Title: Perspectives on Crime and Justice Lecture
Series 1999-2000
Series: Research Forum
Author: National Institute of Justice
Published: March 2001
Subject: Sentencing; crime patterns and future
trends; drug abuse and crime; gun violence; program
evaluation
117 pages
240,000 bytes

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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

Perspectives on Crime and Justice:1999-2000 Lecture
Series

Volume  IV 

March 2001

National Institute of Justice
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Office of Justice Programs
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Washington, DC 20531

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To find out more information about the National
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e-mail: askncjrs@ncjrs.org

National Institute of Justice
Perspectives on Crime and Justice:1999-2000 Lecture
Series

Franklin Zimring
Richard B. Freeman
William A. Vega
Lawrence W. Sherman
Heather B. Weiss

March 2001

NCJ 184245

NIJ

Amy Mazzocco
Program Monitor

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

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

Preface

Policy discussions and debates about crime and
justice are too often reduced to buzzwords and
emotional charges and countercharges that voice
ideologies rather than ideas. It is understandable
that crime and justice evoke intense feelings. A
great deal is at stake: the safety of our
communities--even matters of life and death. This
makes it all the more important that discussion and
debate should be reasoned, conducted dispassionately
at the highest level of political discourse, and
informed by sound and scientifically based research.

The Perspectives on Crime and Justice lecture series
was designed to create an opportunity for
policymakers and researchers to take time to reflect
on the latest and best research on topical issues of
crime and justice. Through this series, NIJ has for
the past 3 years presented discussions by some of the
Nation's most prominent scholars in criminology and
related disciplines. 

The remarkable series of speakers continued this
year. We heard from Franklin Zimring on the politics
of punishment, Richard B. Freeman on the relationship
between unemployment and crime, William A. Vega on
the relationship between immigration and crime,
Lawrence W. Sherman on strategies to reduce gun
violence, and Heather B. Weiss on reinventing
evaluation to improve child and family interventions.
The lectures from this series, published here, are
intended to elevate the level of debate and bring the
results and implications of current research to the
attention of decisionmakers at every level of
government.

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Contents

Preface

Lecture 1: The New Politics of Criminal Justice: Of
"Three Strikes," Truth-in-Sentencing, and Megan's
Laws
Franklin Zimring, J.D.

Lecture 2:  Does the Booming Economy Help Explain the
Fall in Crime?
Richard B. Freeman, Ph.D.

Lecture 3: A Profile of Crime, Violence, and Drug Use
Among Mexican Immigrants
William A. Vega, D.Crim.

Lecture 4:  Reducing Gun Violence: What Works, What
Doesn't, What's Promising
Lawrence W. Sherman, Ph.D.

Lecture 5: Reinventing Evaluation to Build
High-Performance Child and Family Interventions
Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D.

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The New Politics of Criminal Justice: Of "Three
Strikes," Truth-in-Sentencing, and Megan's Laws

Presentation by 

Franklin Zimring
Professor

The Earl Warren Legal Institute University of
California at Berkeley

December 8, 1999
Washington, D.C.

What are the changing political conditions that have
been driving the legislative process on issues of
crime and punishment in the United States in recent
years? First, crime is a more important legislative
issue than ever before at both State and Federal
Government levels. Second, rather than following a
cyclical pattern in which major new laws might
relieve the need for further action in the immediate
future, the pressure for punitive legislation is more
persistent than ever before. Finally, the politics of
criminal punishment in the 1990s is characterized by
hostility toward not only criminals but also
government officials. 

The changing politics of criminal punishment have had
a major influence on the volume of new punishment
laws and on their content since the mid-1980s.
Although scholars and practitioners are aware of the
new political environment of criminal justice, it has
rarely been a central topic of scholarly analysis.

I will discuss several major themes relating to the
new politics of punishment, hoping that this
introduction will tempt others to investigate these
matters in greater depth.

A variety of punishment laws are emerging from State
and Federal legislative bodies, fueled by a political
environment that is more crime centered, more
polymorphously punitive, and more distrustful of
government than the traditional politics of American
criminal justice. Products of this new climate
include "three strikes and you're out" laws (enacted
by 25 States and the Federal Government within a 2
1/2-year period), truth-in-sentencing reforms,
Megan's Law disclosures, "10-20-life" mandatory
minimum sentences for gun crimes, and chemical
castration schemes. Rather than diminishing the
pressure for further punitive changes, one punitive
political success seems to pave the way for others. 

My survey of this new politics comes in four
installments. First, I cast doubt on two theories
that explain the cause of this new political
atmosphere: the "crime wave" and "mad as hell"
explanations. Second, I describe three
characteristics of the new politics that have helped
shape penal legislation. Third, I offer my theory of
the causes of recent political change. Finally, I
suggest promising ways to limit the negative impact
of the new politics on criminal justice.

Two Simple Explanations

According to two popular explanations, the intense
new politics of punishment is (1) a result of rising
crime rates or (2) the product of increasing citizen
hostility toward criminals. Neither explanation fits
well with recent American history. The bulk of the
U.S. violent crime increase occurred between 1964 and
1974, when the homicide rate doubled. Between 1974
and 1980 homicide rates declined, then climbed up to
the 1974 level in 1980, dropped through 1984, and
climbed again through 1991. 

This crime pattern does not follow the punitive
policies pattern on either the upside or the
downside. Despite the "crime in the streets" theme of
the 1968 presidential election, the U.S. prison
population declined through 1972, and there was
little legislative activity on punishment at the
State level. When sentencing reform heated up in the
mid-1970s, there was little of the strident punitive
emphasis that later characterized the new politics of
punishment. By the time the punitive political
setting had developed, the sharp increase in crime of
the 1960s and early 1970s had been history for a
decade.

The new political paradigm also was not closely
linked to the crime rate on the downside. Crime has
been declining in the United States since 1991, and
the cumulative impact of that decline was more
substantial by 1998 than in any earlier post-World
War II period. Yet, the political pressure for new
punitive responses has not let up significantly.
Instead, the politics of punishment has become a
version of "heads I win, tails you lose," in which
decreases in crime are evidence that hard-line
punishments work, whereas increases are evidence that
they are needed. The sustained crime drops of the
1990s have not produced an era of good feeling. For
example, the continued angry pressure for hard-line
responses to juvenile offenders persisted in 1998 and
1999 in the face of the sharpest drop in juvenile
crimes on record from 1994 to 1998. The juvenile
crime pattern is typical.

The second popular theory of the origins of the harsh
new politics of penal policy fits the historical
record better than reaction to rising crime rates but
still seems quite unsatisfactory. The driving force
of this version is the hostility of the public to
crime and criminals. In the famous phrase from the
motion picture "Network," the man in the street is
suddenly "mad as hell and not gonna take this
anymore." This theory shifts attention from
variations in crime rates to variations in the public
mood about crime, an important plus for the
mad-as-hell approach. The timing is more flexible
too, because it takes time for citizen anger to be
aroused and more time for anger to be channeled into
political action. 

But this explanation for political change wrongly
assumes that the man in the street 30 years ago did
not think burglars and robbers should be locked up.
We suspect that populist attitudes about most crime
and most criminals always have been consistently
negative in the United States. Yet if hostility and
punitive preference are nearly constant over time,
populist sentiments cannot explain the recent sharp
change in the political climate. It seems more likely
that citizen fear and anger are necessary conditions
that have been present all along and have interacted
with other changes in recent times to generate a
distinctive new political climate. I will return to
this matter.

Three Characteristics of the New Political Landscape

Before advancing my own theories of cause, I would
like to single out three characteristics of the
recent politics of punishment that deserve special
attention: (1) the loose link between the symbolism
and the implementation of punishment laws, (2) the
zero-sum rhetoric supporting punishment proposals,
and (3) the paradoxical politics of distrust in penal
legislation.

Loose Linkage

Legislation concerning criminal punishment serves two
very different public purposes. One is the symbolic
denunciation of crime and criminals, a statement of
condemnation that enables the political community to
make its detestation of crime manifest in legal form.
A second public purpose is to change the behavior of
courts, prisons, or parole authorities. For most
members of the public, symbolism is the most
important aspect of penal legislation. Therefore, no
profound linkage is needed between symbolic
legislation and major changes in the way the system
punishes criminals. 

This loose link between symbolic and operational
impacts has traditionally allowed new criminal laws
to bark much louder than they bite, to satisfy the
need for symbols of denunciation without making much
difference in the penalties meted out to most
offenders. But recent events have shown that the
loose connection between symbolic and operational
impacts can work both ways. The U.S. Federal system
and California enacted laws labeled "three strikes
and you're out" in 1994. By late 1998 the U.S.
Federal statute resulted in 35 special prison
sentences, while the California law produced more
than 40,000 special sentences. The difference is more
than a thousandfold. In other words, laws serving the
same symbolic function can produce very different
results in different settings. 

The Federal law was traditional in that it barked
louder than it bit. The California law, on the other
hand, bit louder than it barked because 90 percent of
California's enhanced prison sentences were given not
to people who had two prior convictions (strikes) but
to offenders who had only one prior conviction. The
law was 10 times as broad as its label, "three
strikes and you're out." 

When citizens are concerned more with the symbolism
of penal laws than with their results, the same
rhetoric can lead to very different operational law
reforms. In such cases, the practical impact of new
penal laws is determined more by who controls the
planning and drafting processes and what they want
than by the level of public support for labels like
three strikes. And those who wish to maximize impact
can ride slogans a long way. The California version
of three strikes has resulted in 9 times as many
prison terms as all of the 25 other three-strikes
laws combined. The chronically loose link between
symbolic and operational impact will lead to
high-stakes competition for control of legislative
drafting as a recurrent phenomenon in the politics of
modern criminal justice.

The Zero-Sum Fallacy

A second feature of the recent politics of punishment
also concerns the relationship between the symbolic
and the operational aspects of penal law. The
rhetoric supporting new punishment proposals in
current politics often seems to assume that criminals
and crime victims are engaged in a zero-sum contest:
Anything that hurts offenders by definition helps
victims. If the competition between victims and
offenders is like a football game, then any detriment
to the offender team helps the victim's score.

The zero-sum assumption also conveniently avoids
questions about exactly how (and to what extent)
measures that hurt criminal offenders might also help
their victims. The law of equivalent benefit in true
zero-sum settings implies that anything that hurts
the other team helps the competition in equal
measure.

Therefore, to choose punishment policy in a true
zero-sum setting, a citizen must simply decide
whether she prefers victims or offenders. What makes
this approach illogical is the fact that crime and
criminal justice is not a zero-sum game. When victims
of violent crime are given public funds to compensate
them for their economic losses, does that benefit
automatically hurt criminal offenders? Of course it
does not, because there is no zero-sum relationship
to government policy toward criminal punishment and
crime victims. But assuming there is one generates a
justification for endless cycles of increased
suffering on false grounds. Perhaps some believe that
the symbolic denunciation of offenders always
supports the social standing of crime victims, but
that does not mean that the pain of punishment
creates equal and opposite reactions in victims.

The Paradoxical Politics of Government Distrust

The punishment of criminals is at root an exercise of
government power. It might, therefore, seem
reasonable that citizen support for harsh measures
against criminals would rise with increasing citizen
trust in government and that citizen support for
excessive punishments would decline when confidence
in government falls off. In this interpretation,
support for harsh punishment would be a disease of
excess confidence in state authority. But the recent
pattern is the opposite: Support for mandatory
penalties and truth-in-sentencing laws increases with
additional distrust of, for example, parole
officials, judges, and other professionals meting out
punishment.

Distrust in government can raise the stakes in
criminal punishment policy. Citizens worry that
judges will identify with offenders and treat them
with inappropriate leniency. A bad judge in this view
"coddles" criminals and thus acts against the
interests of the ordinary citizen. The imposition of
stern penal measures such as the mandatory punishment
term guards against such governmental weakness. But
the mandatory term is a huge expansion of punishment,
rendering excessive outcomes in many cases to ensure
sufficiency of punishment in a very few that might
otherwise escape their just deserts. Such huge
inefficiency is the hallmark of the three-strikes law
in California and of truth-in-sentencing reforms
generally. The politics of distrust links Megan's Law
(which allows citizens rather than just police access
to information on sex offenders' addresses) to three
strikes and to truth in sentencing. Megan's Law
reflects distrust of police, three-strikes and
mandatory sentences reflect distrust of judges, and
truth in sentencing reflects distrust of parole
authorities.

The Punishment Lobby and Structural Shifts

If fear of crime and hostility toward criminals are
persistent features of public opinion, what accounts
for the intense new phase of the politics of
punishment? I suggest two changes in political
conditions relating to punishment policy that have
interacted with broader changes in State and local
politics to create an altered political climate. The
first is the growth of single-issue lobbies dedicated
to criminal punishment issues. The second is the
reduced distance between the symbolic politics of
crime and the locations in government where
punishments are set.

The single-issue punishment lobby is a new element in
American State politics. Mothers Against Drunk
Driving was one early example in the 1980s. Victims'
rights organizations came on the scene in the late
1980s. In California, we have a prison guards' union
with a strong pecuniary interest in expanding the
scale of imprisonment and a large budget for
political contributions.

Single-issue lobbies have changed the politics of
punishment in several ways. They have mobilized
citizen fear and hostility, shaping these emotions
into a hard-line consensus for additional punitive
legislation. In addition, many of these groups--for
example, the guards' union and the authors of the
California three-strikes law--care about not only the
symbols of punishment but also making punishment more
severe. Truth-in-sentencing legislation, like
mandatory minimum penalties, is another reform
designed to create the maximum impact on prison
populations. The job of the results-oriented lobby is
to push the public consensus into legislative
directions where big operational changes are
produced. 

Finally, single-issue lobbies keep the pot constantly
boiling. For example, after the three-strikes law was
enacted in California, prime mover Mike Reynolds was
in danger of working himself out of a job. Without a
pending issue, his political importance was in
question. So within months, he had introduced a
10-20-life set of mandatory minimum penalties for
crimes committed with firearms. When a version of
this proposal passed in California, he worked for its
enactment in other States. If he had not, he would
have needed still another new proposal or been
relegated to the sidelines. 

I believe that the work of single-issue lobbies to
keep the political pot boiling destabilizes the
jurisprudence of criminal punishment. Layers of new
law are added on top of others like stalactites and
stalagmites in limestone caves. By 1999 the layers of
legislation that determine criminal punishment in
California are as unintegrated and collectively
unprincipled as any penal code in the developed
world--and subject to change without notice.

Structural shifts in the governmental organization of
punishments have multiplied the impact of lobbies in
State legislatures. Such shifts rendered California
vulnerable to a three-strikes revolution of maximum
impact. The gap between largely symbolic legislation
and the operational setting where punishments were
determined was traditionally maintained by the power
of expert bodies and legal actors to influence
punishments. Sentencing was the province of judges,
and power over prison release was in the hands of
parole authorities. 

Removing the authority of parole agencies in the
1970s and putting legislatures in charge of
determining punishment for individual offenses and
offenders drastically reduced the insulation between
democratic politics and the governance of punishment.
A key function was relocated from the professional
to the political arena. Once that occurred in
California in 1977, for three strikes to pass was
only a matter of the right groups learning to exploit
the vulnerabilities of the new governmental
organization of punishment. The deprofessionalization
of setting punishment started long before the
single-issue lobbies grew powerful, but the two are
interacting in some jurisdictions to destabilize
punishment levels in a new way.

The mandatory minimum sentence is the nuclear weapon
of the new politics of crime because it purports to
remove any discretion from the sentencer in punishing
individuals prosecuted for committing mandatory-term
crimes. This disempowers judges and makes the
identity of the offender irrelevant to the punishment
imposed. In practice, the prosecutor simply assumes
powers that prosecutors and judges had shared. In
theory, however, choosing punishment becomes
nonprofessional and entirely under the control of
democratic politics. Broad mandatory minimum laws
patterned after California's three-strikes law are
the ultimate extreme of politicized punishment. They
can be mitigated by prosecutorial discretion, but
they otherwise make the enterprise of criminal
sentencing a nonprofessional act. Criminal sentencing
becomes the province of politics, not professional
expertise. There is no insulation between political
sentiment and the principles of criminal sentencing. 

Limiting the Negative Impact of the New Politics

What are the countermeasures to unitary and extreme
political control of punishment? One focus ought to
be on separating individual punishment decisions from
general sentiments about crime. The legislature that
enacts a penal code should rarely, if ever, decide
what prison sentence a person convicted of an offense
should serve prior to release. This blending of the
general and the particular invites disaster. I have
similar reservations about binding general rules
promulgated by sentencing commissions. A second focus
should be insulating the sentencing of offenders far
from political sentiments by interposing expert
institutions.

Sentencing commissions in several States can be seen
as deliberate attempts to create new expert
institutions as insulation between politics and
punishment. But sentencing commissions are both a
risk and a benefit as insulators because they often
attempt to restrict discretion in individual cases.

The sentencing judge is a key expert in a defense
against a populist politics of punishment. In any
legal system based on proportionality in criminal
punishments, individual decisions and individual
discretions are necessary. Judicial discretion was
one early casualty of the politics of governmental
distrust back when distrust of government was a theme
from the Left rather than the Right. Nothing could
have been further from the intentions of those early
critics than most of the laws and policies produced
by the new politics of the 1990s. But the unintended
consequences of the shift to determinate sentences
may greatly increase the operational impact of a
punitive regime if it occurs.

It is my belief that structural remedies will be more
effective than appeals to reason in the politics of
crime. Damage control almost always is the first
priority in the democratic politics of punishment.
Creating distance between symbolic legislation and
the determination of punishment in particular cases
is the best hope currently available for a sustained
program of damage control. These structural
approaches are much more than just mechanical
tinkering. Keeping the symbolic and operational
spheres of criminal punishment separate confronts the
duality of criminal punishment in an appropriate and
fundamental way.

Question-and-Answer Session

Elizabeth Fraser, Institute for Law and Justice,
Alexandria, Virginia: I learned recently that a
couple of the Northwestern States have State
legislation that moves sentencing decisions for
revocations of parole into the correctional side,
rather than requiring them to go back to the court.
When there is revocation by sentenced offenders, they
go back to the parole body that watches over them and
have a hearing under that authority rather than going
to the court. Do you think having sentencing
decisions go to the correctional authorities is an
improvement?

F.Z.: In general, if there is a principled rationale
for it, I am greatly in favor of "back end" power in
determining correctional stays and questions like
revocation because of the "dual currency" phenomenon.
When you are sentencing a criminal, you are doing two
things at the same time: you are condemning crime,
making it perfectly clear how terrible the offender
is and how innocent and worthy of community support
the victim is; you are also deciding how you should
allocate a scarce resource like prison time, how
dangerous the offender is, and whether he rather than
the next person you are going to judge should deserve
an extra year in the State prison system. Those are
an awful lot of agendas to juggle. The sentencing
judge is making a "front end" decision, one that is
closer to the crime and further removed from the time
when a person gets out of prison. In traditional
parole, a "time to be served" decision was made after
the dust had settled and closer to the time that
release might occur. The notion that you could
maintain the focus on operational impact was an
advantage of parole (particularly when people were
sentenced to very long terms) that we never noticed
until we started abolishing it.

There is another thing that we never noticed about
our State systems: Who pays the bills for prisons?
State governments. Who controls prison populations?
Usually, local governments. Judges and prosecutors in
most States are instrumentalities of local units of
government, and sending people to prison is something
like a free lunch for local government. If you ship
them out of the county (as opposed to putting them in
a county jail), the State pays the bills. When we
abolished parole and adopted determinate sentencing,
centralized State correctional authorities suddenly
had no power over their own population. Parole was
the one centralized power that States had. They could
make those decisions at the back end of prison
sentences and influence and respond to prison
overcrowding. The most famous example of that in
California came during the Reagan administration
when, rather than the States' spending new money, a
lot of people had the back ends of their prison terms
snipped off in the interest of economy.

Having said that there is a great deal structurally
to be argued for back-end controls, let me also say
there are two things that must happen for the
back-end control to have credibility in the new
political environment. First, the agency should have
a claim to expertise. It is not good enough that some
faceless bureaucrat does this. Second, there should
be some rationale. The California Determinate
Sentencing Act of 1976 appeared to have no rationale.
The lawmakers thought parole was awful, so instead an
oriental carpet sale replaced parole in California:
every sentence issued by a judge was cut 50 percent
through nearly automatic good time. This way symbolic
sentences could be doubled without paying for the
operational impact.

I think we learned from three strikes, 10-20-life
sentences, and everything else that we're doing in
California that without a credible rationale, that
kind of mechanical discounting function is naked of
principle and thus highly vulnerable. Under those
circumstances we must create a structure of
governance in which the back-end punishment
adjustment agencies can say what it is they are
supposed to be experts in and how they are doing a
job that couldn't be done as well by a legislature. 

What sorts of things might that be? Judges can look
at the particular facts of a particular crime and a
particular offender and measure proportionally how
that offender compares with other robbers or burglars
and to other claims on penal resources.
Proportionality is one part of it. We have to
remember that criminal sentences are legal decisions.

Anybody who tells me that the rehabilitative ideal is
dead in the sense that rehabilitative considerations
are irrelevant has never visited a drug court or a
juvenile court. Considering alternatives to prison is
a second claim to expertise--on either actuarial or
treatment grounds--for people who are making
decisions about individual offenders. 

These kinds of structural accommodations are good
ideas that can work only with credible rationales and
claims to expertise. If there is a good final-exam
question for a criminal law class on this, it is
going to be, "What is the claim to expertise of a
sentencing commission?" One thing is scarce
resources--the allocation of scarce penal resources
on a centralized, rationalized basis. But I'm not
sure that sentencing commissions are a good way (and
I'm sure that sentencing guideline grids are not a
good way) of measuring proportionality in individual
cases. And I'm absolutely sure that, while you might
want to add to actual punishment at the back end of
the punishment system, the one indispensable actor in
individual cases and the one indispensable discretion
in the criminal justice system in sentencing is the
judge. Any system without substantial judicial
discretion will sooner or later be gratuitously and
excessively punitive.

Charlie Sullivan, Citizens United for Rehabilitation
(CURE), Washington, D.C.: I certainly agree with your
analysis, but I'd like to point out that there are
two areas in this prisoner and prison buildup. First,
what you are talking about is scarcity of resources,
and I don't think that we have looked at the role of
the U.S. Department of Justice in this expansion of
prisons and prison space. The Justice Department,
since the 1994 Crime Act, has given close to $3
billion to States to build more prisons. And a
condition of half of that money is that they move
into truth-in-sentencing reforms. This is basically
"seed money" to move in that direction. 

