one more minute one more minute but afternoon good afternoon the committee when i'll come to order i'm pleased to welcome you today to this hearing before the subcommittee on crime terrorism and homeland security to discuss what is effective in preventing gang crime and what is not the latest of several subcommittee hearings we have held to take testimony in counsel from experts in the field of justice over this session of congress for the purpose of developing effective crime legislation today among our witnesses among our witnesses we're joined by professor charles ogletree the director of the charles hamilton houston institute for race and justice at harvard law school the institute recently completed a study and released a policy brief in march in two thousand and eight entitled no more children left behind bars a briefing on youth and youth gang violence and juvenile crime prevention the focus of today's hearing will be to discuss the study's findings which give the most up to date information about evidence based foundations for sound crime policy and working on crime issues over the years i've learned that when it comes to crime policy you have a choice you can reduce crime or you can play politics the crime the politics of crime calls for the so called tough on crime approach such as more death penalties more life without parole a mandatory minimum sentences treating more juveniles as adults or as gang members however we can now show about research and evidence that while these approaches score well in political polls they have little to do with preventing crime under the get tough approach know about how tough we were last year we have to get tougher this year we have to we've been getting tougher for about twenty five years thousand nine hundred eighty we've gone from about two hundred thousand persons incarcerated in the united states to over two million and this incarceration bench is not free and your prison costs have gone from an about nine billion dollars into the one nine hundred eighty two to over sixty five billion dollars a year now most angeles county spends about two billion dollars a year in state federal and local funding to lock people up in the city to several cities in my district we spend between two hundred fifty to five hundred dollars per citizen about seventy seven fifty to fifteen hundred dollars per child if you targeted for add wrist children about fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars or more per child per year locking people up the chart on the left shows that where we are  international incarceration rates united states now is the world's leading incarcerate or by far but incarceration rate that is seven times in a national lab which the world average of incarceration is about one hundred persons per hundred thousand the average rate in the united states is over seven hundred per hundred thousand and in some states the rate goes over four thousand four hundred thousand russia the next closest with the rate of incarceration with about five hundred sixty every other nation is below that such as india the world's largest democracy thirty six people locked up today april two thousand population china the world's largest by population one hundred eighteen four hundred thousand the united states over seven hundred and in some areas over four thousand in the united states has become some has the world's most severe punishments for crime especially for juveniles of over more than twenty two hundred juveniles sentenced to life without parole all over the world but about a dozen are in the united states some were given their sentence as first time offenders in a circumstances such as being a passenger in a car from which a drive by shooting occurred examples like this to prove that we're already tough on crime all states have provisions that allow if not require juveniles to be treated as adults or trials sensing and incarceration for serious offenses most juveniles treated as adults are convicted actually for nonviolent offenses and again we're very tough one crime especially juvenile crime and this chart shows it on a graph that we're off the chart in terms of incarceration and yet crime persist and it's growing by some accounts even as we continue to cling to our get tough approach still under some proposals before this congress such as those who are addressing gangs we would further expand the gun get tough approach by punishing conspiracies than attempt the same as completion of the crime this would result in a lot more french involved individuals being senates the harsh punishments such as life without parole and the impact of the this focus on tough enforcement approaches falls disproportionately on minorities particularly black and hispanic children many studies have established that when compared to similarly situated white children minority children are treated more harshly at every stage of the juvenile and criminal justice system i'm concerned that policies such as expanding the definition of gang and expanding the gang databases will only exacerbate this problem with no impact on reducing crime without appropriate intervention these children will be on what the children's defense fund is described as the cradle to prison pipeline where many minority children are born on a trajectory to prison when we realize that it is possible to get them on a cradle to college pipeline it is tragic and much more costly to society in the long run if we don't do so research isn't an analysis as well as common sense tells us that no matter how tough you are on the people you prosecute today unless you're addressing the underlying reasons for crime nothing will change the next crime wave will simply replace the ones you've taken out and the crime continues so the get tough approach has little impact on crime further all credible research and evidence shows that a continuum of services for young for for youth notified as being at risk of involve behavior and those already involved will save much more money than they cost compared to the avoided law enforcement and other expenditures and these programs are most effective when they are provided in the context of a coordinated collaborative strategy involving law enforcement educational social service mental health nonprofit faith based and business sectors working with another five children at risk of involvement the criminal justice system in the face of all of this evidence it is curious that we have important hearing today on strategies for combating gang violence my colleague from virginia and i share the concern for the impact of violent gangs in our communities in our youth although we may have different approaches for addressing this issue our goal is the same today there are nearly one million gang members in america one million it may be hard for some to appreciate the magnitude of this but when you consider that the total number of navy and army active duty personnel is a donor fifty six thousand then it becomes a startling figure sadly the problem of gang violence in america is not a new one for decades gangs of all shapes and sizes of exacting control of our neighborhoods brought narcotics and guns to our street corners and install fear in our families street gangs prison gangs biker gangs even border gangs each with different styles and organizations presented daunting challenge for long forstmann once thought to be only a problem in our nation's largest cities gangs have now invaded smaller cities in suburban areas cities like richmond orlando tulsa and even mountain tower texas where nearly twenty years ago a gang task force was implemented with sophisticated any gang initiatives that have been traditionally utilized in los angeles new york or chicago equally troubling is that today's gang members are younger and younger gang members commit a high percentage of gang murders robberies in  statistics nearly one in five gang murders are committed by offenders under the age of eighteen preventing america's children from joining a gang is perhaps the greatest heart of stopping the growth of gangs in my home state of texas rival mexican drug gangs are at war with each other across the us mexico border the gulf cartel and son oil cartel of turn laredo texas and mexico's neighboring sitting a wave of radio and the most significant launching point for illegal drugs into the united states it has become basically a war zone to protect and expand their criminal operations these cartels maintain highly developed intelligence networks on both sides of the border and employ private armies to carry out enforcement measures the gulf cartel employs a group of former elite military soldiers known as los zetas the zetas have been instrumental in the gulf cartels and the domination of the drug trade in the way bill right o in addition to defending the gulf cartels to rein in northern mexico the zetas are also believed control trafficking routes along the eastern half of the us mexico border and cities all across the country prevention education rehabilitation events are being combined with law enforcement strategies to provide a comprehensive approach dismantling gangs prosecuting gang violence and deterring gang affiliation particularly among young people but violent international gang such as image thirteen our border gang such as  dangerous threat the requires a sophisticated coordinated law enforcement response but one tactic must be mandatory and that is for greater border security at a time when estimates we have heard in indicate that there may be seventy to seventy five percent of gang members illegally here in this country and the estimate we've seen in testimony today i think is illustrated that probably ninety percent of the mass thirteen years or illegally here gangs have evolved from what they were just a few decades ago the answer to the answer the question what's effective to combat gangs must evolve as well one size no longer fits all welcome our witnesses thank you for chairman this is important because we've been dealing with gangs for decades if not generations and there been unusual attempts at it i'm glad there's one of our witnesses with a sociological and hopefully psychological approach that i will be very interested in and of course we have our dear friend from harvard law school charles ogletree who has joined us on many occasions in the judiciary committee  but i was struck by your observation that unless you deal with the underlying causes of crime we're not going to get very far down the line and of course it requires what's necessary in all federal legislative undertakings you have to deep politicize the subject matter you try to deal with health care and if you don't politicize it you just get different groups with their own points of self interest  arguing or sharing views with one another and we won't get anywhere of course frequently have any racial connotation s and that is due to in my view the fact that it's much easier for young people of color to get into an unhealthy relationship with law enforcement than anybody else namely because we're still clearing the race situation out of law enforcement and out of criminal justice and out of the courts and out of the prisons so it doesn't take a lot of research to realize that some of these notions of how to deal with gangs some some wanted to increase prosecution we've got some bills i think still laying around fortunately there in your committee so we sleep pretty comfortably at night but these bills say well there let's crack down on crime everybody says right on well let's get the gangs first and then you get a few young men of color on the corner and they say well any association like that that constitutes a gang and let's break them up right away and so this kind of simplistic implication of lack of education living in a poor economic community and then having a broken down education system on top of all of that and then throw in the vast unemployment characteristic and i used to laugh about the unemployment