the same sloppy
methods on the space program, we would still be
trying to get a rocket off the ground.

Crime prevention programs need evaluations as
their primary purpose, not as an afterthought.
Until we know what works, our primary task is to
answer that question and not just throw in
everything but the kitchen sink. Once we know what
works and what doesn't work, we can do more of the
former and less of the latter. But if we disregard
the need for evaluation, we will be fooling around
with the problem from here to eternity.

This point is most important when defining the
Federal role. It is arguable as to whether the
Federal Government should redistribute income to
support effective homicide prevention programs in
high-homicide areas. After all, that can also be
done by States and cities. But what the States and
cities cannot do is launch national tests of
effective methods. Such field tests are absolutely
vital, yet they have never been done.

As a matter of science, it is essential to study
what scientists call the "unit of analysis." To
attack the homicide problem in the United States
and learn what works, we must focus on the
relevant unit of analysis: the hot-spot
neighborhoods where most homicides are
concentrated. Most federally funded evaluations of
programs in such neighborhoods have examined them
one at a time. As a matter of scientific method,
that is a woefully inadequate approach and may be
a major waste of money. Unless we start to use
larger samples of homicide hot spots, including
multicity experiments, we will remain uncertain
about what works to reduce gun violence.

A Plan for Action

The following steps are not easy to accomplish,
but they do offer the best prospect for the
long-term capacity of this Nation to control its
number one crime problem: the high rate of
homicides. If we fail to take these steps, we will
watch homicide rates rise and fall without any
knowledge of what causes them to change. If we do
take these steps, we can start to build on what
the National Institute of Justice and other
federally funded research has already shown about
the patterns and control of crime (Sherman et al.,
1997). To summarize, the steps include:

1. Putting the money where the homicides are.
Census tracts or other small geographical areas
with homicide rates five or more times higher than
the national average should receive at least half
of all Federal crime prevention funding.

2. Making evaluation the primary purpose of
Federal aid. This means that Federal programs
should be designed around strong evaluations,
rather than weak evaluations tacked onto programs
after they are already set in motion.

3. Using large samples of homicide hot spots,
including multicity evaluation programs. Only this
approach will make it possible to rule out the
many rival explanations for changes in homicide
rates and provide reasonable certainty about what
works.

The specific content of the programs that merit
testing is properly a matter for partnerships and
negotiations between local communities and the
Federal Government. Many programs have already
been found effective against some crimes,
including early-infancy home visits and one kind
of mentoring (Crime Prevention Effectiveness
Program, ongoing research). But few programs have
been tested using decreased gun violence as the
primary measure of program success. The Boston and
Kansas City gun program evaluations have produced
the most encouraging case study results to date,
but they urgently need large-scale testing (Crime
Prevention Effectiveness Program, ongoing
research). Unless these programs are tested in a
systematic fashion, we will continue to see the
homicide rates of inner-city poverty areas rise
above the national average like the Rockies rise
above the prairie.

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

References

COSSA Washington Update, Consortium of Social
Science Associations, December 1997.

Crime Prevention Effectiveness Program. College
Park, MD: University of Maryland, ongoing
research.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the
United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1997.

Kelling, George L., Tony Pate, Duane Deickman, and
Charles Brown. The Kansas City Preventive Patrol
Experiment. Summary Report. Washington, DC: Police
Foundation, 1974.

Roane, Kit. R. "Eight Killed in 6 Incidents Over
12 Hours." The New York Times, January 4, 1998,
A17.

Sherman, Lawrence W., Denise Gottfredson, Doris
MacKenzie, Peter Reuter, John Eck, and Shawn D.
Bushway. Preventing Crime: What Works, What
Doesn't, What's Promising. A Report to the U.S.
Congress. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 1997.

Suro, Robert. "Drop in Murder Rate Accelerates in
Cities." The Washington Post, December 31, 1997,
A1.

Wright, John, ed. The Universal Almanac 1993.
Kansas City, MO: Andrews and McMeel, 1992.

Zimring, Franklin, and Gordon Hawkins. Crime Is
Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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

Communities and Crime: Reflections on Strategies
for Crime Control

Jack R. Greene

Communities and Crime: An Overview

The relationship between crime and disorder in
community settings is complicated by many factors,
including land use (e.g., residential, commercial,
industrial), population and residential density,
housing stock age and infrastructure, the local
economy, and local social ethos. These factors
conspire in many ways to either stabilize or
destabilize communities. The lack of community
stability has for many years been associated with
crime and delinquency.

In recent years, communities have increasingly
become the targets for criminal justice
interventions, particularly those of the police.
National programs aimed at "weeding and seeding"
as well as youth firearms prevention have included
"the community" in the conception and resolution
of neighborhood crime and disorder. In addition,
community- and problem-oriented policing have
sought, among many things, to recontextualize the
police--putting them in closer proximity to
residential communities and local social and
economic institutions, building more effective
alliances between the police and the public (both
residential and business), and solving persistent
and complex community crime and disorder problems
(see Kelling and Coles, 1997; Hope, 1995).
Cumulatively these efforts, it is hoped, will help
stabilize communities, thereby making them less
crime prone and more resistant to criminal
invasion.

Destabilized communities are said to produce an
environment of criminality, and result in an
acceleration in the exodus of local businesses and
homeowners. Moreover, destabilized communities
such as residential neighborhoods are seen as
places governed by fear and criminal
victimization, furthering the spiral of decline,
particularly in urban areas (Skogan, 1990).

While crime and disorder have always been seen to
have a community attachment, historically much of
the work of the police and the criminal justice
system has focused on individuals and cases, not
necessarily on social aggregates of people in
defined places. Moreover, while communities have
long been a focus of criminological inquiry, much
of the explanation of crime dynamics within
community contexts has not been "actionable" by
criminal justice agencies. That is to say, while
criminology has identified several important
indicators of the likelihood and persistence of
crime in communities, criminal justice
interventions are the least likely to address
those indicators in any direct or systematic way.
For example, neighborhood studies beginning with
Shaw and McKay (1959) and continuing to the
present suggest that concentrated poverty, ethnic
heterogeneity, and community or residential
instability lead to social disorganization within
communities. Social disorganization, in turn, has
a linkage to delinquency, crime, and disorder,
generally through the inability of the community
to adequately define and supervise public
community behaviors (see Taylor et al., 1984;
Sampson and Groves, 1989).

Refinements in the social disorganization thesis
have caused many to investigate the linkage
between crime and disorder and the following
factors: poverty, inequality, community mobility,
the ethnic and racial composition of communities,
family structure, and the density and types of
housing within communities (see Sampson, 1995, for
an extensive review of this literature). While
some agreement exists that these factors
dramatically shape and account for community crime
patterns as well as the differences in crime rates
across communities, the justice system continues
to have little opportunity to directly affect
these community crime factors. Several other
government agencies, however, particularly those
associated with education, housing, job training,
family support, and health care, do impact on the
factors that shape both the level of community
crime and disorder and, perhaps more importantly,
the ability of the community to fend off criminal
behaviors. Linking the capacities of various
government and local agencies in the strengthening
of local communities should become a central theme
in community crime prevention efforts.

Community social disorganization essentially
refers to the inability of any particular
community to effectively maintain social control
or to establish shared values (Sampson and Groves,
1989; Bursik, 1988; Bursik and Grasmick, 1993).
Social disorganization theory assumes that
communities, when functioning as social aggregates
with shared values and regularized patterns of
interaction, exercise considerable social control
through networks of local, informal relationships.
These local networks and affiliations provide
clout for the community to sanction inappropriate
behavior, while at the same time socializing those
within the community to accepted community norms.
Although communities have historically been
defined in terms of their geography, many define
them in terms of their ability to build and
sustain networks.

The social disorganization perspective also argues
that neighborhood decay not only reduces the
horizontal bonds between neighbors within
communities but also reduces the vertical linkages
between communities and larger political, social,
and economic institutions. These linkages are
essential if communities are to defend themselves;
that is, muster the political, economic, and
social resources to stem criminal activity.

The Use of "Community" as an Organizing Framework

To some extent the criminal justice system has
been in a quandary over the importance of
communities in the control of crime. This quandary
stems in part from oftentimes conflicting research
findings about the effect of justice system
interventions on crime and disorder, as well as
from the shifting focus of crime prevention
efforts--from offenders to victims to communities.

Historically, the justice system has linked crime
with individuals--either those who commit crime or
those who are the victims of crime. Many police
tactics have sought to address types of offenders
or victims. So too have prosecutorial and court
interventions sought to isolate repeat offenders
from the community. But until recently, the
community has had a passive role in crime
prevention and order maintenance work. Although we
often do not see it directly as such, effective
crime prevention is about building and sustaining
relationships in community settings. The presence
or absence of relationships within neighborhoods
and communities has been suggested as greatly
affecting disorder and crime. Strengthening the
community's involvement in and capacity to sustain
local crime prevention efforts should become a
central goal of any community crime prevention
initiative.

As previously indicated, much of the study of
crime has concentrated on offenders and victims;
that is, the people who are either involved in or
affected by crime (Clarke, 1980). In recent years,
there has been a shift in focus from people to
places in the explanation and prevention of crime-
-at least certain types of crime. This shift is
built on a recognition that crime is not equally
distributed within cities and that criminals make
decisions about where their crimes will take
place.

The idea of "social structure" is fundamental to
the study of people in places. Social structure
essentially refers to the regularized pattern of
social interaction occurring among people in any
given place and the values and/or beliefs that
people attach to these interactions. Social
structure accounts for both the interactional
nature of human relations and the social
psychology of these interactions--or their meaning
to the people engaged in such interactions.

The idea of "place" has a significant role in
understanding human behavior. People are
inextricably linked to places. They have
identities with their homes and families, their
neighborhoods, and their communities. In a word,
they have an environment within which they take
cues and direct their behavior. At the same time,
people direct their behavior toward the
environment, ultimately reshaping it through
continual person-environment-person interaction.
How we use space, how we identify spatial issues,
and how we build primary and secondary social
networks, in part on the basis of place, are
important to understanding the design of criminal
justice and other community support interventions.
Such understanding helps to identify who belongs,
who has ownership of the neighborhood, and who is
likely to support police and other social
controls.

Focusing the Federal Role in Community Crime
Prevention

The Federal Government plays a potentially
significant role in shaping State and local crime
prevention policies, first and foremost by setting
the tone of the discussion about community crime
prevention and then by setting evaluation
standards and a funding agenda for State and local
programs to participate in such efforts. These
three activities--shaping a clearer agenda,
setting standards for program assessment, and
providing funding--are consistent with the
historic role the Federal Government has played in
addressing domestic issues, although this role has
been significantly diminished by the
agency-centered approach to policymaking and
funding that has long dominated the Federal
process.

Shaping the agenda in community crime prevention
is a critical role for the Federal Government, as
it sets the general tone of the process by
identifying goals, objectives, and outcomes as
well as a range of potential interventions. At
times the tone set by the Federal Government in
the crime prevention discussion has been less
clear in the messages sent. This circumstance is
created largely by differences in the ideological
approach adopted by many in the justice debate,
coupled with a Federal agency focus that has been
client and not problem oriented. While it will
likely be more difficult to address conflicts in
the ideological premises undergirding the justice
debate, the agency focus issue is much more
actionable.

Historically, there has been a significant tension
in the way the justice debate has occurred. Two
major positions appear to have been drawn from
this discussion. First, there are those who see
the debate centered around issues of the root
causes of crime, such as the macrolevel social
structure, distribution of wealth, employment
opportunities, and decay in the American family
and social values. The second position suggests
that we should first control the streets before we
worry about the root causes of crime (Wilson,
1995). In some respects, the former argument is
about long-term change (or its potential), while
the latter approach is more pragmatic and focused
on current problems. In recent years, the more
pragmatic of these approaches has captured public
attention. While many of these approaches have
included some attachment to larger social,
economic, and structural forces shaping crime in
local communities, by and large these programs
have been enforcement and not prevention focused.

In the current climate, the Federal Government can
play a significant role in furthering crime
prevention in communities by placing crime
prevention within a wider arena and more directly
linking government agencies that impact on
community quality-of-life issues. Those at the
Federal level can also broaden the approach to
enforcement and prosecution to include a greater
focus on prevention.

Such an approach will require that we focus not on
offenders, victims, and crimes exclusively but
also on children, families, and communities,
providing interventions that strengthen individual
and collective capacity to resist criminal
behavior. One step along this path would be
creating a policy forum within the Federal agency
system that better links justice, housing,
education, and health and human services
capacities within the Federal Government to
address issues of strengthening families and
communities.

While Federal agencies currently have overlapping
responsibility for community crime prevention
either through improved education, housing, child
care, or social welfare policies (as well as
through the actions of the criminal justice
system), much of the crime debate is agency or
topic centered, relying far too much on the
justice system as the source of intervention. That
is to say, policies developed in education, public
housing, urban development, or health and human
services, to name a few, have a great potential to
have an impact on community safety, although they
are not necessarily designed or articulated with
such goals in mind. For example, Federal agency
policies affecting the availability of day care,
preschools, and health care for children and their
families are important influences on a family's
ability to participate in community life because
they build local support networks and help to
develop a community ethic governing prosocial
behavior. Similarly, policies shaping the
concentration of poverty in neighborhoods and the
rebuilding of urban communities also significantly
affect the ability of those neighborhoods to
provide social control and link with others in
local areas to stem criminal behavior. Educational
policies that seek to create safer schools are
significant in linking this process to safe
neighborhoods, communities, and families. Despite
these linkages, at present the forum for such a
discussion and policy coordination is at best
fragmentary. Since crime is a problem that
destabilizes families, communities, and larger
cities, creating a forum for the coordination of
Federal programs and objectives seems an important
shift from client- to problem-specific
community-based programming.

Until such a policy forum is created, specific
Federal agencies can craft policies for multiple
purposes. For example, policies that promote
neighborhood stabilization through housing and
public assistance and efforts aimed at
deconcentrating poverty and dependence strengthen
neighborhoods and ultimately impact on criminal
behavior. For this reason, policies supporting
communities, families, and children need to
integrate crime prevention as one of their
intended outcomes rather than as a latent effect.
Integration of crime prevention into a wide range
of Federal programs affecting community quality of
life will require that some agreed-upon goals be
established so that agencies can design policies
to achieve those goals while at the same time
monitoring their attainment.

Designing an assessment framework and providing
funding opportunities follow the creation of an
expanded definition of Federal agency involvement
in crime prevention. Currently, there is a wide
array of funding possibilities for the myriad of
problems that confront communities. Each has
differing objectives and outcomes, and in some
cases they actually compete for the same clients--
defined as individuals, families, and communities.
Outcomes sought for these programs should include
concern for how they strengthen local communities
and build social capital (Coleman, 1990). In this
regard, with discrete programs in education,
health and human services, housing and urban
development, and the like, assessing community and
family cohesion and stability and then measuring
change in those conditions resulting from these
programs are necessary steps in building better
links among these agencies. All too often, local
client-specific agencies are unaware of programs
offered by Federal agencies that may have an
impact on their needs or even of those other local
programs designed to work in the same community.
At present, there is a patchwork of Federal,
State, and local efforts--often in the same
community and with little cross specification,
evaluation, and communication.

Finally, Federal agencies addressing community
crime issues need to be more directly linked with
those of State and local governments, particularly
as projects unfold in local communities. Over the
past several years, oversight boards or management
processes emphasizing Federal, State, and local
involvement in program design, implementation, and
monitoring have become more evident. Their
coordination is often quite complicated.
Nevertheless, requiring such interactions as part
of program delivery, monitoring, and reporting can
go a long way toward reducing some of the
operational barriers that occur between Federal,
State, and local agencies addressing aspects of
community crime prevention.

Enhancing the State Role in Coordinating Community
Crime Prevention State governments also play a
potentially significant role in community crime
prevention, primarily in the ways State resources
are brought to bear on local crime problems:
through the coordination of State services with
local government services and through the
integration of differing levels of jurisdiction,
often complicating the integration of justice
services. For example, typically, police and
prosecutorial services are provided locally (in
municipalities and, to some extent, counties),
probation and juvenile services are provided by
the county together with local jails, and
correctional services are generally supervised by
State governments. The judiciary typically spans
all levels of government, further complicating the
administration of justice in communities.

A primary role for State governments, then, might
be to focus on integrating services in areas
targeted for crime intervention while at the same
time linking State and county correctional and
probation policies and enforcement practices with
local police and community-based intervention
efforts. Moreover, State governments must hold
State agencies accountable for their impact on
localities, not just on aggregated statistics for
the State. At the same time, State governments
should actively encourage and support local
initiatives for rebuilding communities and
supporting families and children.

Broadening the Role of Local Governments to
Rebuild Community Order and Safety

Local governments are charged with creating a safe
and secure environment within which community
residents and local businesses work, reside, and
recreate. Such a responsibility requires that
local governments refocus the efforts of their
police to identify and address community hot spots
of crime.

A better understanding of the spatial and
territorial nature of crime has led to better
police interventions. Over the past several years,
important criminological literature has emerged
that postulates that the routine activities in any
location and the rational choices made by
reasoning criminals greatly affect the level of
crime in that place. According to the routine
activities and rational choice perspectives, crime
and victimization occur through a natural process
in which individuals' work and leisure patterns
create crime opportunities that are acted upon by
discerning criminals. That is to say, the pattern
and type of human activity (e.g., houses abandoned
while people are at work, women walking alone,
drunks, strangers) produce potential victims or
targets (unlocked cars, convenience stores,
automated teller machines), which reasoning
criminals observe, assess, and make decisions
about. These decisions are influenced by the
routine activity as well as the physical
environment in which the activity takes place
(Clarke, 1980; Clarke, 1995; Clarke and Felson,
1993; Felson, 1986; 1987).