Statistics have backed up the idea that, if a person
is locked up, they will be able to divert many, many
crimes. We almost were at cross purposes. The Justice
Department just gave almost another half billion
dollars in this last year's appropriations. General
Barry McCaffrey, Director of the Office of National
Drug Control Policy, talking about drug treatment,
says 10 percent of that money could be used by States
to provide drug treatment. A year ago, Minnesota
Senator Paul Wellstone wanted to divert that money to
drug treatment to help mentally ill prisoners, and
the Justice Department went against that. 

What you're saying in all of these areas is that the
Democrats (going back to Lyndon Johnson, etc.)--the
ones leading and talking about an enlightened policy-
-have joined the Republicans. I think it goes back to
the Willy Horton case. Politically, the Congressional
Black Caucus is the only group that is continuing to
talk about an enlightened criminal justice system and
enlightened prison policy.

The second point, besides the role of the Justice
Department in this prison and prisoner buildup (which
I think has not been really researched), has to do
with the role of the National Rifle Association
(NRA). This gets back to the Democrats as well. The
NRA was very close to them, particularly in rural
areas where the Democrats have dominated. It has kind
of been a "marriage" in which Democrats might have
said, "Okay, NRA, we are going to listen to you and
we are going to lock up the people who commit crimes
for longer sentences."

I was in Texas when the first mandatory minimum
started in the mid-1970s. It came out of the
Democratic legislators, who felt this was the way to
respond to the NRA. "If you do the crime, you will do
the time." They were trying to avoid the gun control
issue. (By the way, I think the Justice Department
has done a wonderful job, at least on that issue).
Because I am with a grassroots prison reform
organization of families of prisoners (as you can
tell from my question), I am on Capitol Hill a lot,
talking about these issues.

F.Z.: Let me first take a little bit of the heat off
the Department of Justice by saying that the 1994
Crime Act passed by Congress, with so-called
truth-in-sentencing incentives (although incentives
of a very peculiar kind) was a wonderful example of
the new politics of punishment. It was passed in 1994
in an atmosphere of insatiable punitiveness. Despite
that, the Republican majority was back 6 months later
to try to amend it to make it more punitive--to take
out, among other things, the famously labeled
"midnight basketball" and to toughen up some policy
programs they regarded as equivocal.

That $3 billion in grants that you're talking about
is in pursuit of one version of truth in sentencing,
which is wildly different from other versions, and I
want to use it as an example. It requires that
prisoners convicted of violent crimes serve 85
percent of their sentences. This aim at violent
offenders, if it had any impact at all, might have
been a radical redistribution of prison resources.
The creation of a double scale in which the State
correctional facilities can without penalty "cycle
out" their nonviolent drug offenders while keeping in
their violent offenders (while that is problematic on
some theoretical grounds) is very different, in a
practical sense, from having legislatively imposed
truth in sentencing for everybody. 

Yet, truth in sentencing as a Federal law is totally
mindless because there are three very different
sentencing systems in the States, and the law has
hugely different impacts on each. Where there are
sentencing commissions with mandatory guidelines that
were historically based, the 85 percent really means
that people will go on serving sentences that
historically had been determined by previous parole
release patterns. That's very different from what is
going to happen where there are active parole
authorities at the State level and the standard
sentence that Federal law requires is much longer
because it is based on nominal preparole sentences.
That's different again from systems that have become
determinate through force of law without anybody
doing anything--the automatic releases of the
California system.

So I think that the Federal truth in sentencing
incentive is, first of all, an example of the new
politics. Second, it is a wonderful example of how
having some control over the process of drafting a
law can make for huge operational changes in a system
if truth in sentencing was going to happen in some
form. The violence-only form that the 1994 Federal
law gave it was by no means the one that would have
maximized the negative operational impact of truth in
sentencing. Third, when you look at the money that
Congress was trying to give the States and the
pressure it was trying to put on the States, and you
compare that with what the Federal Government has
done in truth in sentencing--how much money has been
spent and how stringent the Federal effort has been
for making sure that a lot of folks are getting
locked up with that money--you see that there is a
huge gap. There is no ideological sincerity on the
part of the administration of the Department of
Justice in the enforcement of those provisions.

If you use the Crime Act of 1994 as an example of the
new politics, it is still "barking a lot louder than
it bites," at least through the end of the year 2000.
The political winds may change that, and the
structural accommodations may still create a system
in which the net effects of this kind of Federal
policy are to increase prison populations and
increase them substantially.

Jeremy Travis, National Institute of Justice, U.S.
Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: The only
point I would make about the NRA is that their usual
political incentive for tough mandatory penalties is
simply to change the subject away from guns. Now,
that's fine. The way they used to do that had zero
operational impact on the prison system. They didn't
care about impact on prisons because their primary
ambitions were legislative negatives: to keep the
attention off guns.

F.Z.: What happened is that, once the NRA started
interacting with some of the other single-issue
lobbies, they were the big money source (with the
prison guards union behind three strikes in
California). They also didn't care much if in fact
these new laws had a high impact on prison
population. So rather accidentally, they got co-opted
into the operational impact business and are now
supporting laws that "bite a lot harder than they
bark" just as easily as they used to support the
symbolic laws that had no operational impact. I don't
think that theirs is a principled presence in the new
politics. I think they have been "swept up" like the
rest of us have. 

Paul Hofer, U.S. Sentencing Commission, Washington,
D.C.: In your concern that any sort of determinate
rules, mandatory minimum statutes, or guidelines are
going to be vulnerable to manipulation if your
solution is going to be to empower judges, what about
the traditionalists' concern regarding disparity in
the power of different judges?

F.Z.: The issue of disparity in outcomes was solved
in two very different ways in the 1970s. Most of the
State determinate sentencing regimes that tried to
solve the problem of individual judicial disparity
did so in a way that turned out to be unprincipled.
That is, what they did (I will use Illinois and
California as examples simply because those are
systems I studied more thoroughly than Indiana and
some of the other early determinate sentencing
States) is to say that the judge still has unlimited
discretion in deciding whether or not a convicted
offender goes to prison. We're not touching that
discretion. But, if a sentence of imprisonment is
decided upon, we are going to force the judge,
constrain him given what offense was committed, to a
very narrow selection of terms of imprisonment.

From a standpoint of principle, that is a hilarious
system. What it was responding to was the notion that
two guys are cellmates and one says, "I'm a burglar,
and I got 10 years." And the other says, "I got 2."
So somebody like former corrections commissioner
David Fogel writes a book called We Are the Living
Proof and makes sure that no matter how many burglars
are out on probation, if two of them end up in the
Stateville Penitentiary (which he is running), they
will have roughly analogous sentences. As a logical
matter, that kind of a system had real flaws.

The Federal Sentencing Commission guidelines, the
Criminal Justice Act of 1984, and the guidelines of
1987, instead, take a broad look at general
disparity--because what could be more important, from
the perspective of disparity, than whether offenders
go to prison or not--and the way in which they
deal with the issue is to create binding or
near-binding general notions of an appropriate
punishment. The problem is that the criminal justice
system is now (and has been for most of the 20th
century) muscle bound. For most marginal offenders,
the choice in punishment is a choice between doing
too little and doing too much. The "too much" is
prison, and the "too little" seems to be everything
else. We have made some efforts in the intermediate
punishment area lately, but we don't believe in the
credibility of our efforts to create real punishments
that aren't imprisonment, if we look at how our
sentencing commissions behave.

What that meant with the Federal effort was that the
way to constrain judicial discretion on the in-out
decision was to create a presumption. What kind of
presumption? In the Federal sentencing
guidelines/standards, that is one of the world's
easiest questions to answer: It was a presumption of
penal confinement. With that, what you worry about is
that discretions, when displaced, can be displaced
with excess punitiveness because of the
conservativeness of any decisionmaker. That is, the
decisionmaker has to worry about two kinds of
mistakes: punishing serious crimes not seriously
enough and punishing not-serious crimes too
seriously. When forced to a choice in a politically
responsive environment, if they need a general rule,
they are going to punish more seriously and more
severely than they would if they had unconstrained
discretion.

We have learned in 25 years that the choice of
displacing in-out discretion is a tradeoff between
allowing like cases to be treated in nonalike ways
with high degrees of individual discretion, and a
system that is excessively severe for many, if not
most, of its cases. If the question then is, which of
those two evils would I select? I think I'd go for
the former.

Nick Turner, State Sentencing and Corrections
Project, Vera Institute of Justice, New York, New
York: You made reference to the fact that this new
politics of criminal punishment and the shift of
punishment determination from the professionals to
the politicians was an unintended consequence.
The push for determinate sentences was from people
who were concerned about disparity, racial and
otherwise, and the consequences were unintended and
perhaps unwelcome as well. Do you think there is
another unintended consequence of this new politics--
the extreme fiscal burdens it has placed upon States?
One example is California, where spending on prisons
and corrections has outpaced or surpassed spending on
secondary education. On the flip side, States like
Georgia or Alabama are considering setting up
sentencing commissions to address these cost
expenditures. Can you comment on this as a
consequence of the new politics?

F.Z.: Well, what I'd like to do is buy a
postponement. I'd like to wait 10 years to answer the
question of whether the costs of prison are an
important restraint on excessive imprisonment. I
think it's largely an untested notion--particularly
in periods of great State and local prosperity. 

I'm from California and I probably have the same
conflict of interest that the prison guards union
has. The reason they are rooting for mandatory
minimum punishments is rather obvious. They get paid
a lot more than school teachers, and the more prison
sentences there are, the more members are going to be
hired. 

My obvious conflict of interest is that I'm an
employee of the State university system (although
lately we have become almost private). It's not true
that California now spends more money on corrections
than on secondary education. It does, however, now
spend more money on its prison system than it spends
on the University of California. And that happens to
be the branch of government I work for. The reason I
know that difference is because secondary education
and junior colleges are protected by a State
constitutional initiative and will always get their
share of the budget. In times of scarcity, it turns
out that the prison system and the university system
are competing for the same very limited dollars, and
so far, the prison system has done a lot better. It
is a now $4 billion system in that single American
State. I think we have about $2.6 billion in State
support in the university system.

I'm not sure that California has now entered the
biblical "7 fat years." It can't keep many fiscal
reserves because the same initiative system that gave
us three strikes makes the State issue refunds if it
accidently happens to collect too much in taxes. The
problem with prosperity is that it makes prison space
seem a good deal more affordable than it would
otherwise be and that is one reason I'd like to find
out how great the fiscal bite is in the longer term.
The other problem with assuming that fiscal factors
will slow down prison growth is that we also are
learning that there are many political shortcuts to
make expenditures (particularly capital expenditures)
seem pain free. 

In California, because of the Proposition 13 and
Proposition 9 reforms, it looked like bond measures
would have to be approved by citizens. The problem
was that even during the new politics of punishment,
citizens would vote down bond measures. Do we say
that will be the way to keep them from building
prisons? Not quite. What we do instead is issue a lot
of revenue bonds to build prisons. How can you build
prisons on revenue bonds? How are you going to get
the revenue? Are you going to charge the prisoners?
Well, the same legalese that we taught my students to
use for the government to justify school expenditures
in the context of these constraints works just as
well when you are justifying prisons.

I think good can flow from the fact that imprisonment
is expensive. From the standpoint of worrying about
"overimprisonment," one useful law reform strategy is
to try to make imprisonment more expensive. It is a
lot more expensive in California than in Texas. But
I'm not sure that the decisive battles on
imprisonment policy are going to be won on fiscal
grounds. I think a couple of principles and some
notion of limit in the punishment game would help the
fiscal arguments a lot.

Michael Siegel, Federal Judicial Center, Washington,
D.C.: I appreciate your comments about the difficulty
of fighting on the symbolic front. However, one, if
we cede this ground too easily, are we making the
lives of the operators very difficult? Two, are we
sure we are going to get the right operators there,
particularly in States where judges are elected
rather than appointed? Three, I want to offer the
possibility that one leverage area is the media. If
you watch a week of television news, you do not know
that crime is going down in this country. 

F.Z.: Let me start with the last. That's right; crime
hasn't gone down on television. Jeremy mentioned that
I did a study for the MacArthur Foundation on
American youth violence, and we found one of the
great split-personality situations of all time.
Homicide arrests have fallen by half among kids
between ages 13 and 17 in the United States over the
past 6 years. That's the fastest drop we have ever
had for any age group that I have ever observed. On
the other hand, I don't pick up any media or
political coverage that suggests anything other than
the notion that youth violence is going up. So, if we
can defy gravity when the statistics show that
American youth violence has dropped as fast all over
the country as lethal violence has dropped in New
York, and nobody is noticing, there is a lot to the
notion that propaganda on crime rates and crime risks
must be countered if the political pressure is to be
resisted.

Do we risk leaving operating personnel undefended if
we don't fight the good fight symbolically? Yes. Is
there a problem if the wrong people then are put in
charge? Yes. But again, the point I would make is
that with whatever political energy and intellectual
capital you have, it is very important to be
extremely sophisticated about the structural nature
of the operational impacts of legislation and to
exploit the area between the symbolic and the actual.
Because, you see, the symbolic gap and the
punitiveness of populism are not American
characteristics and not 1990s characteristics. Those
are part of the basic operating principles of the
governance of punishment in any modern democracy, and
they probably always have been. Learning to play by
the rules and play off those effects is going to be a
lot more promising than trying to win the hearts and
minds of the general population.

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

Does the Booming Economy Help Explain the Fall in
Crime?

Presentation by 

Richard B. Freeman

Professor
National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard
University

and Professor
Centre for Economic Performance, London School of
Economics

February 23, 2000
Washington, D.C.

Starting in the mid-1990s, the United States has been
experiencing a great economic boom, as reflected in
the rapid growth of some of the major indicators of
economic health, such as the gross domestic product
(GDP) per capita, rising employment, and low
inflation. Unemployment fell to levels that just a
few years earlier most experts had thought impossible
in a noninflationary economy. In addition, after two
decades or so of decline, the real earnings of the
less skilled men disproportionately involved in crime
began to rise.

Over roughly the same period, the rate of crime
reported in the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)
fell, while crime reported in the National
Victimization Survey continued the downward trend
begun in the 1970s. Such well-defined crimes as
homicides dropped substantially. Although in 1998 UCR
crime rates still exceeded their early 1960s figures,
they were 30 percent below the peak rates of the
1980s.[1]

To what extent, if at all, has the booming economy
contributed to the drop in crime? To what extent, if
at all, did the fall in pay for less skilled workers
and weak overall job market of the 1980s help
maintain a high level of crime, despite the mass
incarceration of offenders?

The economic model of crime predicts that individuals
will choose between crime and legitimate work,
depending on the chances of getting a job and the
wages in the legitimate market compared with
opportunities for illegal earnings and the risk of
apprehension and incarceration or other penalties for
illegal activity. It is hard to argue a priori
against this formulation of the decision to engage in
crime, for it simply assumes that, on the margin,
criminals respond rationally to differential
opportunities. In the extreme, moreover, economic
factors have to matter for some crimes. If we were
all billionaires, why would anyone commit property
crime? If our families were starving, who would not
consider stealing food? But economic incentives
change more modestly than from billionaire to pauper.
In the 1990s boom, unemployment fell by 3 percentage
points or so and real wages rose modestly, while
income inequality roughly stabilized. Were these
changes enough to affect crime in a substantial way? 

This essay argues that the answer to this question is
yes. The evidence is not unequivocal, and there are
empirical problems that create some uncertainty, but
the preponderance of studies, particularly the most
recent econometric work, supports the claim that the
booming economy helped reduce the crime rate. This
essay first presents the facts about the economic
boom and level of crime and examines the predictions
of the economic model about the economic rewards of
crime and the supply of persons committing crimes. It
then makes the case that economic factors have played
a substantial role in the 1990s decline in crime. The
next section argues against the case that economic
factors played an important role in the decline in
crime, as it might be presented by a noneconomist.
The essay concludes by linking the effects of the
economy and other contending explanations to the
change in crime over the past half-century. 

The Economy and Crime

"Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts."
--Sergeant Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police
Department, "Dragnet" television series, circa 1960

The 1990s boom was the longest in the 20th century.
It brought the U.S. rate of employment per adult to
an all-time high and reversed both the decline in
real wages for regular workers and the rising
inequality that was the hallmark of the previous
decade or two. Exhibits 1 and 2 show how the 1990s'
boom affected the major indicators of the job market.
Exhibit 1 documents the rise in the ratio of
employment to population to more than 64 percent and
the fall in the unemployment rate to about 4 percent
by the end of 1999. The less educated young men and
minority young men who are disproportionately
involved in crime benefited substantially from the
boom. Among out-of-school young black men with high
school or less education, the unemployment rate fell
more than the unemployment rate in the overall
economy (Freeman and Rodgers 1999). Exhibit 2 shows
the pattern of wage change in the 1980s and 1990s.
The real hourly earnings of all male workers,
including the young men who make up the bulk of
offenders, rose in the late 1990s after having
dropped in the previous two decades. The gains in
wages included those with the least skills, due in
part to an increase in the minimum wage but due
largely to the tight labor market. Although the
upswing in earnings occurred later than the upswing
in employment and seems more fragile, if the
unemployment and wage statistics are combined by
multiplying the chance of getting a job (1 minus the
unemployment rate) by wages to yield an expected
return from labor market activity, clear improvement
is found in opportunities in the legitimate economy
for all workers, men, and less educated men. 

Exhibits 3, 4, and 5 present the crime part of the
story. They record the UCR rates of crime, property
victimization, and homicide. All measures fell in the
1990s, but the timing and extent of the changes from
the 1970s to the 1990s differ. The UCR rises through
the late 1970s, drops in the early 1980s, then rises
again until the 1990s. (See exhibit 3.) The
victimization survey shows a different pattern:
Victimizations drop in the late 1970s and early
1980s, level off in the mid-1980s, and fall again in
the 1990s. (See exhibit 4.) While the UCR crime rate
in 1999 was 20 percent below its peak, the rate of
property crime victimization in 1999 was less than
half the rate in the late 1970s. Homicides, a more
clearly defined measure of crime, follow the UCR
pattern for the most part. (See exhibit 5.) 

Because unemployment was high and real wages fell for
less educated men in the 1970s and 1980s, the UCR
data crudely follow the pattern of change in
legitimate market incentives. The victimization data,
however, move so differently as to create a problem
for economic analysis and, for that matter, for any
other effort to account for the changing pattern of
crime over time. If explanatory factors fit the UCR
time pattern, they will have trouble fitting the
victimization time pattern, and the converse is true.
But in the 1990s, on which this essay focuses, the
two series move in tandem. 

Many social factors beyond economic calculation
affect crime (Wilson 1983; Wilson and Petersilia
1994). Some of these factors changed greatly in the
period under study--as much as or more than the
legitimate labor market. Incarceration increased
massively from the 1970s to 2000, with huge
proportions of men in the high-crime demographic
groups imprisoned. The parents of young Americans
were better educated than in the past. (Among blacks,
this reflects the civil rights revolution, which
opened educational opportunities in the 1960s.) Also,
young Americans came from smaller families (partly
the result of the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion)
(Donahue and Levitt 1999). The age distribution of
the population changed. Policing strategies changed.
The number of police per capita increased in the
1990s. Finally, the market for drugs, which greatly
affects illegal income opportunities, changed. 

The economics model holds fixed all factors beyond
those that affect the monetary incentive to commit
crime and asks the following question: How do the
financial returns from crime--as opposed to legal
work--affect decisions to engage in crime? Formally,
if in the formula below "Wc" is the hourly earnings
from successful crime, "p" is the probability of
apprehension, "S" is the extent of punishment, "W" is
the hourly earnings from legitimate work, and "e" is
the probability of getting a legal job, the
individual will choose to commit crimes rather than
take a legitimate job when the utility ("U") from
crime exceeds the utility from work:

 (1-p) U(Wc) - pU(S) > U(eW)

This equation has several implications for empirical
analysis. It implies that crime should pay a higher
wage than legitimate activities (Wc > W). Although
reliable data on the rewards of crime are lacking,
the limited known information supports this
expectation. Hourly rates of pay from crime appear to
be higher than from legitimate activity for
criminals, but most people who commit crime do not
earn that much annually from it. (See exhibit 6.)
Most crime is sporadic, and many people combine legal
and illegal work to make a living. The model also
implies that attitudes toward risk, measured by the
curvature of U, are an important element in the
decision to commit crime. The risk averse will
respond more to changes in the probability of
apprehension than to changes in the difference in
wages from crime and legitimate work.

Most important, the formula shows that the major
determinants of decisions to commit crime--the legal
job market, illegal opportunities, and sanctions--are
intrinsically related. If the rational model is
accepted as a valid description of behavior, it
cannot be claimed either that tougher penalties
reduce crime while a better labor market does not, or
the converse.

The individual decision to commit crime is, of
course, only the first part of any economic analysis.
To measure the supply of crime in society, the
decisions of all people must be aggregated to produce
a schedule that links the total amount of crime to
the incentives. One simple way to represent the
aggregate relation is to use p, W, e, Wc, and S
(where S is measured in dollars) to form the expected
return to crime:

(1-p)Wc -pS-eW 

This return becomes the price in a standard labor
supply schedule. 

The shape of this schedule is critical for assessing
the way economic and other factors affect crime.
Exhibit 7 shows three supply schedules--(A) a
standard upward sloping supply schedule, (B) a
vertical or inelastic schedule with no economic
responsiveness, and (C) a horizontal or infinitely
elastic supply schedule. Exhibit 7 also depicts the
"demand for crime," measured by opportunities to earn
money from crime relative to legitimate activities.
This schedule is a downward sloping relation. More
crimes reduce the earnings potential due to the
declining marginal productivity of crime. The
marginal productivity of crime falls for several
reasons: the likelihood that criminals pick off easy
targets first, the increased effort that citizens are
likely to make to protect themselves and their
property as crime grows, the likely expansion of
policing and harsher penalties in a crime wave, and
the greater risk of competition from other criminals. 

When the supply schedule is inelastic, one way in
which criminal justice policy can reduce crime--
incapacitation--operates with complete efficiency.
Every criminal incarcerated reduces the number of
crimes by the exactly the number of crimes that the
criminal would have committed had he been at large.
By contrast, when the supply schedule is elastic,
incapacitation has no effect on the amount of crime.
When Joe is incarcerated, his neighbor Bill sees the
opportunity to make money and commits Joe's crimes. 

Because evidence on the returns to crime is spotty at
best, it is difficult to get a handle on the
supply-of-crime schedule. One way to assess the
potential shape of the schedule is to examine how
increased incapacitation affects crime over a given
period. Assume, as a first approximation, that the
demand and supply schedules for crime are roughly
constant in a given period. Then calculate how much
crime should change when more or fewer people are
incarcerated. If the actual crime rate falls by that
amount, the supply of crime is inelastic. If, by
contrast, crime falls hardly at all, the supply of
crime must be elastic. The apparent failure of
incarceration to reduce the rate of crime by anything
like the magnitudes predicted by any model of
incapacitation (Zimring and Hawkins 1991; Freeman
1996) implies, crudely, that the elasticity of crime
is rather high. 