statistics when they're talking about six percent and seven percent zero in some places it's up to look there are places inside the inner cities of america where there's fifty percent unemployment sixty percent unemployment more people out of work than are working and then if if if you were to academic about this chairman scott you start saying well let's look at the technical reasons look if you don't have a job you come from a broken family the education system isn't working the police are frequently associated more as your enemy than as your friend and then you say well i wonder why they for joined a gang and so we're here to begin t exploration the continued examination of a very important subject and what this committee has done is i can say as the longest serving member on it what the crime committee has done in the one hundred tenth congress breaks new grown and so we continue this exploration of how we get to the truth in this matter and that's why i'm proud to be with the committee today thank you very much mr chairman ranking member is with us today the gentleman from texas mr smith thank you mr chairman  our children began their summer vacations their safety is now more than ever on the minds of parents across the country and these concerns are no longer reserved for families in large cities with the spread of violent crime to traditionally suburban areas and smaller cities parents in all parts of the united states fear violence in their neighborhoods gangs are responsible for a large number of violent crimes committed including homicide experts estimate that there are more than one million gang members nationwide in texas my hometown there are over four thousand five hundred gang members and those are only the ones who have been identified and documented by local law enforcement officials as part of our efforts to prevent violent crime and curb the expansion of gangs in our communities we need to address the flow of illegal immigration that's because some of the most dangerous gangs in america today are comprised primarily of immigrants for example thirteen is one of the largest and most violent gangs in the country active in at least thirty eight states approximately thirty to fifty thousand members worldwide going to the center for immigration studies ninety percent of  thirteen members in the u s are immigrants in california eighty percent of the gang members are illegal immigrants from mexico and central america and los angeles ninety five percent of all outstanding warrants for homicides are for you legal immigrants last week u s marshals arrested three men in the may thirty first death of omar four in virginia one of the three men apprehended sebastian cortez fernandez had been deported in two thousand and three after being arrested on charges it is clear that many gangs in the united states are heavily dependent on the recruitment of illegal immigrants the only way to put gangs out of business is to secure our borders and  there's also a special federal role in promoting cooperation and coordination among various jurisdictions especially through task forces and targeted grants because many gangs do not respect communities borders thank you for holding this hearing and i want to thank the witnesses school professor of law founder and executive director of the charles hamilton houston institute for race and justice is a prominent legal terrorist who has made an international reputation by taking a hard look at complex issues of law and working to secure our rights guaranteed by the constitution for everyone equally under the law is a bachelor's degree and master's degree in political science from stanford and from harvard law school dr frank straw is a commissioner of public safety for the city of white plains new york he has over twenty four years of experience in law enforcement of the federal state and local levels nationally recognized as an innovator having introduced comp stat concept to improve of richmond richmond virginia police department who brings a wealth of diverse investigative tactical and organizational experience he has received several medals of honor during his service including the medal of valor the police medal the swa medal meritorious police duty award the unit citation and the excellent police duty award he has he has a bachelor's degree in applied science from the university of richmond and is a graduate of the f academy next witness will be florrie's a former gang member who has become a talented organizer facilitator and public speaker he has worked with many community based organizations in the los angeles area  working on community organizing social awareness workshops facilitation workshops asset based community development adult ism leadership development and california legal education is working on educational pursuits at this time he is working on an associate's degree and liberal arts from trade technical college in los angeles and is working toward certification and youth development training by youth build usa next witness will be kevin j o'connor associate attorney general of the united states is a wealth of legal experience including partnership with the law firm of de berry de berry and howard and served as league corporate counsel for the town of west hartford connecticut and as a staff attorney for the united states exchange commission he has a bachelor's degree from the university of notre dame and a j d from the university of connecticut school of law and our final witness will be dr robert macey director of community services for the center in boston massachusetts he has twenty years of experience during clinical interventions and academic research in the field of behavioral health crisis intervention and traumatic incident management which he has presented at numerous regional national and international conferences is a bachelor's degree from lewis and clark college a masters degree from lewis and clark college a masters degree in psychology from lesley university that advanced graduate degree in cognitive neural n eyewitnesses summarize your testimony in five minutes or less to help you stay within that time there's a timing device at the table which will start with green go to yellow when you have about a minute left and finally read when you're five minutes  begin with professor ogletree thank you congressman bobby scott and i'm very pleased to be here to testify today this is the first time i've been us far away from the clock and testifying and so i can't see how much time i have left but i'm sure you will remind me i'm very happy to be here today and i wanted to have my knowing my testimony so was the record but also a report that we did called no more children left behind bars briefing on youth gang violence and part of the record thank you dr susan even david harrison join a wallet and dan listen i've been working extremely hard on this topic and i hope there will be at least two important conclusions today first of all there is no one on this panel  or in this room who supports the idea of gang violence we all think it's a problem and it should be addressed it's not to suggest it's not a serious problem but the problem is how we have addressed it thus far the money that we've spent on games at the expense of prevention it's just astonishing we have focused on targeted groups many of them male many of them black and brown and if you look in this audience today you see a lot of young men who have overcome those challenges and tell us if we invest in our communities it makes a huge difference and those will be able to make a difference and if we want to solve the problem of violent crime it's imperative that we focus on the gang members and not every single person of color who happens to fit that age the dress of the race and the residential profile it's too inclusive and it undermines the idea of having a focus and seriously address criminal justice system i also want to acknowledge the work of dr robert macy who you'll be hearing from momentarily who is providing expert testimony today support and he supports the most counter productive  direction that we can move in it tells you is to expand the net of offenses for which youths can be prosecuted incarcerated if we do he'll tell you we will snare into that net those children and teenagers who are neither dangerous nor violent but very much  guidance and direction in opportunities to develop healthy pursuits talents and skills moreover a strategy that will almost certainly target children of color who live in the communities are already overwhelmed undermines the very purpose of crime prevention we can prevent these crimes by addressing more systematically more systemically and more effectively and more costly the idea from birth to teenage years giving those children a healthy environment an opportunity to go to school with family resources and a community that has programs that address them in our report we outline some of the best practices in the country that have been very effective over the past few years and they are there for the committed to consider and one of the problems that you can't ignore this idea of sweeping and gaining says led to an on slot of sweeping in black and brown males particular places like california and in places like the city of detroit and chicago and philadelphia and washington d c you can almost take any map and see where there is a large conglomerate of african american men or latino men and see an overrepresentation the criminal justice system it's a problem that as been playing by the absence of meaningful educational programs by a net that's too large and by the absence  of any meaningful efforts to address it systemically finally i would say that our institute is very interested and willing and able to assist this committee and not only looking at the data that's available but also coming up we're recommendations that will address the concerns of  fight crime and fight the criminals and not just fight balls who are innocent bystanders and who are the byproduct of a system whose net is much too large whose focus is much too general and whose target is largely men of color who are african american  latino we can address those issues much more systemically and i hope we got a chance to do that during the course of this hearing and beyond thank you thank you  thank you chairman scott members of the subcommittee for the opportunity to testify about why planes please strategies that have reduce violent crime and gang activity improve communication with our young people and build trust in our neighborhoods in two thousand and six a series of violent events a fatal stabbing in march a fatal shooting in may two more stabbings in september and a shootout in the city's largest public housing complex brought the realities of game violence to white plains in response the police department increased uniformed patrols and stepped up enforcement in crime hotspots because his identify gang leaders arrested them and their crews the community policing division conducted home visits interrupting potential violence and preventing retaliation police and youth bureau representatives now with the african american community and ministers in that community who demanded that the police and the violence at the same time to describe incidents that it generated animosity and distrust between the community and the police there was no single response to youth violence and gang activity in force and alone is insufficient long term solutions require comprehensive collaborative models that offer real alternatives individualized services support and mentoring we partnered with the north american family institute to develop and implement a program to reduce youth involve violence and improve community police relations the youth police initiative brings at risk youth and patrol officers together to discuss race respect street violence and gang activity to role playing they learn how their actions and language can escalate street encounters and by the