Using these perspectives, the natural pattern of
usage of an area can be studied and choices made
as to when places are under less surveillance and
control and therefore are more susceptible to
criminal attack. These patterns and offender
decisionmaking have been well documented for
burglary, drug offending, retail theft, and auto
theft, among several crime types. If criminals can
make such assessments and act on them, so too can
the police, communities, and others attempting to
increase local safety. Increasing guardianship for
communities is consistent with situational crime
prevention theories and practices. These and other
studies about community crime prevention
activities stress the importance of understanding
locations and adjusting police and other responses
to address problems that may be concentrated in
those locations.

Hot spot analysis suggests that 3 percent of the
places in Minneapolis accounted for 50 percent of
the calls for police service, that no police cars
were dispatched to 40 percent of Minneapolis
addresses or intersections, and that the remaining
intersections and addresses each logged about one
call for service per year (Sherman et al., 1989).
In Jersey City, a recent project to police drug
hot spots reported that 56 hot spots accounted for
only 4.4 percent of the street sections and
intersections but 86 percent of narcotics sales
and arrests and 84 percent of emergency calls
before the project was started (Weisburd and
Green, 1995).

In addition to identifying and addressing local
crime hot spots, local governments need to focus
the efforts of all city agencies on solving
community problems and integrating local services.
This will require building local crime prevention
coalitions that can address local problems.

Under the general rubric of "community crime
prevention" (Hope, 1995), a wide range of programs
aimed at strengthening social and institutional
relationships within communities have emerged,
often directed by the police. Essentially,
community crime prevention efforts have focused on
rebuilding communities, particularly urban
communities, that have been greatly affected by
changing social, economic, and political
conditions. They have included programs aimed at
organizing communities, improving citizen-police
interactions, protecting the vulnerable, and
changing the physical environment. They have
included storefront police stations, Weed and Seed
programs, police athletic leagues, and other youth
intervention programs such as D.A.R.E.  and
G.R.E.A.T., as well as community mobilizations for
drug marches and neighborhood cleanups. More often
than not, research assessing these programs has
concluded that they have failed to produce their
intended results (Rosenbaum, 1986), often because
they were poorly implemented or did not involve
significant agencies within cities that might have
improved their impact.

Such findings about the effects of community crime
prevention programs have shifted attention from
the broad realm of communities to smaller areas
evidencing high crime, particularly among youths
(see Hope, 1995, for a discussion). By focusing on
more discrete areas--those with high crime rates
among youths--program specialists and researchers
hope to simultaneously address high crime
offenders while supporting the victims and other
community residents within these areas. Such
coordinated, place-bound strategies are continuing
to emerge as part of community crime prevention
efforts. Recent work completed in Boston showed a
dramatic decrease in firearms usage among
crime-prone youths, primarily due to coordinated
local interventions as well as refinements in the
definition of youths and handgun problems in that
city (Kennedy et al., 1996).

Finally, local governments need to continue to
focus on infrastructure development in three
important areas--physical, social, and political.
There is a significant amount of literature in
criminology that suggests that the level of
physical and social incivility in any particular
community is related to increased fear of crime
(Wilson and Kelling, 1982; Skogan, 1990; Kelling
and Coles, 1997). This line of reasoning suggests
that communities can affect crime and disorder by
reclaiming public spaces, reducing the signs of
crime (graffiti, trash, drug paraphernalia),
tightening up on the licensure of bars and liquor
stores that habitually sell to minors or operate
illegally, picketing or marching against drug or
prostitution locations, cleaning and sealing
abandoned housing, and tagging and towing
abandoned autos, among a wide array of
community-based and often community-initiated
activities. Strengthening and supporting local
initiatives of neighborhoods to reclaim their
communities should be part of any local government
crime prevention agenda. Increasing the capacity
of the community for local surveillance and prompt
response to antisocial behaviors must also be part
of this agenda.

Addressing the physical and social incivilities
evidenced in any community is perhaps an easier
task than building community political support or
empowering local community organizations to
provide leadership for their community. Often,
communities most in need of intervention are least
capable of defining and supervising community
standards. Nonetheless, as Etzioni (1993)
suggests, "communities themselves need some major
fixing if they are to provide the social
foundation for a life that is more cognizant of
the values we all share." This is perhaps a major
political dilemma requiring that we redefine
individual, community, and governmental rights,
responsibilities, and actions. It will require
that we reshape authority and accountability in
communities while at the same time reshaping how
core governmental services are provided. Some of
this work is currently under way. Police, public
health, and education systems have all built
stronger community alliances over the past several
years. This reinvention of government and
reengineering of services suggests that
empowerment is a complicated process. Nonetheless,
rebuilding local community leadership is an
important element of any community crime
prevention effort.

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

Bibliography

Bursik, R.J., Jr. "Social Disorganization and
Theories of Crime and Delinquency: Problems and
Prospects." Criminology 26 (1988): 519-552.

Bursik, R.J., Jr., and H. Grasmick. Neighborhoods
and Crime: The Dimensions of Effective Community
Control. New York: Lexington, 1993.

Clarke, R.V. "Situational Crime Prevention: Theory
and Practice." British Journal of Criminology 20
(1980): 136-147.

Clarke, R.V. "Situational Crime Prevention." In
Building a Safer Society: Strategic Approaches to
Crime Prevention, ed. M. Tonry and D.P.
Farrington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995: 91-150.

Clarke, R.V., and M. Felson. "Introduction:
Criminology, Routine Activity and Rational
Choice." In Routine Activity and Rational Choice:
Advances in Criminological Theory, vol. 5, ed.
R.V. Clarke and M. Felson. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 1993.

Coleman, J. Foundations of Social Theory.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Etzioni, A. The Spirit of Community. New York:
Crown Publishers, 1993: 20.

Felson, M. "Linking Criminal Choices, Routine
Activities, Informal Control and Criminal
Outcomes." In The Reasoning Criminal: Rational
Choice Perspectives on Offending, ed. D.B. Cornish
and R.V. Clarke. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986.

Felson, M. "Routine Activities and Crime
Prevention in the Developing Metropolis."
Criminology 25 (1987): 911-931.

Goldstein, H. Problem-Oriented Policing. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1990.

Hope, T. "Community Crime Prevention." In Building
a Safer Society: Strategic Approaches to Crime
Prevention, ed. M. Tonry and D.P. Farrington.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995: 21-90.

Kelling, G., and C. Coles. Fixing Broken Windows.
New York: Free Press, 1997.

Kennedy, David, Anne Piehl, and Anthony Braza.
"Youth Violence in Boston: Gun Markets, Serious
Youth Offenders, and a Use-Reduction Strategy."
Law and Contemporary Problems 59 (1) (1996): 147-
196.

Rosenbaum, D.P., ed. Community Crime Prevention:
Does it Work? Beverly Hills, CA: Sage
Publications, Inc., 1986.

Sampson, R.J. "The Community." In Crime, ed. J.Q.
Wilson and J. Petersilia. San Francisco: ICS
Press, 1995: 193-216.

Sampson, R.J., and W.B. Groves. "Community
Structure and Crime: Testing
Social-Disorganization Theory." American Journal
of Sociology 94 (1989): 774-802.

Shaw, C.R., and H.D. McKay. Juvenile Delinquency
and Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1959.

Sherman, L.W., P.R. Gartin, and M.E. Buerger. "Hot
Spots of Predatory Crime: Routine Activities and
the Criminology of Place." Criminology 27 (1989):
27-55.

Skogan, W.G. Disorder and Decline: Crime and the
Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods. New
York: Free Press, 1990.

Taylor, R.B., S. Gottfredson, and S. Brower.
"Block Crime and Fear: Defensible Space, Local
Social Ties, and Territorial Functioning." Journal
of Research in Crime and Delinquency 21 (1984):
303-331.

Weisburd, D., and L. Green. "Policing Drug Hot
Spots: The Jersey City Drug Market Analysis
Experiment." Justice Quarterly 12 (4) (1995): 711-
735.

Wilson, J.Q. "Crime and Public Policy." In Crime,
ed. J.Q. Wilson and J. Petersilia. San Francisco:
ICS Press, 1995.

Wilson, J.Q., and G. Kelling. "Broken Windows."
Atlantic Monthly (March 1982): 29-38.

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

Panel Three: 

Promising Programs and Approaches

Crime Prevention as Crime Deterrence

David Kennedy

I have been directing something called the Boston
Gun Project for the last 3 years under NIJ
support, and the able stewardship of NIJ's Lois
Mock. This is a project, a type of open-ended
problem-solving project, directed at serious youth
violence in Boston. Many of you may have heard
this project described as a juvenile violence
project. It wasn't. It was aimed initially not at
legal juveniles but at violence among young
people. We started at the age of 21 and moved that
up, for reasons I will explain, to about age 24
during the project. A lot of you will recognize
this as sort of the typical crack-and-gun curve of
the last 15 years. Crack showed up in Boston in a
major way in 1988. The city had its homicide peak
in 1990. Homicide rates in Boston do not mirror
rates in Chicago or Los Angeles, but our homicide
rate jumped by nearly 50 percent in 1990, totaling
150. The rate fluctuated for a year or two, and
from 1992 to the present, remained stable at this
historically elevated level. In the middle of 1996
and into 1997, rates changed and the death toll in
this 24-and-under age group dropped by two- thirds
from the figures between 1988 and 1995. These are
not controlled experiments that I am going to be
talking about; there is room for interpretation.
But I think most people looking at this curve
would say that something happened in 1996, which
is what I am going to talk to you about.

Elements of the Gun Project were also put in place
in Minneapolis. So these are June through November
homicide series for all age groups. Minneapolis is
one of a group of worrisome smaller cities that
seems to be experiencing a new round of crack and
gang problems. The homicide rate doubled between
1994 and 1995 and continued to go up. This
intervention I am going to be talking about began
in early June 1997, and it appears that something
has happened there across all age groups.

The Boston Gun Project

There are two elements that comprise what we in
Boston called the Ceasefire Initiative. One--this
was the inspiration for the Boston Gun Project and
why it is called the Boston Gun Project--is that
this is a gun problem, and there seemed to be an
opportunity to do something directly about the
illegal acquisition of firearms. It was not gun
control, traditionally construed, but attention to
what seemed like a missed opportunity, focusing on
the fact that where young people and adult felons
are concerned, gun acquisitions are already
illegal. However those guns are acquired, it is a
crime, and to the extent that new guns and used or
stolen guns are being sold within these circles
and on the street, that is a criminal enterprise.
If you went to most local police departments and
asked them about their burglary strategy, their
car theft strategy, or their prostitution
strategy, they would have one. Some strategies
might be good, some might be bad, but departments
would have one. But if you asked them about guns,
the response generally would be, "Huh?" One of the
goals in the Gun Project is to try to change that.

This is a profile of a gun trafficker. Boston has
been tracing all of the firearms recovered by the
police for the last 5 or 6 years. Generally, we
trace guns only in support of particular
investigations. We find the smoking gun next to
the body and no perpetrator, and we trace the gun
to try to find out who might have been the
shooter. Finding the same situation with somebody
standing there, we don't trace the gun. Boston
started tracing all of its guns, not to solve
particular crimes but to try to figure out how
this illicit market in firearms might be working
and whether there was something that could be done
about it. And, it turns out, there was. So these
are real guns, real gun stores, and real people.
When you look at these traces, you find patterns. 

A number of guns used in crimes came from one gun
store in Georgia. They were all bought by a
handful of first purchasers. This is information
that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
(ATF) can give you when they trace guns. Anybody
familiar with the street scene could see that
these guns were the kinds of guns that are popular
among gang members. And when we matched the
possessor information--that is, from whom the guns
were taken--with the Boston Police Department
information, it turned out that the majority of
these individuals were known Boston gang members.
Something was wrong here. When this was
investigated by ATF, what was wrong turned out to
be that these purchasers were selling guns to two
individuals who did not show up anywhere, because
they did not have their names on any of the
paperwork. These two individuals were taking guns
up to Boston and selling them in the
neighborhoods. Both of these guys are now in
Federal prison. It turns out that this
unapproachable gun market is actually not that
unapproachable after all. These relatively new
guns turn out to be more popular among gang
members and youth offenders than among older
people.

We still have many used and stolen guns floating
around out there, and you are not going to find
the providers of those through traces. But the
good news is, at some level, the people who know
where those guns are coming from get arrested all
the time because they are chronic, active, street
offenders. The way you get the older and stolen
guns is by talking with these offenders, the same
way we have always "flipped" narcotic offenders
around narcotics. Police are now interviewing
these guys about where their guns are coming from.
They can lead you to these providers of both the
new guns and the old and stolen guns. Subsequent
police work can put these guys out of business. So
there is, in fact, a meaningful opportunity for
doing something about guns out there.

Here is the second thing that quite unexpectedly
came out of this problem-solving process. The Gun
Project worked by convening a large group of
frontline practitioners. We had police; probation;
parole; local and Federal prosecutors; youth
corrections; school police; and street workers,
who in Boston do direct outreach to gang members
and at-risk youths. Later in the process, a number
of other groups got involved. What all of them
said at the outset was that this was a gang
problem, that these are chronic offenders hurting
one another: "We know who they are. When they get
killed we know both the victim and the shooter."
For various reasons, my Harvard team was not
enamored by this analysis. But we pursued it, and
it turned out to be largely correct. And again,
there are reams of research out of both Boston and
Minneapolis on this. There were 155 victims, 21
and under, between 1990 and 1995. Again, this is
not Chicago or Los Angeles, but it is bad enough. 

When we ran criminal histories on each of these
victims, we found that 55 percent had an arrest
record in Massachusetts, about 20 percent had been
in either an adult or juvenile lockup facility
before they were killed, more than 40 percent were
on some sort of probation at some time before they
were killed, and 15 percent were on active
probation supervision at the time they were
killed. In addition, 25 percent of offenders
committed murder while on probation. The offense
counts were remarkable. Each of these groups, both
offenders and victims, had an average of 10 or
less offenses. About half of them had more than 10
offenses. And they were being arrested for all
sorts of crimes. This is a classic concentration
of offending. Criminologically, the only new thing
about this was that it applied to this new
population of young offenders. We always knew this
about adults. Guided by our practitioner partners,
we examined the gang problem in Boston. In Boston,
these are small, fluid street groups. But they
know who they are in the community, and the
authorities know who they are. We found 61 gangs,
with about 1,300 members, total. In the summer of
1995 when we did this analysis, the Intervale
Posse, which is a group in Roxbury, had an active
dispute with the Big Head Boys, and a historical
but at the moment quiescent dispute with the
Castlegate and Fuller Street gangs. What our
practitioners said, and our own subsequent
research showed, was that this was what was
generating most of the killing among young people
in Boston. This was not primarily about drug
business. It was mostly about respect and personal
issues, very Hatfield and McCoy. It was
vendetta-like, extended over time, sometimes
extending to younger siblings and friends. There
were 1,300 kids in total in these groups. That is
less than 1 percent of their age group in the
city, less than 3 percent in gang-troubled
neighborhoods. There were 61 crews, and they were
responsible, conservatively, for 60-70 percent of
the youth homicide. This was a very focused
problem. Once again, this is classic criminal
justice stuff. Matters turned out to be
essentially the same in Minneapolis where we did
similar analyses. So now we come to what changed
in both of these cities, in Boston in the summer
of 1996 and in Minneapolis in June of 1997. We
told them to stop. That is what happened.

When we think about crime control, we tend to
think about prevention and criminal justice as
separate enterprises, almost by definition. I
think that is wrong. Prevention, in criminal
justice, is deterrence. It is the use of authority
in the exercise of changing behavior. We would
prefer not to use authority, but there are always
individuals and groups that need authority. We
have almost given up on the idea of actually
creating deterrence in criminal justice. The
Ceasefire strategy as it emerged was an attempt to
try to create meaningful deterrence among chronic
offenders. It is an unusual strategy that makes
different use of some routine tools. The first
unusual piece is to sit down with your target
population--in our case, these gangs--and explain
to them how the world is going to work. In
mid-1996, there were formal meetings between this
working group of authorities and Boston gang
members. The authorities explained that they knew
who the gang members were and what they were
doing. While the city would continue to pay close
attention to all their offenses, the authorities
stressed that there was now going to be a new
regime where violence was concerned, and
violence-related offenses, such as carrying guns
and firing shots, would subsequently draw a unique
response. The authorities told the gangs that they
were informing them of their intentions because
nobody wanted to do any unnecessary enforcement.
No one wanted to sweep the streets of these
youths. But when these rules were broken, the
interagency group would sit down, examine the
groups in question, and figure out ways to reach
out and touch them.

A handout was given to Bowdoin Street gang
members, a group called the Vamp Hill Kings, as
part of the first structured Ceasefire crackdown.
It simply states, "We said it and we meant it."
Here is what happened to the Kings, a gang that
was killing each other from the inside out: There
were three intragang homicides within the Kings
within a very short time in early 1996. The flier
said that the authorities that usually work
separately now were working together and any
information that one group had would be shared
with the others. They indicated that these
cooperative efforts were the reason that none of
the Kings had been able to work the corners (to
sell drugs) and that the authorities had
deliberately made the gang broke because of their
violent behavior. They explained that this was why
there had been such a heavy police presence in the
gang's area doing what police know how to do:
serving warrants, making street drug arrests,
enforcing disorder laws, and talking to parents
and neighbors. This was why those on probation or
parole had been subject to stricter supervision.
This was why a gang member who pulled a gun on a
police officer in the course of the operation had
been given over to a Federal prosecutor rather
than the county prosecutor and why the local
prosecutor had been giving priority to
gang-related cases and opening old cases in which
these gang members might have been involved. The
message was that these efforts were being
undertaken because of the violence, that this was
the way police and other authorities would do
business henceforth.