The weakness of this argument is the assumption that
the demand and supply of crime schedules are
unchanged. Given the swings in the drug trade, demand
for crime surely rose in the 1980s. There also may
have been shifts in the supply of people who commit
crime due to changing mores and other factors.
Perhaps moral values fell in the 1980s. The
abortion-induced decline in unwanted births in the
1970s may have reduced the supply of young people
with a propensity for crime in the 1990s (Donahue and
Levitt). If both demand and supply schedules shift,
no inferences can be made about the shape of the
schedules without additional data on those shifts. 

Some insight into the supply-to-crime relation can be
gained from an incapacitation model. Given the huge
rise in incarceration, UCR data should have shown a
drop in crime from the 1970s through the 1980s.
However, crime rose, then stabilized. One plausible
interpretation is that the supply curve to crime is
relatively elastic, so mass incarceration had little
effect on the level of crime. The drop in crime in
the 1990s was consistent with an improved economy
reducing the incentive for crime. At minimum, the
evidence shows that there is much more complex
behavior in the pattern of crime than a simple "lock
them up" criminal justice policy would recognize. To
examine the hypothesis that the legitimate labor
market can explain some of that behavior and that the
booming economy reduced crime in the 1990s, it is
necessary to look directly at the relationship
between economic incentives and crime. 

The Case That Economic Factors Matter

The first piece of evidence that economic factors
matter is that the population of offenders consists
disproportionately of people who have low legitimate
job market opportunities (Bernstein and Houston
2000). Whatever the source of data on crime--
prisoners, arrestees, self-reports of criminal
activity--the less skilled invariably are
disproportionately represented. Indeed, U.S. prisons
are filled with young men, roughly half from minority
groups, who have less than a high school education
and score low on written tests, which places them at
the bottom of the job market in earnings potential.
The contrast with virtually every other aspect of
social life, where the educated and skilled are more
active in politics, church attendance, volunteering,
and so on, is striking. Although the
overrepresentation of people with low earnings in
crime could reflect psychological or decisionmaking
problems among this population, studies show that
people who commit crimes are more likely to be
unemployed (or idle when they are of school age) than
others with comparable skills and that the same
person is more likely to commit a crime when jobless
than when employed (Freeman 1999). 

The second piece of evidence is geographic. Nearly
all studies of crime rates among several areas,
including those focused on non-labor-market factors,
contain unemployment in the local job market as a
covariate. Many studies include measures of earnings,
incomes, or earnings inequality. In 1983 I reviewed
the cross-area evidence and concluded that it
supported the claim that unemployment affected crime,
but not strongly. Ensuing work provides stronger
evidence that crime and unemployment across areas are
inversely related. Studies that pool cross-section
and time-series data across States or metropolitan
statistical areas in the 1990s offer particularly
powerful evidence of the crime/job market trade-off.
These studies include area dummy variables that
eliminate any unmeasured fixed-area factors and year
dummies that eliminate any overall trends and thus
base conclusions on how differential changes in
unemployment or wages across areas affect
differential changes in crime across areas. As
exhibit 8 shows, the three most recent studies find a
substantial relationship between unemployment and
crime, with a 1-percent change in unemployment
associated with an approximate 2-percent change in
crime rates. They also find a relationship between
wages of less educated workers/workers in retail
trade and crime, with an elasticity that averages
about -0.5. Studies of the effect on crime of area
earnings or inequality give a wider range of
estimates of the supply response, possibly because
there is no single wage or inequality measure across
or even within studies. 

The third piece of evidence comes from analyses that
relate reports of individual crimes or ensuing
criminal justice activities to their reported legal
or illegal income. These studies look for positive
relationships between the extent of individual crime
and earnings. One study (Grogger 1997) uses a formal
structural model to estimate an elasticity of supply
of time to crime of about 1. The 1980 module of the
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth contained a
question about the proportion of total income that
young people who committed crimes earned from crime.
The share of income from illegal sources has six
values: zero and five nonzero values (very little, to
which I assign the value 0.05, about a quarter
[0.25], about half [0.50], about three-quarters
[0.75] and nearly all [0.95]). Using this numeric
scale, the variable has a mean value of 0.17 for
out-of-school youth who said they earned illegal
income. Conditional on the number of crimes committed
and amount of time worked, the share of income from
illegal sources varies with the relative rewards of
crime (Wc/W). Columns 1 and 2 in exhibit 9 estimate
the link between incarceration and share of illegal
income (conditional on age, race, Armed Forces
Qualifying Test (AFQT) score, weeks worked, and years
of schooling). Note first that the chance of
committing enough crimes to be incarcerated is
positively related to age, negatively related to
schooling and AFQT score, and negatively related to
weeks worked. The column 1 estimate of the effect of
relative income on criminal behavior is huge,
implying an elasticity of crime to relative earnings
of more than 1.5.[2] In column 2, I added a control
for the number of crimes the youth committed. This
reduces the effect of the share of income from
illegal sources because it is necessarily highly
correlated with the number of crimes committed in
1979. Still, the relative income variable has a
powerful and highly significant impact, with an
elasticity in the range of those estimated by
researchers Gould, Weinberg, and Mustard (1998) using
area data.

The final piece of evidence comes from national
time-series data. A modest cyclical link is found
between rates of crime and the state of the economy,
conditional on trend factors. But the fact that crime
rates rose rapidly from the 1960s through the 1980s
while unemployment trended up only modestly and the
economy grew makes it clear that changes in
legitimate market opportunities are not the sole or
predominant factor at work. The long time-series
analysis is a reminder that changes in the legitimate
economy are only part of the story of changes in
crime rates.

In addition to the direct evidence of the
relationship between measures of the job market and
rates of crime, evidence from studies of the effect
of sanctions on crime also favors the rational
decision framework. Indeed, most empirical analyses
find that measures of the probability of apprehension
or sanctions have more consistent and statistically
stronger impacts on crime than unemployment and wages
in the legitimate market. Many analysts view labor
market factors and sanction factors as competing:
Those with a liberal bent want the labor market to
matter more while those of a conservative bent want
sanctions to matter more. I view this as a false
dichotomy. The economics model implies that both
factors work through the same decision calculus.
Incapacitation aside, sanctions work by affecting
incentives, just as legitimate and illegitimate
earnings opportunities do. It may be that the
generally stronger results obtained with measures of
sanctions reflect the fact that we have better
measures of them than of the pecuniary rewards from
crime, given our inadequate indicators of the actual
earnings from crime.

I conclude that the preponderance of evidence
supports the claim that the job market affects the
supply of crime. The order of magnitude of the
estimated response parameters suggests, moreover,
that economics matters quite a bit. Gould, Weinberg,
and Mustard (1998) estimate that economic incentives
explain 7 to 18 percent of the increase in particular
crimes from 1979 to 1989, with the major factor being
the fall in real wages for less skilled workers over
the period. Others estimate that the fall in
unemployment explains 40 percent of the drop in crime
from 1992 to 1997 (Raphael and Winter-Ebmer 2000).
With crime changing rapidly, however, the proportion
of the trends that economic factors can explain
depends on the time period studied. If an elasticity
of crime to unemployment of 2.0 is combined with a
3.5-percent drop in unemployment from 1992 to 1999,
the booming economy reduced the rate of crime by 7
percent, which compares with an actual drop of about
27 percent. The rise in real wages of less skilled
workers at the very end of the 1990s may have
contributed an additional 2 percent or so to the fall
in crime, bringing the contribution of changes in the
legitimate market to one-third of the overall change.
Because none of these estimates includes estimates of
changes in illegal earnings opportunities, moreover,
they potentially understate the total contribution of
changing economic incentives to the drop in crime. In
this period at least, the evidence suggests that the
economy is an 800-pound gorilla in the crime market. 

The Case Against the Economics Case

How much faith should any sensible soul put in what
economists say about crime? Economists are honorable
folk, but consider their track record in their own
domain. A few years ago, they thought the United
States could never combine full employment and stable
prices. The Federal Reserve Board claimed that the
natural rate of unemployment was around 6 percent and
denounced those who thought otherwise as
irresponsible radicals. How can we explain today's
booming economy? A figment of the imagination of the
economically unwashed! A few years ago, economists
also thought that the Federal deficit would go on and
on and on. How can we explain today's budget surplus?
Impossible! Unthinkable! Yes, economists are
honorable folk, but they cannot explain much of the
change in productivity, inequality, or stock market
prices. And when they take their theories to the real
world, what do we see? The collapse of long-term
capital management, gangster capitalism in Russia.
The notion that the job market is an 800-pound
gorilla affecting crime is pure hubris and chutzpah.
Let us look more closely at the alleged evidence.

Consider first the timing of changes in crime and the
economy. Over the long run, the economy has improved;
real wages rose for most of the 20th century. By the
standards of 1900, we are all quite well off, with
cars, color TVs, telephones, CDs, and more. Only a
few of us are billionaires but we are almost all far
from paupers who need to rob to feed our families.
Has crime fallen during this long period? No.
Unemployment was far lower in the 1980s than in the
Great Depression. Is crime lower? No. 

We do not have to go back in history to find flaws in
the economists' case. When did the U.S. crime rate
begin to rise? In the early 1960s. What was the state
of the job market then? Full employment with the real
wage of less skilled workers increasing. The UCR
crime rate doubled from 1960 to 1969 while GDP per
capita grew by more than 2 percent a year. Even in
the 1990s, the timing of the drop in crime and the
improvement in the economy is not quite right: The
UCR index began falling in 1992 while unemployment
rose to its peak 1990s level.

Much recent economic evidence comes from comparisons
of changes in crime and economic conditions area to
area. But in which city did crime fall the most in
the 1990s? New York City, whose economy was at best
sluggardly. Compare the Big Apple and Seattle. In
1998 New York City had an unemployment rate of nearly
8 percent while Seattle had an unemployment rate of
nearly 3 percent. But the rate of crime for the New
York metropolitan statistical area was 4,208 per
100,000, while that for Seattle was 6,208 per
100,000. Whatever accounts for the low crime in New
York City--Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Police
Commissioner William Bratton's heralded policing
policies, the success of the Yankees, changes in the
drug business, or the influx of immigrants--it is not
a low unemployment rate.[3] 

Indeed, economic factors do not come close to
explaining the variation in crime rates among
different areas. Cities, precincts within cities, and
blocks within precincts have vastly different rates
of crime that cannot possibly be attributed to
economic incentives (Glaeser, Sacerdote, Sheinkman
1995). And if we are looking at geographic data, do
not forget that there are other countries in the
world. Inequality in Europe is much lower than in the
United States. Is property crime lower? No. 

Finally, consider the data on individual crimes. The
very notion that there is a tradeoff between crime
and legitimate work far exaggerates the evidence.
Fagan and Freeman (1999) point out the porous
boundary between legitimate and illegitimate work.
The mugger or drug dealer may hold a regular job
while committing crime or may switch from month to
month between crime and legal work. If that is the
world of crime, why should anyone believe that a
tighter labor market reduces crime? 

But what is most disingenuous about the economists'
claim that the tight job market explains so much of
the 1990s drop in crime is that they do not run their
analytical calculations against any other possible
explanations. Where are the estimates of the effect
of changes in social attitudes, or policing practices
in the 1990s, or the drug market? The rational
calculus model may treat illegal earnings, legitimate
opportunities, and sanctions in one unified
framework, but there is a difference between changes
in wage and employment opportunities and better
policing or greater sanctions or changes in the drug
trade. There is surely a place for economic
incentives in criminal behavior, but it's more like a
lemur or rhesus monkey than an 800-pound gorilla.

Economic Factors in a Consistent Narrative

The problem with assessing the economics case is
that, rhetoric aside, the evidence is by no means
uniform. The case against economics makes valid
points. Economic factors cannot explain large parts
of observed patterns, and they seem inconsistent with
the rise in crime in the 1960s. But the same is true
of most other univariate explanations. That the UCR
crime rate did not decline in the 1970s and 1980s
despite mass incarceration can be interpreted as
evidence either that incarceration does not reduce
crime or that it can, but its effect is dwarfed by
other factors. Demographic trends fail to explain
much of the fluctuations in crime rates, although
young men are the major offenders. Some analysts
believe that new policing strategies have worked, and
it is difficult to explain the pattern among
different cities without considering local criminal
justice policies. But crime fell in areas with very
different policing strategies. Changes in the size of
families and reductions in the number of unwanted
children due to abortion may explain some of the drop
in crime, but proponents of this hypothesis do not
claim that this is the entire story. If you think
that any single factor can explain a multifaceted
social phenomenon like crime, you are not a social
scientist assaying the evidence.

But this does not mean that we are left with a huge
"residual" in our effort to explain changes in crime
rates over time. We can weave a consistent story of
the swings in the 1990s and earlier. This story is
not a story solely of job market incentives, although
incentives play a significant part. My "narrative"
contains four factors that affect crime: social mores
and the way citizens view illegal behavior, demand
for drugs and other illegal activities, criminal
justice policies, and the job market. As best I can
tell, crime rose in the 1960s and 1970s despite full
employment because of (1) a shift in attitudes toward
legal authority--evinced, for example, in race riots
and protests against the war in Vietnam--which made
citizens more willing to commit crime and produced
less effective policing, and (2) growing demand for
illegal drugs. The mass incarceration of the 1970s
and 1980s stabilized but failed to reduce the rate of
crime because the job market for less skilled young
men was poor. Finally, crime fell in the 1990s
because of the strong job market, combined with
criminal justice policies including continued
incarceration of criminals, to lower the economic
incentives to commit crime.[4] To be sure, this
narrative has enough factors operating to fit almost
any pattern of change (economists can get anywhere in
the positive price-quantity quadrant by shifting
supply and demand), but it is not empty because it
directs attention at factors that are quantifiable.

Question-and-Answer Session

Michael E. Siegel, Federal Judicial Center,
Washington, D.C.: I am a political scientist. Do you
have any sense of or data on the effect of employment
on white-collar crime?

R.F.: No. Mostly I would break it down between
property crime and violent crime. You would expect
that the economic factors should matter in property
crime but not so much, if at all, in violent crime.
If you look at the tables for some of my estimates,
they say "property crime." In fact, you will always
get a bigger response of property crime to economic
incentives than of violent crime to those incentives.

Devon Brown, Office of the Corrections Trustee,
District of Columbia Government, Washington, D.C.: I
am a behavioral scientist. Do you have any data on
whether offenders were employed or underemployed at
the time they committed their criminal act?

R.F.: Yes. We have some data on that. First, the
prison inmates' survey asks questions such as, "What
were you doing before you were arrested?" They show
that offenders do have a much higher unemployment
rate than nonoffenders with, for example, similar
skills and low education. Several years ago David
Farrington and coworkers in the U.K. followed people
for a certain period of their life (Farrington et al.
1986). They found that someone who, for example,
committed 10 crimes over 5 years was more likely to
commit those crimes when unemployed than when holding
a job. The evidence is overwhelming.

A. Franklin Burgess, Superior Court of the District
of Columbia: I'm from the legal profession. What
about the Depression in the 1930s? Did it tell you
anything statistically about the relationship between
the economy and crime?

R.F.: Crime was zooming, but I think Prohibition was
overwhelming any Depression effect on crime. When you
calculate national time series (analyses in which I
don't put much faith), you have to add trend or
period variables to control for noneconomic factors.
You see a pattern of high unemployment and more
crime, but you have to look at the other things
happening during the same periods.

Marie Provine, National Science Foundation,
Washington, D.C.: I'm a political scientist and
temporary bureaucrat. Do drug crimes follow any
pattern that is different from property crimes, or do
you put them in the same category as property crimes?
What would you hypothesize, and what do you find in
that area?

R.F.: The most striking thing about drug crimes is
their elasticity of supply. It is very high and
that's why I use them as an example. When a drug
dealer is arrested, the gang or business that sells
drugs will just recruit somebody else. The situation
with drug crimes today is similar to the situation in
Prohibition: People want a commodity that is illegal.
Economists will say that it is very hard to reduce
drug crimes because of their elasticity effect. I did
no special analysis of drug crimes. 

Studies of the drug trade in particular cities have
come out pretty strongly in support of the economics
explanation. Drugs are probably the best case for an
economics explanation. If people decided they didn't
want these drugs, the demand would die off, and the
people who were supplying them would have to make a
living in some other way.

Beatrix Hamburg, Cornell University Medical College,
New York, New York: I'm a behavioral scientist. I was
interested that you mentioned England. Also I was
hoping that you could give us some policy
implications of your talk. It is my impression that
in Europe the acceptable unemployment rate has been
much lower than in the United States. However, I
suspect that there have been some changes in the
acceptable rates by reason of the vicissitudes of
their own economies. Have you done international
comparisons? Should we change our conventional wisdom
about acceptable rates here?

R.F.: The crime rate in England has been going up in
the past year or so--much to the surprise and
unhappiness of the people. When you compare Europe
with the United States, the property crime rates are
very similar. The only place we as a country beat out
the Europeans is in violent crime. Europe (including
the United Kingdom) currently has higher unemployment
than the United States. On the other hand, European
countries have less wage inequality and the earnings
of the people at the bottom 10 or 20 percent are
quite a bit higher; they earn more in real terms
adjusted for prices. They don't have as many
billionaires as we have, but they take care of the
poor, low-wage workers, and other such groups.

As far as I can tell, the higher wages and higher
unemployment offset each other, and most European
countries end up with a crime rate similar to the
U.S. rate. They have not had a drop in crime, as we
have. Instead, it has gone up a bit in some places.
So I don't think that we have anything to learn in
that sense from the Europeans. 

The British do a lot of policing and activity that is
space related: putting more police in place and
giving locks to people who have been robbed a number
of times. Property crime seems to be very localized.
They have done quite a number of experiments getting
the police and the anticrime strategies in the right
place at the right time (a British specialty). But
violent crime is different: You get into the issues
of guns and other tools used by society that
contribute to violent crime. 

As for policy, if you believe the economics story,
you might favor extending the earned income tax
credit so that it goes to young men without family
responsibilities or raising the minimum wage to deter
crime. Increasing the minimum wage hasn't cost any
jobs, but at some point it will. Extending the earned
income tax credit to these young men says to them,
"Your wages are not high because you are a high
school dropout or did not do well in school, but
society is going to give you some extra money for
being a hardworking person who earns a living
legitimately." Of course, the costs of such a policy
must then be considered.

Vincent Schiraldi, Center on Juvenile and Criminal
Justice, Washington, D.C.: You said that in Europe
the wages for the bottom levels are higher and
unemployment rates are higher than in the United
States, so it is a wash. That might explain why we
have similar property crime rates, but the United
States has about six or seven times as many people
locked up. In the property crime category, we should
be doing a lot better than the Europeans, forgetting
violent crime.

R.F.: Yes, that is correct. It is a sad thing that we
have to do so much more to maintain a rate of
property crime comparable to theirs. I stand
corrected.

Wayne Miller, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms, U.S. Department of the Treasury,
Washington, D.C.: Boston has been held up as a model
of effective community policing. Did your study look
at Boston in terms of reducing violent crime and the
economic impact there?

R.F.: I did not study Boston, but I know about the
studies of Boston. I talked both to the police and
the police union people who were involved. Getting
guns out of the hands of the kids was the priority.
They said to the young guys, "No guns. If we catch
you with a gun, we're going to throw you away
forever. We're really going to be tough on you." They
didn't say, "Go sell your drugs," but they said, "Do
your normal business (which meant go sell your
drugs). If we catch you, we catch you, but we are not
going to look for you or target you in a particular
way." There was a strong policing component and the
support of the community, particularly the black
community, but the white community as well.

The police brought in the gang kids, and they would
have a "lineup" with several police officers, a
district attorney, and church leaders. Everyone sent
the same message: "Don't you dare use guns. You will
have no support in this community if you use guns."
Black kids were targeted (it was profiling in a real
sense). If I walked down the street and I was 18,
white, and middle class, they presumably wouldn't
hassle me. If I was a black kid in the neighborhood,
they would hassle me and if they found anything
suspicious--a bulge or something--they'd check for
the gun.

This strategy had the support of the community
because the community was being terrorized. One kid
got shot outside a school by marauding gangs fighting
over something. There was a uniform statement that
this society of adults was as one: You are not going
to use guns. It turned out that a lot of the kids in
the gangs agreed with the adults. Rather than, "I
have a gun and you have a gun. I could shoot you and
you could shoot me," now, it is "neither of us has
guns." (Crime European style!) In Boston it was not
just the community doing its part; it was very
focused on the message: We want the guns out of the
hands of the kids so we don't have the homicides.
Everybody understood that.

They didn't send the message, "We are going to stop
the drug trade." There is so much money to be made in
drugs, and that is where the elasticity of supply is
great. A situation developed where all the interests
(including the kids, in the end) were aligned. And
that was the reason for the success in Boston. Boston
did not have quite as big a decline in crime as New
York, but it was one of the leading cities in terms
of the decline of crime.

References

Bernstein, Jared, and Ellen Houston, "Falling Crime
Rates in the 1990s: The Role of the Low-Wage Labor
Market," February 2000, Washington, DC: Economic
Policy Institute.

Donahue, John J., and Steven D. Levitt, "Legalized
Abortion and Crime," Stanford Law School Working
Paper, Stanford, CA, June 24, 1999.

Fagan, Jeffrey J., and Richard B. Freeman, "Crime and
Work," in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research,
ed. Michael Tonry, Volume 25, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999: 113-178.

Fagan, Jeffrey J., Franklin E. Zimring, and June Kim,
"Declining Homicide in New York City: A Tale of Two
Trends," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88
(4) (Summer 1998): 1277-1324.

Farrington, David P., Bernard Gallagher, Lyndia
Morley, Raymond J. St. Ledger, and Donald J. West,
"Unemployment, School Leaving, and Crime," British
Journal of Criminology 26 (1986): 335-356.

Freeman, Richard B., "Disadvantaged Young Men and
Crime," in Youth Employment and Joblessness in
Advanced Countries, eds. David Blanchflower and
Richard Freeman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
for the National Bureau of Economic Research, 2000:
Ch. 5.

Freeman, Richard B., "The Economics of Crime," in
Handbook of Labor Economics, Volume 3c (general
series editors, K. Arrow and M.D. Intriligator), eds.
Orley Ashenfelter and David Card, Amsterdam,
Netherlands: North Holland Publishers, 1999: Ch. 52. 

Freeman, Richard B., "Why Do So Many Young American
Men Commit Crimes and What Might We Do About It?,"
Journal of Economic Perspectives 10 (1) (Winter
1996): 25-42. 