end of the two weeks the youth employees officers come to realize that maybe they're not that different team building exercises held outdoors in the heart of our public housing complexes generate community interest and support for many residents this may be the first time have seen police officers positively engaging with youth in their neighborhood step up another critical component of our gang reduction strategy is based on the o'jays comprehensive gang model program at risk youth enter step up through police referrals youth bureau outreach and most recently young men and women in the program have recruited their peers once engaged the youth receive individualized case management to address truancy school performance job skills teen parenting substance abuse and other issues among the eighty seven young men and women who have participated in step up today individual risk levels and negative p contact them reduced by the twelfth month the white plains police department prisoner reentry program the first in westchester county represents a further effort to prevent via once a multi agency team led by the police department meets with county jail inmates one month prior to their release social service providers religious groups and community organizations or for employment housing education mental health and other services the police reinforce the message that criminal activity will not be tolerated and discuss repercussions of reoffending in two thousand and seven the reentry team met with eighty four inmates only seven have been rearrested the white plains police department under my leadership is committed to fighting crime on all fronts traditional police strategies target heart rate offenders illegal activities and crime hotspots the community policing division partners with the city's youth bureau and community organizations to develop and implement programs that target the factors that drive violence and gang activity as a result serious crime has declined by forty percent to the lowest level in forty two years there has not been a homicide since the fatal shooting in may two thousand and six the white plains police paradigm confirms that the police through their actions and forstmann community building can shape in the find the factors that impact crime thank you for the of crime and that will create lasting partnerships with the community in our local and federal law enforcement partners the key to this focus strategy is accountability on all levels of our organization as well as community members and our law enforcement partners violence and the influence of gangs and youth in our community group is funded through a grant from the u s department of justice group has four categories one being prevention primary and secondary prevention includes a wide variety of activities that focus on the entire population of high crime how risk communities the primary prevention strategy for group centers around providing a single one stop service and resource center this facilitates effective distribution of services another part of group is intervention group incorporates aggressive outreach and recruitment efforts that are needed to ensure that these high risk individuals in their families receive needed services another part of our group strategy is directed suppression and re entry where prevention and intervention fail gang leaders  in targeted for aggressive suppression efforts re entry target serious and gang involve offenders who face multiple challenges to reentering their community examples of some of the partnerships and programs under a grip initiative include a one stop resource center afterschool programs truancy and dropout prevention gang awareness training for both our officers in the community and directed police patrol in the targeted neighborhoods the center piece of group has been its partnership with so many outstanding organizations departments and citizens targeted communities in two thousand and seven showed a reduction of twenty five percent of robbery of businesses twenty percent reduction in robbery of individuals and a twelve percent reduction in aggravated assaults in two thousand and seven we continued upon the reductions with robbery of business gave me in two thousand and eight over the two thousand and seven reductions robbery of businesses have been reduced by seventy one percent robbery and in two individuals by thirty six percent and aggravated assaults by thirty one percent to increase communication and coordination of efforts between the richmond police department and our federal partners the cooperative reduction program was formed in may of two thousand and five member organizations a c v r p include the richmond police department richmond camos attorney's office attorney general virginia and the united states attorney eastern district  and then deploy the combined resources of the c b r p partners to interdict suppress and prevent violent crime the c r p is a multi pronged approach to reducing the historically high rate of violent crime in the city of richmond the five prongs that are associated with r c b r p approaches homicide and violent crime prevention this is designed to gather intelligence identified neighborhoods and target habitual offenders using the collective resources of member agency homicide in violent crime deterrence which is based on the boston approach of pulling levers homicide a violent crime intervention which is grip is our centerpiece for this portion of the c r b pay and homicide about crime investigation this prong includes and maintaining a fully staffed centralized homicide and gang unit within the r p g consisting primarily of most experienced detectives finally homicide involve a crown prosecution or sector prosecutors this fifth and final prong if assizes the role the prosecutors play through the partnership with not only police but with also the community community prosecution is achieved in richmond by integrating designated prosecutors into each of our twelve police sectors the collaborative efforts of grip and see or v p along with a focus sector approach to policing which not only addresses violent percent in year to date where the twenty four percent reduction in violent crime to the crease from eighty six in two thousand and five to fifty five homicides in two thousand and seven which was the lowest rate of homicide since one nine hundred eighty one currently we're on track to meet or go below the two thousand and seven numbers the richmond police department continues to review and evaluate its methodology in tactics endeavoring to remain flexible responsive to changing crime trends and thank you  under resourced oppressed community where more youth are sent to prisons rather than rehabilitation or college for that matter our mothers were oversold or well and they could do little to prevent us young men from searching for other means of sense of belonging in the streets that led a straight to prison and some of us even jail or even death violence was my learned resolution for our changes for the challenges i face that many young people who grew up in poor communities and disenfranchised communities with few opportunities i live by the law of dog eat dog and the survival of the fittest i raise my fist in violence over nothing maybe someone made fun of my shoes or clothes perhaps someone talking negatively about my mom or my sister my brother perhaps someone challenge my so called manhood a fight was always a conclusion where i'm from being scarred and bruised was like when we military stripes on a battlefield or one on a battlefield whenever the pain was too much to bear many of us chose to take a dose of marijuana or whatever drugs relieve that pain or the gangsters found it fun the paid kids against each other instigating little disagreements that escalate it's a fight violence was commonplace it was in a tame in and towards kids it seemed normal violence plus the lack of resources and a dearth of opportunity made it easy for me and other kids to pursue fantasy lives and to emulate gangster  job dealing my brother and i slipped into that even i've been in situations where i was forced to fight individually for claiming or stating their membership to another gang that we did not get along with my anger and violence led me to use weapons to hurt people i condition myself to not care whether or not my victim ended up in a hospital or for that matter and the dead the same rules my homeys and i live by also rude the people that i thought of as my enemies one of the experience that changed my life was when my one of my homes was shot dead at the age of fourteen he used to be a skateboarder he always problems and he'd never join a gang but one day the peer pressure and lack of other options got the best of him he joined a local gang in a month later he was shot and killed right outside of my grandmother's house  that cycle continue with the years of retaliation as i began to develop my consciousness about social issues i asked myself why are the so many poor people in prisons and especially black and brown people in prison and why do they keep going back  is it is it the people's fault is of the community's fault or is it the parents fault and then i realize that i was trying to come up with an answer from an oppressed and deficit perspective of course there has to be some accountability for the people but there also has to be kind ability for the institutions that contribute to the problem and don't help to solve the problem that affects not just young people caught up in the cycle of violence and deprivation but the entire society in which we live in south central los angeles is already a poor community but continuously program and introduce to me a positive program a program of transformation self accountability and leadership because of this key i was given because of this opportunity i was given i became an activist because of this key i helped develop  develop a passion for community work and help numerous people of diverse and challenging communities opportunity was really given to people but it was given to me because of this opportunity i've been able to not only get recognized  member of congress and i want to be recognized by the city of los angeles but also has been given me a chance to even travel to places as as like israel to try to work with palestinian and israeli youth to try to bring peace among them so i want you to imagine that like an x gang member who who lived by violence who did who acted in violence against other people and i can tell you that that i've actually been i'm now an actor and activist or an advocate for peace right only here in los angeles a bit but in israel so when you think about when you think about developing some sort of programs or or allocating money think about my story right thinking about that a gang member that is sitting here right in front of you that could have been incarcerated could have been dead because of some because of resources and opportunities that were given to our community i can see here and tell you that a gang member can become a productive member of society in a gang member can become an advocate for peace and advocate for justice thank you thank you indicates the country experienced a decrease in the number of violent crimes for two thousand and seven compared to two thousand and six much of the credit for this decrease of course goes to our local and state partners many of whom are represented here today as well as to local  and community leaders faith based leaders in their communities who are working tirelessly to address the problem of violent crime and gangs in their communities i applaud their efforts the department supports their efforts and we in the department will continue to be vigilant and support their efforts to fight violent crime notwithstanding the recent good news the department will not take its foot off the gas pedal if you will we will continue as we must be proactive in combating gangs and we remain fully committed to