After the May meeting, most of the summer of 1996
was quiet. For a time, most of the Ceasefire
interventions consisted of authorities reaching
out to gangs that looked to be turning violent and
explaining, "We are the guys who brought you
Bowdoin Street. If this goes any further, then you
are next." This is what we started to think of as
"retail deterrence." Usually in criminal justice
we would send these terribly broad messages. These
were narrowly focused messages, and gangs
listened. One group that did not attend was the
Intervale Posse in Roxbury, and in late August
1996, the core of this gang was arrested by the
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on Federal
drug charges. Once again the authorities went out
on the streets and said, "You are reading in the
[Boston] Globe that this was a drug investigation,
but it was a means to an end. They were warned and
they didn't listen. We did this because they were
being violent; now we are sitting back waiting.
Who wants to be next?"

That was the last operation of anything on this
scale as part of Ceasefire. The streets got
quieter and quieter.

These are not controlled experiments. It is going
to be impossible to parse out exactly what went
into the interventions in Boston and Minneapolis.
But it looks like something important is
happening.

Crime Control Implications

I would like to talk about the crime control
implications of this approach. We are concerned
about crimes committed by chronic offenders: drug
activity, domestic violence, youth and adult
homicide. It is well known that these serious
crimes are embedded in patterns of chronic
misbehavior. One can focus on any selected
dimension of that chronic misbehavior and
influence it by imposing costs across the other
dimensions. Retail deterrence is, in theory, a
strategic communication component, which makes it
clear to the people you are dealing with that
there are going to be consequences--we call them
"pulling levers" consequences, because you "pull
levers" to create rapid costs, for example, by
serving warrants--around homicide, street drug
markets, or other illegal activities.

We had a large interagency group that was a
powerful tool. We brokered social services. We
introduced kids to the Ten Point Coalition, a
wonderful group of activists and black clergy in
Boston. The larger message was: "We want the
violence to stop. We will give you any help you
need, but we are all standing here together saying
it stops today." That was shoulder-to-shoulder
communication. If you make it very clear--and we
usually do not--to these chronic offending
populations what is going to draw a special kind
of response and then have the organization and
surveillance to follow up on it, you can deliver a
type of sanction with a swiftness and
predictability that appears to create compliance.
Having done something similar to gun control to
curb violence, you can move on to a second target.
In Minneapolis, the conversation is about a
similar type of approach to control street drug
activity, which is that city's other big community
problem. It is easy to imagine how you might do
this. Go to a bunch of crack houses and say, "We
are not going to tolerate this anymore. We have
five DEA investigations ready to roll. We will
deploy them to crack houses associated with
violence or generating a high level of community
disorder." Over a period of 5 or 6 months, one
could control those problems associated with crack
dealing, even if one perhaps would not be able to
shut down drug dealing citywide.

I think this is a promising approach. We will see
whether it can be applied to other types of crime
problems.

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

Revitalizing Communities: Public Health Strategies
for Violence Prevention

Deborah Prothrow-Stith

As a public health professional, medical doctor,
former Commissioner of Health of the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, and activist in the field of
adolescent violence, I am constantly aware of the
heavy toll violence takes on our Nation's spirit,
health, and economy. Violent injury, disability,
and death consumes enormous health care resources
and diminishes the quality of life of individuals,
families, and communities.

The United States has a problem with violence that
is unlike any other country in the world. Our
homicide rate for young men is eight times that of
the developed country with the next highest rate,
and 100 times that of the developed country with
the lowest rate.[1] The Federal Bureau of
Investigation estimates that 1.8 million people in
the United States are victims of violence each
year. Partner and child abuse plague many of our
homes. Schools, the place where young people spend
a significant amount of time, are increasingly
unable to provide secure settings where learning
can take place. Meanwhile, our media glorify
violence. We are tired of reading about it in the
newspaper. Too many people have suffered the
tragic and senseless loss of a family member or
friend to violence.

If violence were inevitable--just a part of the
human condition--then one would expect the
homicide rate to be relatively similar from
country to country. When I learned that our
homicide rate was so much higher than that of
other countries, I was horrified and daunted.
Later, I realized that these statistics also
revealed an important truth: Violence is
preventable. We do not need to have this problem.

Our public policy teaches us to view violence
mainly as a criminal justice issue. People believe
that building more prisons, lengthening prison
sentences, trying children in adult courts, and
preventing early parole are solutions. The
criminal justice system intervenes only after
someone has committed an act of violence. We need
solutions that prevent violence from happening in
the first place.

Public Health Strategies

In 1985, then Surgeon General C. Everett Koop held
a landmark conference to address violence in the
United States as a public health problem. The
conference ignited professional interest and
sparked an array of activities throughout the last
decade that continues to grow and expand. Public
health professionals not only began using
quantitative methods to better understand violence
and its risk factors, they also started developing
a variety of prevention strategies. They have
convened conferences; produced reports; designed,
implemented, and evaluated programs; and
contributed to a growing public awareness of
violence prevention.

Public health approaches to violence prevention
are analogous to the prevention methods used to
reduce lung cancer: primary prevention for the
general population, secondary prevention for those
at higher risk, and tertiary prevention or
treatment for those with the disease. Though not
perfect, the analogy illustrates the three levels
of prevention and demonstrates the need for
comprehensive efforts at all levels of risk.

Primary lung cancer prevention programs create
negative and offensive images of smoking using
health education and mass media campaigns. Primary
violence prevention uses mass media messages,
classroom education, peer leadership and
mediation, and community-based training programs
to change social norms and attitudes. The goals
are to redefine the "hero"; create alternative,
problem-solving strategies; and reward and
celebrate nonviolent problem solving.

Secondary prevention strategies are designed to
help people at greater risk--those who smoke--
using behavior modification programs, counseling,
or group therapy. Children at risk for violence
require secondary prevention, including
mentoring/nurturing programs, individual and group
counseling, "in school" suspension, and
first-offender programs for court-involved youths.
Children who witness violence or are victims of
violence, two of the most defining risk factors,
need specialized attention from professionals.

With lung cancer, tertiary prevention is
treatment--surgery or chemotherapy. With violence,
it is medical treatment and the criminal justice
response--arrest, prosecution, defense,
incarceration, and rehabilitation. A campaign to
reduce lung cancer that focused only on improving
treatment would not be successful; more surgery
will not reduce lung cancer rates. A successful
campaign would have to help those who smoke to
stop and prevent people from beginning to smoke by
making it unpopular. The same is true with
violence prevention; more severe punishment will
not prevent violence.

The magnitude and characteristics of
violence-related problems cry out for new and
creative approaches. The most effective programs
must be comprehensive, family- and
community-oriented, and collaborative in nature.
Some schools, communities, social service
agencies, and politicians around the country have
incorporated this formula for success and
developed strategies to help children and their
families prevent or cope with violence. These
programs offer the opportunity to learn from their
successes and failures.

The Boston Violence Prevention Movement: Promising
Programs

In many ways, Boston is the birthplace of the use
of public health prevention strategies to address
youth violence. One of the major contributions of
public health professionals is their focus on
prevention, not intervention. In 1978, a precursor
of the Violence Prevention Curriculum for
Adolescents[2] was taught in all 10th grade health
classes at the Boston Technical High School. In
1982, the Boston Program for High Risk Youth was
started at Boston City Hospital, 1 of 20 across
the Nation funded by the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation specifically to address adolescent
health issues. Based on the curriculum, the Boston
program focused on adolescent violence as a public
health problem at the outset. In 1986, the Boston
Program for High Risk Youth became the Boston
Violence Prevention Program and focused solely on
applying public health techniques to violence
prevention.[3] Over the years, a diverse and
comprehensive set of strategies were employed. The
basic strategy of the Boston Violence Prevention
Program is to train youth-serving professionals
from many disciplines in the key ingredients
needed to prevent youth violence and to provide
technical assistance as they develop strategies to
use in their respective agencies and work. The
trainings focus on:

--A "can do" or "can prevent" attitude that
emphasizes the instigation and escalation phases
of fights rather than aggressive responses to
fights.

--The application of the same strategies used for
smoking, drunk driving, or teen pregnancy
reduction to violence prevention. This analogy is
helpful because many of those trained are already
working with teens on one of the three issues.

--A holistic approach to violence prevention that
not only acknowledges the need for a
transformation of cultural attitudes and social
norms but also draws upon, is predicated upon, and
encourages individuals to take responsibility for
their actions and the things they do to promote
fighting and violence.

The trainings use the Violence Prevention
Curriculum for Adolescents, and the participants
are encouraged to adapt the classroom activities
and discussions to their specific programs
(afterschool, peer leadership, theater groups,
etc.). Spinoff activities, programs, and trainings
are directly encouraged and technical assistance
is provided. A trainee's clearly stated
responsibility is to return to his/her agency and
design and implement violence prevention
strategies that could be integrated into his/her
agency program. The program was incorporated into
the city's Adolescent Wellness Program in 1994.

After its use at the Boston Technical High School,
The Violence Prevention Curriculum for Adolescents
was developed in a Boston public high school,
officially published in 1987 by the Education
Development Center, and has sold more than 20,000
copies. It continues to be used in several Boston
schools and other youth-serving programs. Two
separate and recently published evaluations
associate the use of the curriculum with declines
in student suspension rates in two Boston public
high schools as well as with behavior changes
among students in Augusta, Georgia.[4,5]

It is fair to estimate that over the years the
Boston Violence Prevention Program trained several
thousand professionals from Boston's schools,
youth programs, human service agencies, police and
criminal justice organizations, religious
institutions, business groups, recreation
programs, and health centers and hospitals, as
well as public housing residents and teenagers.
Boston is now the site of numerous violence
prevention and peace promotion programs, many of
which emerged as direct spinoffs from the Boston
Violence Prevention Program. Exhibit 1 illustrates
the year of startup and the cumulative
accomplishments of several of these programs. Some
examples of these spinoffs are described below.

--In 1990, Boston City Hospital began a project of
visiting and providing special violence prevention
counseling to adolescents admitted to the hospital
for gunshot and stab wounds. The program
eventually grew to involve patients' friends and
family. A safety plan is developed for each
patient and followup includes more than attention
to the physical wound.

--Citizens for Safety was founded in 1990. It has
held several gun buyback programs in conjunction
with the police and sponsored several
neighborhood-based public policy initiatives. Its
most recent campaign, "Hands Without Guns," is
headed by Michael MacDonald, a survivor of
violence. This campaign is a middle-school-based
initiative that promotes nonviolent options for
students, coordinates and promotes youth
activities, and develops mass media messages
highlighting youth accomplishments.

--In 1990, Ulrich Johnson started a volunteer,
anti-gang-violence teen peer leadership program
called Teens Against Gang Violence that has
consistently provided workshops for parents,
schools, and community groups.

--Joseph and Clementina Chery started the Louis D.
Brown Peace Curriculum after their son was killed
in 1993. It is now used throughout the Boston
public schools.

--Ann Bishop, director of the school-based clinic
at Brighton High School, has been teaching
violence prevention to Boston teenagers for 12
years and runs a special initiative for students
who have experienced or witnessed violence. Her
students developed and produced a rap song on
violence prevention.

--Peter Stringham, a physician at East Boston
Health Center, has been teaching his patients
violence prevention strategies for several years.
He has been providing parents with guidance on
discipline practices and their arguing patterns as
early as the first well-baby visit. He also
educates other physicians on how to do the same.

--In 1992, Boston City Hospital initiated a
special program for children who witness violence,
and the Harvard Community Health Plan Foundation
has sponsored parent information brochures on
television watching and disciplinary techniques in
addition to their "Think--Violence is for Those
Who Don't" campaign. WBZ-TV's (Boston's CBS
affiliate) Stop the Violence Campaign is 4 years
old and represents a concerted media blitz with
measurable impact on public policy and funding for
domestic violence initiatives.

Numerous other programs have been established over
the past decade, including Gang Peace, the Living
After Murder Program of the Roxbury Comprehensive
Health Center, the peer leadership programs at
local health centers, and the teen peer theater
and education group We Educate!--A Touch of Class
(W.E.A.T.O.C.). The list also includes several new
initiatives such as the national "Squash It"
campaign, which focuses on using the media to make
it acceptable to walk away from fights. Other
national initiatives that have complemented
efforts in Boston include the Children's Defense
Fund's Safe Start Initiative; efforts by the
Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the American
Medical Association, and the American Academy of
Pediatrics; and several publicly funded programs
from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, the National Institute of Justice, and
the U.S. Department of Education.

Other programs such as those addressing economic
development and homeownership in Boston's poor
neighborhoods must also be considered. As a result
of consistent activism and advocacy, in
Massachusetts home mortgage lending to all
minority borrowers increased to 33 percent between
1993 and 1995, outpacing the national average. And
within Boston, multifamily mortgage originations
increased nearly 40 percent during those years.[6]

Conclusion

The Boston violence prevention movement has
involved a determined, coordinated,
multidimensional, and lasting campaign across
agencies, disciplines, and institutions. There are
many promising programs that are having an impact
in the Boston community and are being celebrated
nationally. Such programs require ongoing support
and commitment.

The contributions made by public health
professionals toward efforts to prevent violence
have been tremendous. The continued application of
public health strategies to the understanding and
prevention of violence assures success. The public
health campaign to reduce smoking took 30 years
after the first Surgeon General's report to reduce
smoking. Violence reduction can be expected to
take at least as long and will require as many, if
not more, diverse strategies.

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

Notes

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
"Rates of Homicide, Suicide, and Firearms-Related
Death Among Children--26 Industrialized
Countries," Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
46 (5) (February 7, 1997).

2. Prothrow-Stith, D., Violence Prevention
Curriculum for Adolescents, Newton, MA: Education
Development Center, 1987.

3. Prothrow-Stith, D., H. Spivak, and A.J.
Hausman, "The Violence Prevention Project: A
Public Health Approach," Science, Technology and
Human Values 12 (1987): 67-69.

4. Hausman, A., G. Pierce, and L. Briggs,
"Evaluation of Comprehensive Violence Prevention
Education: Effects on Student Behavior," Journal
of Adolescent Health 19 (1996): 104-110.

5. DuRant, R., F. Treiber, A. Getts, K. McCloud,
C.W. Linder, and E.R. Woods, "A Comparison of Two
Violence Prevention Curricula for Middle School
Adolescents," Journal of Adolescent Health 19
(1996): 111-117.

6. Speech given by Eugene Ludwig, Comptroller of
the Currency, to Massachusetts Housing Investment
Corporation members, January 17, 1997.

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

Lawyers Meet Community. Neighbors Go to School.
Tough Meets Love: Promising Approaches to
Neighborhood Safety, Community Revitalization, and
Crime Control

Roger L. Conner

The purpose of this session is to identify
promising programs and approaches that can enhance
the Federal Government's efforts to decrease crime
and revitalize communities.

For the past 8 years, I have served as Executive
Director of the Center for the Community Interest
(CCI) in Washington, D.C. CCI does research,
public education, and advocacy for civic
associations and neighborhood groups on crime and
quality-of-life issues. One of our primary
objectives is to keep the innovative grassroots
activists and local government officials out of
trouble with the courts. We also maintain a
clearinghouse on legal challenges to strategies
that improve the quality of life in urban
neighborhoods and business districts, and we go to
court whenever balanced, effective strategies come
under legal attack.

As you might expect, local leaders on crime and
quality-of-life issues are in touch with us a
great deal. I could fill the entire conference
agenda with a list of the promising programs that
have come across my desk in the past couple of
years, because there is an enormous effort under
way in neighborhoods and communities across this
country. I would like to highlight four clusters
of promising approaches that should draw more
attention and support at the Federal level.

A New Role for Lawyers

Almost 2 years ago, Jeremy Travis gave a talk in
New York entitled "Lessons for the Criminal
Justice System From 20 Years of Policing Reform."
In that talk, he offered a prediction (or,
perhaps, what he hoped would be a self-fulfilling
prophecy): That other elements of the criminal
justice system will start looking over the fence
at the progress being made by their policing
brethren and import the lessons into their own
territory. He postulated "three essential lessons
from the development of community policing that
can be applied to the rest of the criminal justice
system":

--View the community as a full partner.

--Focus on solving the problems that matter to the
community.

--Pay attention to little things.[1]

As a lawyer, I feared that my colleagues would be
the last to look to the blue-collar workers of the
justice system for guidance. The inner momentum of
the law is enormous, as is its resistance to
change. However, I am glad to report that a
growing number of attorneys working in and in
association with the criminal justice system are
developing a new approach to their work that draws
on the lessons of community policing. There are
enough of them, and their work is so distinctive,
we can now say that a new kind of practice, a new
legal specialty, is emerging. Jeremy Travis has
suggested a name for the specialty: Community
Safety Law. I hope that community safety law (CSL)
will eventually take its place alongside
environmental law, securities law, and
communications law as a recognized specialty.