Freeman, Richard B., and William Rodgers, "Area
Economic Conditions and the Labor Market Outcomes of
Young Men in the 1990s Expansion," Working paper no.
7073, National Bureau of Economic Research,
Cambridge, MA, May 1999.

Glaeser, Edward, Bruce Sacerdote, and Jos Sheinkman,
"Crime and Social Interactions," Quarterly Journal of
Economics 110 (2) (May 1995): 507-548.

Gould, Eric, Bruce Weinberg, and David Mustard,
"Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in
the United States, 1979-1995," Paper presented to the
National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute
Workshop, Cambridge, MA, July 6, 1998.

Grogger, Jeffrey, "Market Wages and Youth Crime,"
Working paper no. 5983, National Bureau of Economic
Research, Cambridge, MA, 1997.

Raphael, Steven, and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer,
"Identifying the Effect of Unemployment on Crime,"
mimeo, University of California at Los Angeles, Los
Angeles, CA, January 2000.

Wilson, James Q., and Joan Petersilia, eds. Crime,
San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994. 

Wilson, James Q., ed. Crime and Public Policy, San
Francisco: ICS Press, 1983. 

Zimring, Franklin E., and Gordon Hawkins, The Scale
of Imprisonment, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991.

Notes

1. The peak total crime index was 5950 in 1980. The
crime index in 1998 was 4616. On the basis of data
from the period January to June 1999, it will be
about 4,154 in 1999, for a decline of 30 percent. See
Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime
Reports, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice,
Federal Bureau of Investigation, November 21, 1999.

2. The logistic equation does not immediately give
the elasticity of supply to crime because both the
dependent variable and the independent variable are a
bit more complicated than a regression of ln quantity
on ln price. The logistic can be thought of as a log
odds ratio regression, linking to independent
variables the log of the ratio of the chance of going
to prison to the chance of not going. The share of
income from crime varies with the ratio of criminal
to legal wages, but also depends on the amount of
legal and illegal work. As a result, the coefficients
in the table must be reduced modestly to obtain the
elasticity. See Freeman 2000.

3. Fagan, Zimring, and Kim (1999) look at homicides
in New York over a longer period and tell a more
detailed story about "contagion effects" in violence.

4. Changes in the drug market may have also played a
role here.

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

Exhibit 1: Employment/Population Ratio and
Unemployment Rate, 1980-2000

Source: Council of Economic Advisers, The 1999
Economic Report of the President, updated.

Exhibit 2: Median Weekly Earnings of Full-Time Wage
and Salary Workers, 1980-2000

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States,
various editions.

Exhibit 3: Uniform Crime Reporting Rate of Index
Offenses per 100,000 Inhabitants

Source: Tabulated from Maguire, Kathleen, and Ann L.
Pastore, eds, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice
Statistics 1996, Washington DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997, NCJ
165361, Table 3.106, with 1996 update from the
Sourcebook Web site: www.albany.edu/sourcebook.

Exhibit 4: Property Crime Victimization Rate per
1,000 Households

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics Web site:
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs.

Exhibit 5: Homicide Victimization Rate per 100,000
Population

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics Web site:
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs.

Exhibit 6: Estimates of Illegal Wages

Source: Fagan, Jeffrey, and Richard Freeman, "Crime
and Work," in Crime and Justice: A Review of
Research, Volume 25, Michael Tonry, ed. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999: 225-290.

Exhibit 7: Elasticity of Supply and Incapacitation of
Crime

Exhibit 8: Estimates of the Impact of Job Market
Conditions on Crime Using Cross-Area Difference in
Difference Models

Sources: Gould, Eric, Bruce Weinberg, and David
Mustard, "Crime Rates and Local Labor Market
Opportunities in the United States, 1979-1995," July
6, 1998, National Bureau of Economic Research, Summer
Institute, Cambridge, MA; Freeman, Richard, and
William Rodgers, "Area Economic Conditions and the
Labor Market Outcomes of Young Men in the 1990's
Expansion," National Bureau of Economic Research, WP
7073; and Raphael, Steven, and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer,
"Identifying the Effect of Unemployment on Crime,"
Journal of Law and Economics, forthcoming.

Exhibit 9: Logistic Curve Estimates of the Effect of
the Illegal Share of Income and Numbers of Crimes
Committed in 1979 on Ever Being Incarcerated, 1979-
1996

Source: Tabulated from the National Longitudinal
Survey of Youth, U.S. Department of Labor.

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

A Profile of Crime, Violence, and Drug Use Among
Mexican Immigrants

Presentation by

William A. Vega

Professor of Psychiatry

Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey

March 15, 2000
Washington, D.C.

We are a nation of immigrants and immigrant struggles
are part of the American cultural mystique.
Ironically, the treatment of immigrants in the media,
public policy, and political discourse is often
aggressive and harsh. The history of 20th-century
America often was punctuated with periods of acute
hostility toward immigrants. It began with rancor and
pejorative descriptions of Eastern and Southern
European immigrants as they forged their way into
urban centers in the East and Middle West. Less
noticed in the Eastern United States was the
considerable emigration and resettlement of Mexicans
into the Southwest, Far West, and Chicago during the
Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. These new urban and
rural settlement areas became the templates for
continuing Mexican immigration throughout the
century, during which periods of particularly intense
immigration alternated with periods of voluntary and
involuntary repatriation to Mexico. Occasional
outbreaks of overt anti-Mexican hostility also
occurred, such as the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles
during World War II--a period when segregation of
Mexicans and Mexican-Americans was common practice in
the Southwestern U.S. In the mid-1950s more than 1
million Mexicans were deported under Operation
Wetback. The most recent and vivid example of
anti-Mexican immigrant hostility was seen in
California in the 1990s during the tenure of Governor
Pete Wilson. This period instigated anti-immigrant
legislation to limit health, social, and educational
services to immigrants, such as Proposition 187, a
precursor to the abolition of affirmative action in
California.

Mexican immigration greatly increased during the
final two decades of the 20th century. Problems with
the Mexican economy, vigorous U.S. economic growth,
and the strong demand for labor in U.S. agriculture,
services, and construction industries were powerful
stimulants for peak migration and immigration. In
1980 only about 2.2 million of the 8.7 million people
of Mexican origin residing in the United States were
immigrants. The number of Mexican immigrants doubled
by 1990 to 4.3 million, and by 1997 it had
accelerated to about 7 million immigrants.[1] These
figures document that the number of recent immigrants
has significantly increased. I estimate that the 2000
U.S. Census will enumerate about 20 million people of
Mexican origin residing in the United States; 40
percent of them will be immigrants. Although this
population continues to be disproportionately
concentrated in California and Texas, the new
immigrant streams are truly national, with Mexican
immigrant populations now rapidly developing in the
New York-New Jersey area and the Middle Western and
Southern States. This increase in numbers of new
immigrants has had, and continues to have, a powerful
impact on public opinion and the criminal justice
system.

Media Images Versus Documented Realities

It is clear that anti-Mexican feelings have played a
consistent and important role in shaping immigrant
policy in past decades, and public antipathy
regarding the "dilution" of American culture and
income transfers to immigrants is now a major public
concern. Media images, including political ads, in
recent years have portrayed an incessant stream of
illiterate Mexicans swamping the border regions,
overwhelming the limited resources of the U.S. Border
Patrol and making a mockery of immigration policy.
Coinciding with these images have been stories of
rampant narcotics trafficking on the border, the use
of immigrants to import illicit drugs, and Mexican
immigrant communities across the United States being
used as Trojan horses for the deployment of drug
distribution networks. Mexican immigrants are also
blamed for challenging local law enforcement agencies
with gang activity, increasing levels of violence and
theft, and overburdening health and educational
institutions. 

Despite the media-fueled specter of invasion, the
United States continues to offer pragmatic reasons
for the continuing influx of immigrants. The
integration of economic activity under the North
American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect
in 1994, has not created disincentives to Mexican
immigration in the face of the demographic explosion
south of the border, the lack of jobs in many rural
areas of Mexico, and the low wages for unskilled and
semiskilled workers in the urban centers of central
and northern Mexico. As Alan Greenspan, Chairman of
the Federal Reserve Board, has remarked on several
occasions, the most important long-range threat to
U.S. economic growth is a shortage of workers, as
U.S. population growth declines. Indeed,
Mexican-Americans have among the highest rates of
employment of any ethnic group. Although there is an
apparent concentration of high-tech growth in the
United States, this increasing national affluence has
been accompanied by a demand for service and
construction workers. Given that the economic
disparity between the United States and Mexico is
unlikely to change in the decades ahead, it is not
too risky to predict a continuing high volume of
Mexican immigration into the United States. Only a
very serious stall in U.S. economic expansion is
likely to offset this trend. Immigration studies have
shown that new immigrants will follow the paths of
previous family members to established ethnic
enclaves and to employment, ultimately reestablishing
family networks.

With a pattern of accelerating Mexican immigration
and settlement in all regions of the United States,
it is worth focusing on their documented patterns of
behavior rather than depending on the imagery from
media reports of sensational incidents or contentious
political debates about immigration control. 

My purpose is to present survey information of
importance to criminal justice, law enforcement, and
public health officials in formulating their policies
and programs. This information is derived from a
large field survey of Mexican immigrants and
Mexican-Americans residing in urban and rural areas
of central California conducted in 1996.[2] (Data
gathering and analysis were supported by the National
Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute
on Drug Abuse.) The primary goals of the survey were
to gather information about the prevalence of
psychiatric disorders and substance abuse problems
and to determine patterns of health services
utilization. The survey, designed as an
epidemiological study, uses a scientifically viable
sampling strategy and household interviews to gather
information about 4,000 people between ages 19 and
59. The respondents were representative of the
population from which they were selected: low income
and disproportionately low education. Immigrants
averaged only a grade school education. The
crime-related behavior patterns of Mexican immigrants
with Mexican-Americans born in the United States are
compared. This is self-reported information, gathered
through the use of a fully structured interview and a
high-quality survey process.

Indications of Criminal Behavior

Certain behaviors of interest to law enforcement were
compared, including nativity (place of origin)
differences in who carried a weapon (defined as a
gun, knife, or club) in the 30 days before the
survey, who had been arrested in the 5 years before
the survey (other than those arrested by the
Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS]), who
had been in a fight serious enough to cause injury,
who had used illicit drugs in their lifetime, and who
had a diagnosis of lifetime drug abuse or dependence.
Immigrants had lower rates than U.S.-born
Mexican-Americans on every indicator. Males were much
more likely than females to engage in these
behaviors, and the differences among males were
dramatic. For example, rates for U.S.-born
Mexican-American males were about 30 percent greater
than those for immigrants for arrests, 150 percent
greater for carrying a weapon, 300 percent greater
for fighting, 100 percent greater for any illegal
drug use in their lifetime, and 300 percent greater
for lifetime drug abuse or dependence. 

The criminal behavior profiles for women were
distinctive because their overall rates were much
lower than those for men and the rates for immigrant
women were negligible. It is precisely for these
reasons that the relative differences in drug use
between U.S.-born and immigrant women were so
striking. Immigrant women had very little illicit
drug use, but U.S.-born women had a rate of 45
percent. The lifetime abuse or dependence rate for
U.S.-born women was 700 percent higher than for
immigrant women and 100 percent higher than for
immigrant men. U.S.-born female arrest rates,
although very low, were about five times higher than
for immigrant women. Rates of fighting were similarly
low for both groups of women. The pattern that
emerged was very clear. Immigrants, whether male or
female, had a much lower likelihood of engaging in
these behaviors than did their U.S.-born co-ethnics.

These comparisons beg the questions, Is there any
evidence of change over time in these behaviors among
immigrants? Do things get worse the longer immigrants
reside in this country and, if so, for which
behaviors? To answer these questions, the study
compared those who had resided less than 14 years in
the United States with those who had resided 14 years
or more, as well as comparing them with the U.S.-born
sample. Again, a stable pattern emerged. Immigrants
residing in the United States 14 years or more had
higher rates overall, a pattern reflected in almost
every age group. This pattern was more general for
men than women, because immigrant women had such low
rates of these behaviors. What is striking about this
information, however, is that immigrant men who had
come to the United States as children had high rates
of arrests and carrying weapons. Also, long-staying
immigrants were much more likely to carry weapons
even in middle age compared with shorter residence
immigrants. Although immigrant women had very low
arrest rates, women who entered the United States as
girls also had higher rates of carrying weapons than
those who entered as adults. (See exhibit 1.)

The only instance in which immigrant women with less
than 14 years residence had higher rates of negative
indicators than long-staying immigrants was in regard
to physical and sexual abuse by a current partner.
(Of course, in this instance the women were victims,
not perpetrators.) This outcome suggests that these
households were stressed by their social adaptation
to the United States, economic situation, and
heightened marital tensions. Declining physical abuse
rates suggest that these problems subsided over time.
It is interesting that no similar pattern was found
for verbal abuse or threats.

Law enforcement practices also were assessed by
examining the disposition of arrests among immigrants
and the U.S.-born. To reiterate, the U.S.-born had
higher overall arrest rates, and Mexican immigrant
women had negligible criminal arrests. Among
immigrants arrested, almost half were detained for
driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI), whereas
one-quarter of the U.S.-born were detained for this
reason. The proportions that proceeded to prosecution
were similar among immigrants and the U.S.-born
(about 40 percent). About half of U.S.-born women
were convicted, as were about two-thirds of U.S.-born
men and three-quarters of immigrants. The higher
immigrant conviction rates may be due to a greater
likelihood of conviction for DUI. Incarceration rates
were similar for the U.S.-born and immigrants (about
80 percent of those convicted). These comparisons do
not suggest a criminal justice system bias favoring
or disfavoring immigrants. The only issue of note was
the relatively high arrest rates for DUI among
immigrants. (See exhibit 2.) 

A second way to look at this issue is to compare
U.S.-born rates with immigrant rates for persons with
a diagnosis of drug abuse or dependence who were
arrested. Again, there were no differences between
immigrants and the U.S.-born, with about half of each
having been arrested in the year before the survey.
Although this information reveals nothing about
fairness in law enforcement practices toward
Mexican-born people as a group, immigrant status per
se does not appear to inordinately increase arrest
rates. 

Overall these results correspond with the analyses of
two decades of institutionalization rates. Butcher
and Piehl estimated that "if natives had the same
institutionalization probabilities as immigrants, our
jails and prisons would have one-third fewer
inmates."[3] Therefore, they observed, immigrants
were "assimilating to the (higher) criminal
propensities of natives."

Implications for Policymaking

The seemingly inexhaustible demand for mobile,
low-cost labor in the United States will continue to
attract millions of Mexican nationals. Many will
settle in this Nation, begin new lives, and start
families. What do the results of this and other
studies tell us about their impact on the law
enforcement and criminal justice systems?

--The INS faces immediate resource problems and
policy issues regarding physically controlling the
border, limiting production and distribution of
fraudulent documents, and regulating employers.

--Narcotics traffickers will continue using
relatively small groups of individuals, including
established Mexican-American gangs, to foster drug
importation and distribution, and immigrant enclaves
will be used for clandestine marketing. The problem
in this instance is not primarily immigrants but the
infiltration of the immigrant stream by traffickers
to conduct their business with less risk.

--Despite low rates of arrest, drug use, and violent
behavior among immigrants, their greater numbers are
increasing the burden of law enforcement, judicial,
and correctional resources. This is an example of a
low crime rate becoming a major problem when the
population increases dramatically.

--The major impact on the criminal justice system is
long range: The problem of delinquency and drug use
among Mexican-Americans will vastly increase in
magnitude if current trends continue. People who
are born in the United States or who enter the United
States during childhood or adolescence will have much
higher rates of delinquency, arrest, and substance
abuse in their lifetime than adult immigrants. The
intergenerational shift to higher rates was
concentrated among U.S.-born Mexican-American women
who were arrested and have substance abuse problems. 

Without major changes in the educational and income
structure of Mexican-Americans, these statistics on
crime and substance abuse can be predicted with a
high degree of certainty. California juvenile arrest
data show that, as early as 1993, Hispanic youths had
100 percent more felony arrests than
African-Americans and Hispanic youths were involved
in more than half of all status offenses reported in
the State.[4] Perhaps the most powerful finding from
the growing body of research about Hispanic
adolescents and adults is that poverty is a much more
significant factor in increasing criminal behavior
and drug use within U.S. communities among Hispanics
born in the U.S. than among immigrants.

Long-range solutions must address core determinants
such as education and academic achievement and the
vitality, safety, and cohesiveness of low-income
communities. Although school-based prevention
programs to reduce drug abuse and crime are
important, their effectiveness depends on improving
key indicators of population and community
prosperity. The profile of intergenerational economic
mobility for Mexican-Americans indicates a
substantial improvement in income between the
immigrant generation and the first generation born in
the United States.[5] However, there is no
improvement in the second generation's median income.
No doubt this stagnation is attributable in large
part to the lack of secondary school completion among
35 percent of the Mexican-American population. The
second generation is isolated in low-income areas, is
at high risk for drug abuse and criminal behavior,
and is more likely than Mexican immigrants to come in
contact with law enforcement, criminal justice, and
correctional systems as juveniles--and later as
adults. 

Question-and-Answer Session

Luis A. Payan, George Washington University,
Washington, D.C.: These are interesting observations,
but what do they mean? Have you done any thinking on
a more philosophical level? What do they mean for the
economy, for politics, for justice issues? At the end
of your talk you began to address the causes: not
enough Mexican-Americans go to school and on to
higher education--perhaps they don't graduate. I'm
sure there are other causes. Is it because this is a
relatively violent society? Is it because they
acquire these traits from society?

And second, what about the solutions? What does it
mean for us who are working in the different
communities--justice communities, immigrant
communities, and so forth? What are we to learn from
this?

W.V.: We are a violent society; we have the highest
rates of violence of any Western industrialized
nation. We have the highest rates of substance abuse,
experimentation, and addiction of any society on
earth. Immigrants move from a society that is very
different and has minimal illicit drug use problems.
Even though there is trafficking in Mexico, the
levels of drug use are very low, except in the border
regions, where trafficking is most intense and there
is a high confluence from the two sides.

I have thought a great deal about the question of
whether it is possible to intervene in this process
meaningfully, outside basic economic/educational
determinants. I don't think you can do it without
engaging the educational and economic systems, but is
there something you can do above and beyond
addressing the problems that create communities of
vulnerability? Can you do something about the issue
of weakened families and social networks?

I have been asked this in forum after forum. I'm
caught in the situation of judging whether this is an
existential dilemma of people changing societies and
changing cultures. Must they adapt to the new
environment? Is there an iron law that says they must
conform to American expectations and norms (which
includes such things as higher levels of drug use and
crime)? Or can we find a way to stop this process--
through carefully thought-out interventions at
multiple levels--by buttressing these families'
strengths, values, and methods of socializing
children to be more law abiding adults? That is the
next concrete step. 

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and
National Institute of Mental Health experiment with
those kinds of approaches. Some of the issues
inherent in such approaches include the scope of
interventions possible, the generalizability of these
interventions, and the question of how to get them
accepted and implemented throughout the Nation.
Enormous resources would be involved, along with the
need to integrate Federal Government incentives and
local and State coordination to implement,
disseminate, and maintain these programs over the
long haul. We have yet to see a track record that
proves it can be done in the United States (not just
for Mexican-Americans but for adolescents from all
groups). We need to develop interventions that work,
are based on scientific evaluation, and can be
implemented by people other than the experts who
designed them. Resources to sustain these
interventions must be available over decades because
it takes decades to change a culture.

Carol Wilder, U.S. Department of State, Washington,
D.C.: In underdeveloped countries all over the world,
people have left the rural, less densely populated
areas and poured into urban areas. They leave behind
the social constructs that help them obey societal
rules. They are "at sea" in the cities and their
crime rates soar, especially among the second
generation. This pattern does not occur just among
Hispanics moving into the United States and is not a
result of the "evilness" of the United States. The
breaking up of family and community constraints is, I
believe, the prime determinant. We also need to look
at poverty; we need to look at the two factors you
talked about--education and community material
well-being--so that people have opportunities and can
break out of negative environments. I think that is
much more important. I think your last suggestion of
working to maintain the old culture, keeping what's
good and helpful, is a losing battle. I think this
other is a far, far greater determinant.

W.V.: Research has definitely shown that the healthy
kids are the bicultural kids, the kids who have
mastered and positively identified with both
cultures--especially Mexican-Americans in the United
States. The issue of positive identity development
for Mexican-American, African-American, and Puerto
Rican children is fundamental. Each must perceive his
or her color positively, not internalize self-hate,
and not accept external definitions of self. Color
variation should be normal and positive.

I agree that there are many examples around the world
where populations go through this process. However,
if you look at the Mexican example (other than Mexico
City), crime rates have not increased in the other
cities the way they have soared among Mexican
immigrants in the United States. This issue is
becoming more confusing because many migrants return
to Mexico from the United States and take back a lot
of U.S. behaviors and styles. Mexico is beginning a
rapid transformation in expectations for both men and
women.

Richard Stana, Administration of Justice Issues,
General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C.: What is
your opinion about the Los Angeles Police
Department's "Rampart" scandal? Is it an isolated
incident? Do you see task forces going "across the
line" like that in other cities? What should local,
State, and Federal law enforcement do to make sure
that ethnic groups get a fair shake in the criminal
justice system?

M.V.: That breaks down into two issues. One has to do
with the aggressive culture of law enforcement in Los
Angeles, which has been well known for a very long
time by those who have lived there. I grew up in East
Los Angeles so I can tell you from firsthand
experience.

The extent and magnitude of the problem is different
from place to place. Places like San Diego have done
a very good job of overcoming some of those problems.
Other places like Los Angeles, perhaps because of the
sheer size of the police department, have had much
more resistant enclaves. We see the same thing in New
York City. Large police departments in general have
difficulty implementing new goals and standards of
conduct. It is difficult to maintain consistency in
professionalism, especially in segments of
the department that are given the "leading edge" in
tough enforcement practices, such as gang and
narcotics enforcement units. High morale and
professional standards must be reinforced in these
units especially.

Additional support for drug courts, drug
rehabilitation, and educational programs in the
correctional system is needed to help offenders.
Otherwise, juveniles will be released and involved in
criminal activity again. A proposition was passed in
California during the 2000 election that made
offenders ages 14 and older criminally liable. This
is a very serious problem that will
disproportionately bring more and more Mexican-origin
youths into the criminal justice system. They will
fill the adult system as well because they will
graduate very early in the criminal justice system
and ensure a population for the adult prison system.

Doris M. Provine, National Science Foundation,
Washington, D.C.: Based on your arrest and
dispositional data, it sounded like you said that the
criminal justice system is not treating
Mexican-Americans differently from the native-born.
However, I noticed there were some interesting
differences between the two groups regarding arrested
persons who were illegal drug users. Did you conclude
that there is less drug use among Mexican-Americans?
Can you speak about who gets arrested and for what?
Are there other differences and similarities within
your arrest data?