implementing strategies to violent crime focusing not just on traditional law enforcement but as many of have noted also working with our community partners to provide opportunities for at risk youth and returning offenders to learn the skills and attitude is that they need to become productive members of society the department's comprehensive approach to gang and gang violence center's briefly on three key areas enforcement prevention and prisoner reentry one example of this protest the department's comprehensive anti gang initiative this initiative targets communities plagued by gang violence to the prosecution of the most significant gang members intense prevention efforts employing local strategies to reduce gang membership in violence and reentry strategies that create mentor based assistance programs for prisoners reentering those communities upon completion of their sentences currently the initiative operate operates in ten jurisdictions across the country with each jurisdiction receiving a total of two point five million in targeted grant funding this amounts to one million dollars for enforcement one million for prevention and half a million dollars for reent programs as you can see well more than one half of the funding in each of these sites is dedicated to prevention and re entry another good example this comprehensive approach to gang violence is project safe neighborhoods a national program which targets the most serious violent criminals with aggressive enforcement of our federal and state firearms laws under project safe neighborhoods the federal government through this congress has committed more than two billion dollars to fund more than two hundred federal and five hundred fifty state local prosecutor prosecute gun crime i should add the money has also been used to support training for more than thirty thousand law enforcement officers prosecutors and community members across the nation to develop prevention and deterrence efforts to reduce gang and gun violence our efforts as you can see are not limited to prosecution of gang members at the direction of the attorney general every united states attorney including myself when i had the pleasure of serving in connecticut convened a gang prevention summit in their district that collectively brought together over ten thousand law enforcement community leaders to discuss best practices identify gaps and services and create a prevention plan and their particular districts to target at risk within our communities the department has long supported other gang prevention activities such as the gang resistance education and training program as my colleague d r major bukvich referred to as well as many other gang prevention strategies the third component the department's strategy is funding and support for prisoner reentry programs these programs provide services and supervision for gang members in particular upon their release from prison the goal of this initiative is to connect community organizations with law enforcement to provide much needed services tailored specifically for prisoners re entering their communities in order to reduce violent crime the federal government cooperatively and collaboratively with our partners in state local and international law enforcement we must also as it's very clear today's hearing focus not just on dealing with today's criminals but on preventing our children from to murdering and tomorrow's criminals along today i see two major domains involved in what i would consider to be one of the top two or three public health crises in our young two hundred thirty year old nation and that is this issue that you are committed to looking at today and hopefully beyond the two primary domains of public safety which i think has been established through our other witnesses to be of prime importance and cannot be ignored the second domain is what i would call social capital i learned this term from the world bank it refers to our children to our future leaders and our not only future leaders but to the people that actually run the country at the basic human community religious cleanup level within these two domains we have to consider at least five huge challenges which are complex lee layered as presents pointed out by the two members from texas with respect to immigration and what i would consider to be racketeering organized crime groups which are m s thirteen which is actually a nonprofit organization established by the one c three hundred thirty eight states and of course the border gangs we really can't compare those to what are called sneak gangs and younger youth gangs around america but we have this we have this issue of protecting public safety which primarily is at this point using arrest and incarceration and there are some key issues here as i just pointed out with respect to illegal immigrants and ice is doing quite a good job and i think needs to certainly be applauded for what it can do and may be able to be brought in to look at some of the violent gang activities with respect to illegal immigrants the second of the cost of arrest and incarceration first is cause for alternative measures to decrease violence among youth and i just want to point out that i'm not as familiar with some of the miles you data that some of my esteemed colleagues but i think if we used to look at age breaks and the decrease in violent crime you might not necessarily see the same decrease in the fifteen to twenty feet or old age range and that's part of the issue sorry i would just say that we as a committee and as  seats of your committee we should probably look at the age break of fifteen to twenty four year olds when we talk about the overall reduction in criminal acts or aggravated assault for the year two thousand and seven because i'm going to be having an educated guess that may actually be increased a third issue is the what's known as the d m c which professor ogletree is testimony written testimony provided that's the dis disproportionate minority contact with which congress is well aware of via the two thousand and seven federally federal advisory committee on juvenile justice and it's been pointing out it's been pointed out here on these charts and i think it's been brought up in several of your comments during the introduction the fourth issue or element is the youth offender him or herself and several people have mentioned this we have to look at not just the crime but the criminal and i would refer to a gentleman name on donda who wrote a seminal article in juvenile justice on looking at offender based sanctioning versus a sense based sanctioning i think that's going to be critical as we move forward and sift is the relationship between trauma and violence which is what i'd like to spend the rest of my time on which looks like it's not very much and that is that we have ninety billion dollars a year spent on child maltreatment this is a determined by the u s surgeon general two thousand five report so one of the questions i posed to all of us is increase sanctioning severe sanctioning actually feeding into child maltreatment it appears from the overwhelming research high fidelity research among many different investigative domains that children are grown in impoverishment without resources first experience trauma and in order to survive they use maladaptive coping strategies i e they try to protect themselves so you have an example of young if and if you can think of this as your own son or daughter irrespective of the color of their skin they want to get to school and they want to pass the test and they want to belong and they want to become but in order to get to school they're called or want to be gang member they're not involved in gangs yet but they get a gun or they get a knife they don't really know how to hide it they get tagged the end up with a felony they end up not being able to vote and they end up being incarcerated at quite a great cost so in summary i think public safety and social capital are of equal value and we have to hold them as of equal value both the public safety in the development of social capital the protection of our children and i'd like to end with a quote by black abolitionist and xscape slave frederick douglas who said it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men and i think we have several approaches that are evidence based some of them registered in the national registry of evidence based practice is that would speak to the issue of using treatments that are spy or psycho socially driven rather than treatments of incarceration thank you thank you and i want minutes i noticed in all of the testimony that we didn't hear any need for new statutes any gang related statutes appeared to me if you catch someone major brockovich if you catch somebody in a drive by you my response to that would be the richmond police department whether it is a gang related or non gang related shooting investigates with the same amount of energy and aggressive investigative techniques as we would any type of you get more time with it's dressed up as a gang related drive by shooting as a regular drive by shooting if someone was was killed or or injured it's the same life yes ok and no one it if we're going to do  gangs dressing up the criminal code doesn't appear to be what we need to do to reduce gang membership because by the time you get to the point of sentencing they've already joined the gang committed the crime got caught got convicted and now you're arguing about how much time they're going to get when the criminal code court in this shot you're doing pretty good police are doing a pretty good job and we've locked up more people on earth than any where those around charge showed no one in the minority community compared to the rest of the world it just doesn't seem that the criminal code changing the criminal code would be a necessary elem maybe more enforcement of the present criminal code but the criminal code itself has produced this chart where you where the united states and particularly the minority community the first round chart is the average african american incarceration rate the second round chart is the top ten states was many states are around four thousand per hundred thousand locked up today when most of the world is around one hundred so it seems that all the criminal code seems to be working pretty good  your testimony talks about the effect of getting real tough on gangs being possibly counterproductive what it means in terms of helping with gang membership getting kids out of what do you mean by that thank you i think the more generalized issue which is critical for all of us is young children face a pretty significant decision early on because as you all know with your own children or grandchildren their primary questions one is who do i belong to who belongs to me how do i become and so children actually seek permission for many things including to kill and this has been certainly been demonstrated in dr david grossman's work on killing but in fact children face a difficult decision when they offer their permission to someone to tell them what to do so right now in this country many of the disadvantaged children which we call at risk are faced with a decision like eli was which is do i give my allegiance to actually give my permission to tell some to have someone tell me what to do to a gang or leadership authority structure organize around violence or do i give it to a gang or leadership authority organized around justice peace democracy and so if we sanction children too young and too hard what usually happens in my personal field experience in the research is that they end up giving their affiliation their permission to authority structures that are organized around violence the second issue is that if you take a kid and you bring him into jail irrespective of all the old sort of old timers stories about how kids learn more crime in jail there's a more significant issue as we increase arrests and use felony charges to keep kids in