Briefly, CSL practitioners are attorneys who take
a direct, working interest in the public safety
problems of particular places. Right now, they're
a diverse and scattered body--some employed as
"community prosecutors," some as city attorneys or
solicitors, some engaged in delivery of legal
services to the poor through nonprofit
organizations, some working for nonprofit "public
interest law firms," and some in private practice.
At this time they have few opportunities to
network, share information, recognize one
another's achievements, or gain a clear sense of
themselves as a distinct group. But insofar as
there is a community justice movement--one that is
gradually opening up the criminal justice system
to popular collaboration and reorienting it in the
direction of practical problem solving--these are
the men and women who are defining what it means
to be a lawyer in this new paradigm.

The common public perception of the lawyer's role
in the criminal justice system is straightforward:
to process cases efficiently and uniformly and
maximize convictions (or defend against
prosecution). CSL lawyers do not fit comfortably
into this mold. They take a direct, active role in
the provision of public safety in the communities
where they work, and not primarily by processing
criminal cases. Some have nothing whatever to do
with case processing; others are not even
prosecutors. A few illustrations will serve to
suggest how far from the conventional CSL model
practitioners are straying:

--The Community Law Center, a nonprofit community
legal services agency in Baltimore, has become so
deeply involved in drug nuisance abatement; vacant
housing receivership actions; direct enforcement
of housing, building, health, and zoning codes;
and other "purely civil" efforts to fight crime
and disorder on behalf of the neighborhood groups
it serves that it now operates its own anonymous
tipline for crime reporting.

--A "Neighborhood District Attorney" in Portland,
Oregon, brokered a "partnership agreement" between
local police and operators of motels suspected of
conniving at prostitution and drug dealing on
their premises, granting the operators special
services (extra patrols, prompt trespass
enforcement) in exchange for their taking measures
to safeguard against criminal use of their rooms
(screening guests, accepting only certain types of
identification, requiring visitor registration,
granting police access to registration records).

--A former homicide trial lawyer in the U.S.
Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia,
now stationed in a police district as part of a
community prosecution pilot project, quickly
discovered that: (1) local residents wanted
something done about nuisance properties in the
area, especially abandoned buildings being used by
local drug dealers and users, and (2) local
agencies were not inclined to help. So she made a
video. That is, she went out with a police
officer, a housing inspector, and a camera to put
together a video tour of the area's 30 worst
abandoned properties. The footage she came up with
was dramatic and eye-opening--at one point, on
camera, a quantity of heroin was actually
discovered in a chimney--and resulted in public
and media pressure that eventually prodded the
responsible agencies to act.

Abstracting from these and many other examples of
CSL work undertaken to date, it is possible to
isolate six basic features that both distinguish
CSL from traditional criminal practice and serve
to define it as a distinct legal specialty.

1. The unit of work is different. In the
traditional model, the basic unit of work is the
criminal case, which is "delivered" to the
prosecutor by way of a police investigation/arrest
and thereafter "handled" in various ways until
eventually "disposed of." The individual case may
or may not be related to a broader public safety
problem in the community from which it arose, and
the handling of the case may or may not have some
impact on the broader problem. But either way, the
attorneys (both prosecutor and defense) literally
take things "one case at a time."

Portland's Neighborhood District Attorneys rarely
even handle cases. However, most community
prosecutors have conventional case-processing
responsibilities and work at seeing past
individual cases. Ronnie Earle, long-time head of
the Travis County District Attorney's Office in
Austin, Texas, "look[s] at crime as an opportunity
to intervene, to solve the problem that led to the
crime in the first place."

2. The source of the work is different. It follows
from the distinction described above, between
cases and problems as units of work, that
traditional and CSL attorneys get their work in
different ways. For traditional case-processing
prosecutors or defense attorneys, "intake" is
fairly simple. They need not be entirely passive
in accepting casework--they may lead or influence
investigations, confer closely with police before
arrests are made or warrants issued, screen out
some cases altogether and assign varying
priorities to others--but their casework will
arrive regularly whatever they do. Most lawyers
serving the poor in legal services or nonprofit
organizations also have their priorities driven by
the walk-in cases, and collective action tends to
be for the purpose of addressing a collection of
individual rights against landlords, businesses,
or governmental agencies.

A CSL practitioner, on the other hand, must go out
and look for problems. Several of the
practitioners I have met spend a significant
amount of their worktime doing what can only be
described as mixing: attending neighborhood
association meetings, participating in marches,
dropping in on community-based social service
providers, even lending a hand to church groups
that need help with flier distribution and other
routine tasks. One practitioner laughingly calls
it "unskilled labor"--and yet cultivating and
maintaining these contacts with the community
could not be more essential to her work. Without
them, she would have no way of knowing what work
there was to do.

3. The connection with the "client" is different.
Traditional case processors naturally focus on
what matters to their work--the individual
defendants, witnesses, and victims whose actions
alone have significance as part of the drama of
the criminal case; the "law-abiding community" is
at most a vague backdrop, a rhetorical device for
summations, an abstraction well to the rear.

In contrast, the CSL practitioner has something
more like a lawyer-client relationship with the
community: direct, intimate, face-to-face. The
difference, particularly for prosecutors, may have
something to do with physical location:
respondents in community-prosecutor positions
repeatedly (and apparently unconsciously) use
physical-spatial terminology in contrasting their
jobs "out here" with those of conventional
prosecutors "downtown." CSL prosecutors are not
merely physically removed from the center--and
incidentally isolated from the conventional
prosecutorial subculture, with its peculiar
preoccupations, status rivalries, and assumptions
about the world. Their responsibilities now cover
a much smaller part of the whole.

Even the part of a CSL practitioner's work that
concerns individual case handling is affected by
this more intimate lawyer-client relationship.
Because of their many contacts with local people--
at block meetings, ward meetings, patrol service
area meetings, church meetings, even informal
"walk-along" meetings with volunteers in citizen
patrols--they are much more knowledgeable about
the human context in which crimes occur than a
traditional prosecutor could be. A case screener
with a CSL orientation will tend to "know the
problems," Stephanie Miller says, and "who the
players are." She is much more likely to "call
around" to dig up background before making a
screening decision, and much less likely to "work
in the dark." So, for example, trespass, unlawful
entry, and other "insignificant" offenses will get
her attention in certain cases, where they would
not have before, because she understands their
importance to real, flesh-and-blood people.

For some CSL attorneys, the community--at least in
the form of a community group and its elected
leaders--is literally the client. When the firm of
Davis, Polk, and Wardwell in New York intervened
for a local public housing tenants' group in a
court case challenging a new speedy drug-eviction
policy, they did it for the same straightforward
reason that most lawyers do most legal work:
because that's what their clients wanted them to
do.

The same was true of attorneys with the Community
Organizations Legal Assistance Project (COLAP) in
Indianapolis, who, on behalf of neighborhood
associations, community development corporations,
and other representative groups, hammered out a
comprehensive memorandum of understanding with
various city and county agencies outlining a
step-by-step plan for eradicating drug markets in
seven city neighborhoods.

Anne Blumenberg, Executive Director of the
Community Law Center (CLC) in Baltimore, estimates
that about 15 percent of the work CLC staff
attorneys do for the community organizations that
make up their clientele concerns straight
corporate, tax, and transactional matters, but,
since these organizations are based in "some of
the worst crime and drug areas in the city," the
remaining 85 percent of the work they need done is
pure CSL.

4. The priorities are different. Traditional case
processors, typically remote from
neighborhood-level concerns and accustomed to
dealing with each criminal case in isolation from
its neighborhood context, naturally tend to
prioritize cases according to their abstract
"seriousness," with major felonies at the top and
many common, street-level offenses beneath notice.
One CSL practitioner calls this the "reactive,
episodic" approach to strategic and
resource-allocation decisions in which individual
crimes are considered "without examining the
landscape of the criminal cases or the impact of
cases tried on the community." She is now studying
her office with an eye toward moving Federal
prosecutors away from this traditional,
"case-by-case" view to get them to take into
account the connections among cases and between
cases and problems. But she admits it will be a
"daunting task." For the traditional prosecutor,
the equation is automatic: a community's "serious"
problems are by definition its "serious" crimes
and vice versa; to find out what these are, you
simply "run the stats."

CSL lawyers experience a total shift in their
thinking. From assuming that only "big felonies"
matter and that a neighborhood with, for example,
a lot of armed robberies could not possibly be
concerned about vandalism or panhandling, they
typically discover that it is the misdemeanors and
noncriminal infractions that cause the most
concern. These are the very matters that are
allocated few resources in the criminal justice
system. The "offenders" are not the kind of people
you can "put away," even hypothetically. And yet,
at a neighborhood meeting, they are all residents
want to talk about.

5. The tools are different. A traditional
prosecutor has, in essence, two tools to work
with: criminal prosecution and the threat of
criminal prosecution. The traditional legal
services lawyer functions as an adversary of
landlords, housing agencies, cities, and even the
police to protect the individual rights of
low-income people by defending them in litigation.
This is so even where the individual who obtains
legal assistance is actually part of the problem
for the surrounding neighborhood. CSL attorneys
have many additional, unconventional tools to
choose from, including the following:

--Community consultation and mobilization. CSL
practitioners invariably address localized public
safety problems by enlisting the creativity,
support, and energy of local residents themselves.
All of the CSL practitioners I have met and talked
with report that frequent consultation with
residents is central to their jobs--for purposes
of both problem definition and problem solving.
So, for example, Neighborhood District Attorney
Wayne Pearson learned early on from residents of
Portland's Lloyd District that many of their
low-level disorder problems--public intoxication,
littering, vandalism, petty theft, etc.--emanated
from a growing population of transients illegally
camping in a nearby gulch. The solution: Once it
was cleaned, cleared, and posted with "no camping"
signs, voluntary resident-patrols monitored the
gulch for signs of new encampments.

The Community Law Center in Baltimore has been
intimately involved with community groups in
developing training for community mobilization
against drug markets and writing legislation that
simplifies civil actions against landowners. Legal
Services in Kansas City, Missouri, has written new
laws to clear titles to abandoned properties to
speed them into the hands of community development
corporations.

--Focused education. A large part of CSL work
involves formal and informal teaching. One
community prosecutor conducts special
presentations to educate prosecutors working in
the local municipal courts, public housing
managers, and special deputies handling security
in large housing complexes on how to make trespass
laws stick. Baltimore's Community Law Center has
produced a book on how to use civil remedies to
deal with problem properties. The law firm of
Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft wrote a 350-page
book on civil remedies and how they could be
improved in New York State.

--Interagency collaboration. Ronnie Earle, Travis
County, Texas, District Attorney and outspoken
proponent of what he calls "community justice,"
reports that his office is engaged in 25 different
collaborations, task forces, and working groups
with local nonprosecutorial agencies, ranging from
those in which the office takes a leading role to
those in which staff members sit on boards. The
"convening power" of the DA's office--basically,
the power to cut across traditional bureaucratic
barriers to focus the whole community's energies
on a public safety problem--is perhaps best
exemplified by Travis County's "Neighborhood
Conference Committees," in which local school,
police, juvenile court, and health and human
services officials as well as private citizens
came together under the sponsorship of the DA's
office to form an elaborate alternative sanctions
system for juvenile first offenders.

--Partnerships with police. Attorneys under Robert
Messner, who heads the Civil Enforcement Unit of
the Legal Bureau of the New York City Police
Department, work with police to target stolen-auto
"chop shops," unlicensed social clubs,
prostitution and drug-dealing fronts, and other
illegal businesses, using civil nuisance abatement
and forfeiture procedures rather than traditional
criminal prosecutions to shut them down. According
to Messner, because of the sophisticated
organization of these businesses as well as the
intricacy of the law in this area--the body of
laws and regulations pertaining to
auto-dismantling chop shops is "more complex than
the tax code"--police continuously need to consult
with lawyers to have any impact.

--Civil and administrative remedies. The Community
Law Center in Baltimore has no power to prosecute
criminals, and yet it has made itself into a
formidable force against "crime and grime" in the
neighborhoods in which it operates--primarily
through an aggressive program of "private" code
enforcement and nuisance abatement litigation. As
legal counsel for community organizations with
broad, welfare-promoting purposes, the Center
files hundreds of actions each year to enjoin drug
trafficking in neighborhood properties, force
landlords to take security measures against
criminals, and compel property owners to
rehabilitate buildings or turn them over to
nonprofit receivers for renovation and resale. In
fact, the Center has gone so far in this direction
that it now sees itself at the forefront of a
movement toward what is called "the coproduction
model" for the delivery of government services--in
which private citizens and their voluntary
organizations "coproduce" as well as "consume"
traditional government services.

--The Los Angeles County Prosecutors Office, in
cooperation with the local law firm of Latham &
Watkins, was the first to file civil suits to have
specific gangs declared a "public nuisance." The
resulting injunctions have dramatically altered
the quality of life in Southern California
neighborhoods that had been terrorized by gangs
for many years. Other California jurisdictions
have implemented the same approach, which was
recently approved by the California Supreme Court.

--CSL innovations. There is "no form book" for CSL
attorneys. As one neighborhood DA put it: "The
community wants a solution. You're a lawyer. Go
find it." There is a sense of freedom from
traditional assumptions and arbitrary limits in
the work that all CSL lawyers have in common.

6. The definition of success is different. A
traditional case processor's definition of success
is more or less dictated by the nature of the
work: Success is winning cases. There is, of
course, at least a theoretical relationship
between winning cases and larger goals of public
safety and justice for the individual. It is not
just a matter of winning for the sake of winning,
but the fact remains that a conventional lawyer in
the justice system has only one way of furthering
those larger goals and cannot afford to
concentrate on anything else.

A CSL attorney--anchored to a particular place,
answerable to its residents, focused directly on
its safety--must have a definition of success that
is at once more concrete and more complicated than
this. Most actual public safety problems never "go
away" in the way that even the most drawn-out
criminal cases eventually do: Success is a matter
of maintaining a critical balance, first holding
and then gaining ground, gradually increasing
residents' confidence, but never actually winning
the day. 

In a broad sense, CSL successes are always related
to actual problem-solving improvements in public
safety--to better coordination, more community
commitment and vigilance, and less fear. But the
ideal CSL attorney would be a kind of all-purpose
fixer, like a beat cop who understands that the
most important part of the job is staying on the
job.

Many district attorneys, prosecuting attorneys,
and U.S. Attorneys have always seen themselves as
policymakers and problem solvers in addition to
prosecutors of individual cases. Indeed, it was
U.S. Attorney Michael Baylson of the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania who invented the model
that became the Weed and Seed program. If you
think about the parallel to community policing,
the chief and his or her top staff focused on
problem solving even during the heyday of
911-driven policing. Community policing pushed
discretion and a problem-solving orientation much
deeper into the ranks. Similarly, the innovation
we are seeing among lawyers is pushing the
collaborative, problem-solving orientation deeper
into the ranks.

Preparing the Community for Community Justice

There is much talk around the U.S. Department of
Justice these days about community justice. The
discussion represents recognition, at the Federal
level, of a range of experiments introduced by
innovative, pragmatic leaders at the State and
local levels. "While the concept of community
justice is still developing," Assistant Attorney
General Laurie Robinson wrote in a February 1997
invitation letter to the community justice
conference, "two key principles stand out . . .
making the community a full partner with agencies
of the justice system to promote public safety and
addressing the needs of the community and the
victim through a problem-solving approach."

The trouble is, it's hard to tango with someone
who doesn't know how to dance. When I was in
college, there weren't any courses on organizing
your community to get rid of drugs or crime. My
high school civics course didn't cover how to keep
block clubs going from one year to the next or the
difference between community policing and
911-driven random patrol. Like me, most citizens
have no training, experience, or knowledge of how
to be more than passive cheerleaders for police
and prosecutors.

In a handful of jurisdictions, organizations have
emerged to recruit, organize, and train citizens
and serve as the local "institutional memory" on
how to make the justice system work for the
community. The structure of such organizations is
quite diverse. For example:

New York. The Citizens Committee for New York City
(CCNYC) provides training, technical assistance,
small grants, and self-help literature for more
than 11,000 block clubs in New York City. It also
operates formal training programs for neighborhood
safety advocates, block club leaders, and youths.
Although it deliberately avoids taking advocacy
positions, CCNYC is the institutional memory for
many past public safety volunteer efforts and a
place for new activists to come and learn what
works.

Chicago. Chicago has a number of organizations
with public safety as their mission and full-time
organizers and trainers on staff. The most
prominent, the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood
Safety (CANS), at one time had a contract with the
city to organize and train citizens in every
precinct in the city on how to be "coproducers of
safety." The evaluation reports on their work are
in: CANS organized and trained citizens to
understand problem solving and work effectively
with police as partners. The Northwest Austin
Council is another Chicago group that has had
full-time organizers on staff for over a decade,
and the difference between their neighborhood and
others similarly situated is remarkable. Chicago
now has a number of organizers on staff, but
whether they can match the independent citizens'
groups in effectiveness has yet to be determined.

Baltimore. In Baltimore, the Community Planning
and Housing Association (CPHA) has been an
advocate for low-income neighborhoods for many
years. It believes neighborhood safety is
necessary for neighborhood development and
stability. More important, they have created a
"train the trainers" curriculum by which the
original handful of inspirational leaders have
passed on their knowledge to new staff and new
neighborhood activists. I understand that the
evaluation report from Baltimore's Comprehensive
Communities Program is giving significant credit
for the progress in the target neighborhoods to
the trainers and organizers of CPHA.