W.V.: Frankly, the arrests of immigrants are so
dominated by DUI offenses (50 percent) that the other
categories don't provide much of a comparison. The
U.S.-born are more likely to be involved in
traditional property crimes or crimes against a
person than are the immigrants. When the DUI rate is
that high, it completely monopolizes any profile.
That is not necessarily a negative, because DUI
arrests may keep people away from criminal behavior
and offer the opportunity for rehabilitation. They
also keep people out of situations that lengthen
their criminal sentences and produce three-time
losers.

The difference in my data between foreign-born and
U.S.-born arrestee rates is 30 percent. The people
who study institutionalization say the difference in
institutionalization rates between the foreign-born
and U.S.-born is about one-third. These two sets of
findings match very closely.

Doris M. Provine: What about the drug war? Could it
be that the drug war is more aggressive toward, say,
African-Americans and other minorities?

W.V.: I don't think you can make any direct
connection between the impact of the drug war and the
data I have presented. My data are not from the
border or places where primary importation takes
place, such as Tijuana, San Diego, Juarez, and El
Paso. My data are from areas removed from the border,
in which there obviously is illicit drug traffic
taking place. But it's clear that the foreign-born
population is not participating as consumers to the
same degree as Mexican-Americans. This is different
from saying that narcotics traffickers are not using
these communities to hide out, to be invisible in
setting up manufacture and transportation of, for
example, methamphetamine. I think that is in fact
going on. I think that communities are aware of these
things, but they are not participating in them. 

Marianne Pieper, Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice,
Washington, D.C.: You stated in your response to an
earlier question that the most successful people had
contact with both cultures. What is the impact of not
allowing young children to speak in their native
tongue (as in California elementary schools)--and not
allowing them to learn English? What happens when we
ask them to forget their native history? When we say,
"You're not allowed to speak in your native tongue in
school," does that have an effect?

W.V.: In my mind, it has a tremendous impact
symbolically. There's no question that the culture is
going to be reinforced simply through population
growth and the continuing immigration of
Mexican-Americans. The media now offer the Spanish
language on TV as well as on the radio, and last year
was "Hispanic year" in the music industry. I think
there is not a problem at the level of cultural icons
and cultural reinforcement through the media.
However, if you tell people, "Your language will no
longer be taught," does it send a signal that they're
worth less because they are from the culture
represented by that language? On the other hand, I
know from research I've done that the primary problem
faced by adolescents who come into the country is
language, a problem usually overcome in their first 4
or 5 years if they come as children.

Mastering English quickly is to their advantage.
This, however, begs a different question for a
different seminar: Does simultaneously learning
Spanish and English enhance or reduce the likelihood
of learning effective English language skills and
vocabulary?

Victor Stone, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of
Justice, Washington, D.C.: Could it be that your data
reflect that the immigrant population is trying to
not be visible, particularly because of the way our
laws currently are structured? The INS may not arrest
them, but that doesn't mean they don't fear that
every traffic stop is going to turn into a
deportation. Therefore, while they are immigrants,
they are trying very hard not to be sent back. They
came here to raise their standard of living, so they
are very motivated to stay here. If an event scares
them (even if it doesn't turn into an arrest or a
conviction), they may disappear into another
community to be less visible or go back to Mexico for
fear that the system will deal with them unfairly.
However, their children who are born here know they
are U.S. citizens and can't be sent back; they don't
have to remain invisible and they haven't experienced
the different standard of living. I think this has
been true for all immigrant groups, historically, in
this country. The first generation born here doesn't
know what the previous generation left, so the first
generation is not as motivated to get ahead. Have you
or do you plan to elicit that as a factor?

W.V.: I think that is a very astute observation. It
would be very difficult for me to say whether it's
true. To some extent it probably is true.

We also studied risk factors for depression among
these populations in California. One of the most
profound risk factors for depression we found among
the U.S.-born (yes, the U.S.-born!) was fear of
detention by the INS--fear of being asked to show
papers, being taken away, or having to prove U.S.
citizenship (or even worse, accidentally being sent
to Mexico and having to make your way back somehow).
So the cultural specter of enforcement affects both
the U.S.-born and the foreign-born. However, only for
immigrants is there danger that a contact with the
criminal justice system could actually lead to
deportation. This has been part of the culture of
California from the mid-1990s to now.

Notes

1. Schmidley, A. Dianne, and Campbell Gibson, Profile
of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States:
1997, Current Population Reports, Series P23-195,
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999.

2. Vega, William A., Bohdan Kolody, Sergio
Aguilar-Gaxiola, Ethel Alderete, Ralph Catalano,
Jorge Caraveo-Anduaga, "Lifetime Prevalence of
DSM-III-R Psychiatric Disorders Among Rural and Urban
Mexican-Americans in California," Archives of General
Psychiatry 55 (1998): 771-778.

3. Butcher, Kristin F., and Anne Morrison Piehl,
"Recent Immigrants: Unexpected Implications for Crime
and Incarceration," Working paper no. 6067, National
Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1997.

4. California Department of Justice, 1993 juvenile
justice statistics, unpublished data, Division of Law
Enforcement Information Center, California Department
of Justice, Sacramento, California, May 1994.

5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population Profile of
the United States: 1997, Current Population Reports,
Series P23-194, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the
Census, 1998.

Exhibit 1: Conduct Problems by Gender and Birthplace

Exhibit 2: 5-Year Criminal History of Arrestees by
Gender and Birthplace

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

Reducing Gun Violence: What Works, What Doesn't,
What's Promising

Presentation by 

Lawrence W. Sherman

Professor of Human Relations

Fels Center of Government

University of Pennsylvania

April 5, 2000
Washington, D.C.

The year 2000 has become a crucible for gun control.
This year, more than ever before, the Nation has
moved toward a policy of making guns "safer," with
only "safer" people having guns. The Smith and Wesson
agreement,[1] State legislative initiatives, and the
President's Federal legislative proposals have
captured the public imagination with this gun safety
strategy. The continuing tragedies of children
shooting children have made the "safe guns, safe
people" approach seem all the more necessary and
potentially effective. 

The opposition to these strategies comes largely from
the political right, which resists any new
legislation as unnecessary. It frames the alternative
as more enforcement of existing laws, which would be
so effective as to make any new laws unnecessary.[2]
Almost buried in the debate is the opposition from
the left, which advocates the policies of all other
nations with advanced economies: virtual bans on the
possession of handguns, with tight registration and
control of a limited number of long guns.[3] 

As the window of opportunity for new gun policy grows
wider, the year 2000 also has become a crucible for
science and its role in making public policy. For as
the gun debate has escalated, research on the effects
of various gun policies has been left far behind. To
the extent that research has been cited at all, it
has appeared in the usually suspect pattern of
selective invocation of the mantle of science to
support one argument or another. Far too often, there
simply has been no research to cite on the major
policy proposals. 

This presentation reviews the research we have, the
research we do not have, and how we can use the
research we have to reduce gun violence. Also, new
legislation supporting the research desperately
needed is suggested. For while many experiments in
enforcement strategies can be conducted without new
legislation, most legislative proposals cannot be
adequately tested without actually enacting
legislation. It is smart policy to treat new
legislation as an experiment and design it to
optimize what is learned from each new law.

Two Kinds of Research: Epidemiological and
Experimental

Two kinds of research methods are covered in this
review: epidemiological and experimental. It is the
experiments, or what some call quasi-experiments,
that form the basis of this presentation and the
University of Maryland's 1997 National Institute of
Justice (NIJ) Report, Preventing Crime: What Works,
What Doesn't, What's Promising: A Report to the
United States Congress.[4] The program evaluations
reviewed for the report fall into the category of
"impact" research, which measures the effects of
programs and practices on measures of crime--in this
case, violence committed with guns.

By contrast, the epidemiology of gun violence--which
traces the patterns of risk factors associated with
its incidence--provides the research essential for an
equally important part of policymaking: "imagination"
research. By this I do not mean that the research
results are fabricated--although that can happen.
Rather, seeing patterns among the risk factors for
gun violence can prod the imagination to invent new,
more effective policies than any we now have or any
we are debating. 

The Parable of the Screwworm

The parable of the screwworm helps to make the
connection between imagination and impact. One of the
unsung heroes of our often-maligned Federal Civil
Service, Edward Knipling, died in April 2000 after a
lifetime of spectacular achievement.[5] As both an
epidemiologist and experimentalist in the U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA), he led the way in
eliminating the screwworm in North America, as well
as combating the tsetse fly in Africa and the
Mediterranean fruit fly. His targets were a cause of
great human misery as well as a major loss of food
supplies. The screwworm sought out wounds on any
warmblooded animal, including humans, and could cause
death in a few days.

Knipling's epidemiological research found that
screwworm plagues were fostered by male worms mating
many times but female worms mating only once. This
finding prodded his imagination. If sterile males
used up each female's one-and-only mating
opportunity, he reasoned, there would be no
offspring. If he could figure out a way to sterilize
enough males, he would be able to drive the species
into extinction. But when he proposed the idea to his
superiors in 1938, they told him his idea was crazy. 

Fifteen years later, Knipling procured an old Army
x-ray machine and conducted experiments showing he
could sterilize male screwworms. He then released
large numbers of them on Sanibel Island, Florida.
Although the species quickly disappeared on the
island, new worms from the mainland soon took their
place. When the Dutch government offered the more
isolated island of Curacao, Knipling released almost
2 million sterilized male worms over 3 months. This
treatment completely eradicated the pest. At that
point the USDA set up full-scale eradication programs
in Florida and the Southwest, using giant
sterilization factories to engineer the screwworm
into extinction. Within 12 years, the pest was
eradicated in the United States and most of North and
Central America. 

Applying the Parable to Gun Violence

Imagine what we might do with a similar strategy in
reducing gun violence. We might notice
epidemiologically, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
has said, that all gun violence is caused by bullets.
A State Governor or legislator might champion the
hypothesis of ammunition control and pass a
one-bullet-a-month law. A State official might cite
the epidemiological evidence that death rates appear
much higher from larger caliber handguns[6] and ban
the sale of large caliber bullets altogether--
anything above a .22, for example. That same State
might couple the restrictions on bullet sales with an
ammunition buyback program, reducing the supply of
bullets in the State. Then the State might make only
modest reductions in gun violence relative to other
States, largely from what is called the "Sanibel
Island effect": the infiltration of bullets from
other States by a thriving black market, just as we
see today in States with strict controls on handgun
possession. That experience, however, could
ultimately lead to national ammunition control and a
stunning drop in gun violence. 

All of this, of course, is speculation. What is not
speculation is the fact that previous public health
successes have always linked the policy intervention
to the epidemiology of the problem. Polio vaccines
have been given to children, not adults. Typhoid
prevention was aimed at the water supply, not beer.
Any effort to assess what works in gun policy must
begin with the epidemiology of the problem, before
any predictions of policy impact on the target
population. For even if we have great successes with
one selected target population, we may do little
about the larger problem if the population we select
is at low risk and the populations we ignore are at
high risk.

From this perspective, it is appropriate to use
epidemiology to judge the "safe gun" strategies.
These strategies seem aimed at middle-class gun
owners who would use a triggerlock as conscientiously
as they use their automobile safety belts. Even the
built-in triggerlock of the Smith and Wesson
agreement can be turned off and the guns rendered
fully useable. In addition, a "personal gun" can be
abused by the person authorized to use it.

From an epidemiological perspective, the premise of
safe-gun strategies is the corollary of safe-people
strategies. If guns are safe because only safe people
can activate them, a great deal hangs on the current
definition of safe people. That boundary between safe
and unsafe is vividly illustrated by firearms abuse
by very young children, but it is not supported by
epidemiological data.

Epidemiology and What Works

The epidemiology shows that current legal boundaries
between people declared safe and unsafe for gun
ownership fall very wide of any empirical measure of
"safety." Since 1968, the major distinction has been
between people convicted of a felony and all others.
Additional bans on gun ownership by the mentally ill
and people convicted of domestic violence
misdemeanors have been hard to enforce, given the
absence of needed online databases for screening gun
buyers at the point of sale. In addition, although in
approximately 18 States gun ownership by people
convicted of certain misdemeanors involving violence,
alcohol, or drugs is now barred, the Brady law and
the battle over the instant background check have
focused on the no-felony-conviction definition of
safe people. Yet, by that definition, the majority of
crimes with guns are committed by people who are
legally safe, law-abiding citizens for purposes of
current gun ownership policy. 

Samples of people arrested for using guns in crimes
consistently reveal that the majority have no prior
felony conviction. The Bureau of Justice Statistics
reported that in 1992, two-thirds of felony weapons
offenders had no prior felony conviction.[7] My
review of data on people arrested for using a gun in
a crime in Indianapolis in 1994 found an even higher
proportion of nonfelons in the sample: 75 percent. In
Prince Georges County, Maryland, my research found
that half of the offenders arrested for using guns in
robbery and assault in 1996 had never been arrested
before for any offense, let alone a felony with a
conviction.

While people with felony convictions are indeed at
higher risk than most people of committing a crime
with a gun, that does not mean they commit most gun
crimes. The key epidemiological fact is that most gun
crimes would still occur even if every convicted
felon in the United States were shipped to Australia
(not just barred from legal gun ownership). This
means two things. One, using a felony conviction to
define "unsafe people" allows gun crime to happen at
a much higher rate than it would be by using a more
epidemiologically based definition. Two, the use of a
gun in crime cannot be predicted simply from previous
criminal history, and strategies other than
restricting sales to safe people must be used to
reduce gun violence. 

Dr. Garen Wintemute and his colleagues offer evidence
for a more accurate definition of high-risk criminal
records. In California, sales of guns to people with
at least one prior misdemeanor conviction were six
times more likely to be followed by a violent offense
than sales of guns to people with no prior criminal
history. Those who had two or more prior misdemeanor
convictions on the day of the sale were 15 times more
likely than the people with clean records to be
charged subsequently with homicide, rape, robbery, or
aggravated assault.[8] Yet, even if all misdemeanants
were barred from buying guns, the United States would
still have the highest rates of gun violence of all
advanced countries, given that a majority of
gun-using criminals have no prior convictions.

The most important epidemiological fact is that gun
violence is geographically concentrated in the areas
of greatest inequality in the Nation--the
hypersegregated poverty areas of inner cities. Half
of all homicides occur in the 63 largest cities,
which house only 16 percent of the population.[9]
Most of those homicides are committed with handguns,
often obtained illegally. Ample epidemiological data
show that the greater the density of guns in a
population, the greater the level of gun injury and
gun death, other things being equal.[10] Thus the key
epidemiological question for any new gun policy is
whether it will increase gun density in areas with
the greatest gun crime. 

The great epidemiological danger of the current
safe-gun proposals is that they will create a large
legitimate market for new, improved guns, leading to
substantial increases in gun ownership and gun
density. Moreover, according to tracing data from the
U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF),
new guns appear far more likely to be used in crime
than old guns. The 1997 ATF analysis of crime guns
traced in 17 cities found that the percentage of
confiscated crime guns less than 3 years old ranged
from 22 to 43 percent for juveniles and 30 to 54
percent for youthful adult offenders.[11] 

Some analysts have used the new-guns pattern to argue
that a ban on new handgun sales would reduce gun
violence, especially if accompanied by a law banning
possession of handguns like the one in force in
Washington, D.C. Others cite the predominance of
high-caliber guns in homicides[12] and suggest that
more selective bans on more lethal weapons could be
attempted. Whatever the merits or failings of these
ideas, they would at least respond to the key
epidemiological facts: most gun crime is committed by
people with minimal criminal records, who are
unlikely to be hampered by safe-gun technology or
current proposals for restricting sales of new guns. 

From Epidemiology to Experiments

There is no way, of course, to apply such
epidemiological analysis directly to predict the
results of a proposed policy. It may be possible to
say that the policy will miss the clearest risk
factors. But only when a policy is implemented is it
possible to assess its effects, both intended and
unintended, good and bad. Ideally, such information
would lead to revisions or refinements of the policy. 

Approaching new legislation in the spirit of
experimentation would take this into account.
Unfortunately, the ideological and political stakes
in such legislation create a strategy of "ready,
fire, aim," for which advocates must say they are
convinced they are right before they enact it. They
may indeed be convinced, but that conviction is based
on faith rather than fact. 

Using facts more effectively to combat gun violence
would require us to enact all new laws for temporary,
preliminary assessment periods, accompanied by a
rigorous and comprehensive evaluation, followed by a
debate on the facts of that evaluation as well as on
the theories behind each law. The Federal Government
could even provide incentives for the States, as the
laboratories of democracy, to conduct such
legislative experiments. In the meantime, it is
possible to review the available evaluation research,
not just in terms of what works, but in terms of how
much it works; that is, what proportion of gun
violence would be affected by a national
implementation of the program producing the same
results.

Reducing Gun Violence

The 1997 University of Maryland report used a
moderately high standard of evidence for deciding
what works to prevent crime: at least two separate
studies with a minimally adequate control or
comparison group reporting crime prevention
effects.[13] In addition, there could be no
conflicting evidence at the same level of rigor.
Where only one such study was available, we
classified the program as promising. Similarly, two
or more negative findings were needed to put a
program on the list of what doesn't work, again
without conflicting evidence. 

This standard yields a very short list: two policies
that work, one that doesn't, and several that are
promising (see sidebar). 

What Works: Gun Patrols and Background Checks

The two programs known to work are epidemiologically
focused on the high risks of gun violence. One
focused on high-risk times and places and the other
on high-risk people. The first program required
uniformed police patrol of gun crime hot spots in
areas with homicide rates many times above the
national average. The second program required
background checks before selling guns to ensure that
buyers were "safe" (by some definition). Although the
patrol strategy apparently can address a far larger
portion of all gun violence than the background check
strategy, the effects of background checks could be
greatly magnified by matching the definition of
unsafe people to the epidemiological data.

Uniformed Gun Patrols. The first formal test of
uniformed police patrols against guns was the Kansas
City Gun Experiment in 1992. Police in a high-crime
area worked overtime to increase gun seizures by 65
percent and found a 49-percent reduction in crimes
committed with guns.[14] This NIJ study found no
change in either gun seizures or gun crimes in a
similar area several miles away. 

A modified replication of the Kansas City study was
funded by NIJ in 1996 and carried out in
Indianapolis. Two target areas either maintained or
increased the level of gun seizures, while gun
seizures dropped in a comparison area by 40 percent.
According to the Hudson Institute's evaluation by Ed
McGarrell and his colleagues, gun assaults, armed
robberies, and homicides dropped by 50 percent in one
area and 25 percent in the other, even as those
crimes rose 22 percent in the comparison area and
remained constant citywide.[15] (Note that the result
for the second target area is a new finding, one that
modifies an earlier reported conclusion that the
strategy had only worked in one of the two target
areas.) 

An evaluation of the strategy of uniformed police
patrolling high gun crime areas looking for illegally
carried guns was reported recently in the Journal of
the American Medical Association. In this study, gun
homicides in two Colombian cities, Bogota and Cali,
declined by about 14 percent whenever gun carrying
was banned, and police mounted special patrols using
methods similar to those employed in Kansas City and
Indianapolis.[16] Gun crime was not reduced as much
as in the U.S. experiments, a fact that may be
related to the extraordinarily high rate of guns
seized per capita in the United States during the
experimental periods. For example, the rate of
seizure in Kansas City was 42 times higher than in
Cali; no gun seizure data were available for
Bogota.[17] 

The Boston Police Department's well-known reduction
in homicides in the early 1990s was statistically
related to a major increase in weapons arrests, in a
pattern that mirrors the national trend of increased
weapons arrests and decreased homicides.[18] The same
pattern is found in New York City. The change in the
ratio of weapons arrests to homicides is the key
change around the time that homicide rates fell. As
people carry fewer guns, fewer gun arrests are
expected as well as fewer homicides.

Plain-clothes patrols and drug enforcement recently
have been associated with controversial cases of
police-citizen encounters. The actions of these
plain-clothes officers should not be confused with
the results of uniformed patrol experiments. The
Kansas City, Indianapolis, Colombia, and other data
show the effects of what officers do in uniform, with
full public awareness that they are police. In 1997
the Prince Georges County, Maryland, Police
Department mounted such a program with a major
increase in traffic arrests--all the more impressive,
given its reduction in complaints of excessive force
at the same time. There is no logical conflict
between police (1) enforcing gun laws more frequently
(sometimes misnamed "aggressive patrol") and (2)
being polite to citizens and explaining what they are
doing as they go along.

Criminal History Checks. Background checks for gun
buyers also are effective at reducing gun violence.
The Brady law is often acclaimed as a success because
it has stopped more than 300,000 people from buying
guns illegally in a 5-year period nationwide.19 The
true test of its success, however, is not the number
of gun sales blocked but the number of gun crimes
prevented. While the gun homicide rate has been
dropping steadily nationwide since the Brady law
became effective, the total number of guns sold, the
number of federally licensed firearms dealers, and
the reported level of crack dealing in some major
cities have also dropped. Because we cannot separate
the possible causal connections between gun homicides
and the simultaneous changes of these and other
factors, we must look at microlevel data for a more
valid assessment of the effect of presale clearance
strategies.

Two impact evaluations meet the threshold of valid
research designs using the University of Maryland
Scientific Methods Scale. One study compared the
subsequent crime rates of convicted felons who were
blocked from buying a gun with the subsequent crime
rates of people charged with (but not convicted of)
felonies who were allowed to buy guns. If convicted
felons are more dangerous people, we might expect
them to have higher rates of crime even if they were
barred from buying a gun. But according to the sample
of 2,640 California background checks examined by
Mona Wright and her colleagues, the 170 convicted
felons who were prevented from buying new guns were
18 percent less likely to be charged with a gun
offense over the next 3 years than the gun buyers who
had felony arrests but no convictions. In other
words, using arrested felons as a control group, gun
crime by convicted felons appears to have been
reduced by the background check policy.[20] 

A second impact evaluation using a different research
design reached the same conclusion about the
effectiveness of background checks. David McDowall
and his colleagues found that when Florida adopted a
mandatory waiting period and background check for
handgun purchases, homicide rates dropped relative to
controls.[21] Taken together, these two studies give
background checks a secure status as a means of
reducing gun violence. Although they do not
necessarily reduce gun availability in the places
where gun crime rates are highest, it is at least
possible that background checks do so indirectly. Gun
smugglers and straw purchasers, for example, may have
found background checks too difficult to deal with
and dropped out of the business. 