jail in order for them to stay alive in jail especially the younger ones they have to swear their lives to a gang for protection and then they owe that gang but when they get out so we're actually increasing gang membership by this methodology might i believe professor ogletree what does get tough approach to the cohesiveness well it makes it even stronger and that's what surprised me a little bit by crime policies as we indicate now reports only lead to the contrary result i'm not sure you can say you've succeeded because you have more people in prison but you haven't solved the problem of young people being able to be productive members of our community and i think that what we need to do is to do what's been successful all these departments in white plains these are east northeast and richmond southern people take the time to figure out how to work with communities how to work with the c with young people creating remarkable changes both what ellie said about his own experience and what you heard is that if you give a child a chance it makes a difference and if you don't you're going to find more people incarcerated which are not going to everybody's come at it from a different position floyds appreciate what you've been able to do with the help of caring people we've got a number of questions to ask folks i ask questions because i didn't hear anybody get to the heart of what i heard over decade of sitting on the bench over thousands of criminal cases i started taking my own little survey for three months for a quarter i randomly picked five years of age way over eighty percent nearly eighty five percent of the people that came before me for sentencing on felony cases that had no relationship with the father since  at least age five mr flores your testimony started off and you prepared your testimony i take it you chose to start off by saying i was abandoned by my father  pointed out people are looking to belong in our society there are to be societal pressure to be a father and i know that some of the greatest contributions in this country have come from people from single parents and will continue to come from people from single parent homes some of the major problems have come from people with two parents but  testimony here dr straw the statement incarceration breaks up families and disrupts social networks a process and i'm thinking breaking up families  about incarceration i was senate seeing a young man who was a gang member and a just poured out his heart and he had made stoic you couldn't tell hardly when he was lying because he was so cold and his gang his family he felt safe with his gang that was his family you know and it concerns me that with all your expertise and with all the q sitting here in front of me that we're not talking about that that the societal pressure to be there be a good father do your best to succeed you know there ought to be pressure to do well in school you know for far too long to and in my criminal court over and over people came before me and they said the pressure from i was a hung around was don't succeed don't sell out  pressure ought to be there to succeed in school to do well and i'm just afraid we're not talking about an elephant in the room the societal breakdown of the family and not being seventy three i was an exchange student in the soviet union and i was taken t numerous daycare centers as a as a point of pride because they pulled the kids we were told there were right americans there that year we were told the government knows best we had these government programs for raising the kids the parents can always be trusted so as soon as they were old enough to walk and in some cases before that would get them in here in our daycare center so we can start working on them highest alcoholism rights anywhere in the world is what out under stood the government was not the answer so i welcome him put my time's about up and five minute lobar was done really do it for any of you with your vast amount of research i would welcome him put from any of you in writing after the hearing but i'm afraid we're not dressing an important societal problem here different setting this is too formalized and ritualistic you had formal forms of crime where we said in a different relationship  this is a bureaucratic legislative hearing about a something that touches the nerve endings of us all where we sit around and everybody could  been in these kinds of sessions that we've had not only in the congress but around the country and that harvard is well come to think about it but let me tell you what i'm thinking about  a lot a lot of this has a do with belief systems and they start out early and sometimes we don't make as much progress as quickly as we want to but i begin to think that in this country at this point in time we're beginning to get more on this and realistic about the nature of race relations and the cultural considerations that are all a part of that and  i think of martin luther king and now after more than a dozen years it took to get the king holiday bill  where a person got up and said nonviolent protests can win the day that that is still coming out of a cultural background ogletree that's crazy re spend more money on not only weapons of destruction it was one point three trillion dollars world e and we have a huge research activities going on more in this country than any other where we're developing new weapons we now out in space so when you come back then and say well it was one of the great leaders of all time you don't understand congressman his nonviolence theory and they say hey wait a minute  we have a culture of violence that has been from the beginning of time that's the way things always were it was roosevelt and churchill came along at the end of world war two so there ought to be treaties against torture and there ought to be treated then we came to  nuclear not proliferation treaty then we came to war crimes tribunals now that's maybe far away from the subject of gangs but you know when you're looking at a are video television and are cultural recreational things you get into some serious problems who are kids have seen the fifteen hundred murders on television before to twelve years old and then you say well why why did you join a gang tommy and he looks at you like you must be on another planet what do you think  most of our recreation is about crime law and order and i'd just like to get a reaction from professor ogletree and macy on this  and congress i mean you hit the nail on the head in a very impressed with the analysis of connecting all these things together is exactly right we have a culture of violence it is imbedded in our culture and at the same time we don't even recognize the fact that as a democratic progressive nation if you look at this chart i mean we are off the charts in terms of promoting violence it's part of our culture and it  goes to the question raised by our from glamour as a judge and i can see the challenges well i think dr macy hit the nail on the head as well when he talked about social capital if you care about children you care about families and if you and i of moral courage and those fathers who aren't there some of them aren't there because they're deadbeats some are not there because they are incarcerated before they can get a job they can't help the family they can't go back to school they can get a driver's license so that social capital as well not just  children the family and i agree with you about the importance of two parents but it's not that they don't want to be there we have created an infrastructure that prohibits them from being a part of a family and if we really want to solve the gang prom the violence probably going to say that man who has been in prison has been released can paint a fence can cut some grass can be a tax paying wage earning citizen and not a reset of us that means we're looking at a holistic problem if we take that up and they will address from because if we look at it holistically that social capital not just a child but also the adults we could begin to address this but we haven't even scratched the surface of a look at the symptoms not the problem i agree with the professor mr conyers i think you're on track and i think connecting the dots are important i did that in my written testimony in terms of the global violence with respect to what is called identity conflict which is age old but has gastronomical portions in the last fifteen years and i just i think i might as well say what i think the white elephant in the room is and i say with the greatest respect for all of us who are struggling really with very difficult complex challenges it's very hard to legislate good parenting i think there should be a taboo against poor parenting but as we know it's very very difficult and the professor speaks to some proportion i would i would give an educated guess it's all it's more than fifty percent of fathers that want to be fathers especially after the age of twenty five the developmental psychopathology literature points that out are in jail so it's hard for them to father but the white elephant referring to slavery and i have part of this proven i don't have the whole thing proven but i tried in my verbal testimony i'm a man i go to link trauma as a root cause to violence as opposed to saying violence causes trauma psychological trauma appears to be one of the root causes of violence violence as a way to protect oneself in an unsafe world created by trauma which is really a psychological shattering of the whole human being and how did that come about if we look at the history certainly of our country and then you look at the graph here we do have an issue which i think we can avoid which is which is slavery and the enslavement of these young men and i sense a recapitulation of that and then what i've been looking at and working with the gangs that gang is just another form of imprisonment it's no better being in a gang the being in prison and so it's now you can call the secondary form of enslavement where young men do unto others what was done under them only better they ask for allegiance to violence and to destruction and  congressman forbes i agree wholeheartedly with your comments that we need to bring a multiple approach to the problem of at risk youth or gang involve youth there clearly is not one solution and there clearly are people who are serious criminals who need to be incarcerated and i think all of us would readily admit that in speaking to her congressm cormorants comment about the incarceration and fatherhood i'm fortunate to have two children of my own and clearly believe that fatherhood is critical but i would echo professor  ogletree comments about the effects of incarceration in and breaking up families and putting fathers in jail some deservedly there's no doubt about it the problem becomes this constant churning of communities where the community never settles down and so there really is no stability in the community and i think we have to explore ways to to make that happen clearly we w encourage people and we want to encourage fathers to be with their family and to be good families and i think the programs that we talked about specifically in way planes is very much about that addressing other colleagues have referred to addressing systemic enablers we're not going to be successful in the long term and we have to engage the community i know in richmond that engagement means more than just going to community meetings and telling them this is what crime is like in your neighborhood it means going to community meetings and saying this is what we need this is what we need to help us to help your community and i think that that's the direction we have to  go i think that you have a point we're talking about a lot of religious groups are doing a lot of good work but i would raise the question that what happens to those gang members who don't believe in religion i don't who don't believe well i don't want any affiliation i'm guessing