Fort Worth. The Citizens' Crime Commission of
Tarrant County has created a "Community Leadership
Development" (CLD) program. CLD volunteers receive
a year of leadership training seminars similar to
those offered to corporate or government middle
managers. In exchange, they pledge to participate
as members of their police precinct's Citizens
Advisory Committee, to team with city officials to
address problems in their own neighborhoods, and
to recruit their own replacements after 1 year.
Along with this effort, the police department has
recruited and trained 145 block and neighborhood
groups (with 2,800 members) to patrol streets for
code violations. The most visible crime problems
(open-air drug markets and prostitution) were
driven out by their organized presence.

Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Crime Commission is
providing a year or more of intensive leadership
training to citizens from specific neighborhoods
(called State "Weed and Seed" sites). The idea is
to strengthen the capacity of the communities by
training leaders. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania
program selects a mixture of people who reside in
the target area and who work there, because both
residents and institutions need to get involved in
meaningful solutions.

Everyone seems to agree that having the community
as a partner in safety and justice issues is a
good idea. It is remarkable to me that formal,
organized training and technical assistance are
recognized as a necessity for the justice
professionals but as a luxury or an afterthought
for the citizens who are being asked to be
partners in implementing the new paradigm of
community justice.

Consider the success of community policing in
Portland, Oregon. Much has been made of the police
chief's leadership, and I do not discount it.
However, Portland's 94 identifiable neighborhoods
are supported by the full-time staff of the Office
of Neighborhood Associations, and I suspect they
have played a bigger role than we can see.

Granted, we need to know a lot more about the
creation and nurturing of such groups. Can the
city government or the police provide the training
and organizers? Will the money be wasted if it
goes to nonprofits? Is the "support group" model
(CCNYC) better than the advocacy model (CANS)?

However, I make this assertion on the basis of my
own experience: Citizens will never be effective
partners with the criminal justice system without
institutionalized recruitment, training, and
education. President Clinton once observed that
10,000 effective community organizations could do
more than 100,000 police officers. If he is right,
it is a pity that there are untold resources for
training police for community policing but none
for training citizens.

Addressing Disorder in Urban Centers and
Commercial Districts

Another cluster of promising programs that has
emerged recently has to do with restoring security
and civility in the central business districts and
older commercial strips of our Nation's cities.

If a trip to the downtown area or the neighborhood
stores requires citizens to run a gauntlet of
unpleasant encounters, people with options are
going to leave. At CCI, we have received hundreds
of requests for assistance over the past 2 years
for help dealing with aggressive panhandlers,
homeless people who have set up encampments in
public parks, frightening and dangerous persons
apparently afflicted with mental illness, and
"Deadheads" sprawled across sidewalks near
university districts.

The problems to be overcome are both political and
legal. No one wants to be, or to be seen as,
hostile to destitute and homeless people who
cannot care for themselves, and the courts are not
willing to give police broad discretion to force
people to "move on." The compromise that seems to
be emerging in the interplay between courts and
communities is that ordinances that target
specific antisocial conduct rather than broad
categories of people will be accepted. Cities are
saying that a tolerance for diversity is not
inconsistent with reasonable standards of conduct
that apply to everyone, and the courts, with some
notable exceptions, are agreeing. 

Some of the newly adopted ordinances include:

Panhandling controls. Total bans on panhandling
have been rejected. When New York City attempted
to enforce an old law that banned loitering and
panhandling, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals
rejected the ordinance as an infringement on the
First Amendment. The same result occurred in
Massachusetts. In contrast, the same courts have
consistently held that "reasonable time, place,
and manner" regulation of panhandling is
permissible. For example, bans on "aggressive"
panhandling have been adopted in several cities
and approved by Federal courts in Seattle,
Atlanta, Santa Monica, and Dallas. But one Federal
District Court in Los Angeles has recently ruled
to the contrary, and an appeal is expected.

Restrictions on locations where panhandling
presents special problems have also been approved,
ranging from subways, airports, State fairgrounds,
and post offices. To the extent that future judges
follow their peers, panhandling bans in locations
that are inherently provocative (near automatic
teller machines) or crowded (beachfront
boardwalks) appear to be on firm constitutional
footing. Again, however, a Southern California
District Court judge recently went against this
trend and threw out a ban on panhandling at the
Los Angeles International Airport.

Some innovative area bans include:

--Las Vegas put a huge, expensive glass canopy
over the main central business district
thoroughfare on which a light show is displayed
hourly each night, then banned panhandling within
"The Freemont Street Experience."

--A new Santa Monica law says panhandlers may not
be intoxicated and must not approach closer than 3
feet from their targets.

--The City Council of Berkeley banned all
panhandling at night as inherently threatening.

Urban camping, public sleeping, and sidewalk
obstruction. Ordinances that restrict public
sleeping in specific places, such as the immediate
surroundings of public buildings and monuments or
heavily used urban parks, and that prohibit
camping (the colonization of public spaces) thus
far have been approved in every instance. The use
of trespass laws to break up concentrations of
people who set up encampments on public land has
also been approved. However, where cities have
attempted to defend depression-era laws banning
public sleeping in all public places in a city,
the record is mixed. Some courts agree with the
theory that sleep is essential to life and thus
have ruled that it violates due process if, in
fact, there are persons with no place to sleep on
private or public property in an entire community.

Seattle and other jurisdictions have also banned
people from sitting or lying on sidewalks in
business districts during business hours. These
efforts have been upheld by the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals and the State courts as well.
Many other laws can be used as a part of
quality-of-life enforcement efforts, including
ordinances on excessive noise, dumping the
contents of public trash cans, automobile
cruising, and the like. While constitutional
arguments have been made against all of these,
courts have been uniformly hostile.

The most persistent quality-of-life problems will
not yield to enforcement efforts alone, for they
are rooted in untreated addiction, mental illness,
or a combination of both.

One of the worst social experiments this country
ever imposed on its weakest citizens was the
deinstitutionalization of people affected by such
neurological disorders as schizophrenia and
bipolar disorder. In 1955, there were more than
559,000 patients in State psychiatric hospitals in
this country. The population of the United States
has almost doubled since then, and the number of
people with severe mental illness has increased
accordingly. There are fewer than 90,000 persons
in State mental hospitals, and even taking into
account the psychiatric wards of general hospitals
and aftercare facilities, there are approximately
750,000 people living in the community who would
likely have been inpatients in State psychiatric
hospitals in an earlier day. What looks like a
quality-of-life problem to be addressed by law
enforcement is actually an untreated medical
problem.

Although it may not appear to be related to
quality of life on the surface, laws that require
insurance companies to provide "parity" for mental
illness--so that the need for medication for
schizophrenia is treated the same as the need for
medication for HIV or Parkinson's--will have a
direct effect on quality of life by preventing
some, perhaps many, from falling into the clutches
of the "street shrinks" (i.e., drug dealers). The
Mental Health Parity Act of 1996, which took
effect January 1, 1998, will require large
companies to make annual and lifetime benefits for
mental illnesses equal to those offered for other
physical disorders. Several States have adopted or
are considering similar laws.

As much as we would wish it, however, more
services alone will not do the job. Mental illness
often blinds the individual to the nature of his
or her own condition. Ed Ehrenright, the son of
the founder of the California Alliance for the
Mentally Ill, recently stabbed his beloved
brother, Mark, to death. The same disorder that
made Ed believe he must kill his brother also
convinced him that he was not ill and did not need
to take his medication.

States are slowly beginning to address the
problems of persons like Ehrenright who "lack
insight" into their condition and become
"treatment resistant" or "noncompliant." North
Carolina has been a leader in the use of
outpatient commitment, which combines release into
the community with a meaningful threat of
institutionalization should the person fail to
follow through on needed medication. California
has used "conservatorships" and "guardianships" so
that a loved one or friend can step in after the
patient loses contact with reality but before he
or she lands on the streets. Other States are
using conditional releases from mental hospitals,
although this affects only a small minority who
are admitted to a mental institution in the first
place. In a handful of jurisdictions, most notably
Massachusetts, local judges are using
quality-of-life infractions as an opportunity to
plead with, cajole, threaten, and pressure
mentally ill persons to return to their treatment
and medication regimens; this experience suggests
that we need the mental illness equivalent of drug
courts. Finally, New York is in the midst of a
3-year experiment with "mental health warrants,"
which give judges greater leeway to return
patients to State and city institutions.

All of these experiments are edging toward greater
community capacity to protect persons with
neurobiological disorders in the same manner that
it would protect minor children or persons with
Alzheimer's. This discussion may seem far removed
from the topic of this conference, but it is
intimately connected. In the end, you will not be
able to provide quality of life in urban centers
without getting mentally ill persons, particularly
those who have severe mental illness, off the
streets. Unless we find a legal way to address the
needs of persons whose mental illness prevents
them from accepting needed help, quality-of-life
enforcement will fill the jails with broken
people; indeed, it already has. The sheriff of Los
Angeles County says he is running the largest
mental institution in the world. We should not, as
a matter of morality, allow this to continue, or
else the courts will eventually step in.

Tough Meets Love

Consensus is hard to come by on crime in America.
However, there is broad agreement across the
political spectrum that there is a small and
"distinct group of [juvenile] offenders who tend
to start early and continue late in their
offending" who constitute a disproportionate share
of the "violent and serious personal property
offenders" among juveniles. A recent Office of
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
(OJJDP) study report calls this group "serious and
violent juvenile (SVJ) offenders." The Reagan and
Bush administrations reached the same conclusion
but used a different term: "SHOs" ("serious
habitual offenders").

The recent OJJDP report drives home the point that
many--perhaps most--of the serious criminals in
the United States make themselves known to
neighbors, teachers, principals, juvenile
probation officers, police, judges, and jailers
early in their "careers" with "behavior problems,
including aggression, dishonesty, property
offenses, and conflict with authority figures."
When I walk with people at the neighborhood level,
they say it is these same young people who provoke
the most fear and anger with their swagger, their
guns, and their drug-based money.

We cannot talk about revitalizing communities
without dealing with this group of young people.
They drive law-abiding residents into their homes,
draw other youths into the streets, and create an
insurmountable barrier to the private investment
that our distressed neighborhoods need
desperately.

What are we to do? I think the experience of
Patrick Hadley of Ocala, Florida, is instructive.
Hadley, a recovering addict and ex-convict who had
put his own life back together, was living in West
Ocala, a neighborhood suffused with crack-driven
violence, when a drive-by shooting in front of his
home impelled him to act. After watching the
evening news, this anguished father stood on the
steps of city hall with a simple sign: "I care
about West Ocala." Soon he was joined by other
men, and they formed the "Mad Dads" of Ocala.

The Mad Dads marched the streets of West Ocala,
driving out the drug dealers with civil
rights-style chants ("Drug dealer, drug dealer,
you can't hide, we charge you with genocide"). At
some point, Hadley did the unthinkable. He offered
a hug and a chance to one of the young people who
served as a "tout" (one who introduces buyers to
sellers) for dealers. Others followed. The Mad
Dads now operate a mentoring program for hundreds
of young men and women, a diversion program for
the juvenile courts, and a scholarship program
that places their mentoring graduates in junior
college.

I use the phrase "tough meets love" to describe
the Mad Dads because the antidrug marches are
continuing. Hadley still works with police to
identify people who are beyond the reach of the
love and support he offers. The Mad Dads in Ocala,
Chloe Cooney's Corporation to Develop Communities
of Tampa, and the Alliance of Concerned Men at
Benning Terrace in Washington, D.C., are only a
few examples of hundreds you can find across the
country. The Corporation to Develop Communities of
Tampa has organized civil rights-style marches
against drug dealers, replete with chants of "Drug
dealer, drug dealer, you can't hide; we charge you
with genocide." The group also offers mentoring,
training, and job referrals to win young people
away from the dealers. Benning Terrace was one of
the most violent places in Washington, D.C., until
a handful of "OGs" (old guys)--former prisoners
and drug addicts--went into the streets and
embraced warring gangs, bringing them to the table
for a peace summit. A truce was arranged; the city
housing authority offered gang members jobs
rehabilitating the development. The alliance
members mentored and counseled the young people
daily. As a result, the entire neighborhood is
safer. In 1997, there were 45 murders in Benning
Terrace. There have been none since the peace
accord was struck.

The promising approaches to dealing with this
problem group appear to have at least three things
in common:

1. The leaders of the programs exude love and
support for young people who everyone else has
given up on. The love is real because it is rooted
in a deep religious faith.

2. The leaders are confident that the targets of
their work are making wrong choices, that they
need to "change the way they do business." There
are no relativists in this group, and no one is
intimidated by taunts or criticism of paternalism.

3. Neighborhood safety is as important to them as
saving individual lives. While they believe in
every young person they take in, there is a tough
side to their love for those who spurn the
outreached hand, who try to drag the fellows back
to the streets. "I offer these young men
unconditional love," Hadley says, "but if you are
going to keep poisoning my children, you ain't my
brother."

There is a fourth feature that most of these
programs lack: A means to keep going once scarce
Federal demonstrations dollars move on to the
political leaders' new hot spot. I applaud the
Office of Weed and Seed's decision to include
training for local program managers on fund
raising so they can dig in for the long haul.
Almost every community in this country has a Lung
Association (the old TB Society), a Red Cross
chapter, Boy Scouts, and more, none of which are
receiving Federal grants to keep their programs
alive. I believe there is a key Federal role, one
that has not been recognized, in leading
foundations, local governments, and
philanthropists to recognize tough love
organizations as a necessary component of a city's
health. There are a number of organizations, such
as the Council on Foundations and the
Philanthropic Round Table, that provide guidance
to philanthropists and foundations. I urge those
of you in the Federal Government to make them a
target of your educational outreach, to prepare
the way for the Patrick Hadley's of the world to
make their pitch for funds.

It is also important for our groups to find
self-renewing funding sources. For example, as
local legislators look for alternatives to
incarceration, our neighborhood safety groups
should be developing proposals for court-funded
diversion programs that would be much more cost
effective than jail. Even more important, however,
is the private marketplace. There are many streams
of money flowing through our communities that
could be captured to finance community-based
organizations.

For example, a new shopping center was recently
developed in Anacostia, bringing a new Safeway
store, among others, to the poorest part of
Washington, D.C. We can all point to individual
examples of success in low-income neighborhoods.
But the Anacostia Economic Development Corporation
(AEDC) has gone one step further. It operated as
an investor/developer for this project rather than
as an observer or even catalyst. As a result, AEDC
has the contract to manage the Good Hope Market
Shopping Center, a responsibility that will bring
money to their organization in perpetuity. It also
leveraged government grants into an equity
position in the development. Linda Goldstein, a
lawyer with Goodwin, Proctor & Hoar in Washington,
D.C., was the architect of AEDC's new role, and
she observes that Safeway, Inc., and other similar
businesses will not take the initiative to make
community groups economic partners, but they are
not opposed to the idea if the community group is
represented by lawyers with the skill to assemble
the deals.

Some organizations that provide treatment and
training for addicts are marketing their clients
as a work force to finance their drug and alcohol
treatment. Robin Roberts Harven of Austin has made
"work therapy" a central component of her drug
treatment program. She argues that the addicts are
getting the benefits of the program and should pay
for it with their labor, and the program has been
able to generate enough money from contract work
to get off the treadmill of government funding.

Not every community has a Robin Roberts Harven, a
Chloe Cooney, or a Patrick Hadley. Is government
powerless in such places to focus on young people
who seem destined for lives of crime? Several
communities are creating ersatz substitute parents
in the form of intensive supervision delivered by
government employees. The Community Intensive
Supervision Project (CISP) in Pittsburgh involves
small sites that allow 20-40 offenders to attend a
program based in their own neighborhoods. Young
people are picked up at school and transported
directly to the CISP sites, where they spend the
evening working on catching up to their peers in
school, physical fitness, Narcotics Anonymous
sessions, and job readiness. Community service is
a required part of the program. Young offenders go
home at night with electronic ankle bracelets.
Early evaluations look promising, and CISP is
significantly less expensive than jail.

There is a mighty struggle going on in low-income
communities between the teachers, ministers, and
parents and the drug dealers, or what social
scientist Elijah Anderson terms the "decent"
versus "street" culture. It is extremely hard for
government and nongovernment leaders outside the
afflicted neighborhoods to know how to strengthen
the forces of community rather than try to impose
an authoritarian solution. Some of the questions
yet to be addressed include:

--How do foundations and local government
distinguish between a Patrick Hadley and a ripoff
artist?

--Can Hadley train other leaders in other
communities?

--Once some of the volunteers are given staff
positions, will the other volunteers stop working
and leave it to the paid staff? Or if there are no
staff positions for full-time volunteers, will the
volunteers burn out and eventually quit or move
on?

--Can government programs that supply paid
mentor/counselors, backed by sanctions, substitute
for the families these young people need?

The Weed and Seed program in particular has
created a wealth of experimentation on these
questions, and I hope that some of the evaluations
to come will provide answers.

A somewhat different approach to intervening in
the lives of the most crime-prone offenders is
intensive drug testing for persons on probation,
parole, or otherwise under the control of the
criminal justice system (i.e., after arrest and
before trial). I mention this only briefly, since
it is one of those rare programs blessed by both
academic evaluation research and politicians
(President Clinton made it the topic of a radio
address and pushed legislation through Congress).
What is striking to me is how little headway this
common sense idea has made, despite its pedigree.
Do local officials believe the research? Have we
failed to get the information out to them? Have
treatment professionals convinced them that drug
testing without an expansion of inpatient
treatment is cruel (although the research
indicates that many offenders can get off drugs on
their own with sufficient incentives)? Is money
really so tight at the local level that successful
programs cannot be replicated without Federal
grants? Is the problem that intensive drug testing
is neither punitive enough to generate support
from the right nor gentle enough to generate
enthusiasm from the left? Or did the idea succeed
too quickly? (As of this writing, there is no
citizens' coalition for drug testing; there are,
however, several for extending prison sentences
and building more jails.)