There is an immediate implication of placing
background checks on the list of what works. That
implication is closing the loopholes related to gun
sales. If background checks reduce crime committed
with guns sold in licensed gun dealerships, it is a
reasonable hypothesis that they would do the same for
gun shows and third-party gun transfers. About 4
percent of gun owners surveyed in 1994 had purchased
their guns at gun shows, and 65 percent had purchased
their guns in stores subject to the Brady law. Thus
one-third of all gun sales are currently excluded
from Federal law on background checks, either at gun
shows, through classified ads, or in sales among
friends and family.[22] Closing the gun show loophole
alone may not do very much, but requiring all
nonstore sales to be recorded and subjected to
background checks could broaden the impact of the
Brady law. 

What Doesn't Work: Gun Buyback Programs

The program that is best known to be ineffective is
gun buybacks, at least in the United States. In three
separate, moderately strong scientific evaluations,
there was no reduction in gun violence following the
purchase by police of large quantities of guns.
Richard Rosenfeld's evaluations of two separate gun
buybacks in St. Louis examined a 1991 program that
bought 7,500 guns and a 1994 program that bought
1,200 guns. Neither showed any reduction in gun
homicides or assaults relative to the same offense
types committed without guns.[23] A similar
evaluation of a gun buyback in Seattle found no
reduction in homicide and some evidence of an
increase.[24] 

From an epidemiological perspective, buyback programs
receive low marks for relating resources to risk
factors. Nothing in the structure of gun buyback
programs focuses the intervention on the risk. Guns
are bought from anyone, regardless of where they live
or whether the gun was readily accessible to people
at high risk for crime. These programs are often
justified rhetorically by saying that "every gun
bought back is a potential life saved." Yet not all
guns are at equal risk of being used in crime, a risk
that varies widely by geographic area, type of gun,
recency of manufacture, and criminal record of the
gun owner. 

The ineffectiveness of the gun buyback programs is
all the more important because this research has been
ignored. These findings have been in the public
record for some time. They were included in the 1997
Maryland Report to Congress and in the 1998 summary
of that report. There is, to my knowledge, no
contradictory evidence purporting to show that gun
buybacks can be an effective policy for reducing gun
violence. In addition, these programs are extremely
expensive, usually costing hundreds of thousands of
dollars. Yet as recently as the fall of 1999, another
Federal program was launched to encourage local
agencies to spend many millions of dollars on
buybacks in public housing authorities. Such a
program might conceivably have some effect on gun
violence if it was limited to residents of the small
percentage of all public housing projects nationwide
that suffer gun violence problems. But based on the
citywide program results, that seems unlikely.

What's Promising: Gun Bans

The available evidence suggests that several kinds of
gun bans have been effective, although none of the
findings has yet been replicated with rigorous field
studies. One is a blanket or near-blanket ban on
possession of handguns. New York City first enacted a
near-ban on the purchase of handguns in 1911 with the
Sullivan Law. While this law has not been formally
evaluated, New York did have a lower homicide rate
than many other big cities for most of this century.
The law clearly alters the dynamics of the gun
market, with strong evidence of the Sanibel Island
effect: 85 percent of New York City crime guns traced
by the ATF were imported illegally from outside the
State.[25] 

Handgun Ban in Washington, D.C. When the District of
Columbia passed an even more restrictive handgun ban
than New York's in 1976, it created an opportunity
for a detailed evaluation of its impact on gun crime.
Colin Loftin and his colleagues examined the trends
in gun homicides in Washington, D.C., and its
surrounding communities before and after the change
in the law. The 25-percent drop in firearms homicide
that followed was not matched by a drop in other
types of homicide, nor in an increase in homicide by
other means. Nearby areas of Maryland and Virginia
had no change in either firearms or nonfirearms
homicides. The reduction in Washington, D.C., was
sustained until the crack cocaine epidemic in
1987.[26] Yet it is possible that the ensuing
increase in homicide that pushed Washington, D.C., to
claim the highest murder rate in the country might
have been even worse without the handgun ban having
been in effect all those years. 

National Assault Weapons Ban. The 1994 national ban
on the sale of newly manufactured assault weapons of
specific manufacture and design was the subject of a
national evaluation mandated by the Congress when it
enacted the legislation. The NIJ evaluation by
Jeffrey Roth and Christopher Koper found that
requests for ATF traces of the banned weapons after
use in crime dropped by 20 percent in the first year,
steeper than the 10-percent drop in all homicides and
in trace requests for all other gun types. Moreover,
gun murders dropped 11 percent below projected levels
in the 38 States that had not previously passed a
similar ban but did not drop in States where such
weapons were already banned.[27] There was also a
reduction in the rate at which police were murdered
with guns. 

Finally, it is worth noting that since 1934, U.S.
restrictions on the ownership of fully automatic
machine guns have been associated with the extremely
rare use of such guns in crime. 

Summary

This discussion of what works has focused on a
limited but critically important criterion. We have
considered not what works to reduce all crime or even
to reduce violent crime. Instead, the standard for
what works in this list is what works to reduce gun
violence. Whatever the merits of such claims as "more
guns, less crime," they are ultimately beside the
point from a public health perspective. America's
crime rates, apart from gun violence, are quite
modest by international standards. Americans are less
likely to be burglarized in Washington, D.C., than
Australians are in Canberra, and other crime rates
are now higher in England than in the United States.
As Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have argued,
crime is not the problem.[28] The problem is gun
violence and the crippling injuries and deaths that
it causes. 

Using standards for impact evaluations that are
substantially lower than those used by the Food and
Drug Administration to approve new drugs, we have
still produced a very short list. Only two strategies
have acquired scientific evidence that rises to the
level of what works: uniformed police patrols in gun
crime hot spots and background checks for gun buyers.
Only one strategy has been certified as ineffective:
the expensive gun buyback programs. The only
promising strategies are bans on specific types of
guns, which are of course politically volatile.

Nonetheless, this list provides useful guides to
action. If uniformed and polite gun patrols as well
as background checks were significantly increased,
less gun violence might quickly be achieved. How much
less remains to be seen. It is important to note that
far more Federal funds could be invested in these
patrols in the 1,000 or so census tracts at highest
risk, and far more gun sales could be subjected to
background checks. Thus the available research points
the way to major policy changes that could work
wonders.

Ironically, in a year in which the policy choices
have been framed as more laws versus more
enforcement, the research evidence suggests that both
enforcement and legislation can make a difference.
The choice between them is clearly false, for nothing
makes them mutually exclusive. Police efforts to get
illegally carried guns off the streets can only be
aided by greater limits on who gets to buy new guns,
which have been the fashion statement of choice for
many young men without criminal records.

In this crucible year, however, the list of what
works excludes most of the proposals now on the table
for reducing gun violence. Those proposals include:

--External triggerlocks.

--Internal triggerlocks.

--Personal weapons, or "smart guns" that work for
only one owner.

--"Firearms fingerprinting" before sale to allow
police to trace all bullets fired to the gun that
fired them.

--Serial numbers on more places on each gun.

--A 10-shot limit on firing each gun.

--A national one-gun-a-month purchase rule.

This list, which is far from exhaustive, is testament
to the imagination of policy analysts who have
developed these plans. The extent to which they rely
on epidemiological data varies widely. But the
effects of these plans can only be properly measured
by trying them out. Whether or not any new
legislation calls for a mandatory evaluation (like
the national assault weapons ban did), there will be
more opportunities to learn what works.

The Smith and Wesson agreement, for example, should
create a major "natural" experiment, testing several
of these proposals simultaneously with about 20
percent of the new handguns sold in the United States
each year:

--Using both Smith and Wesson guns made before the
agreement and guns made by other manufacturers, the
National Institute of Justice could compare the rates
at which Smith and Wesson guns with internal,
external, and no triggerlocks are used in crime,
suicide, and accidents.[29]

--Comparing the new Smith and Wesson serial number
system to the old one may show differences in the
rates at which police can catch gun crime offenders
and possibly differences in the rates at which
well-numbered and poorly numbered guns are used in
crime.

--The effects of a stronger trigger-pull pressure
requirement can be measured in the rates of accidents
involving young children. 

--The effects of requiring background checks at gun
shows can be tested directly with the data from
dealers following the new Smith and Wesson code of
conduct.

--The one-gun-on-purchase-day limit with a 14-day
waiting period for each buyer to collect the rest of
the unlimited number of Smith and Wesson guns can be
used to test the effects of that rule on gun
violence. If Smith and Wesson crime gun traces
decline, the waiting period may have discouraged gun
smugglers from buying them for transport into Sanibel
Island States. 

Whatever opportunities these innovations may provide
for experimentation, epidemiology must not be
forgotten. The example of the screwworm must not be
forgotten, nor such basic ideas as ammunition
control. Gary Kleck, whose 1991 book on gun control
policy indicts a multitude of ideas, dismisses
ammunition control as well.[30] (Yet he conceded that
if there were an end to ammunition, it would cause an
end to gun violence.) He predicted it would not work
solely because it is easy for skilled people to make
their own ammunition. That ease presumes access to
such elements as gunpowder, the sale of which could
also be tightly restricted. 

Even if some people know how to make gunpowder, the
obstacles to obtaining bullets would clearly rise
under ammunition control. If they rise high enough,
they would render useless many or most of the 200
million guns in circulation, without confrontation
between police and citizens.

It is always important to know, based on experiments
performed, what works and what doesn't. But the list
of what is known to work must never be confused with
the list of what could work--if it could be tested.
The list of experiments must be lengthened, and gun
violence must be treated as the complex problem it
is. For complex problems--whether natural ones like
screwworms or human-made ones like bullets--can only
be solved through systematic and long-term trial and
error.

Question-and-Answer Session

Paul Blackman, National Rifle Association, Fairfax,
Virginia: I have two questions. First, you mentioned
that very few criminals use machine guns since the
restrictions of 1934. Are you also suggesting that
they don't use sawed-off shotguns, which were
similarly restricted at the same time? Second, both
the Kansas City study and the Washington, D.C., study
used what might be considered inappropriate controls;
that is, controls dissimilar from the places being
studied--for example, Washington, D.C., was compared
with the suburbs rather than the city of Baltimore,
which had a homicide rate that fell more rapidly than
Washington's. Can you explain why you still find
those studies valid?

L.S.: Sawed-off shotguns are different from, say,
Thompson submachine guns from the World Wars. The
potential for sawing off legally sold shotguns is
clearly much greater than the potential for obtaining
a Thompson, which is banned from commerce. My source
on this is Gary Kleck, and I defer to his
observations on it.

On the second point, I think it is worth noting that
you lump together the Kansas City and Washington,
D.C., experiments with the same methodological point.
The point about appropriateness of controls doesn't
apply to Kansas City because the control area was as
similar as possible: It was several miles away within
Kansas City. Both areas had very high rates of
homicide and driveby shootings. The major difference
between them was population density; the target area
was more dense than the control area.

We looked at the potential for displacement of crime.
Although gun crime went up somewhat in the
immediately surrounding beats, it didn't do so
significantly. That is what significance tests are
about. The Washington, D.C., study of the ban on
handguns by Colin Lofton and his colleagues comparing
gun and nongun homicides had internal controls and
looked at surrounding areas as potential for
displacement (and also as possible controls). I think
Tom Frazier might argue that Baltimore is as
different a world from Washington as San Francisco
is. There is no scientific basis for saying that it
is a more appropriate control than any other big city
in the United States. Perhaps what somebody should do
is take a sample of cities with a population of more
than 500,000 and check it out. That will add further
fuel to this debate that has been going on since
1991, when the study was published in The New England
Journal of Medicine. 

Frankly, you could pick at all of these experiments
in one way or another. That is the nature of science,
trying to figure out from each week's headlines, for
example, whether hormone replacement therapy is a
good idea for women over 50. You are left with the
same questions in any case: How is the research done,
and what can we conclude from it? All we can do is
continue to do research and make the best of it.

Jeremy Travis, National Institute of Justice, U.S.
Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: I'd like to
note that it is gratifying that at a research forum
we can have Handgun Control and the National Rifle
Association sitting next to each other--and trading
notes. This is wonderful! 

Vincent Schiraldi, Center on Juvenile and Criminal
Justice, Washington, D.C.: You said there was a false
dichotomy sometimes between the law enforcement
approach and some of the bans on handguns or certain
types of handguns, but you talked about how both are
important. It strikes me that the approach used in
Prince Georges County, Maryland, and New York City
makes much more sense in an environment saturated
with handguns than one in which handguns were banned.
For example, I could maybe support squeegee men or
turnstile jumpers being aggressively or assertively
targeted in an environment in which many of them can
legally obtain (or at least, easily illegally obtain)
handguns. But where they couldn't, it might be
different. 

I don't think it would be a false dichotomy that, if
we could get control of those 65 million handguns, we
wouldn't need to roust people from jumping turnstiles
as if they were potential killers. I think that some
of the goodwill reflected in public opinion polls
represents this attitude: "Crime went down in my
neighborhood. Yeah, search the guy jumping the
turnstile. But if crime went down in my neighborhood
without doing that, I wouldn't feel as good about
it." Can you comment on that?

L.S.: I think the major attraction of ammunition
control for me is precisely the point you are making,
that it would be a way to get around this enormous
stockpile of guns in the United States that makes
squeegee people or turnstile jumpers into potential
killers. You only have to look at the number of
homicides in New York City subways before and after
they used frequent arrests of turnstile jumpers
(again, you don't have to arrest people
aggressively). Another NIJ study found that when
people are arrested politely, they have a much lower
repeat offending rate than if they are not arrested
politely. In public discussions I think frequency of
arrests and impoliteness of the arrest process have
been totally conflated as "aggressive policing. That
is, if you are making frequent arrests, you must be
doing it in an aggressive manner. That may be the
case in some cities; but it doesn't have to be. Law
enforcement leadership can speak out about the
tremendous importance of treating all citizens not as
potential killers (although in a country with lots of
guns--certainly in high gun crime areas--that has to
be a part of the working assumptions), but as
potential customers, like a major hotel corporation,
where an officer says, "Have a nice day," after
saying, "May I pat you down?"

We have to focus on where the problem is. This is not
unique to guns. In AIDS prevention, for example, we
have a great deal of expenditure going to low-risk
populations and not nearly enough to high-risk
populations. That's partly due to the way the
founders wrote the U.S. Constitution, giving, for
example, 15 percent of the population control of half
of the U.S. Senate, resulting in rural interests
hostile to investing in cities even if that is where
the problems are found. We will continue to have a
very disjointed national debate because these
policies look different, depending on where you sit
and where you live. The U.S. Supreme Court has to
continue to interpret law for the whole Nation on
when the police can frisk and when they cannot. They
have done some very interesting things this term
about that, and I think that's fine. But the issue is
not only how we enforce, but how much we enforce,
where we enforce, and whether there is some way to
get around that terrible problem that police reformer
August Vollmer predicted when the automobile was
invented, saying, "Oh no, now the police are going to
have to confront all kinds of middle-class people,
and we are never going to regain their friendship and
loyalty." Imagine if we had a world without traffic
enforcement.

Michel McQueen, Nightline, ABC News, Washington,
D.C.: I am curious how the uniformed patrols in gun
and crime hot spots actually work. Is the goal
confiscation, or is it prosecution? Do you make a
distinction between juveniles and adults in these
patrols?

L.S.: The goal is prevention. And how it's achieved
may not be as important as the fact that it is
achieved with dignity and legitimacy by the police.
Taking guns off the streets, deterring gun carrying,
or deterring crime in general--all might require
additional police in gun crime hot spots.
(Incidentally, hot spots are very localized. It is
not just a matter of saying "this precinct has a high
rate." Within that precinct, crime mapping can tell
you that 1 to 3 percent of the addresses in that
precinct have the majority of the gun crime.) One of
the problems we have with police is that they get
bored easily. If they stay in a hot spot and nothing
happens, they say, "See, I told you there is no need
for me to stand here." They then go to some other
low-risk place, which of course increases the risk
that crime can happen at the street corner where it
has happened most often in the past.

Michel McQueen: How do you envision this working in
practice? I'm thinking about the recent killings of
public school students in Washington, D.C. There was
a very emotional outcry about this. Public school
students came forward at one of the public events and
talked about their feelings of being unsafe. They
talked about a heavy police presence, particularly in
certain neighborhoods known to be saturated with
guns. They see police there, but they don't see the
police doing anything, so they feel unsafe. This
cycle of paranoia leads to more gun carrying. I'm
interested in more detail about how this actually
works. Do the police just stop and frisk people?

L.S.: You can't stop and frisk people without
"articulable suspicion." What you can do, and they
did in Kansas City, was to fully enforce traffic
laws. Very often they found guns sitting on the seat
in plain view. In Prince Georges County [Maryland],
as Phil Pan of The Washington Post reported when the
program began, they were fully enforcing traffic laws
and also asking people for consent to search their
trunks or glove compartments or other places, saying,
"There has been a lot of gun crime in this area
lately. For your safety and ours, would you mind if
we checked out the other parts of the car?"

Racial profiling has become a big issue in the New
Jersey State Police. Racial profiling was not a
policy in Prince Georges County. In fact, some
comments made to the Post reporter at the time
include, "I wish they'd done this a long time ago.
This is going to make us more safe." There is tension
between wanting the police to do something and not
wanting them to do too much or to do things too
rudely. I think that's what places such a tremendous
burden on police in these areas and leads some people
to say, "They simply can't be trusted; let's leave
them out of it. Let's find other ways and not have
heavy police presence because it creates this
terrible risk, as in the Amadou Diallo case." 

We can look at the overall numbers and see what's
been prevented. The New York City Police Department
went from 77 killings of citizens in 1971 to 18 the
year before Diallo was killed (and 13 the year after
he was killed). The risk of police killing citizens
has gone way down; the capacity to detect and get
guns off the street has gone way up. Homicides are
far below their 1971 levels in New York. When people
tell me there is no progress, I'm now old enough to
know that they are wrong, at least in some cases. We
can make tremendous strides; we just have to keep
holding on in the face of these bad events that drive
policy and create opportunities to destroy good
policy. We must look at the evidence in a more
systematic and objective way to find out what will
work best for everybody.

Elizabeth Glazer, U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern
District, New York, New York: Recently, particularly
in light of the successes of Operation Exile in
Richmond, Virginia, Federal prosecutors have been
urged to do a much higher volume of felony possession
cases, using Federal laws to put felons who are in
possession of firearms in jail. Your numbers seem to
show that felony convictions are not necessarily a
good predictor of who's an unsafe person. In light of
that, do you have any advice about strategies Federal
prosecutors should employ to reduce gun violence?

L.S.: There are two issues here. One, the 25 to 35
percent of gun crimes committed by convicted felons
could have been prevented if those folks had been
behind bars. Two, there may be a big chunk of gun
violence that could be prevented by selective
incapacitation of gun offenders under Project Exile,
Operation Triggerlock, or the other Federal
interventions. We can argue that there is more room
for using sentencing policy with respect to gun
crimes. There is some controversy in the literature
about the effectiveness of mandatory sentencing
policies, which is why I left them off the list. But
what may be even more important is the complete
disdain State judges hold for treating the offense of
carrying a concealed weapon as a serious crime. The
typical sentence for carrying a concealed weapon in
most big cities is probation. 

That was what drunk driving was like in 1980, and we
stopped treating it that way. If we took the risk of
carrying a gun as seriously as we take the risk of
driving a car drunk, we might find that we could
deter gun carrying through sentencing policy as much
as (or maybe even more than) through police patrols.
Combining the two, in which the sentences would be
substantial for carrying a gun along with the higher
likelihood that the police would be able to detect a
gun if you are carrying it on the street, could have
two effects. One, it could reduce the rate of gun
carrying; the other, it could increase the rate of
violence in police encounters with citizens. If
somebody knows that they are going to do time for
carrying a gun, they might choose to shoot it out
with the police officer. This is why we have to do
experiments. We can't figure these things out in our
heads. We have to test the policies and see what
happens.

Ted Gest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C.:
Could you elaborate on your apparent dismissal of the
"more guns, less crime" theory, which was an allusion
to the thesis that more, legally obtained concealed
weapons had some correlation or maybe causation with
decreased violence? Have you determined whether that
theory is flawed, whether it has no effect or
negligible effect on gun violence? Should it be
tested, or is the basic policy of easier access to
legally concealed weapons flawed, based on your
analysis of the Brady law?

L.S.: John Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime:
Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws makes me
ask, what is the issue? Is it crime or gun injury?
Even if we are willing to concede that the price of
having a homicide rate equal to Australia's (which is
2 per 100,000, or 25 to 33 percent of the U.S. rate)
is to have an Australian burglary rate, which is
substantially higher than ours, I'm happy. Assume
hypothetically that more guns deter burglars. If they
also cause more gun crimes, why is that good?
Although the focus of Lott's book is on the
relationship between guns and crime rates, it has
virtually no data on gun violence except for gun
homicides. It is a national sample and does not look
at the effects of gun-carrying laws in the few areas
that have most of the homicide, making the analysis
irrelevant to the policy issue of reducing gun
homicide in the United States.

Officer Paul Liquorie, Montgomery County Police
Department, Rockville, Maryland: What findings do you
have on projects with mandatory minimum sentencing
for illegal possession of handguns, like Project
Exile? 

L.S.: I'm not aware of any evaluation of prosecution
at the Federal level and its impact on gun violence
in a city like Richmond. I don't think a Richmond
evaluation has been done. Again, my point: Let's not
confuse what has been found to work (or not) with
what could work (or not). We need to do a lot more
evaluations.

Notes

1. Dao, James, "Under Legal Seige, Gun Maker Agrees
to Accept Curbs," New York Times, March 18, 2000, A1.

2. Bruni, Frank, "Bush Moves a Little Away From the
N.R.A.'s Positions," New York Times, March 18, 2000,
A8.

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

4. Sherman, Lawrence W., Denise Gottfredson, Doris
MacKenzie, John Eck, Peter Reuter, and Shawn Bushway,
Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's
Promising: A Report to the United States Congress,
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office
of Justice Programs, 1997, NCJ 165366. (Visit the Web
site http://www.preventingcrime.org to access the
report.)

5. Nagourney, Eric, "Edward Knipling, 90, Enemy of
the Dangerous Screwworm," New York Times, March 27,
2000, A25.

6. Koper, Christopher S., "Gun Lethality and
Homicide: Gun Types Used by Criminals and the
Lethality of Gun Violence in Kansas City, Missouri,
1985-1993," Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland,
1995.

7. Greenfeld, Lawrence A., and Marianne W. Zawitz,
Weapons Offenses and Offenders, Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 1995, NCJ 155284.

8. Wintemute, Garen J., et al., "Prior Misdemeanor
Convictions as a Risk Factor for Later Violent and
Firearm-Related Criminal Activity Among Authorized
Purchasers of Handguns," Journal of the American
Medical Association 280 (1998): 2083-2087. 

9. Computed from Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Crime in the United States, 1993, Uniform Crime
Reports, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1994.