that here's a different approaches that you can you can use to incarcerate someone so i think this should be the same way in order to rehabilitate someone to get someone out of a gang culture and exactly what professor what she was talking about the social capital of it and there's a lot of people that want to be parents i became apparent at the age of seventeen and if i didn't have it or if i didn't read them fine for the social capital i might have been there either you know i might have been incarcerated or whatever not so i think also the social capital issue is this huge and that is breaking up families and this is going on right so i think this issue needs to be from all sorts of directions not just one just saying just you know religious based or whatever but needs to be from all sorts of directions because we've also been incarcerated you'll find out that gang members might be might be part of his lifestyle but even in the gang lifestyle there's diversity within there as well so the need to be  different try to avoid being repetitive and i would just say your perspective as a judge is one i think every prosecutor deals with you know prosecutors feel generally content particularly when the victim of violent crime sees their perpetrator go to jail it's justice restores confidence in the system but i don't know of a prosecutor who doesn't stop and say boy this kid threw his life away and he's going to jail for the rest of his life if you're that imus thirteen member in maryland yesterday with a life sentence and that's why i don't know a prosecutor who doesn't go back to the local police chief or the community or say what are we going to do to stop this it's not just throwing people in jail i mean we have an obligation to enforce the law people commit violent crimes we're going to prosecute and that's what the public expects but we prefer not to be prosecuting these cases we'd prefer kids in their program and the kids made better choices we also recognize that as prosecutors we're not social workers we don't have the ph d s we're lawyers and so we rely heavily on community groups faith based or otherwise to tell us what can we do to stop people from coming in because by the time a file lands in my office it's too late somebody already been victimized and somebody is going to be held accountable the real goal is to keep people from entering the criminal justice system in the first place and that's why i think prevention and enforcement they're not mutually exclusive i would say they are strongly complementary of one another you send a message to enforcement that there are consequences to wrong choices to prevention you say to people and you have better alternatives thank you to decrease the violence and i would argue from the social work combined criminology side before it gets to mr o'connor's desk that we look at the public mental health model where we're using  identification assessment and early intervention starting someone brought it up earlier starting really in preschool daycare to look at children who are already at risk for mental distress which leads to mental disorders and the studies are overwhelming at this point if you look at the united states secret service report on school shootings in the last forty seven years where it was the last twenty five years forty seven shootings was all youth on youth violence and they tried to us the secret service is expert at doing develop a portrait or if you will a profile of the next school shooter and they couldn't do it because there is no next school shooter profile because there are so many differences they found two stunning similarities among seventy five percent of all the shooters no matter their color their advantage their disciplinary action record or their academic achievement one was seventy five percent of all shooters prior to the shooting had evidence of suicidality and to that almost ninety percent of the shooters no adult in the school system actually knew who the kid was knew anything about the kids he got factors of mental illness and isolation this carries over into kids who get conscripted into gangs as early a fifth and sixth grade to do they initiate in which is absolute grotesque behaviors which are high level military combat techniques which these gangs know about to condition them to kill because the universal human phobia to kills we have to condition that out of a human and so they start very young with kids who are not just at risk because of their disadvantaged neighborhood or their they're being born into slavery because they have a mental burgeoning mental illness i think adding to the matrix in concert with criminology a public health mental model is going to be crucial to consider now the very brief car from ford to make some great points let me just take two of the points you made and try to  expand on them and tell you where i think there's a problem with the overgeneralization you talk about organized crime which is a good example and i think the strategy in the sixty's and beyond the seventies to come up with their approach to fight organized crime was an important one it was a law enforcement effort that labeled every single adult who happened to live in italian community a weapon to be poor as a as a member of an organized crime it was surgical finding the people responsible punishing them very severely but leaving that in leaving the community intact that's very important so i think that examples are good when they didn't just anyone who was in the neighborhood or anyone who had it at  restaurant that that's an example the mother who depends on the economics that's a broken family we talk about in our report here the broken families part of the problem another one that really is important to keep for a place like britain is the school system that people who are in gangs aren't in school they aren't at home they aren't under supervision and it tells us those people who are finishing high school and going to college you know have a job and  the solution we've got to figure out how to balance dealing with the violence of the crime of gang members but also try to be preventive it's not either or i'm not saying that public safety or social capital is both and the idea is the proper balance with my sense that would be much better if that fourteen year old was not out of school was not suspended or expelled was not in a single family with no supervision was not unemployable because he was arrested as a juvenile all those things are preventable and i just think that we really aren't that far off in terms of our point of view and my sense is that where you see a thousand gang members i see a hundred and i'd rather we focus our resources on that ten percent to address that substantively then  to put in that group a lot of people who can be saved who would be more productive us citizens and no matter what we do we can't kill them all they're all coming back whether they're twenty or thirty for the coming back and so if we can prevent it on the front end which i think lock them up and you throw them away you get tougher you give longer sentences create more laws sending a signal to the public that you're top on crime i really want  o would like very much to solve this problem but they don't have the resources to do it and while they may have a march in the community to talk about taking back t community dedicate a standard to preaching about it the gangsters are not in church they're not in prayer meeting on wednesday night and the ministers are truly not in the public housing project it's where the gangs so i want us not to think that somehow that we can rely on the base based community or the community to sob these problems the communities are begging for help they're begging for the system to do something substantive i listen to the justice department and i you know i just this i was hoping this would not be the kind of hearing where you would feel the need to have to talk about how good you are and how much good you're doing and how you're dealing with the problem because really you're not the justice department in my estimation is not doing a lot with prevention as a matter of fact i'm not so sure that the justice department is cooperating well enough with the local law enforcement authorities to do what could be doing in dealing with getting some of the shot callers and the shooters off the street so that we can deal with the others who have been described to you in many different ways who have a lot of potential i have worked with the crips bloods  grapes traders in south central los angeles since the eighty's i know and understand the community of gangs and i know and understand as been you have alluded to here today that many of these are the children of families that are deep trouble at five public housing projects and many of those parents were dead in jail addicted out on crack cocaine l grandmothers living nowhere because the law's a terrible as it relates to poor children number one and ought to be on that lease after a certain age in public housing projects that cost more money so they not on the list i don't live anywhere they lived in some of the vacant units without the gang members and they had decided that truly was their family and that nobody really cared about them when i started a program in all five of these public housing projects in south central los angeles with wagner pizer monies i walked the public housing projects and we recruited people to come to our training programs because we decided we understood that in the public housing projects for some reason they were treated differently than other parts of the city the training the job training programs private industry counterprogram didn't get inside those public housing projects so there was no job training going on we started to our good eyes we got took over the gymnasium on the first day and chart and down housing project i'll never forget we had a lot around the corner over two hundred young people who had responded to these fires and to the talking in the walk in that we had done about trying to change their lives we discovered a lot about them many of them most all of them were had experimented or were dealing with crack on marijuana some form of narcotics surprisingly many of them had graduated at that time from high school because they had not gotten down to the age that they are now the fourteen and fifteen year olds many of them had not learned how to negotiate the employment system had never been to personnel offices not of that stuff so we dealt with all basic stuff of how you fell out applications how you dress what employers were expecting but this is another thing that we did you can't do job training without stipends and money for people to survive on while they're in training the system does not want to put the money and to training these young people if you've got a train poor children young men who have no money you've got to have food and you've got to have stipends but them to have some decent clothing some haircuts other kinds of things we put the thousands into the program and we trained a lot of young people we discovered that the how public housing project would get contractors from outside of the community they would come in to lay cable and do other kinds of things and the people who live there that have a shot our chance at those jobs and nobody connected them with the jobs we finally said to the public housing authority you will bring no other people in from out of the community  from other cities to do these jobs without at least finding out what you have here and giving young people a chance to do the job way hooked up with a t n t when they first laid their cable we got gang bangers how hard on those jobs i've never seen a happy a group of young people they put their bandanas on they head they got down in those trenches they dug those dead trees they laid that cable they made money and some of them moved out of public housing we went on to develop a fiber optics program at the