In any event, I suggest drug testing as an idea
that should command much more forceful leadership
from Federal officials whose job it is to speed
the adoption of innovative ideas across the
country. And I suggest it as a good case study for
those of you of a more academic bent to identify
the impediments to the spread of innovative ideas
within the justice system. 

A final example of focusing on individuals that I
want to mention in passing is the quiet revolution
going on with probation and parole. I hope
everyone here is familiar with "Managing Adult Sex
Offenders in the Community: A Containment
Approach." As reported in that NIJ study report,
something very important is happening in Maricopa
County, better known as Phoenix, Arizona. They
have achieved a recidivism rate among sexual
offenders of less than 2 percent. The Maricopa
County Probation Department now considers the
prevention of crime as its first priority, and it
has proven that investments in probation can
produce tangible benefits for the community.

Maricopa County has two innovations that merit
your attention. The first is the way the
conditions of probation, which have been tailored
for this specific group of offenders, are
enforced: Offenders must submit to weekly
Alcoholics Anonymous-type group therapy sessions,
monthly lie detector tests, and frequent
interaction with specially trained probation
officers with small caseloads. The second is that
the duration of community supervision has been
disconnected from the duration of the maximum
sentence. That is, in Arizona, sexual offenders
often receive lifetime probation; there are 500
persons on lifetime probation in Phoenix alone.

I could say more about the reinvigoration of
probation and parole, but since I share this
session with one of the Nation's leading experts
on that subject, David Kennedy, I will leave
further discussion of this important topic to him.

One way of thinking about crime prevention is to
focus on the offenders who have committed most of
the crimes--the approach of the programs I have
just discussed. Maryland and Pennsylvania are
taking another approach entirely; they are
focusing on the places where most of the crimes
take place.

Under the leadership of Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy
Townsend and Michael Sarbanes, Executive Director
of the Governor's Office of Crime Control and
Prevention, Maryland has applied crime-mapping
techniques to every county in the State. What they
found was that every city and town, even quite
small ones, had specific locations that accounted
for much of their local reported crime. From this
insight and Sarbanes' experience at the Community
Law Center in Baltimore has come the "Maryland Hot
Spots Communities Program," which encourages local
officials to use community mobilization and
collaborative problem solving to address the
environment in each of these locations.

Although Pennsylvania is a much bigger State, it
is taking a similar approach. David Castro, who
formerly ran the Drug Nuisance Task Force for
Philadelphia District Attorney Lynn Abraham, is
now Director of the State Weed and Seed program,
operated out of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission.
Castro's staff tries to identify "hot spots";
create collaborative teams of State, Federal, and
local officials; generate highly concentrated
enforcement activities; and promote leadership
development.

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

Conclusion

It seems to me that the promising approaches I
have outlined above have some features in common.
They involve a renewed focus on specific people
and specific places in order to solve specific
problems that are of concern to the community.
Most of them involve the community outside the
justice system in a newly robust partnership with
the traditional agencies responsible for crime and
punishment. In other words, there are signs that
Jeremy Travis' prediction, which I cited at the
beginning of this talk--that the ideas at the
heart of community policing might spill over into
other parts of the justice system and the
community itself--might be more than wishful
thinking after all. I certainly hope so.

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

Notes

1. Travis, Jeremy, "Lessons for the Criminal
Justice System From 20 Years of Policing Reform,"
keynote address, "New Beginnings"--the First
Annual Conference of the New York Campaign for
Effective Crime Policy, March 10, 1996.

2. I would like to give special credit to
Catherine Coles and Barbara Boland for their
groundbreaking work on community prosecution,
which first introduced the lawyer-innovators among
prosecutors to the rest of us.

3. Foote, Joseph, Expert Panel Issues Report on
Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders, Fact
Sheet, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice,
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, October 1997, FS-9768.

4. In a recent interview in the Chicago Sun-Times,
researcher Robert J. Sampson summarized a decade
of research on crime and delinquency this way:

[T]he little things matter . . . we ask about
things like kids skipping school, spray painting
graffiti, showing disrespect to an adult . . .
these are simple, everyday activities of children,
not serious crimes . . . what we find is that the
collective willingness of adults to intervene and
show responsibility for children with regard to
these activities varies considerably across
neighborhoods. Where it is high, crime seems to be
low. Groups such as the Mad Dads are, perhaps, a
way to return this kind of consistent adult
feedback to youths who have a foot on the slippery
slope.

5. Anderson, Elijah, "The Code of the Streets,"
Hope (March/April 1996): 26-43.

6. English, K., S. Pullen, and L. Jones, "Managing
Sex Offenders in the Community: A Containment
Approach," Research in Brief, Washington, DC: U.S.
Department of Justice, National Institute of
Justice, January 1997, NCJ 163387.

7. See Kennedy, David M., "Pulling Levers: Chronic
Offenders, High-Crime Settings, and a Theory of
Prevention," Valparaiso University Law Review 31
(2) (Spring 1997): 449-484.

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

Panel Four: 

What Do We Do Next? Research Questions and
Implications for Evaluation Design

Dynamic Strategic Assessment and Feedback: An
Integrated Approach to Promoting Community
Revitalization

Terence Dunworth

About 70 years ago, John Dewey wrote a book called
The Public and Its Problems.[1] Dewey was one of
the foremost educational and social thinkers of
this century, and the observations he made in his
writings are perceptive and provocative. I first
read this book about 25 years ago, and its
timeless themes have stayed with me over the
years. This book has been constantly on my mind
during the 2 years that I have been involved in
the national evaluation of Weed and Seed, because
it directly focuses on the kinds of things that we
have been considering in the evaluation--that is,
issues that we have been discussing at this
conference.

One of the main arguments in The Public and Its
Problems is that the sense of community that
existed at an earlier time eroded as the Western
industrialized world developed. Dewey wrote that
this erosion in the sense of community that people
once felt has led to many of the problems that the
public now faces. These problems are, of course:
crime; social disorder; a loss of the sense of
community and well-being; a decline in the sense
of interdependence among people; and the idea that
the future and the present are intermingled and
that when things go well for a neighborhood they
go well for you, and when they go badly for a
neighborhood they go badly for you. The erosion of
these concepts led to a sense of isolation for
many people.

For me, Dewey's book illustrates something that I
have come to believe since I have been involved in
Weed and Seed. There is hardly anything, certainly
no idea that I have had, that hasn't been said or
written previously. Many of the ideas that we
think are fundamental now in the discussions that
we are having about Weed and Seed are in this
book. 

In addition, I see them reiterated when you look
at the relevant literature. When James Gibson gave
his talk at the beginning of this conference, he
summarized the actual responses and the
interventions that have been made, particularly at
the Federal level, focusing on this idea that
communities are declining and that many are in a
state of distress. He made the point that what he
has seen in the 30 years that he has been involved
in this field is a reinvention, a redeclaration, a
rediscovery--he used many words beginning with
"re." I am using the same "re" with respect to the
ideas that we have. We are repeatedly expressing
ideas that others developed previously.

If we buy into this notion that most of the ideas
and most of the interventions have been tried
before, and yet we still have distressed
communities, we have to ask ourselves what we are
doing. We have a national Weed and Seed effort
trying to address these problems. How are we going
to go about doing it? If we acknowledge that most
of the interventions that we can think of have
been tried before, then what is it that we can do
that we think is different and that will
accomplish things in the future that we haven't
been able to accomplish in the past?

It is easy to become disheartened by this thought.
But I am not, because I believe there are ways we
can do things differently. Change is possible not
so much in the area of the specific interventions
but in the way we go about things. This is what I
want to talk about today. Before I go on, I want
to stress that my comments should not be construed
as a criticism of the work that has been done, the
ideas that have been expressed, or the
interventions that have been undertaken in the
past--some of which have been successful, some of
which have not. 

I want to suggest that we need to reorient the way
we think about community revitalization and how we
go about trying to achieve it. There are two
primary areas where I think it is possible to
accomplish something. One of them is the structure
and the organization of the effort that we want to
make; the other area is how we assess whether or
not that effort is having the effect we want it to
have. The latter, of course, is what we have
always referred to as research and evaluation.
Over time, I have become somewhat disenchanted
with these two terms because they imply an
orientation toward finding out what works and what
does not work that, in my opinion, has become
outmoded and lost its utility. I will elaborate on
that idea as I go along.

Structure and Organization

With respect to structure and organization, there
are a few basic premises that must be emphasized.
I don't mean that these premises have never been
discussed before. I expect that most of you have
thought about them yourselves. But I would suggest
that we--and I include the Federal agencies as
well as the research community--have not
implemented these ideas effectively.

The first premise is that community revitalization
must be approached strategically at the
governmental level. A government program that
focuses on a relatively narrow definition of the
problem--with the definition of that problem being
made at the Federal level--will not be effective.
A community revitalization effort has to be
strategic and has to embrace all of the issues
that influence community revitalization. This
means that at the Federal level, interagency
cooperation and collaboration must occur in an
overt and direct way. Communities will not be
helped if the Department of Justice does its own
thing, the Department of Education does its own
thing, the Department of Labor does its own thing,
and so on. Traditionally, however, our political
system leads to that kind of orientation. It
establishes turf boundaries between these
different agencies, and these boundaries are
difficult to break down. This is one of the
reasons why our current ideas about intervention
have probably been defined and attempted in some
setting other than the one we are presently
considering. What we have not done is develop the
interventions in a strategic fashion, especially
at governmental levels. I think that needs to
change if we are going to make much progress.

The second premise with respect to structure and
organization is that as we define community
revitalization and think about the things we want
to do, we must do so from the community up, not
from the government down. The definition of the
problem has to be at the community level, not at
the Federal level. There has been a tendency in
the past where the Federal agency involved
essentially says:

Uh huh, there is a problem out there. Here is the
definition of that problem, and this is the
solution we want to apply to it. We will do a
couple of things to get local communities to
embrace our solution. One is that we will throw
money at them to get them to accept our approach.
The other is that if they do not do it our way,
then we will take the money back.

There has been an imposition from the Federal
level to the community level not only with respect
to the definition of the problem but also with
respect to the approach to dealing with it. I
think that has to change. I don't mean to imply
that there are zero instances in which this
already takes place. I know there are some. But
there are not enough, and they are not systematic.
The Federal Government and the Federal agencies
involved need to embrace this notion overtly,
start from the bottom up, bring community agencies
and organizations into the planning process at the
outset, and concentrate on strategic designs for
community revitalization efforts.

This leads to another consideration: Community
revitalization and the strategic design that
should be undertaken with respect to it need to be
multifaceted. This underlines the point I have
been trying to make--that interagency coordination
is a prerequisite because you cannot have a
multifaceted approach unless you have different
agencies participating collaboratively. This has
to take place at both the Federal and local
levels.

Another problem experienced in urban areas is that
local politics with respect to these kinds of turf
issues and interagency conflict can be
destructive. The best intentions can be thwarted
by the local political considerations that come
into play. We have to find some way to deal with
these issues and develop an integrated approach on
the local level as well as the Federal level.

There is an implication behind these ideas that we
often do not address well or think about much: If
these considerations are true, then what is needed
is diversity of approach. By that I mean that the
approach to be undertaken in "jurisdiction A" may
not be suited to the approach needed by
"jurisdiction B." This confounds in some ways a
fundamental principle of the Federal approach to
these kinds of problems. For instance, those of
you who have been around for some time will be
familiar with phrases such as "programs of proven
effectiveness" and "technology transfer." The idea
embodied in these terms is that if you go out to a
particular community, try a particular approach,
and it works, then you have developed something
that can be essentially lifted, taken somewhere
else, and put down with the expectation that it
will work in the same way. The actual practice of
doing this has not produced much in the way of
positive results. It would be a terrific concept
if it worked, but it doesn't seem to work in
practice very often. One of the reasons it does
not is that the situation in the new place where
this program is put down is, in fact, quite
different than the one from which the program
came, but the key ways in which this is so are not
well understood. The point is that something
entirely different has to be developed for this
second jurisdiction. Locally focused strategic
planning offers the hope of accomplishing this.

These ideas have enormous implications for every
aspect of community revitalization and the funding
stream. It suggests that having the same level of
funding for "jurisdiction A" and "jurisdiction B"
may not make sense because the problem and the
context are different and so may require a
different level of funding. It also implies that
the mix of programs in this multifaceted approach
may need to be quite different. Even if
"jurisdiction B" has a problem that seems similar
to the problem experienced in "jurisdiction A," an
approach that works in the latter does not
necessarily fit the former. It is the reason an
intervention that seems to have positive results
in one jurisdiction has disappointing consequences
when transferred. I think this is because we have
not properly understood the variation between
local jurisdictions, and we have not defined local
needs properly. This stems from the lack of
orientation that I was talking about earlier.

Research and Evaluation

There are also research and evaluation imperatives
that flow from these ideas that are quite
different from the traditional approach that
researchers and evaluators like myself have tended
to take in the past. Loosely speaking, we are
trained to follow the medical research model as
closely as we can. We would like to randomize
selection of participants in programs. We would
like to have experimental and control groups. We
would like to track things over a period of time
and have a lot of information that we can compare
from one place to another and from one time to
another. In the end, with that orientation, the
medical model promises a better chance of defining
the actual impact and the outcome of a particular
strategy and a particular intervention. I have
lost confidence in the idea that this will work in
the community revitalization world. I have not
lost confidence in the idea that it can work in
other kinds of contexts or that it can work with
respect to a particular, relatively narrow
intervention within a community. But I am arguing
that the medical model of inquiry will not help us
decide whether or not a particular community
revitalization effort based on a particular
strategy design for that jurisdiction is doing
what we want it to do. Something different is
needed. I will try to state some general
parameters defining what that orientation ought to
be.

First, one of the premises of the traditional
approach that I was describing is that the
evaluation and research component is of the
stand-back type. We stand back here and look at
you implementing an intervention, and we make our
notes and observations, and at the end of your
intervention we will say it did or did not work.
We will do a process kind of orientation as well
and say, "Well, the reason it didn't work is that
they didn't do this or they didn't do that, or
they didn't cover their bases," and so on. I do
not think that is good enough. What is going to be
needed is for the research and evaluation
component to participate intimately with the
programmatic component from the beginning. I do
not think there is any point in expecting research
and evaluation to produce useful information about
a community revitalization program unless
participation of the research and evaluation
people starts at the beginning. If you admit this,
the nature of what comes next has changed because
you are no longer the detached, objective
observer. You get drawn into being a participant
with the programmatic effort. This is the price,
and it is a high price, that has to be paid for
the orientation I am promoting. That price is that
you lose objectivity and your independence,
because you get drawn in and have a vested
interest in the outcome. For example, as you are
going along with this process, you become involved
in midcourse corrections. You can say in
conjunction with the program people--let's say
after 10 percent of the time has gone by and 10
percent of the program has been implemented--that
it looks like you are going in the wrong direction
and maybe a change is needed. 

If we are shooting an astronaut to the Moon and I
am evaluating that program for its effectiveness,
and I see when she is halfway there that she is
going to hit Mars, not the Moon, what am I going
to do? Can I stand back and say, "Boy, am I going
to have a story to write when this is over," when
that astronaut is on Mars but she ought to be on
the Moon? Of course I am not going to do that. I
am going to say that a midcourse correction must
be made because we want this ship to go to the
Moon, not to Mars. We need to do the same thing in
respect to community revitalization. Once I start
doing that, I am no longer a traditional
evaluator. I've lost my independence and my
objectivity. To me that no longer matters. I know
it matters to many researchers and evaluators, and
I understand that point of view. But to me it no
longer matters because I want what I do to have an
effect and to help the program. I view the role
that we can play as researchers and evaluators to
be one in which we will make a contribution to
programmatic success in the present and not one
that will only turn in a scorecard and maybe
provide a guide to future programmatic design.

Many things will be affected by this change in
orientation. The notions of technology transfer
and programs of proven effectiveness are two of
them. I do not look to them as being the primary
outcomes of what we can do in the research and
evaluation world. I also think that my orientation
will produce outcome evaluations that are
probabilistic rather than definitive. It will be
"iffy." It will be extremely difficult to be
definite about what the outcomes actually are and
what one's own objectivity is with respect to
them. Further, the timeframe for most
interventions is probably unrealistic. To some
extent, this is a Federal funding issue, a
political issue, and it is of extreme importance.
The timeframe that most Federal programs have in
mind is 1 or 2 years at the most, occasionally a
bit longer. Weed and Seed has had a 3- to 4-year
timeframe. At the end of that time, an evaluation
will be written, saying whether the program
succeeded or failed. I am not sure that is even
long enough to expect a community to start to turn
around. How about a decade? How about 15 years?
The problem with that, of course, is that your
political capital may not last that long. This is
a very difficult issue to deal with.

This suggests that not every distressed community
is a candidate for community revitalization. There
are some preconditions needed to determine whether
a community can be turned around. These should be
considered in the problem definition stage when
the strategic orientation toward revitalization is
being set up in a locally specific context. We
should expect to find that certain communities
that clearly are distressed to the point of
needing intervention are nevertheless not likely
to respond to the kind of interventions that can
be mounted by programs such as Weed and Seed.