10. Reiss, Albert J., Jr., and Jeffrey A. Roth, eds.,
Understanding and Preventing Violence, Washington,
D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1993.

11. U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,
Youth Gun Crime Interdiction Initiative: Crime Gun
Trace Analysis Reports: The Illegal Youth Firearms
Markets in 17 Communities, Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, 1997.

12. Koper, "Gun Lethality and Homicide."

13. Sherman, et al., Preventing Crime.

14. Sherman, Lawrence W., and Dennis Rogan, "Effects
of Gun Seizures on Gun Violence: Hot Spots Patrol in
Kansas City," Justice Quarterly 12 (1995): 673-693.

15. McGarrell, Edmund, Stephen Shermak, and Alexander
Weiss, Targeting Firearms Through Directed Patrols,
Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1999.

16. Villaveces, Andres, et al., "Effect of a Ban on
Carrying Firearms on Homicide Rates in Two Colombian
Cities," Journal of the American Medical Association
283 (2000): 1205-1209.

17. Sherman, Lawrence W., "Gun Carrying and Homicide
Prevention," Journal of the American Medical
Association 283 (March 1, 2000): 1193-1195.

18. Ibid.; unpublished data, Federal Bureau of
Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting Program as
analyzed by Matthew Holtman, University of
Pennsylvania, 2000.

19. Manson, Donald A., Darrell K. Guillard, and Gene
Lauver, Presale Handgun Checks: The Brady Interim
Period, 1994-98, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999, NCJ
175034.

20. Wright, Mona A., Garen J. Wintemute, and
Frederick A. Rivara, "Effectiveness of Denial of
Handgun Purchase to Persons Believed to Be at High
Risk for Firearm Violence," American Journal of
Public Health 89 (1999): 88-90.

21. McDowall, David, Colin Loftin, and Brian
Wiersema, "Easing Concealed Firearms Laws: Effects on
Homicide in Three States," Journal of Criminal Law
and Criminology 86 (1995): 193-206.

22. Cook, Philip J., and Jens Ludwig, Guns in
America: Results of a Comprehensive Survey on
Firearms Ownership and Use, Washington, D.C.: Police
Foundation, 1996.

23. Rosenfeld, Richard, "Gun Buybacks: Crime Control
or Community Mobilization," in Under Fire: Gun
Buy-backs, Exchanges, and Amnesty Programs, ed.
Martha Plotkin, Washington, D.C.: Police Executive
Research Forum, 1995.

24. Callahan, Charles, Frederick Rivara, and Thomas
Koepsell, "Money for Guns: Evaluation of the Seattle
Gun Buy-Back Program," in Under Fire: Gun Buy-backs,
Exchanges, and Amnesty Programs, ed. Martha Plotkin,
Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum,
1995.

25. U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,
Youth Gun Crime Interdiction Initiative.

26. Loftin, et al., "Effects of Restrictive Licensing
of Handguns on Homicide and Suicide in the District
of Columbia," New England Journal of Medicine 325
(1991):1615-1620.

27. Roth, Jeffrey, and Christopher Koper, Impact of
the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban: 1994-96, Research in
Brief, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice,
National Institute of Justice, 1999, NCJ 173405.

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

29. Dao, James, "Under Legal Seige, Gun Maker Agrees
to Accept Curbs," New York Times, March 18, 2000, A1.

30. Kleck, Gary D., Point Blank: Guns and Violence in
America, New York: Aldine deGruyter, 1991: 415.

------------------
SIDEBAR

Reducing Gun Violence: What Works, What Doesn't,
What's Promising

What Works?

--Uniformed police patrols in gun crime hot spots.

--Background checks for criminal history to restrict
gun sales in stores.

What Doesn't Work?

--Gun buyback programs in American cities.

What's Promising?

--Virtual bans on private handgun possession.

--Bans on the sale and manufacture of new assault
weapons.

What's Worth Testing?

--Any program addressing a known risk factor and tied
to a careful evaluation, including:

----Bans on handgun sales and possession for all
convicted misdemeanants.

----Bans on high-caliber handguns.

----The elements of the Smith and Wesson agreement.

----Ammunition control for all or some bullet sizes.

----Waiting periods for ammunition.

----National one-gun-a-month laws.

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

Reinventing Evaluation to Build High-Performance
Child and Family Interventions

Presentation by 

Heather B. Weiss

Director

Harvard Family Research Project

May 3, 2000
Washington, D.C.

The growing push for social program accountability
across the private and nonprofit sectors and at all
governmental levels is stimulating productive debates
about the definition and role of evaluation. In
addition, calls are being heard for trials of new
approaches to knowledge development that emphasize
organizational learning and continuous improvement.
This paper examines the current transformation in the
role and purposes of evaluation and argues for
strategic investments in evaluation and knowledge
development as part of larger systems of learning and
accountability. One vision for a learning system is
described, and its key functions and operations are
illustrated with examples from ongoing efforts to
invest evaluation resources to support learning and
accountability. These examples illustrate an array of
local and State efforts to build the capacity of
organizations to obtain and use data that will inform
and continuously improve practice and policy. The
paper concludes with a brief discussion of the
challenges this reorientation poses for those who
fund knowledge development and evaluation as well as
those who train evaluators.

Growth in the Role of and Demand for Evaluation

Since its origins during the War on Poverty in the
1960s, the field and profession of social program
evaluation has grown substantially and been
challenged repeatedly as Americans have increasingly
demanded "proof" that programs work and merit the
allocation of their taxes and other support. Recent
polls about American willingness to invest in
services for children, youths, and families, for
example, show strong links between willingness to pay
taxes and evidence that programs work.[1] By the
1980s, evaluation was firmly entrenched as a key
ingredient in social problem solving and building
public will to support social programs, and
government and foundation funders invested in
developing and evaluating model programs to ascertain
their effectiveness. The logic behind this was to
test whether a model worked under experimental or
quasi-experimental conditions, and if it did, the
assumption was that it could be "scaled up"
elsewhere. Evaluations of multisite demonstrations
were designed to address questions about
implementation and effects in a variety of community
conditions. Foundations conducted research and
created demonstration programs assuming that the
public sector would at least consider expanding
successful interventions.[2]

This view of the role and positioning of evaluation
in social problem solving has come increasingly under
question. As anyone familiar with social programs
knows, unevaluated or "unproven" programs are
routinely scaled up, while "proven" programs often
fall victim to the "research, demonstrate, dilute, or
adapt" syndrome, in which replications bear little
resemblance to the original. This "model drift" and
evaluation-based learning about the ways in which
contextual factors (such as the richness of community
resources in models that provide information and
referral to other services) influence the
implementation and effects of interventions have led
to questions about the generalizability of research
and demonstration findings to different populations
and communities.[3]

These realizations and questions about traditional
research and development strategy led in turn to
several recommendations for better learning from
evaluation investments. First, some observers
suggested that instead of evaluating only "flagship"
research and development programs, it made sense to
also selectively evaluate the "fleet" of
community-based and -developed innovative
programs.[4] Second, evaluators began to ask more
differentiated questions--not just what works, but
what works where, when, how, and why--to build a more
nuanced and useful base of data with which to inform
policy and practice. The development and increased
use of meta-analysis (summarizing data and results
from multiple evaluations across intervention areas)
has also helped increase the yield and power of
investments in the evaluation of social programs. By
the 1980s, no one flagship exemplar was seen as doing
the "evaluation duty" for all examples of its type,
and public and foundation funders increasingly
required some form of evaluation for new social
programs and interventions.

An example from early childhood programming
illustrates these points. The Head Start program has
typically relied on commissioned evaluations of a
subset of its programs as well as evidence from other
non-Head Start early childhood programs to make the
case that it is a good investment. As States and
localities have bought the argument for the
investment in early childhood programs, they have had
the choice of adding funds to the federally funded
Head Start program or developing and supporting
alternatives. When considering this choice, State and
local officials increasingly ask for evidence that
their local Head Start programs are effective and
more worth the extra cost their than less expensive
local program alternatives. Evidence from national
studies is not regarded as sufficient. Similar issues
have been raised for other Federal programs, such as
the Even Start family literacy program. This demand
for local data is causing Federal agencies to rethink
their evaluation strategies. The Early Head Start
evaluation designed in the 1990s has both a locally
designed component and a common cross-site national
component. Both Federal and State government funders
of social programs have begun to rethink their
evaluation strategies to consider the information
needs of a broader range of stakeholders.

New Challenges in the Era of Accountability 

The biggest and perhaps most far-reaching challenges
now facing research and evaluation leaders, funders,
and customers are a result of the reinventing
government efforts of the 1990s, whose calls for
accountability and results have permeated every
sector. The Federal Government Performance Results
Act (GPRA) has its counterparts in State and some
local governments, and the call for results-based
accountability (RBA) has penetrated the nonprofit and
for-profit service worlds. The advent of performance
accountability is transforming the discussion about
the purposes of evaluation and knowledge development
in critical ways. Since the 1960s, debates about
evaluation methods have been important, but now
issues about who gets and uses information and data
for what purposes--such as learning, accountability,
rewards and sanctions, performance management, and
continuous improvement--are at the center of debate
and innovation. The emphasis on accountability is
also opening up and repositioning the process of
obtaining data from external evaluators and getting
them to the provider organizations, funders, and
perhaps the public.

The push for accountability and performance
management is a complex and testable reform strategy
designed, in theory, to produce better individual and
community outcomes from social and educational
investments. Throughout the 1990s, researchers have
studied State-level efforts to develop results-based
accountability within early childhood and child and
family services and are now examining the transition
to performance management in nonprofits. After a
decade's experience in Federal and State agencies,
communities, and organizations, the implementation of
results-based accountability and performance
management is still in its infancy. It is unclear
whether the transition to fuller implementation is
possible or if it will pay off in better outcomes,
more effective allocation and use of resources, and
increased capacity for innovation. The early work has
been plagued by:

--Insufficient resources (time, money, and staff).

--Primitive tools and measures.

--Burnout or impasses early in the process of
defining workable performance goals and measurable
indicators.

--Little or no organizational capacity to obtain and
use data.

--Competing and overlapping accountability systems
and indicators in executive, legislative, and funding
offices.

--Complexities and risks of determining the locus and
consequences of accountability, particularly when
agencies or individuals have only partial control of
necessary services and resources.

--Resistance and the view that, like the U.S.
Department of Defense's program planning and
budgeting system (PPBS) of the 1960s and its
successors, this idea too will pass.[5,6]

Although there is fear of "gotcha" accountability and
a cessation of funding for programs or agencies that
do not produce results, little evidence of this
exists to date, except perhaps with performance
contracting arrangements. The need for program
evaluations as a component of accountability and
performance management strategies is also being
recognized as the limits of performance indicators
for understanding, explaining, and improving
performance become more clear. Finally, government
agencies and nonprofits are having difficulty
locating the sustained internal and external
technical assistance they need to support this work.
At a time when there is growing demand for assistance
from evaluators and others, those with the necessary
skills are in short supply. 

The accountability and performance management process
can be seen as a spiral unfolding over time. The
first loop involves laying out the mission, goals,
objectives, and performance indicators. The next loop
tracks progress on the indicators, celebrates the
improvements, and determines why some indicators
decreased or did not improve. The final loop involves
the dialogues, reflections, and analyses needed to
decide on the next step toward improving performance.
As Letts, Ryan, and Grossman recently argued,[7] the
challenge for service providers is no longer to
develop an effective program, prove it works, and
"put it on autopilot." Rather, the challenge is to
create the organizational capacity to continue to
learn, innovate, improve services, and demonstrate
impact. Very few organizations or public agencies
have completed even the first loop in the spiral. 

As the above discussion suggests, there are numerous
technical problems in implementing performance
management. But perhaps more important are the
cognitive, organizational, resource, and capacity
barriers that must be overcome to allow the second
and subsequent spirals of accountability and learning
to occur, as evidenced by significant organizational
or other changes designed to affect outcomes. One
official from a State with one of the most advanced
RBA approaches summarized the situation by saying
they are at the third point on a 100-point scale.

There is also a growing realization that although
more traditional research and development activities-
-such as experiments with new models or policies--are
necessary and important, they do not address the need
for new approaches to obtaining and using data for
performance management and accountability. All
parties in this system--policymakers and funders,
service providers, and evaluators--are challenged to
reinvent evaluation thinking and practice to create
and test new approaches. It is increasingly clear
that without a system for learning and continuous
improvement, accountability is not likely to lead to
improved policies, services, or outcomes. The push
for accountability will go further and be more
productive if it is set within the larger framework
and support of a learning system, one with a key
strategic role for experiments and other evaluations
as well as supports and expectations for both
accountability and continuous improvement. 

The Learning System Alternative 

The accountability movement is firmly rooted, but its
members are unsure how to move it forward. What do
the stakeholders need to implement and test whether
performance management and accountability can lead to
improving outcomes and solving social problems? The
answer that is proposed and will be discussed--the
creation of a learning system focused on using an
array of data for continuous learning and
improvement--is timely and viable for several
reasons. 

First, the increasing pressure for, and experience
with, performance management and accountability at
all levels is creating a will to move from an
immediate to a longer term approach to accountability
that emphasizes improvement, learning, and
innovation. Recent experience also indicates the
scale and nature of the support necessary to do so. 

Second, while evaluation and other research-based
information are rarely used to inform policy or
practice, the demand for this type of information is
likely to grow if the pressure for accountability
continues and the performance indicator "needle" does
not move up on key social problems. So the choice is
not between investing in performance management or
evaluation; rather, it is how to better align them to
improve outcomes. 

Third, research suggests a growing willingness in
both the public and nonprofit sectors to focus on
outcomes and results if (and it is a large "if")
expectations about performance are reasonable and the
necessary resources and support are available.
Finally, at the core of learning systems are learning
organizations. Drawing on private-sector work, Garvin
defines a learning organization as "an organization
skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring
knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect
new knowledge and insights."[8] To be successful
learners, people in organizations must be willing and
able to use data on a regular basis, assessing
implications, and making changes accordingly. The
experiences of a growing number of local and
State-level public and nonprofit learning
organizations (and partial learning systems) offer
some evidence that the proposed reframing is possible
and can lead to more effective services and policies
(see "Examples of Learning Organizations and
Systems"). 

From a Federal Perspective 

To stimulate thinking about learning systems, William
Morrill and I recently laid out the framework
described below.[9] This particular version of a
learning system, developed from a Federal
perspective, specifies the types of investments in
knowledge development, processes, and related
supports necessary to move major Federal programs
toward development of a learning system and
continuous improvement. Although foundations, State
and local nonprofits, and public funders do not make
the same level of investment in knowledge development
and evaluation, the logic of this learning system and
most of its steps are applicable to programs they
fund. Their capacity to move toward learning,
continuous improvement, and accountability arguably
would be enhanced if their efforts were even
minimally aligned with similar Federal ones. For
example, national-level investments in key areas
(such as indicator development, continuing
compilation and dissemination of research and
evaluation results, and strategic commissioning of
evaluations to fill critical knowledge gaps
identified by policymakers and practitioners) would
greatly support the local and State-level work with
performance management and learning. Whatever the
level of application, it is recommended that the
three stakeholder groups--policymakers and funders,
service providers, and evaluators--work together to
build the learning system. Collective building and
operation of a learning system by these groups is
essential for long-term improvement in outcomes. 

Stages of a Continuous Learning System

In a five-stage version of a continuous learning
system (shown in exhibit 1), the basic learning loop
involves laying out the vision, goals, and
performance measures; tracking progress, determining
the reasons indicators changed; and discussing what
additional information could help determine changes
to be made to improve performance. Over time, the
organization works through the five stages
repeatedly, continually examining and modifying its
behavior, model, or policies in accordance with the
learning process--and presumably its outcomes
improve. The learning loop can also guide the work of
larger units, such as large programs or fields of
service or practice (see exhibit 1). 

Stage 1. During stage one, the stakeholders design
the whole learning system. They set the learning
agenda, performance goals, and indicators. They also
obtain resources and a joint commitment to learning
and identify the research and evaluation questions
and gaps. The learning agenda is keyed to an
organization, agency, or field's long-term strategic
plan. It specifies how the stakeholders will come
together to implement all the stages of the learning
system. Another key issue for joint discussion is how
to use evaluation resources to help understand both
how and why indicators change and which services
affect them. This ongoing discussion enables more
strategic targeting of evaluation to help improve
performance. Because information penetrates policy
and practice incrementally and iteratively,
information must be accessible and flow continuously
in a learning system to promote course correctives
and innovation.

It is important that the stakeholders discuss the
accountability consequences--the content and timing
of their expectations for progress in program
indicators, as well as for learning and change in the
learning system itself. 

Expectations should be reasonable and the learning
system should factor in the private-sector experience
of learning from failure.[10] The consequences for
accountability should be clear at the outset for all,
and there should be opportunities and incentives for
risk taking, innovation, and experimentation with new
services and policies. This discussion must also
include consideration of the point in a continuous
learning system at which it is clear that a program
or policy simply does not work well enough to warrant
continued support.

Stage 2. In stage two, the stakeholders learn from
experience and relevant research and incorporate
these lessons into program and policy design.
Activities include assembling resources, specifying
outcome and process measures and the data necessary
to support them, networking to share successful
innovations and common problems, and identifying
technical assistance needs and providers. In this
stage the stakeholders must create the means to
disseminate and synthesize relevant research and
evaluation information not only at this point but
throughout the whole learning system process.
Attention must be paid to developing new thinking
about dissemination to maximize the learning from
research and evaluation. 

Dissemination strategies should attempt to initiate
active discussion and consideration of the
implications for practice, organizational and policy
change, as well as stakeholders' access to timely
information about the latest research and
evaluations. The Cochrane Group in Great Britain[11]
has created a massive database of experimental and
other studies on health and other intervention areas;
similar work is being brought to the United States by
the Campbell Group[12] These are examples of the kind
of effort needed to make high-quality information
more available for stage two--and the whole learning
system. No learning system will succeed without
strategic investments in amassing and ensuring the
accessibility of the information necessary for
continuous improvement, learning, and accountability.

Stage 3. In stage three, stakeholders engage in
innovation, monitoring, and evaluation. Activities
include continuously testing new ideas and
approaches, designing the evaluation strategies to
assess them, and then monitoring and assessing
progress with performance measures, evaluation data,
and clinical data. 

Stage 4. In stage four, the stakeholders learn from
evaluation and comparisons with others and make
course corrections. Activities include using
monitoring and evaluation information to identify the
changes and course corrections needed, benchmarking
to examine progress of the program or field of
practice or policy, and assessing and applying
knowledge from relevant basic and applied research.
The recent work of the National Academy of Sciences
(NAS) on reading and literacy is a good example of
the kinds of work required for a field in stages four
and five in a learning system. NAS gathered
representatives from the three stakeholder groups in
a participatory process to examine the evidence on a
very controversial topic--approaches to reading
instruction--and to make recommendations for
practice, policy, and new research. The discussion,
reflection, and consensus reached by the NAS panel
helped resolve the disabling
phonics-versus-whole-language debate and ultimately
may help improve reading outcomes.[13] 

Stage 5. Finally, in stage five, the stakeholders
examine the lessons for program respecification and
identify knowledge gaps for further research and
experimentation. Activities include identifying
subjects for research and transferring knowledge for
continuous improvement across the network and service
or policy field. This is also a point at which to
consider the types of large-scale and experimental
evaluations that would address knowledge gaps for
large program areas or fields.

Our research on public-sector RBA and nonprofit
performance management underscores that neither they
nor any learning system can succeed without
resources--time, money, and personnel. In his history
of social program evaluation, Levitan notes that
although PPBS launched the modern evaluation
profession, PPBS itself was a failure because of the
lack of adequate financial and organizational
resources.[14] Considerable work needs to be done to
determine the costs of a learning system and how to
pay for it in new and reallocated resources. The
hypothesis is that a learning system would eventually
yield greater returns and do so more efficiently from
knowledge development investments measured in terms
of better and more use of information and gradually
improved social problem-solving capacity. All parties
involved in building such systems should discuss what
critical mass of resources is necessary and specify a
timeframe of a decade or more for assessing whether
their hypothesis is correct.

This model of a learning system is presented to
stimulate discussion and critique. Its viability is
being tested; it will continue to be modified through
research in public and nonprofit accountability.
Researchers are examining what is needed internally
in an agency or organization, as well as the
necessary external support, such as easy access to
relevant research and evaluation data. Ongoing
research suggests that the changes in leadership and
organizational culture, funders' expectations and
support, and resources to shift to learning and
continuous improvement are enormous. Nonprofit
organizations that do not make the shift to the
"accountability game" are in jeopardy, but it is as
yet unclear that those that make the shift and put
forth the effort required for learning and continuous
improvement will succeed. Arguably, their success
depends, in part, on the willingness of the
stakeholder groups to create a system such as the one
outlined here. This requires that policymakers and
funders invest in learning, not just strategic
planning, indicator development, and accountability.
The continuous learning system outlined here is a
starting point for discussion of what it means to
invest in learning.

Examples of Learning Organizations and Systems

Professional service, policy and management, and
evaluation communities are working together in
innovative ways to generate information for learning
and continuous improvement. Each example presented
below shows how key elements of the learning system
link to inform policy and practice. Each example also
illustrates a continuous learning loop or cycle with
the core features of a learning organization: ongoing
use of indicators to track and assess performance;
ongoing dialogue and reflection on the implications;
and resulting change in the organization, program, or
policy. The continuous nature of the process as well
as the use--not just collection--of data
distinguishes this work. The examples range from
single organizations (Project Match) to local
(Consortium on Chicago School Research and the San
Francisco Youth Development Outcomes Project) and
State (Minnesota's Early Childhood Family Education
Program and Vermont's Early Childhood Steering
Committee) service systems. In each case, evaluators
have played major roles in developing the learning
approach and carrying out the work with the other
stakeholders. 

These, along with similar partnerships among the
three stakeholder communities, are leading the way by
bringing new approaches to learning and
accountability to the public and nonprofit sectors.
Although the examples are just the beginnings of
fully developed continuous learning systems, they and
similar activities signal that more researchers and
evaluators are developing the skills and the tools
necessary to facilitate learning and that the service
and policy communities are seeking and using
evaluation and performance management data to improve
practice and outcomes in an ongoing and systematic
way.

Project Match

Project Match, a welfare-to-work program in Chicago,
illustrates how a local program has used its
commitment to evaluation and to the performance goal
of sustainable employment to develop an ongoing
learning system.[15] Project Match analyzed data from
management information systems (MIS) and program
participation to respecify its intervention models
and transfer the lessons learned to inform national
welfare policy. After tracking and critically
examining the patterns of program participants'
involvement in education, training, and employment,
the program managers fundamentally altered their
service model to encourage more clients to first seek
employment rather than education and training. They
found that those who opted immediately for school or
training were more likely to drop out than those who
worked and then went back for more education. This
finding was later supported by the results of several
larger welfare-to-work experiments. More and more
community-based welfare-to-work and other programs
are incorporating key aspects of learning models into
their self-assessment and public accountability. They
are, for example, using a sequence of setting client
and organizational performance goals, developing MIS
and client tracking systems, and then using these
data for problem solving, model respecification, and
accountability. A major challenge for States and the
Federal Government is how to support these local
activities within a broader learning system that
shares knowledge and successful innovations from
other sites and sources, such as experiments.