maxine waters and climate training center that paid a lot of money and those young people bought houses a lot of them moved  lot of deaths of same i've been to funerals but and all that we did in this training we went to the jails that night we ran out to martin luther king hospital when shootings took place to see what was going on and to respond to families in addition to the training that we were doing about how to dress how to fill out applications what was expected of you we had to do tattoo removal we had to deal with the judges and the courts and audit to remove the want to give people a chance to work them off because we discovered if you come in for this job training and you have worn out there are you have not paid your traffic tickets you can't get to anybody's job all of that stuff has to be worked with so i'm thankful for the faith based organizations and others but it takes money it takes real job training gangstas want jobs and this business about them make and so much money dealing with drugs is a myth the only few people who make a lot of money most of these young people who ended up with through rock crack cocaine that they ended up getting mandatory minimum sentencing on which is absolutely nuts and crazy when not making a lot of money they were out there surviving and so we have to change our thinking yes there are some very very bad folks out there who need to be locked up but most of them are not given an opportunity given a chance we have in some of those high schools sixty percent of the students at lock high are in foster homes and so the system has to be dealt with we've got to provide the resources we've got to provide the support we've got to stop thinking we can lock everybody up so i'm here today to say the next hearing mr chairman i hope that we'll bring in a whole roomful of slept out without a place to live and no food they're angry at the system and there's nothing worse than running into a poor young particularly black males who have seen their mothers abuse who have been abused and you think if you put a gun in their hands and i'm going to somebody they will but we can prevent that if we're serious about investing in human potential i like the way you describe it because we don't have the fancy sociological names for what's wrong with the kids but you described i understand exactly what you were saying and we need to take that kind of information and make it more bailab to people in ways that they understand justice department how much money did you have been prevent i wouldn't be able to give you an exact figure but it wasn't allowed was it well i know that we just sent a million plus to l a in particular and then take a million dollars in l a is like a drop in the bucket i agree man and i would say nationally it's well into the hundreds of millions of dollars me tell you i don't want to he's trying to shut me up it's not enough so when you do why we need for you to do is we we need a justice department who will come in here and ask the president i don't care who it is to place in their budget some real money and some real resources to deal with prevention the day that i say you come in saying this is how you can help us that i don't know that you really do understand what the needs are so let me thank all of you for being here mr ogletree i think again everybody should read the stern hamilton used and report that you just gave us and dwell on that last paragraph because i think it is so informative and it directs us and i thank you for your generosity i just had to say that because i know this business i've worked with it long enough i understand it jobs job training the gentleman from north carolina  but among others but as we look toward the economic we will be doing a building of the nation's infrastructure we'll be doing large transit project why can't we be creative and actually write into the legislation that the work for should come from a certain individuals of this definition write it into the law the second suggestion is if there is such a bill because no one is enforcing whether or not people local jurisdictions are in fact reporting law which fuels the fires of how to get there most of their weapons that's how they market you and congresswoman maxine waters hit on an important point i think it's fair for the department of justice to say they may say that's not our business if their business is only to be involved in fighting crime we should know that because congress keeps offering them opportunities to come to get money and they keep saying we have enough for what we're doing i think it's important get an answer and maybe the answer is that's not our business we don't do that prevention stuff we're fighting crime and it would help us to know in terms of what we're doing and what the reports say let me respond of first name one of the important examples of social capital that we've got to figure out how to find a way to employ not over other employ all people but to employ the hundreds of thousands of men who serve their time and who are coming out of prison and who need a chance to work somewhere and let me give an example the irony when we talk about crime if you look at houston new orleans oakland and newark what's interesting about those four places are ports ports that employ thousands of people and that the terrorism law now prohibits even the consideration of anyone the question is whether or not congress will if you really want to solution when you look at whether or not somebody can paint a fence or cut some grass or do something that doesn't undermine national security whatever it might be because that is a place that we're not to reduce employment would increase employment and what a better way to store training people the second chance act that is not the one that was passed but the one that you may recall a decade ago mayor ed koch and the reverend al sharpton i came in to talk about that  years ago what you passed was not what we proposed it was looking at prior offenders making them go through drug treatment making them prove that they are eligible for employment and then they would be rejected that's exactly right and that's the second point the final point is that seems to me here is an example where we can do something that is forward looking by saying rather than knowing that you the opportunity cost of having you back in prison we're going to put you to work at not paying much but pain enough to make it  productive as one of those goals and the public will be happy to know that their tax dollars aren't going to incarcerate somebody they're going to make them employable law abiding productive citizens i think that's a very good idea and i think it's the kind of thing that has congress not being soft on crime being tough on crime punish and send him to jail but when people get out make sure they can be productive part of the community i think that's a very important for looking idea and that's what we talk about in the report and it's not one or the other we're saying it's both you have to be tough on crime focus on the worst criminals but also find a way to be preventive so that you don't increase that and be proud of the fact that we have not one million in the twentieth century but two million people in jail that's not on that the department would be certainly willing to work on any prevention related programs i mean if i may with chairman just answer one thing i don't know where these task forces get their names i certainly don't come up with them but that's not about prevention unfortunately that's after a chief or a mayor has come to us and said there's been fifteen homicides help help us find out who did this and get them off the streets i look around my office in connecticut when i got one of those calls i don't have one social worker in the attorney's office in connecticut i do have seventy five prosecutors and teams of f b i agents and i think it's just important understand that when it comes to prevention the department's role is funding prevention efforts by others not preventing it of self we don't have social workers we send into communities we look for people who are on the ground and do that so i can't commit to saying we won't have task forces the public expects that the mayors the governors the congressman anyone who's concerned community groups we have to do that and i think the challenge for us to be spoken about it one of the biggest issues is building relationships with at risk youth between the police and those youth if there is not an opportunity for them to discuss very difficult important issues of violence respect those conversations never have happened we never have the chance for deescalation we never have the opportunity for either side and i hate to say either side to come to an understanding of each other so i think the youth police initiative which is very very effective in white plains and now is being replicated in a number of cities provides that opportunity  to bring at risk men and women together with police officers to have those very serious discussions that typically as a society we don't want to have we don't want to talk about race we don't want to talk about respect we don't want to talk about violence and let's we bring the parties together and have those conversations in my opinion we're not going anywhere opportunities to try to impact them in a positive way and i know that certainly in richmond we are constantly looking for ways to provide positive role models for the youth whether it's through sports such as our police athletic league or through some of our transit prevention the perception the police officer is developed on the street and it's not that you get a group of kids together and began to talk with them it's how you treat them on the street when you have fourteen fifteen and sixteen year olds who are getting in trouble for the first time and they are made to lie on the sidewalk their head cop drawn up against the car they internalize what they're being the sheriff to please let's get their addresses let's go to their homes i went with them to their homes parents were shocked they didn't have any idea that this was what these kids have been doing but i've since been in touch with them over the years all of these young people are thank you and i'll yield back my time to you mr chairman but let me just say what those parents have told us is that having been apprehended and brought home probably did more and teaching them  the lesson of not breaking into a house not going on other property left a great impression about the police who came to their homes brought them home instead of taking them to jail so i just wanted to say that because i respect the idea that you're trying to build relationships and you talk about getting kids together and talking to them but it really doesn't happen that way it happened  based on how they are treated with their early contacts with the police the statistics are such that by the time an african american male is seventeen years old he has been and touch with the police at least i policing and you first of all i like intervention programs and prevention programs which the justice department used to have i don't know if they have them anymore where kids get in trouble for the first time they are not taken to jail there are alternative ways to deal with them in the community but that does more in developing relationships than going to even a church where they have gathered a group of kids to talk to because usually those are not the kids that need the talking to  member involves people who have committed not convicted of committed crimes which allows you to centrally try that case along with everything else in the trial and what that might do to the one obvious thing it will do congressman scott look at that chart is that it will go off the chart i mean the numbers will be so catastrophic that you won't even be able to confine the rate of disparity based on race in terms of being treated in our system the disparities are our