For example, the central tenet of Weed and Seed is
that a community can be strengthened by reducing
criminal activity and increasing social programs.
This approach is likely to make a community more
resistant to the resurgence of crime. Implicit in
this view is the idea that long-term residence in
the community is likely for a significant number
of its inhabitants. It is through these residents
that a community will revitalize itself. If, on
the other hand, a troubled community is
characterized by high turnover, with residents'
objectives being to leave as quickly as possible,
then it is difficult to have confidence that the
Weed and Seed approach can have much long-term
effect.

I'll conclude by restating three main points.
First, how things are organized at the Federal
level is critical. The effort must extend beyond
agencies, and it must be strategic. Second, the
approach that we want to undertake must be
communitywide. It must be a saturation model,
multifaceted and community driven. We cannot
impose anything from the Federal level. It has got
to come from the bottom up. And third, we have got
to have what we are calling a dynamic strategic
assessment and feedback approach to research and
evaluation where researchers like us participate
from the very beginning and continue until the
very end. We must be more than detached observers:
We must be directly involved.

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

Note

1. --Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems, New
York: H. Holt, 1927.

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

Community Crime Analysis

John P. O'Connell

Analyzing Crime in Our Communities

Community Crime Analysis

Analysis of community issues in relation to crime
tends to examine the criminal and crime events as
separate factors. Most headlines and political
responses are reactions to changes in crime. If
crime is up, we wring our hands and we speculate
about associations between crime and unemployment,
funding shortages for criminal justice system
operations, illicit drugs, and the decay of social
order. If crime is down, we congratulate ourselves
and speculate about associations between crime and
employment, programs for the criminal justice
system, and the decline of the importance of
illicit drugs.

A significant reason that criminal justice
analysis is so focused on this type of
"univariate" analysis is that opportunities for
resources for new criminal justice data are
scarce. We are excited if we can find a database
that is complete, accurate, and timely. Even when
we find a "good database," it is limited to a
local or State criminal justice system that
records data for only one part of the criminal
justice system--such as reported crime, arrests,
or correctional populations. We can count crime or
criminals in prison, and we can even apply
sophisticated models to this one dimensional view
of crime, but we are not necessarily conversant
with the nature of crime.

As important as U.S. Department of Justice
intensive studies are, their impact is largely
theoretical; they seldom have a direct impact on
State or local policies, budgets, or programs.
These reports are usually not timely and are of
secondary interest to politicians and
practitioners because they do not pertain to their
particular community. Improvements in criminal
justice analysis need to take place at the State
and local levels of government, where crime and
crime policy meet in the United States.

New Tools for Mapping Crime

Probably the best example of progress in crime
analysis is the trend in police departments to
move from crime pin maps to computerized geocoding
of crime. Merging jurisdiction maps with crime and
arrest data is transforming crime analysis from
crime counts to assessments of types of crime in
time and space. This "simple" expansion of our
knowledge of crime is revolutionizing our concept
of crime. New York City, Chicago, San Diego,
Montgomery County, Maryland, and others using
off-the-shelf mapping software know more about
crime in their communities than they have ever
known before. This hands-on knowledge is
fundamentally changing police operations. Crime
statistics are no longer limited to end-of-year
summaries.

With the new computer software, precinct- and
street-level reporting are changing how police
deal with crime. District commanders are required
to use changing profiles of crime in their
progress reports and strategic plans. Precinct
captains and shift commanders are required to
review and comment on the previous day's crime
maps. For the first time, officers in each new
shift, as they hit the streets, know what happened
during the previous shift.

As exciting as the computer-aided crime maps are,
they are only the first step toward breaking out
of the "counting" syndrome. Adding the two "real
time" variables of time and location to crime
analysis demonstrates that crime is not an
isolated event. Police departments moving to
real-time computerized crime analysis also are
moving toward more proactive policing and
depending less on reactive methods.

Analyzing Crime as a Non-Isolated Event, or Four
Ways to Better Understand Crime in Our Communities

Crime is Not an Isolated Event: Crime Has Victims

Our understanding of crime and how to deal with it
in our communities will improve as we
conceptualize crime not only as something limited
to criminals but also as a troublesome and tragic
event for crime victims and communities. Expanding
crime analysis to include victim-offender
relationships is important for understanding crime
in our communities. Two useful examples of
victim-offender relationships are shown below.

Juvenile Crime Victims and Their Perpetrators:
Felony Sexual Assault (see exhibit 1) shows the
relationship between the ages of juvenile victims
of felony sexual assault and the ages of the
perpetrators. This analysis provides important
information for both police investigators and
social workers.

Although there are proportionally fewer infant
victims of felony sexual assault (compared with
other age groups), the perpetrators in these cases
are usually middle-aged males. Juveniles (under
18) raping juveniles becomes a significant problem
when the victim is between 3 and 5 years old. Peer
rape (i.e., juveniles raping juveniles of the same
age) is not a major phenomena but is most likely
to happen when both the victim and perpetrator are
between 15 and 17 years old.

Criminal History Patterns for Victims and
Perpetrators of Wilmington Shooting Incidents (see
exhibit 2) shows a different aspect of
victim-offender relationship studies. Shootings in
Wilmington, Delaware, have increased significantly
over the past 2 years, causing not only fear in
the at-risk communities but also in the
surrounding neighborhoods. An indepth study of the
sudden change in firearm violence showed not only
that shootings were associated with open-air drug
markets but that the victims where almost as
likely to be involved in prior drug sales, felony
crime, and firearm activity as the perpetrators.
While not diminishing the importance of the
increase in shooting, the victim-offender
relationship study helped pinpoint the fact that
the increase was not random but was tied to a
significant degree to the illicit drug trade.

Crime is Not an Isolated Event: Offenders Who Go
to Prison Return to the Community and Often
Recidivate

One of the solutions to crime has been to target
those perceived to be the most dangerous and
remove them from the streets for longer periods of
time. Mandatory sentences and truth-in-sentencing
laws, which require offenders to serve a minimum
of 85 percent of their sentences, are two examples
of this policy. These incarceration policies
provide increased "specific deterrence" in that
selected offenders are kept out of a community for
a greater period of time. However, even these
offenders eventually return to the community. A
community may have "bought time" by keeping some
of the worst offenders locked up longer, but when
they return, the issues of rehabilitation and
recidivism become the community reality. Can these
offenders be successfully integrated into their
communities? Currently, we know that 60 percent or
more will be back in prison again within 5 years--
after committing other serious crimes in the
community.

New Castle County, Delaware: Locations of
Department of Correction Inmates Released in
Fourth Quarter, 1996, and Wilmington: Locations of
Department of Correction Inmates Released in
Fourth Quarter, 1996 (see exhibits 3 and 4), show
the relationship between the geographic dispersion
of offenders returning to their communities and
the location of important community rehabilitative
services that can be key to their becoming
constructive members of the community.

In the southern part of New Castle County, there
are significant clusters of former Department of
Correction inmates with few drug rehabilitation or
social services located nearby. This represents
reduced opportunities for rehabilitation.

In Wilmington, there appears to be a better
association between the location of social
services facilities and former inmates. The irony
is, however, that the services may not be well
used by former inmates despite the fact that they
are located closer to them. In part, this may
reflect how difficult it is to place offenders in
services well matched to their needs.

Crime is Not an Isolated Event: Residents of
High-Crime Communities Do Not Always Victimize
Themselves

Delaware has been fortunate in that the U.S.
Department of Justice (DOJ) Weed and Seed program
has provided it with long-term program evaluation
funds. In part, these funds have allowed Delaware
and the city of Wilmington to build a crime
database focusing on a "community at risk." From
this database, new analyses are emerging that
demonstrate different dimensions of crime in our
communities.

An important finding from Delaware's Weed and Seed
database is that at-risk communities are not
having difficulty just because of internal
problems. A significant portion of crime in Weed
and Seed neighborhoods is committed by
perpetrators who live outside the areas.

Journey to Crime: Weed and Seed Area Drug Arrests
(see exhibit 5) shows that 45 percent of the
persons arrested in Delaware's Weed and Seed
neighborhoods for illicit drug sales and
possession reside outside of the neighborhoods.
Twenty percent of the arrestees live elsewhere in
Wilmington, 16 percent live in suburban New Castle
County or other counties in Delaware, and 6.5
percent are from other States (2.4 percent do not
have a known address).

Taking into account the amount of crime committed
by outsiders in at-risk neighborhoods creates a
new policy issue. How would quality of life in a
neighborhood improve if people from outside the
area were somehow dissuaded from coming into these
neighborhoods?

Crime is Not an Isolated Event: The Association
Between Crime and Other Social Problems Needs
Greater Exploration

Wilmington Shooting Incidents and Poverty-Level,
Female-Headed Households With Children Under 18
(see exhibit 6) shows the association between
shooting incidents and households headed by poor
women in at-risk neighborhoods. The association
between crime and such social indicators takes on
stark reality when we see that many of our most
vulnerable families live close to where shootings
occur. Although there is an association between
social indicators and crime, the meaning of this
relationship is not well understood.

It is not uncommon to believe that low income,
unemployment, lack of education, and families
headed by single parents somehow result in crime.
Arrest and sentencing patterns would indicate that
this is true to some degree. However, will
reducing the prevalence of such social indicators
alone be a cure for crime? The fact that crime is
more prevalent in our at-risk communities raises
the possibility of a feedback or "interaction"
effect; that is, the level of crime in at-risk
neighborhoods is just as likely to be related to
the mere presence of criminals, because they
provide social interaction and examples that can
influence those not involved in criminal behavior.

Two Federal programs may provide an opportunity to
analyze community crime in a way that goes beyond
merely counting, reporting, and emotionally
reacting to crime. The first, the Weed and Seed
strategy, addresses some of the issues raised in
this paper. First you control crime, then you
build programs that strengthen the community and
enable it to resist crime--an approach that does
more than just arrest and incarcerate criminals.

The second program, which is smaller in scale than
the Weed and Seed program, is DOJ's Safe Streets
initiative. This program also takes a
comprehensive social approach to crime in at-risk
neighborhoods. Not only is this initiative
concerned with crime and social programs, it
includes education, employment, child abuse, and
child development as variables to be addressed and
studied in an interactive manner.

Hindrances to Improving Crime Analysis In Our
Communities 

Bringing the Analysis to the Local Level

For crime analysis to be effective in communities,
a significant change needs to take place. Today,
except for a few efforts around the country, most
community crime analysis is limited to counting
crimes and reporting change. This level of
knowledge does not allow us to understand the
cycle of crime and the best ways to break it.
Policymakers' thinking is limited to believing
that if crime is going up, you put more police
resources on the job; if crime is going down, you
declare success because the upward trend has
changed.

Local analysis that goes beyond crime counting is
recognized and embraced wherever it happens. Each
step in expanding our knowledge of community crime
sources and patterns will change our policy and
programmatic points of view on better ways to
address crime. The most striking example of this
is computer-aided mapping of crime in communities.
This single advancement of knowledge about crime
in a community is causing a paradigm shift in how
police recognize, deal with, and plan for crime.
New methods of policing will no doubt change the
way police and citizens interact.

In Wilmington, the methods described in this paper
have affected policy regarding crime in
communities. Community policing has a chance of
being institutionalized because a decade of
community crime analysis has shown neighborhoods
with active community policing not only routinely
reduce crime, but the citizens report a better
sense of ownership and quality of life. Less crime
in a neighborhood also seems to be a precursor of
economic development.

Getting States and local communities to do this
level of crime analysis requires a change in how
criminal justice analysis and planning are viewed
at the State and local levels. First, a research
unit needs to have the authority to work with
single or multiple jurisdictions across the State.
The products of this State and local research unit
need to be described to tactical and strategic
decisionmakers. New knowledge is one of the
ingredients of innovation. Without verifiable
knowledge about the nature of crime, we will find
ourselves falling back on the convenient emotional
responses of fear, denial, and congratulations.

Lack of money and leadership to encourage the
development of State and local community crime and
policy analysis are the greatest limitations to
better understanding crime in our communities.

Joining Criminal Justice Databases With Social
Services Databases

DOJ's Safe Streets initiative is one of the first
criminal justice initiatives that explicitly seeks
to examine crime in our communities from more than
just a criminal justice point of view. In this
initiative, DOJ is expanding community crime
analysis to include employment status, child
abuse, and educational success as crucial
variables to better understand crime in our
communities.

Expanding criminal justice analysis beyond
criminal justice statistics will help community
criminal justice analysts move in the same
direction as other Federal agencies that are
studying harmful indicators in our communities.
For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention has expanded public health research
into the areas of victims of shootings and
domestic violence, although traditionally these
were solely in the criminal justice bailiwick. An
advantage of cross-fertilization of criminal
justice and noncriminal justice research methods
is that the study of harm in our communities would
be expanded. We would be able not only to
understand crime from the criminal justice point
of view but also to expand our perceptions to
include the relationship of crime to family
development, education, addiction, and economics.

Combining the traditional criminal justice study
topics with the points of view of other
disciplines, while potentially fruitful, will mean
at least two technical changes. First, as we find
the need to integrate criminal justice and social
services databases, we will need to work through
confidentiality requirements. Second, optimal
analysis would allow us to commingle an
individual's data from various disciplines. This
will be problematic because all data systems have
difficulty in positively identifying and tracking
individuals. The problems of individual
identification will increase significantly as we
try to join databases.

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

What Do We Do Next? Research Questions and
Implications for Evaluation Design

Jan Roehl

Overview

Because the roots of crime, fear, and disorder in
communities are complex and intertwined, current
and future programs to address these problems tend
to encompass a variety of prevention and
intervention strategies under the auspices of many
actors and agencies. This paper advocates an
emphasis on rigorous process evaluations of these
"kitchen sink" programs, aimed at describing what
has happened, where it has happened, what the
immediate results are, and how others might best
package these multifaceted approaches to effect
positive community change.

Community Crime Prevention and Revitalization
Efforts of the Future

Today, programs to decrease crime and revitalize
communities tend to involve comprehensive and
coordinated efforts to control crime and drugs and
improve the quality of life. They combine the
"best" prevention and intervention approaches of
the past two decades with the recognition that the
causes and solutions of crime and community
problems are interconnected and are best addressed
on multiple fronts with extensive involvement from
many community institutions. Examples of these
"kitchen sink" programs--which at times seem to
include every strategy known--are the U.S.
Department of Justice's Weed and Seed and
Comprehensive Communities programs, the Center for
Substance Abuse Prevention's Community Partnership
Program, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's
Fighting Back program, and many comprehensive
efforts launched locally (see, for example,
Clarke, 1992; Davis and Lurigio, 1996; Green,
1996; National Crime Prevention Council, 1992;
Roehl et al., 1995a; Weingart et al., 1993).

The main characteristics of these programs are
partnerships among the community, police, city
agencies, the private sector, and others; problem
solving to address specific problems and problem
places; an emphasis on prevention; and efforts to
increase community capacity building and citizen
empowerment for problem solving. The specific
strategies applied are many and varied, ranging
from primary prevention efforts targeted to young
children to intense drug enforcement efforts by
the police. Some of these programs, notably Weed
and Seed, also encompass macrostrategies such as
economic development and community health care.
The "leader"--the sponsor, catalyst, grant
recipient, etc.--varies from city to city and may
be the police department, a community
organization, a nonprofit group, or a city agency.

These "kitchen sink" programs may include other
strategies popular today, such as place-based
research (Eck and Weisburd, 1995), community
policing efforts (Rosenbaum and Lurigio, 1994;
Goldstein, 1993), and school- and family-based
prevention programs (Sherman et al., 1997). Many
problem-solving and civil remedy strategies focus
on specific locations--in Weisburd's (1997) view,
crime reduction might be more effective if it
focused on the criminal history of a place rather
than an individual.

Recent reports suggest that these types of
partnership-based, multifaceted programs will
continue to flourish. A recent monograph on
innovative State and local programs to revitalize
communities, for example, presents case studies of
24 current programs (Bureau of Justice Assistance,
1997). Of the 24 programs, about half are
communitywide partnerships with multiple
strategies underway; one-third are
prevention/intervention programs for youths
(alternative schools, role modeling, etc.); two
programs are civil abatement oriented; and three
programs offer, respectively, an offender work
program, a domestic violence program, and antigang
efforts through a task force. The common themes of
these programs are partnerships, multiple
intervention strategies at the neighborhood level,
prevention, problem solving through nuisance
abatement, interventions with delinquents and
offenders, and targeted law enforcement.

In Sherman et al.'s (1997) report on "What Works,
What Doesn't, and What's Promising" in crime
prevention, the authors conclude that seven
institutions--communities, families, schools,
labor markets, places, police, and criminal
justice--are interdependent in affecting crime at
the local level. They promote the study of
programs that invest simultaneously in these
multiple institutions, such as the Weed and Seed
program. While Sherman et al. advocate more
rigorous study of innovative programs with
adequate scientific controls for the careful study
of program effectiveness, they also suggest that
more support is needed to "learn why some
innovations work, exactly what was done, and how
they can be successfully adapted in other cities"
(p. xii).

The key variable in designing evaluations for
"kitchen sink" programs is that the unit of
analysis is the community or neighborhood. For any
form of evaluation research, we need to usefully
define community; such a definition would go
beyond outlining its physical characteristics and
boundaries to encompass the cultural, social, and
political factors that define community. The
community as the unit of analysis has far-reaching
implications for evaluation design.

Research Questions

The global research question for programs that aim
to decrease crime and revitalize communities is
whether they result in a safer, better community.
Measuring "safer" and "better," of course, is the
challenging task. I suggest that the key questions
should be whether the communitywide programs make
a positive difference, at the neighborhood level
and over time, in:

--The quality of community life, measured by
residents' and businessowners' satisfaction with
their neighborhood, fear of crime, level of
problems (e.g., drugs, incivilities, trash), and
physical character (e.g., vacant buildings).