Consortium on Chicago School Research

The work of the Consortium on Chicago School Research
led by Bryk and colleagues shows how universities, in
consultation with a range of stakeholders, including
administrators, union representatives, and parents,
can conduct research to improve schools, assess the
progress of public school reform, and report the
results to the public on a regular basis.[16] The
foundation-funded consortium uses multiple methods
(surveys, case studies, administrative records,
classroom observations, and longitudinal analyses of
test scores) and measures to generate information and
provide feedback to guide the reform process. Its
work has helped the Chicago school system focus on
ways to support better learning outcomes, carry out
self-analysis, and build program development for
schools on probation and remediation. The research
model emphasizes mutual learning among researchers,
policymakers, and practitioners. Bryk suggests that
although stakeholder engagement requires much more
time, it increases the likelihood that the research
results will influence the change process to improve
outcomes. The consortium example raises challenging
issues about the resources necessary to create fully
developed learning systems. As noted earlier,
resources are required not only to collect
information but also to engage the  key stakeholders
in using and learning from data as part of a
continuous learning process. Substantial
philanthropic resources are an essential component in
the consortium example. Attaining a better sense of
the resources required to develop key components as
well as complete learning systems will be a critical
next step in assessing their feasibility more widely.

Minnesota's Early Childhood Family Education Program

State-level partnerships between researchers and the
service community, supported by public managers
intent on continuous improvement (and only a small
evaluation budget), can produce high-quality
programs. Michael Q. Patton, a pioneer in
utilization-focused evaluation, and his colleagues
have worked with Minnesota's Early Childhood Family
Education (ECFE) Program over the past 20 years to
build a learning system to support high-quality
statewide implementation.[17] Program managers and
the service community were coached in a
self-assessment research process designed to study
the effects of the program on parents. The findings
led to a series of course corrections to improve
children's developmental outcomes. With strategic use
of a small research budget (a one-time foundation
grant of $150,000 and a $10,000 yearly evaluation
allocation from the State), the State staff, in
partnership with local providers, now have many basic
components of the continuous learning system in
operation at a minimal level. While this case
illustrates the possibility of implementing learning
system ideas within a single program, it is a
substantially greater challenge to develop them
within a whole service sector.

Vermont's Early Childhood Steering Committee

Vermont's Early Childhood Steering Committee is
addressing this challenge in its statewide effort to
build a learning system to improve outcomes for young
children.[18] The committee is responsible for
conceptualizing, implementing, and evaluating a
comprehensive and well-integrated system of early
childhood services. Beginning with a strategic
planning process to articulate a vision for improving
children's lives, the committee examined barriers to
getting there and ways to overcome them. This process
relied on lessons from past State experience and
relevant experiences of other States and on
information about the success or failure of past
experiments. The committee regularly calls in experts
and consultants from within and outside the State and
encourages testing new ideas through experimentation
and innovation. Processes to collect, report, and use
performance indicators and other data have been
established. To improve school readiness, a key
performance goal, the committee is strengthening its
child care system and measuring child care quality.
Consisting of providers, parents, policymakers, and
evaluators, the committee meets regularly and uses
the data to assess progress, understand why changes
have occurred, and alter strategies accordingly. The
committee reports to a State Team on Children and
Families, which oversees the integration of social
and educational services in Vermont. 

San Francisco Youth Development Outcomes Project 

One of the most comprehensive efforts to build a
learning and accountability system currently under
way is the San Francisco Youth Development Outcomes
Project (YDOP). It is a partnership among the
Community Network for Youth Development (a major
youth service intermediary organization), six
foundation funders, seven diverse youth-serving
organizations, and national (the Institute for
Research and Reform in Education and the Community
Youth Action Project) and local technical assistance
providers and evaluators. Following a community-based
youth development framework grounded in developmental
research and developed by Connell and Gambone,[19]
the partners work with the youth-serving
organizations to develop indicators of youth
development and detailed organizational action plans
to improve youth outcomes. The framework lays out
nine areas of organizational practice that research
suggests promote favorable results.

Through a self-assessment process, the agencies
examine their organizational practices, set targets
for change, and track their progress. They are
building agency capacity for the ongoing
self-assessment necessary to support organizational
improvement. Working with funders to develop a
flexible system for outcome reporting tied to
learning and continuous improvement, they pilot and
evaluate this process so it can be shared with
others. 

The YDOP project illustrates how an intermediary
organization can create a partnership among
providers, funders, and researchers and evaluators to
develop and test the five-stage learning system
illustrated in exhibit 1. Early lessons from this
project suggest the key roles of the intermediary
overseeing the process; of committed funders and
agency leadership; and of the flexible, ongoing
technical assistance coaches skilled in
organizational development. Together the partners are
creating agency cultures open to reflection and
change as well as greater understanding on the part
of funders of what it takes  to build agency capacity
for high-performance management and better outcomes
for young people.

Barriers to Implementing Learning Systems

These five cases illustrate the core characteristics
of a learning system at the levels of the agency
(Project Match and YDOP), the delivery system
(Consortium on Chicago School Research), and the
State (Minnesota's Early Childhood Family Education
Program and Vermont's Early Childhood Steering
Committee), and suggest the supports and processes
needed to build them. By Garvin's[20] definition of a
learning organization, these cases are creating and
transferring knowledge and modifying their own
services, organizations, and policies to improve
their outcomes. These and similar examples are
"existence proof" that such systems are feasible in
an array of conditions and that innovative evaluators
are helping to reinvent and expand evaluation ideas
and practices to promote accountability and
performance management. It will probably take another
decade to determine whether this accountability and
learning strategy can be implemented at a larger
scale and, in turn, improve outcomes. In the
meantime, the limited experience to date suggests
several factors are hindering further implementation
of systems of learning, accountability, and
continuous improvement.

First are major resource and training issues for all
involved: evaluators, service delivery staff and
managers, and funders. Public and private
organizations struggle to find evaluators with the
skills they need, managers struggle with developing
the organizational culture and processes necessary
for learning and change, and policymakers and funders
often have unrealistic expectations about
accountability. RBA and performance management are
not quick fixes, nor is the proposed transition to
learning and continuous improvement; it remains to be
seen whether they will attract the support and
resources to be fixes at all.

Second, learning systems with the potential to
improve outcomes require investments in basic
research, experiments, dissemination of promising and
best practices, and State and local evaluation
capacity--the supporting information stakeholders
need to interpret indicator data, design new programs
and policies, and the like. It is unclear how to
create and fund these essential supports for learning
and continuous improvement. The multitiered
evaluation strategy of the Bureau of Justice
Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice, which builds
State and local evaluation capacity, disseminates
evaluation findings, and creates partnerships among
researchers and practitioners, is one of a number of
promising and strategic Federal efforts to support
learning systems.[21] The U.S. Department of
Education and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation's
public-private partnership for the 21st Century
Community Learning Centers is another Federal program
that emphasizes a learning approach with the related
supports to improve out-of-school-time services.

Finally, as Paul Light noted in a recent report on
the embryonic status of performance management in
nonprofits,[22] it is important to begin with modest
expectations, build capacity, and slowly raise the
bar as the necessary resources and experience accrue.
The sports imagery of the high-jump bar conveys the
need for initial, reasonable expectations, as well as
of eventual progress and performance improvement. The
argument here is that 10 or more years into the
accountability experience, it will be time to step
back and look at the whole game--poles, bar, field,
and runners. What are all the future settings for the
bar? What will it take to enable public and
nonprofits to successfully jump over it at each
setting? The argument and example of the continuous
learning system presented here challenges us to
address these questions, while always asking whether
this approach is, in fact, helping to improve
outcomes.

Question-and-Answer Session

Don Murray, National Association of Counties,
Washington, D.C.: We have been watching the Smart
Start Program in North Carolina very closely.
It is tailored to exactly what you are talking about:
grassroots evaluation. Governor Hunt has put $300
million into 100 counties. Does intergovernmental
collaboration fit in your scheme? North Carolina has
demonstrated how crucial that is. Although I do not
know how you would measure this, how do you engage
key stakeholders and track the level of enthusiasm,
which is very high in North Carolina?

H.W.: Two years ago I was the final site visitor of
Smart Start when it won one of the Ford
Foundation/Kennedy School of Government Innovations
in American Government awards. A critical piece of
the work in evaluating Smart Start is being done by a
group of people at the University of North Carolina.
Their approach is not unlike what I have described.
Although they could not conduct an experiment because
the legislature would not let them, they have a good
longitudinal quasi-experimental design. In addition,
as they obtain various information, they are plowing
it back in to all of their Smart Start programs to
support continuous improvement. The Smart Start
application began with each of those places, laying
out the status of kids and families as well as
services for kids and families. They continue to
refer back to that to measure what is different as a
consequence of these Smart Start programs.

Miron Straf, Committee on National Statistics,
National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.: I
wanted to make three points stimulated by your great
talk. First, there is a concern, certainly among many
academics, about the shift from program evaluation to
performance measurement and accountability. The goal
of program evaluation is not really accountability 
la GPRA (Government Performance Results Act of 1993),
because the objectives of GPRA often reflect
political and normative judgments. 

Also, many people feel that program evaluation is
really a science and performance measurement is more
a technology or an art. The crux is to relate what we
can measure (often process variables) to the
outcomes. (Research is a science and should be an
important part of our goal.)

I am pleased that you are going to these continuous
learning systems. We can  learn a lesson from the
engineers who have to deal with many complex
processes. They have a technique called evolutionary
operation, which does not seek to maximize their
process (there is no ideal or best program that they
seek) but does try to make things better. Our
evaluation of health care services would be better if
it moved along those lines.

Finally, there is a big cultural problem: Evaluation
is not thought of in advance when Congress or others
in the administration authorize programs. We will
have to look at welfare reform and the recent
children's health insurance program. Not a dime was
allocated for evaluation, and there was no pressure
for it, even within the administration, in the early
days. Often, evaluation is at best a hurry-up
afterthought, with an excruciatingly detailed
evaluation design written into the legislation.

Bill Christeson, Fight Crime: Invest in Kids,
Washington, D.C.: We are almost 800 police chiefs,
sheriffs, prosecutors, and crime victims who support
getting what works to policymakers so they will make
changes and support interventions to prevent crime. I
went to a very interesting lecture last Friday about
the Baldridge Awards and total quality management
(TQM) in the schools. They are able to bring
corporate America into the schools; they already have
the data management capabilities and they do not have
a shortage of people who can help them with
developing data systems. The evaluation process
seemed to have become totally democratized--the
teachers and the kids themselves, not the
administrators or the program managers, are expected
to monitor, evaluate, and make changes.

For example, they monitored the referrals to the
principal for kids riding on the buses. They put the
monitoring results on the wall and said, "This bus
has x referrals and this bus has y referrals. Find
out what the red bus is doing right and what the blue
bus is doing wrong, and work out a solution." It was
amazing; the system itself was driving solutions and
they were finding many of them. They were homing in
on the behavior of problem kids and working at
different levels to find solutions for them. Before,
they would have gotten lost in the shuffle.

I was very impressed with it. But I am not sure how
well it will replicate. What are your thoughts since
it has been adopted widely in the corporate world?

H.W.: The crux of what you said is very important and
it speaks to larger questions. What are we getting
information for? Whom are we getting it for? What do
we expect that information to do for us? We need to
invest in supporting the kind of thing you just
described. We are trying to have ordinary people get
information for ordinary services so they can improve
those services. It turns a lot of our conventions
about evaluation inside out. The incident you just
described in this bus is a perfect example. People
get information (why is it happening?) and solve the
problem. This is a good use of information for
problem solving and we need to expect that those
kinds of things will take place as part of good
performance management. What you described is
critically important.

We publish a newsletter called The Evaluation
Exchange. If people are interested and not on the
mailing list, let me know. We are always looking for
examples of the sort of thing you just described.
Allow me to mention some recent issues. We have been
promoting the notion of youth participation in
evaluation of youth programs. It is not to say we do
not need good experiments on youth programs. But, in
addition, we need evaluation that includes youths. 

The National Academy of Sciences group that is
looking at community-based youth programs held a
workshop in San Francisco in January 2000. The head
of the California Wellness Foundation, Gary Yates,
announced the foundation would no longer fund
programs for youths that do not include youths--on
the governance board, in the evaluation, in some
thoroughgoing way. If programs it funds deal with
positive youth development and support youth
transition to adulthood, youths must be at the table.
I do not know whether it still is, but the California
Wellness Foundation has been in the top 25 funders of
services and initiatives for children and youths. It
is a very big player in funding innovative approaches
to youths in California.

We have been tracking a number of evaluators who have
included youths in their evaluations. We have written
about it in the past several issues of The Evaluation
Exchange. In a recent issue we profiled a youth-led
evaluation of reforms of San Francisco's juvenile
justice system. Their story is similar to the one you
described in the schools: Youths came up with little
changes that prevented incarceration and other
serious consequences. There is a place for this kind
of thing. It is not all we need, but it is a piece of
what we need if ordinary services are to improve and
produce positive outcomes.

Donna Bownes, Office for Victims of Crime, U.S.
Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: I was
previously with the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), where we administered
the Community Prevention Grants Program (Title V),
which underwent a Government Accounting Office study
in addition to a national evaluation. The program
used government resources, both technical assistance
and funding, to develop a community self-assessment
workbook and to train program managers throughout the
State so they could develop capacity. We also
automated data collection, forms, and so forth to
tailor the program to meet its own needs. We are
working to develop capacity at both State and local
levels.

H.W.: Do you have examples from that program of
places that are actually getting and using the data
for program improvement?

Donna Bownes: Yes, Dr. Heidi Shaw took over my
responsibilities, and she is your contact at OJJDP.

Robin V. Delany-Shabazz, Child Abuse and Neglect
Program, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington,
D.C.: I want to make two observations, and one is to
underscore this thread of a conversation around
client involvement, which is essential in a
constructive continuous learning system. You say the
partnership has to be between the policymakers and
the program evaluators--but the families as well as
the youths are essential partners right from the
outset. Second, we have been working with a number of
different programs whose goal is to construct a
continuous learning system. We have found it helpful
to create a partnership between the technical
assistance providers and the evaluators. The
evaluators then work as members of the team with the
program folks and with the technical assistance
providers, which both builds capacity and measures
the results. We found this was essential to creating
the continuous learning involvement and system.
This is occurring in programs like "Safe Kids/Safe
Streets," "Safe Start," and "SafeFutures," where we
have begun to develop a real partnership among
Federal agency staff, local program staff,
evaluators, and technical assistance providers.

Gloria Laycock, Policing and Crime Reduction Unit,
Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of
Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington,
D.C.: I have a 12-month fellowship to look at the
relationship between research, policy, and practice,
which is what your talk has been about. I agree with
99.9 percent of what you have said. What is really
interesting, though, is how far off the criminal
justice community is from where you are. We are still
arguing about methodology, randomized control trials,
and similar things and not getting to the point. You
have not mentioned the mechanism or the processes by
which things are supposed to work. Evaluators go in
and evaluate things and, quite frankly, they do not
first conduct an evaluability assessment to see if
the proposed intervention could possibly produce the
intended outcomes.

D.A.R.E.[Registered Trademark] is a good example. If
you reviewed the program initially, you were left
thinking, "This cannot work." So, I would like to see
more emphasis on how to carry out the learning
system. I also agree that research and development
need to be closer because good programs come out of
research. You do not do research on them, you develop
them from the research.

And finally, on that point, NIJ is very badly placed
to do that. I think there are several reasons. One is
they do not have enough money. Although NIJ's budget
is in the millions of dollars, it is mostly earmarked
for selected purposes; its discretionary budget is
relatively small, and most of that is spent on
funding investigator-initiated projects, which it has
a responsibility to do. NIJ has no capacity to do
what you want. That is something for Congress to
consider.

H.W.: I believe we need to test the propositions I
have laid out, but I would underscore that the work
Jim Connell and Michelle Gambone are doing in San
Francisco is based on Mr. Connell's own developmental
research. He has been a pioneer in developing logic
models or theories of change-type evaluations with
Carol Weiss and others. There is a logic model for
their work, but Mr. Connell is also asking, "Can you
get organizations both to get and use data and to
make the changes that developmental theory tells us
should be made?"

I wrote a report with a colleague a year or so ago
about the way the 19 biggest foundations in this
country that fund child- and family-related programs
spend their money. Foundations are under the gun;
their boards are saying, "Show that your funding
strategies are adding value, producing results, and
so forth." They are then pressuring their grantees,
who are struggling with this as well. 

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation has entered into
a public-private partnership with the U.S. Department
of Education on their 21st Century Community Learning
Centers initiative. The Mott Foundation is building a
learning system with the out-of-school-time
community. Money is an issue and some of the money is
earmarked for training and technical assistance about
evaluation and continuous improvement. A critical
mass of learning system programs funded through a
public-private mechanism would give us a good test of
whether some of these things are workable or not.

I urge people to be creative when thinking about
funding. I can tell you from the foundation side that
a number of them might welcome an overture to work in
a public-private partnership on youth development or
another area of common interest in the child, youth,
and family arena. 

Jim Breiling, Adult Psychopathology and Prevention
Research Branch, Division of Mental Disorders,
National Institute of Mental Health, Rockville,
Maryland: We have certainly found it highly desirable
in the research models that we have developed to get
feedback from the youths. In the
teaching-family-group home model, which is arguably
the most research-based, humane, and effective group
home model, the feedback from the youths on consumer
ratings of fairness, decency, and concern on the part
of the teaching parents is highly related to program
effectiveness and is built into the ongoing
accreditation. Every year, you do not get
accreditation by taking course credits; you get it by
demonstrating your performance in implementing the
model and receiving high consumer ratings.

I also think the improvement from this ongoing
refinement is very helpful and desirable. But from my
perspective, it is on the edge; in my areas of
concern, the big problems are not knowing about and
implementing major research findings and models that
would make major differences. Risly and Hart have
shown meaningful and enormous differences in
vocabulary development and IQ that after age 3 are
not remediable. Playing music for the fetus may be
nice, but it is a secondary, fringe variable. The key
thing is that the parent interaction and drawing out
the child's vocabulary make the difference between
the 75 IQ of the average welfare child and the 100 or
119 of the professional parents' child by age 3
(which is not remediable afterward). It is too big a
gap. 

Take serious and violent offending delinquency. We
have models based on science that work amazingly
well--they are highly cost-effective. But tweaking
pure cultural models that bring kids together and
violate the pivotal finding that progression into
serious and violent delinquency relates to having
kids together will not do it, any more than a
physician giving milk rather than antibiotics for an
ulcer will. 

We have the data on programs for violence against
women. The group battering treatments are totally
ineffective. Tweaking them will not improve them; we
have to implement the heavyweight research models
that make large differences and make sure they are
refined. How do you get the parents to develop the
vocabulary? How do you keep delinquent kids from
getting together and how do you get them to associate
with nondelinquent kids? How do you deal with the
psychopathology of the serious batterers? I think we
have to get people to work on those heavyweight
variables.

H.W.: I think several aspects of what you said are
very important. On the early development issues,
Catherine Snow and colleagues analyzed Manpower
Demonstration Research Corporation data with welfare
moms and found exactly what you described. It is not
just that a mom is reading to a kid; it is how the
mom elaborates on the book, the conversation the
child and the mom have about the book. How do we get
that information into the hands of the people that do
the family literacy work in this country so that they
are not simply giving a kid a book; they are creating
a relationship between a mom or another caregiver, a
kid, and a book, which is very different from giving
a kid a book.

First, the issue of how to get what is known into
practice is critical. Second, how to keep it
effective is also critical. Nothing works forever.
Therefore, there must be room for continuous
invention and testing in the system. We must start
thinking about a knowledge development and use
strategy, and leave piecemeal efforts behind. That is
my charge to you: How do you make this happen? I can
give you examples in a community, and I can give you
examples within a State agency. Is it ever possible
to bump this up to a broader application? I think a
broader application could potentially bring with it
the resources necessary to get the kind of learning
system I'm talking about into play.

Notes

1. Bostrom, M., "Children as a Political Issue: A
Review of Current Public Opinion," in Effective
Language for Communicating Children's Issues,
Washington, DC: Coalition for America's Children, May
1999.

2. Weiss, H., and E. Lopez, "New Strategies in
Foundation Grantmaking for Children and Youth,"
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Family Research Project, 1998.

3. Weiss, H., and W. Morrill, "Useful Learning for
Public Action," unpublished paper, Harvard Family
Research Project, Cambridge, MA, 1998.

4. Weiss, H., and R. Halpern, "The Challenges of
Evaluating State Family Support and Education
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22. Light, P., Making Nonprofits Work: A Report on
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2000.

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

Exhibit 1: Continuous Learning System: Five Stages

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

Other Titles in the Perspectives Lecture Series

Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1996-1997 Lecture
Series, Volume I, November 1997, NCJ 166609

What, If Anything, Can the Federal Government Do
About Crime? by James Q. Wilson

Why Can't We Make Prohibition Work Better? Some
Consequences of Ignoring the Unattractive, by Peter
Reuter

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and
Practices, by Mark H. Moore

Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for
Breaking the Cycle of Violence, by Cathy Spatz Widom

Crime, the Media, and Our Public Discourse, by Norval
Morris

Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1997-1998 Lecture
Series, Volume II, November 1998, NCJ 172851

Crime Control, the Police, and Culture Wars: Broken
Windows and Cultural Pluralism, by George L. Kelling

Race, the Police, and "Reasonable Suspicion," by
Randall Kennedy

The American Experience With Stimulants and Opiates,
by David F. Musto

A Decade of Experimenting With Intermediate
Sanctions: What Have We Learned? by Joan Petersilia

The Epidemic of Youth Gun Violence, by Philip Cook

Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1998-1999 Lecture
Series, Volume III, November 1999, NCJ 178244 

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

Men and Fathers in the Community, by Felton Earls

Violence, Free Speech, and the Media, by Sissela Bok

Dilemmas of Corruption Control, by James B. Jacobs

To obtain copies, contact the National Criminal
Justice Reference Service (NCJRS): e-mail
askncjrs@ncjrs.org; call 800-851-3420; or write to
NCJRS, P.O. Box 6000, Rockville, MD 20849-6000.
Include the NCJ number. Copies may be downloaded from
the NIJ Web site: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij (in
Publications and Products).