national but they also are ironically the not geographic but when i say that it's not a southern problem you'll find in the northeast you find the midwest you're proud of the north and south even where there are small concentration of minority communities the over representation of children of color in this system is growing exponentially we've identified some the problems of the problems are that these kids are being suspended  expelled from schools that is that the educational system is become part of the criminal justice system there are police on the property there's a whole security apparatus a police officer has the unfettered discretion to decide who stays in school who suspended who's expelled and whether out of school they're out of school not just for the day but to their cases resolved which means they missed six months in school and then they can't repeat that grade so this is a problem where we know there is a solution and the juvenile court judges are calling us asking for help superintendents are calling us teachers are calling us they all are saying there's a problem with the statutes that require our judges to have no role and the only role is a police officer on the school grounds and it creates this kind of disparity metaphor now because who knows where the majority of the majority were anglos are sent home or parents are called versus hispanic and african american you might also suggest that in this economic market this crisis is where adults are competing for the typical youth position summer job out franchises where you can always count on getting your summer job loss for example in our community of a major into taman like you like a coney island which is been lost or whatever in new york which used to be a central spot for hiring a value is gone so the scheme of things is turned upside down and therefore where do they go and what do they do and so a child that gets out of school who has no history of criminal activit how long hot summer drives them unfortunately into a circumstance that may alter their lives so i would i would and let me add one other point i remember having senator paul wellstone during his life detained in these facilities and the mixture of volatility and criminal activity and someone who needs some other kind of help only since that youngster out on the street again not finding the services that they need so i would wan thank you let me let me just say one thing taking a step back the research that we do suggest something very different than what i've heard today that is if we're looking at people who are fourteen to seventeen that's too quiet too active those a d h d and a whole series of other medical mental health issues that have been ignored and in fact they've become aggravating rather than mitigating circumstances because so trying to treat those they become reason to detain excess or as opposed to try to find the right facility still that's a very important issue that the study having said all that there is some good news my wife pamela terry is the president c e o c e o of some cultural services or roxbury is very like many other programs of the child welfare but on their all in the young people's created organization called y t p used to police partnership and these are young people who've been harassed by police who couldn't get along with police and they've decided to tell them why i run when you come after me why i don't want to talk to you in the street in a trade in a remarkable thing because they are go out in the streets talking to other you don't be afraid come to us because we need to work with ways the police can be much more effective harris county is a very good example as well there's a good anecdotal data but there's a big enough set of data we can have access to that to talk about both how young people are in the system earlier and how to increase the ideas of discretion and it really is seeing that everything we're talking about today is tied to the educational system if we want to fix the issue of gangs fix the issue criminal justice juvenile justice we must first start wh the school system is a haven of peace educational opportunity and of opportunity to move forward if we don't do that no matter what we do we're going to find ourselves talking about another violent shooting we are going to have that happen because we haven't addressed the filiation rather my knowledge of them and actually you know my family varies with people from different banks so i'm not going to say who is from where right but i think i'm very knowledgeable of what they do and who they are but i think that intervention at the early age is very important but i think it also is important is that even at early ages as eight year old nine year old you already have a certain vision of a like a cop or  a police officer or anything like that so even at early age you might be refraining from going into these programs that are run maybe by a police station or run maybe by you know the department of justice or whatever it is that they're run by so i  think also the important is is for these departments to look for people who look like them and i think that that's a key that that is a success to organizations in which i work with in los angeles is looking for people that also look like them so those barriers can be scary broken down already of course because there's a lot of kids are already afraid i have a three year old son that already knows to be scared of a couple i don't know where he got it from and i'm not teaching him that but you know i mean being with his mother and he's another place i don't know what he's learning over there in terms of knowledge of police or whatever not so i think in order to break these barriers down we have to use different methods searching for people to look like them and that's one of the keys that that happened with the transformation that i ha as well as transformation of other gang members that i know is that there are people that look exactly like them but but they were giving them a different information rather than different nation as being kicked or brought in by gang organizations or whatever you want to call them employment and it's even tougher with people who've gone through the system which means they have a record they can't get a job they're not eligible becomes a huge problem the other point that has impact is not just the young people but these loss of jobs or their parents the jobs are being moved away it's a huge problem that's a beginning it's been exacerbated by the current economic environment and the foreclosure holmes all that the interesting thing is that it's not just a race issue this is striking poor white families the urban families whether they're black or white or brown and i think it's it is a problem that i hope that now in this congress but the next administration will focus on it is one of the  pink elements in the room that here we are with out jobs that means we have people on the street in washington d c tonight it's probably ninety degrees outside or hotter it will be eighty five tonight it eleven o'clock in a lot of young people to be walking the streets not because they're looking for trouble there's no air conditioning the house there's nothing else to do and they've become targets and we are we are witnessing right now the very problem that we're talking about here in our nation's capital and if we don't see that these kids who can't get a job who don't have a home with air conditioning who aren't in school then we are the problem and leaving them all of the gang leaders is not going to answer it and i think your idea of looking at these unemployment statistics looking at this  i think the other thing that we're going to see is a tremendous amount of frustration which is going to further exacerbate the existing problems one of the issues that we really haven't talked about at all is the whole issue of domestic violence and i think as we see people become unemployed as we see people lose their homes as we see tremendous frustration levels build does going to be a propensity to increase and we've seen already in white plains incidents of domestic violence and that's a whole series of issues it's not just the partners that are involved but it's the children who witnessed violence in their homes and what  this they go forth and their development having witnessed a mother father or other partner type relationships where there's violence and i think you know that's something that we're not talking about you know we're talking about kids on the street or we're talking about these issues but the mystic violence i think is just something that clearly is going to be very much aggravated by the dire economic situation that we're looking at i think employment issue is is huge and it's creating larger gangs if you want to call because i think that a lot of these gang members are young gay members their parents are being laid off right and i think that that also pushes more young people even people in high schools to look for jobs and i think that it's important for someone in high school to not be thinking about a job right to be more be thinking about his or her education rather than thinking about a job and so i know unemployment is a huge issue that is  affecting the large number of the gang growth and things like that and i think one of the things that maxine waters talked about was type and i work in an organization that we stop people from coming to school and i think if we had more programs like that it would alleviate some of that some of the some of the reasons of why unemployment is affecting this issue appears one has to be sensitive to the link there i'm not a social scientist and i couldn't give it but it goes without saying that that would certainly heighten our concerns any prosecutors concerns is going to create an environment where people tend to be more angry ang security and i'm not an alarmist and nor am i a conspiracy theorist but having worked in the middle east over the last seven years to come and look at the destruction of psychosocial degradation militants but in fact when you take a closer look has love which is a organized around violent gang principles is in fact the social service structure for the country of lebanon so they give they get the lebanese children to school they get the lebanese families essential health insurance they're the ones that actually back the poorest of the citizens and it's no mistake at my consultancy work with the department of homeland security in new jersey we're looking at similar recruitment tactics and i think it plays out probably in more than just new jersey where these committee member for terms and network of gangs are looking to take care of younger folks because at this point the gap between how our government and our state i mean as a pow these are unable to take care of them they step right in that gap very quickly and offer a sense of a false sense of security and safety and so we think we have a bigger issue on hand than just increasing violence and if we have a security issue in the long run and i think that you we're going to we're not going to rest or way out of this we're going to have to put significant funding on the table for psycho social servicing that is broadband and includes bio psycho social approaches and includes mental health services along with looking at justice for the disproportionate minorities who are incarcerated approach and we've heard through the entire are hearing that the criminal code has enough to deal with serious crimes we heard that it actually may lead to more gang lock up already more people proportionally than anywhere else on earth this chart shows the united states number one in the world in the minority community getting locked up at a rate that would justify  around a lot almost four thousand the top minority confinement four thousand four hundred thousand when most countries lock up between fifty and two hundred four hundred thousand so obviously the criminal justice