--Crime and delinquency.

--The social character of the neighborhood (e.g.,
informal social control, empowerment of residents,
and the organizational capacity of community
organizations).

--Economic vitality (e.g., unemployment, Aid to
Families With Dependent Children levels, need for
subsidized housing, property values).

--The stability of the neighborhood.

--Citizen satisfaction with the police, based on
principles of procedural justice (e.g., fairness,
trust, respect).

One of the problems faced by evaluators is the
lack of data easily available at the neighborhood
level. Existing indicators of change--for example,
truancy or unemployment figures--are rarely
available for defined areas such as neighborhoods.
Even with the growing adoption of sophisticated
mapping capabilities, data on reported crime,
calls for service, etc., remain costly and
difficult to get at the neighborhood level.

Implications for Evaluation Design

In a recent solicitation for evaluations of
programs funded under the 1994 Federal crime bill
released by the California State Office of
Criminal Justice Planning (OCJP), the proposal
requirements include the following: "Proposals
must demonstrate a balance between rigorous
research and evaluation methodology and usefulness
to customers, stakeholders, and policymakers"
(OCJP Request for Proposals, December 5, 1997, p.
5).

This requirement implies that one cannot have
it both ways and extends the commonly held
belief that "rigorous" pertains only to impact
evaluations, not to process evaluations. I contend
that one can have it both ways, with rigorous
process evaluations producing a wealth of
information useful to customers, stakeholders, and
policymakers. A rigorous process evaluation will
describe in detail, using multiple qualitative and
quantitative measures, program implementation,
daily operations, management, strategies and
services, actors and agencies involved, and
immediate outcomes.

To answer the multiple research questions sketched
out above is to ask the single, classic evaluation
question: What works where? My focus is first on
what and second on where, partly because others
will argue strongly for a focus on works and
propose an emphasis on impact evaluations with
experimental designs. But mostly my focus on what
and where stems from strong beliefs that process
evaluations are most needed to meet the goals of
usefulness and that the most rigorous impact
evaluations we can hope to implement with
available funds will always leave open questions
of attribution, displacement, and measurement
bias.

Recent crime reduction efforts serve as
illustrations of the need for process evaluation.
In New York City, dramatic decreases in reported
crime have been attributed by former Commissioner
William Bratton to police actions. These police
actions, primarily reported in the media,
apparently included "results-oriented management"
and a focus on petty crime and youth offenders.
For the most part, however, we don't know exactly
what was done there, and many are skeptical of
reported crime outcomes and/or that police action
caused them. Until recent journalistic accounts by
Bratton (1998) and Kelling and Coles (1996), no
written documentation on the strategies or their
outcomes was available. Without a process
evaluation, details on what took place--positive
and negative--are scarce. Jurisdictions desiring
to emulate the New York City model must contract
with Bratton's new consulting firm to get this
assistance.

Community policing has been in full flower for
nearly a decade. There has been much debate about
what it entails, whether it is effective, how the
community and others are involved, and how it is
best managed and operationalized. While there is
general acceptance that two dominant
characteristics of community policing are
partnerships and problem solving (Bureau of
Justice Assistance, 1994; Roberg, 1994), we are
still arguing about what it is and what it is not.
Only a handful of studies address what community
police officers "do" while they are doing
community policing (e.g., Wycoff and Oettmeier,
1994; Capowich and Roehl, 1994; Mastrofski et al.,
1998).

A final, positive example of the need for process
evaluation is the Weed and Seed program. The Weed
and Seed program was launched in 1992 with funding
to 19 cities to implement the multifaceted
programs focused on weeding (intensive arrest and
prosecution), community policing, and seeding
(prevention, intervention, and treatment and
neighborhood revitalization). Today, as many as
120 cities have been funded or officially
recognized as Weed and Seed sites. Yet the
national impact evaluation is just reaching
completion today, as scheduled, nearly 6 years
after the start of the program. The belief in the
value of the Weed and Seed approach may be
partially attributed to the findings of the
national process evaluation, which produced both
an interim report (Institute for Social Analysis,
1993) and summary, cross-site, and case study
final reports (Roehl et al., 1995b, 1996).

What We Do Next: Rigorous Process Evaluation

Process evaluation (also known as implementation
evaluation and program monitoring) has always been
considered an integral part of comprehensive
program evaluation. It is clear that such studies
"are essential to understanding and interpreting
impact findings. Knowing what took place is
required in order to explain or hypothesize why a
program did or did not work" (Rossi and Freeman,
1993). In short, it is useless to know whether
something works or not if you do not know what
that something is. Process evaluations also serve
to strengthen impact results concerning theory
versus program failure: If no or negative impact
was observed, was it due to a wrongheaded program
theory or to weak implementation?

Process evaluation can also serve independently as
program assessment, providing information
regarding its form, scope, and value to
practitioners and to policymakers considering
adoption and/or expansion of the program. A broad
view of process evaluation is needed in which
comprehensive process evaluations include
rigorous, unbiased measurement and the assessment
of immediate and short-term outcomes. Process
evaluations need to include baseline measures,
prepare for future impact assessments, and fully
understand the program or policy being
implemented. The line between process and impact
evaluation should be blurred. Comprehensive
evaluations should include multiple measurements
over time--before, during, and after the major
program interventions are in place--to tap
community perceptions and neighborhood changes. In
essence, comprehensive process evaluations should
be pre/during/post studies with rigorous, multiple
assessments in one site, with no control or
comparison group. They should begin when the
program is merely a gleam in an agency's eye.

It would be foolhardy to suggest that rigorous
impact evaluations are not needed, but given
"kitchen sink" programs with the community as the
unit of analysis, impact results will always be
disputed. No matter how rigorous the design--with
matched comparison neighborhoods, surveys in all
experimental and comparison neighborhoods with
randomly selected respondents, crime mapping,
etc.--there will always be questions of
attribution. Even if random assignment of programs
to communities could be achieved (a tall order),
matches between communities will never be perfect,
and impact methods provide few ways to determine
which facets of these multifaceted interventions
can be linked to specific outcomes.

With crime mapping, researchers are beginning to
hone in on displacement, even in place-based
research. Yet I argue that displacement is more a
mark of success than failure, and spending
precious research dollars on its measurement may
be unwarranted in some situations. In the simplest
example, in recent years many problem-solving
efforts within urban communities have focused on
eliminating crack houses. Process evaluation will
indicate how the crack house problem was tackled,
whether the crack house remains active or not, and
whether the community partnership and
capacity-building efforts are enough to keep the
problem at bay. If the crack house is gone, the
problem-solving activities can move on to the next
crack house or neighborhood.

Process evaluations, however, do need to be more
useful and rigorous than many currently are.
Rigorous process evaluation methods should
include:

1. New, improved, and cost-effective methods to
tap community perceptions. Community surveys,
whether by phone or in person, are increasingly
difficult to implement, particularly in
high-crime, distrustful communities. Yet the
community's perceptions are critical, and the
following should be considered:

a. The use of computerized telephone systems for
quick, frequent surveying. Oakland, California,
for example, has installed a new system to
automatically send messages to households; other
cities have similar systems for the relaying of
neighborhood watch messages. Oakland's system can
be used for computerized surveying, with residents
responding to multiple choice items with touchtone
phones.

b. The use of small group methods, such as key
informant surveys, community leader interviews,
and focus and discussion groups. Additional
research is needed on the relative cost, value,
and results of such techniques compared with
traditional community survey methods.

2. Unobtrusive measures. Most of our traditional
measures--surveys, focus groups, calls for
service, reported crime, etc.--are subject to
errors of measurement, reactivity, and bias. We
need to develop and test innovative measures for
assessing changes in crime, drug problems, and
neighborhoods.

One form of unobtrusive measures currently in use
in community-based and place-based research
(Mazerolle et al., in press; Taylor, 1997) is the
objective observation and measurement of social
and physical changes in the neighborhood,
including the licit or illicit use of public
places, graffiti, trash, and level of
paraphernalia. These measures are worthy of
further use and study. Additional unobtrusive
measures to consider include hair analysis through
anonymous collection by barber shops and beauty
salons to assess community drug use over time and
the use of traditional attitude measurement
devices such as the lost letter technique.

3. The routine collection of process data in a
standard manner in cross-site process evaluations.
Within a strong case study design with multiple
measures over time, numerous methods of data
collection should be used, including stakeholder
interviews, collection of program documents,
interviews with residents and businessowners,
observation of program events, collection of
routine process data (level of services, numbers
of target groups reached, etc.), and collection of
routine impact data on immediate outcomes (see
below).

4. Immediate and short-term outcome assessments.
These outcomes--for example, the closing of a
crack house--may be considered process or impact
measures, but I argue firmly that they belong in
rigorous process evaluations. They serve to assess
program coverage and the potential for longer term
impact. In the Weed and Seed program, for example,
the process evaluation reported the number of
arrests in the program's first year and the status
of their prosecution--necessary immediate outcomes
before the successful impact of weeding can
reasonably be expected--and the funding, types,
and levels of seeding activities--necessary to
know before the impact of seeding can be judged.

5. Timely reporting of process results. Swift
reporting of process information, preferably on an
interim basis accompanied by review and comment by
program staff and policymakers, is needed. 

The Federal Role 

Federal agencies, particularly those within the
Office of Justice Programs, have been very
supportive of evaluation research in the past
decade. As any researcher is likely to do, I
advocate increased funding for evaluation,
particularly increased support for process
evaluations. The tendency over the past decade has
been toward rigorous impact-oriented experimental
designs--applying the designs of the laboratory to
field research--which, as I have argued in this
paper, are not easily applied to community
research, nor do they guard against ongoing
questions about "kitchen sink" programs and their
effects.

In addition to funds, the Federal Government has
much to offer in developing evaluation methods
and measures and providing technical assistance to
communities in evaluation research. For national,
multisite programs such as Weed and Seed and
Comprehensive Communities, I suggest that a
national evaluation model be implemented. Under
this model, coordinated Federal support would be
provided to national and local evaluators. The
local evaluations would be given substantial
onsite research support for data collection, and
they would be conducted under the guidance of a
national evaluator and advisory board. The
national evaluator would develop common
instruments and procedures; validate local data
collection; provide assistance in evaluation
methods and local customization; and complete
cross-site data collection, analysis, and
reporting. Such a national evaluation model leads
to routine, standard data collection and improved
cross-site comparisons for both process and impact
evaluations as well as enabling local sites to get
the information they need.

Finally, useful evaluation research must be
produced and disseminated in a timely manner.
Process results can guide local programs in
fine-tuning and redirecting their efforts and
provide information to policymakers concerning
expansion, replication, and support. The Federal
Government can assist this process by supporting
rapid dissemination through electronic and print
media.

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

References

Bratton, W. Turnaround: How America's Top Cop
Reversed the Crime Epidemic. New York: Random
House, 1998.

Bureau of Justice Assistance. Revitalizing
Communities: Innovative State and Local Programs.
Monograph. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1997, NCJ
165360.

Bureau of Justice Assistance. Understanding
Community Policing: A Framework for Action.
Monograph. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994, NCJ
148457.

Capowich, G.E., and J.A. Roehl. "Problem-Oriented
Policing: Actions and Effectiveness in San Diego."
In The Challenge of Community Policing: Testing
the Promises, ed. D.P. Rosenbaum. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1994: 127-146.

Clarke, R.V. Situational Crime Prevention:
Successful Case Studies. Albany, NY: Harrow and
Heston, 1992.

Davis, R.C., and A.J. Lurigio. Fighting Back:
Neighborhood Antidrug Strategies. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1996.

Eck, J., and D. Weisburd. Crime and Place. Crime
Prevention Studies Series, vol. 4. Monsey, NY:
Criminal Justice Press, and Washington, DC: Police
Executive Research Forum, 1995.

Goldstein, H. The New Policing: Confronting
Complexity. Research in Brief. Washington, DC:
U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of
Justice, 1993, NCJ 145157.

Green, L. Policing Places With Drug Problems.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1996.

Institute for Social Analysis. National Evaluation
of Operation Weed and Seed: Interim Status Report.
Alexandria, VA: Institute for Social Analysis,
1993.

Kelling, G., and Coles, C.M. Fixing Broken
Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our
Communities. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Mastrofski, S., Parks, R.B., and Worden, R.E.
Community Policing in Action: Lessons From an
Observation Study. Research in Progress Preview.
Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice,
National Institute of Justice, 1998, FS 000199.

Mazerolle, L.G., J. Roehl, and C. Kadleck.
"Controlling Social Disorder Using Civil Remedies:
Results From a Randomized Field Experiment in
Oakland, California." In Civil Remedies for Crime
Control, Crime Prevention Studies, vol. 9, ed.
L.G. Mazerolle and J. Roehl. Monsey, NY: Criminal
Justice Press, in press.

National Crime Prevention Council. Creating a
Climate of Hope: Ten Neighborhoods Tackle the Drug
Crisis. Washington, DC: National Crime Prevention
Council, 1992.

Roberg, R.R. "Can Today's Police Organizations
Effectively Implement Community Policing?" In The
Challenge of Community Policing: Testing the
Promises, ed. D.P. Rosenbaum. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications, Inc., 1994: 249-257.

Roehl, J.A., R. Huitt, M.A. Wycoff, A.M. Pate,
D.J. Rebovich, and K.R. Coyle. National Process
Evaluation of Operation Weed and Seed. Research in
Brief. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice,
National Institute of Justice, 1996, NCJ 161624.

Roehl, J.A., R.E. Huitt, M.A. Wycoff, A.M. Pate,
D.J. Rebovich, and K.R. Coyle. National Process
Evaluation of the Weed and Seed Initiative,
Cross-site Summary Report (Vol. 1), Case Studies
(Vol. 2), and Executive Summary. Pacific Grove,
CA: Institute for Social Analysis, 1995a.

Roehl, J.A., H. Wong, C. Andrews, R. Huitt, and
G.E. Capowich. A National Assessment of
Community-based Anti-drug Efforts. Pacific Grove,
CA: Institute for Social Analysis, 1995b.

Rosenbaum, D.P., and A.J. Lurigio. "An Inside Look
at Community Policing Reform: Definitions,
Organizational Changes, and Evaluation Findings."
Crime and Delinquency 40 (3) (1994): 299-314.

Rossi, P.H., and H.E. Freeman. Evaluation: A
Systematic Approach, 5th ed. Newbury Park, CA:
Sage Publications, Inc., 1993.

Sherman, L.W., D. Gottfredson, D. MacKenzie, J.
Eck, P. Reuter, and S. Bushway. Preventing Crime:
What Works, What Doesn't, and What's Promising.
College Park, MD: University of Maryland,
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice,
1997.

Taylor, R.B. "Crime, Grime, and Responses to
Crime: Relative Impacts of Neighborhood Structure,
Crime, and Physical Deterioration on Residents and
Business Personnel in the Twin Cities." In Crime
Prevention at a Crossroads, ed. S.P. Lab.
Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing Co., 1997: 63-75.

Weingart, S.N., F.X. Hartmann, and D. Osborne.
Lessons Learned: Case Studies of the Initiation
and Maintenance of the Community Response to
Drugs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, John F.
Kennedy School of Government, 1993.

Weisburd, D. Reorienting Crime Prevention Research
and Policy: From the Causes of Criminality to the
Context of Crime. Research Report. Washington, DC:
U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of
Justice, 1997, NCJ 165041.

Wycoff, M.A., and T.N. Oettmeier. Evaluating
Patrol Officer Performance Under Community
Policing: The Houston Experience. Research Report.
Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice,
National Institute of Justice, 1994, NCJ 142462.

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

Appendix A

Author Biographies

Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D., is J. Erik Jonsson
University Professor of Urban Systems and
Operations Research with the H. John Heinz III
School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Roger L. Conner is Executive Director of the
Center for the Community Interest, which has
offices in Washington, D.C., and New York, New
York.

Terence Dunworth, Ph.D., is Managing Vice
President of Abt Associates Inc. in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.Amitai Etzioni is the first
University Professor of The George Washington
University and is the editor of The Responsive
Community: Rights and Responsibilities, a
communitarian quarterly.

Jack R. Greene is Director of the Center for
Public Policy at Temple University in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

David Kennedy is Professor at the John F. Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

John P. O'Connell is the Director of the Delaware
Statistical Analysis Center in Dover.

Deborah Prothrow-Stith, M.D., is Associate Dean of
Faculty Development and Professor of Public Health
Practice, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard
University, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Jan Roehl, Ph.D., is President of the Justice
Research Center in Pacific Grove, California.

Lawrence W. Sherman, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair
of the Department of Criminology and Criminal
Justice at the University of Maryland in College
Park.

Bailus Walker, Jr., Ph.D., M.Ph., FACE, is
Director of the Health Policy Program with the
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
and is Professor of Environmental and Occupational
Medicine at Howard University Medical Center, both
in Washington, D.C.

Cicero Wilson is a former Senior Research
Associate with the Institute for Families in
Society at the University of South Carolina in
Columbia. He now resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

Robert L. Woodson, Sr., is President of the
National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in
Washington, D.C.

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

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

Janet Reno
Attorney General

Raymond C. Fisher
Associate Attorney General

Laurie Robinson
Assistant Attorney General

Nol Brennan
Deputy Assistant Attorney General

Jeremy Travis
Director, National Institute of Justice

Stephen Rickman
Director, Executive Office for Weed and Seed

Office of Justice Programs
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov

National Institute of Justice
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij