V o l u m e I

November

1997

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

OFF ICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAMS

BJA NI J OJJDP BJS OVC

National Institute of Justice

Perspectives on

Crime and Justice:

1996–1997 Lecture Series

▼

Research Report
About the National Institute of Justice

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), a component of the Office of Justice Programs, is the

research agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. Created by the Omnibus Crime Control and

Safe Streets Act of 1968, as amended, NIJ is authorized to support research, evaluation, and

demonstration programs, development of technology, and both national and international

information dissemination. Specific mandates of the Act direct NIJ to:

◆ Sponsor special projects, and research and development programs, that will improve and

strengthen the criminal justice system and reduce or prevent crime.

◆ Conduct national demonstration projects that employ innovative or promising approaches for

improving criminal justice.

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

◆ Evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice programs and identify programs that promise to be

successful if continued or repeated.

◆ Recommend actions that can be taken by Federal, State, and local governments as well as by

private organizations to improve criminal justice.

◆ Carry out research on criminal behavior.

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

In recent years, NIJ has greatly expanded its initiatives, the result of the Violent Crime Control

and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (the Crime Act), partnerships with other Federal agencies and

private foundations, advances in technology, and a new international focus. Some examples of

these new initiatives:

◆ New research and evaluation is exploring key issues in community policing, violence against

women, sentencing reforms, and specialized courts such as drug courts.

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

◆ Six regional National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Centers and a Border

Research and Technology Center have joined the National Center in Rockville, Maryland.

◆ The causes, treatment, and prevention of violence against women and violence within the

family are being investigated in cooperation with several agencies of the U.S. Department of

Health and Human Services.

◆ NIJ’s links with the international community are being strengthened through membership in the

United Nations network of criminological institutes; participation in developing the U.N.

Criminal Justice Information Network; initiation of UNOJUST (U.N. Online Justice Clearinghouse), which electronically links the institutes to the U.N. network; and establishment of an

NIJ International Center.

◆ The NIJ-administered criminal justice information clearinghouse, the world’s largest, has

improved its online capability.

◆ The Institute’s Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program has been expanded and enhanced. Renamed

ADAM (Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring), the program will increase the number of drug-testing

sites, and its role as a “platform” for studying drug-related crime will grow.

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

◆ The Institute’s program of intramural research has been expanded and enhanced.

The Institute Director, who is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, establishes

the Institute’s objectives, guided by the priorities of the Office of Justice Programs, the Department

of Justice, and the needs of the criminal justice field. The Institute actively solicits the views of

criminal justice professionals and researchers in the continuing search for answers that inform

public policymaking in crime and justice.
i

Foreword

National Institute of Justice

▼

Perspectives on

Crime and Justice:

1996–1997 Lecture Series

James Q. Wilson

Peter Reuter

Mark H. Moore

Cathy Spatz Widom

Norval Morris

Foreword by Alfred Blumstein

November 1997
ii

Foreword

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

810 Seventh Street N.W.

Washington, DC 20531

Janet Reno

Attorney General

U.S. Department of Justice

John C. Dwyer

Acting Associate Attorney General

Laurie Robinson

Assistant Attorney General

Jeremy Travis

Director, National Institute of Justice

Justice Information Center

World Wide Web Site

http://www.ncjrs.org

NIJ acknowledges with thanks the support of the Edna McConnell Clark

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

1996–1997 Lecture Series.

Opinions or points of view expressed in this document are those of the

authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice

Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the

Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and

Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime.

NCJ 166609
iii

Foreword

Foreword

I n organizing the lecture series recorded in this volume,

Jeremy Travis, Director of the National Institute of

Justice (NIJ), pulled together a “dream team” of speakers.

They cover a rich diversity of disciplinary perspectives and

span a broad range of personal ideologies; in addition, each

possesses an excellent research record and the ability to link

research to policy implications.

James Q. Wilson, a political scientist and the leadoff speaker,

has probably been the most influential voice on crime policy

from academia in recent decades. His 1975 classic, Thinking

about Crime, effectively articulated the deterrence argument

and challenged many of the prevailing liberal views. And his

book with Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature,

broadly probed many of the biological and developmental

factors associated with individual criminality.

Norval Morris, a leading scholar in criminal law, has been a

dominant contributor on the other side of the ideological

spectrum. His very influential An Honest Politician’s Guide to

Crime Control was an early attempt to counter the rapidly

growing “get tough” sound-bite epidemic that has so dominated public discussion of crime control policy. His Future of

Imprisonment reported on a classic experiment in randomized

assignment to treatment programs. As the longtime leader of

the Center for Studies in Crime and Justice at the University

of Chicago Law School, Norval Morris has also been the

mentor to an important group of scholars in crime and

criminal justice, including James Jacobs, Michael Tonry, and

Franklin Zimring.
iv

Foreword

These two more senior scholars have been joined by excellent contributors one

short generation behind. Peter Reuter is an economist who has been a leading

scholar of drug markets and their interaction with drug-war enforcement. Cathy

Spatz Widom is a psychologist who has become widely recognized for her work on

the cycles of violence, showing that people who experience violence as children

are more likely to engage in violence as adults. Mark Moore is a policy analyst who

has done important research on many aspects of crime and the criminal justice

system, and he has been a most influential teacher of managers in policing,

prosecution, and other areas of criminal justice through innovative management

seminars at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Even with authors so diverse in their perspectives and interests, some important

common themes emerge from their lectures. Perhaps the most important is the

difficulty of addressing the “what works” question. The difficulties are manifold:

some derive from the extremely limited level of funding available, some from the

technical difficulty of carrying out careful testing in an operational environment,

and some from a generalized suspicion about social science research. But greater

flexibility in research budgets seems to be emerging in recent years. This has been

aided by the allocation of funds to NIJ from the various Crime Act programs to

perform research and evaluation studies.

Another important common theme is the continuing need for evaluation of

various kinds of intervention programs. One can hardly argue against such evaluations; it is critical that we learn which efforts are most effective and which are

futile. One problem that has plagued evaluations in the past has been the prevalence of “null effect” findings, i.e., results showing that the intervention being

evaluated does no better than a control or the status quo. Too often, this happens

because the intervention being tested is too narrow a “technology,” i.e., a strictly

defined approach that is presumed to be broadly applicable. Given this narrowness

of approach, the diversity of individuals being dealt with, and the varying skills of

those implementing the intervention, it is not surprising that most technologies

would fail to produce resonance among all three. It is thus important to recognize
v

Foreword

that any treatment of phenomena as complex as criminal behavior must involve a

portfolio of interventions, one or more of which is applied—perhaps at different

times—according to the individual circumstances, and followup with the individuals being treated. Only with this array of interventions and their extended duration

can we expect to bring about the changes needed for effective management of

crime-prone situations and individuals.

We still need greater readiness to carry out the same kind of probing evaluations of

programs that have political support as we do with programs that raise more

skepticism. For example, I would be prepared to bet on the incremental crimecontrol benefit per dollar of cost associated with providing greater support services

to high-risk young people—as Cathy Spatz Widom argues for—compared to

extending already long sentences. It would be desirable to provide those support

services broadly, especially to avoid any stigmatizing effects. But there will inevitably have to be a triage of focusing the limited resources available where they can

do the most good. We all recognize that such choices are extremely difficult in so

political an arena as that surrounding crime and criminal justice.

The bet is especially secure when an extension of sentence occurs through sledgehammer approaches like mandatory-minimum or “three strikes” sentencing laws

that put very disparate cases into the same legislated box and preclude the exercise

of judicial discretion that is needed to differentiate the most serious cases from

those that are marginal.

These gross approaches have been most evident in the “drug war.” About onequarter of the Nation’s incarcerated population—and about two-thirds of those in

Federal prisons—are imprisoned on a drug sales or possession charge. This is a

consequence of the incessant pursuit of the supply side of the drug market, even

though students of the subject as well as practitioners in the field widely acknowledge that it is demand that drives the market: suppliers somehow find a way to

respond to the demand. As Peter Reuter points out, many thought that the

escalation of incarceration for drug offending over the past 15 to 20 years would
vi

Foreword

raise the price of the drugs to compensate sellers for the greater risk implied. But

we have seen just the opposite trend: the marketplace has been swamped with

cheaper, higher quality drugs. Ironically, the increase in availability has been

accompanied by a decrease in the demand for cocaine, the most serious drug in

terms of violence associated with its use and with its markets. Other factors in the

society have been at work in a much more powerful way.

Driven strongly by the drug war, intervention by the criminal justice system

has been considerable. By 1996, the incarceration rate reported by the Bureau

of Justice Statistics had surged to 440 per 100,000 population—quadruple the

rate that had prevailed for the 50 years from the early 1920s to the early 1970s.

The Sentencing Project has estimated that one-third of African-American males

in their twenties are today under the control of the criminal justice system; the

rate is even higher in urban centers. Mark Moore raises the question of whether

we have come to overrely on the criminal justice system for addressing too many

of our society’s problems. Such a greatly broadened scope of intervention may

diminish the impact of deterrence—arguably the system’s greatest leveraging

point. It is difficult to use the threat of conviction or even incarceration as a

stigmatizing menace when it is happening to so many in the neighborhood.

Another major thrust of the lectures was the problems of juveniles, especially

minority juveniles trapped in urban ghettos and deprived of many of the influences

that would facilitate their entry into the legitimate economy. This was particularly

emphasized by James Q. Wilson, who pointed to the growth in juvenile violence,

much of it attributed to the recruitment of predominantly minority kids into the

drug markets—and thus, into the world of handgun violence—both of which

dramatically raised their homicide rates as victims and offenders.

The problems these kids pose to the larger society will undoubtedly be exacerbated

by welfare reform as their mothers scramble to replace welfare checks with jobs that

will diminish their child-care time and attention—or with criminal activity if they

can’t find jobs. This calls attention to a point raised by a number of the authors about
vii

Foreword

the need to be concerned with the unintended consequences of what we do. The

intensity of political rhetoric driving crime policy makes it all the more important

that research feed information on unintended consequences into the debate.

I would also like to extend Norval Morris’s reference to “the most corrupting lie is

the truth poorly told.” While his comment focused on the presentation of overly

simplified information by the press, I think his point is applicable to almost everyone

who comments on issues of crime or criminal justice. The phenomena are so multifaceted—in terms of type of crime, demographic group, and geographical location—

that aggregate statements miss many of the important distinctions. Disaggregation

on these various dimensions is critical to assess meaningful conclusions.

Indeed, one can anticipate that the same broad and disaggregated perspective is

needed in pursuing a program of research on crime. One needs a rich mixture of

disciplines and continual challenge to any intermediate findings, which must

always be seen as potentially refuted or, more likely, modified in terms of the scope

of coverage of any particular finding. This process may seem to be expensive, but it

is far less expensive than the cost of the wasted effort spent on ineffective programs

and is necessary in order to develop the solid body of knowledge and technique

that will enable us to get beyond Wilson’s enumeration of dubious findings.

NIJ has made an important contribution by bringing speakers of such quality and

diversity to Washington. These scholars clearly felt free to challenge existing

policy and to raise questions that should be addressed. NIJ’s research program and

the public policy debate are very much helped thereby. It is encouraging that this

process will continue in a new series of lectures in the coming year.

Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D.

J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research

H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management

Carnegie Mellon University
ix

Foreword

Introduction

P ublic opinion surveys show that crime is the

number one issue on the minds of Americans.

Crime dominates evening news broadcasts, demands

large shares of governmental budgets, influences our

decisions about where to live, and plays a role in our

choices on election day. Crime also inflicts enormous

losses on youths, families, and the Nation’s sense of

security.

Yet there is no consensus about what we should do to

meet the challenge of crime and the demand for justice.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has initiated this

lecture series to broaden the reach of research conducted

under its sponsorship and contribute to the national

debate on criminal justice policy.

This volume presents the first of NIJ’s Perspectives on

Crime and Justice Lecture Series—for 1996–1997. Some

of the most distinguished academics in our field were

invited to offer their thoughts on the topic of their

choice. They were expected to challenge conventional

thinking, offer candid recommendations, and lead a

robust debate. They did not disappoint.

On behalf of NIJ, I wish to express my appreciation to the

Edna McConnell Clark Foundation for its support of the

lecture series. Their funding provided the planning and

coordination assistance needed to implement each lecture.
x

Introduction

We are pleased to announce that the Perspectives on Crime and Justice

Lecture Series will continue; the 1997–1998 series will begin in December

1997. NIJ has asked other scholars to examine new issues through the lens of

public policy as a way to bring the results and implications of current research

to the attention of decisionmakers at the local, State, and national levels.

Jeremy Travis

Director

National Institute of Justice
xi

Introduction

Foreword ............................................................................... iii

Introduction ......................................................................... ix

Lecture 1: What, If Anything, Can the Federal

Government Do About Crime?

James Q. Wilson, Ph.D. ..................................... 1

Lecture 2: Why Can’t We Make Prohibition

Work Better? Some Consequences of

Ignoring the Unattractive

Peter Reuter, Ph.D ........................................... 23

Lecture 3: The Legitimation of Criminal Justice

Policies and Practices

Mark H. Moore, Ph.D...................................... 47

Lecture 4: Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities

for Breaking the Cycle of Violence

Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D .............................. 75

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

Norval Morris, LL.M., Ph.D. ........................... 99

Notes.................................................................................. 123

Contents
1

Norval Morris

What, If Anything, Can the Federal

Government Do About Crime?

Presentation by

James Q. Wilson, Ph.D.

University of California at Los Angeles

December 10, 1996

Washington, D.C.

P olitically, Washington must pretend it can do a lot

about crime. Practically, it can do very little. The

President is not a police chief, a warden, or a probation

officer, and he can issue few commands to anyone who is.

The size of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has

grown, but it is, at best, only one-fortieth the size of local law

enforcement in the country. By contrast, the Home Office in

England has a great deal of influence over policing because it

provides half or more of the budgets of local constables. Here,

of course, Congress also spends money on crime, but the

Federal Government outlay is but a small fraction of what

local governments, communities, States, and private agencies

spend. We sometimes think that however small the Federal

proportion is, it can influence the rest of the system. But in

my view—and the view of many others—this small tail will

not wag this very large dog. Ideas and local political pressures

drive local law enforcement in this country. The role of the
2

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

Federal Government is, at best, to try to shape the direction in which those

movements occur. The vast majority of all offenders are tried before Stateappointed judges, sent to State-run prisons, and released into the custody of

State-directed parole officers.

The gap between what is possible and what is politically desirable has not

prevented Washington from trying to do a lot. It has made over 3,000 offenses

into Federal crimes, even though most of the important offenses have been

State crimes for decades. The slow movement toward the Federalization of law

enforcement is worrisome to many Americans for reasons I fully share. If we

have 3,000 Federal criminal charges and if this is more than purely symbolic

politics, then a Federal officer must investigate their violation.

Federal investigations play a very important part with respect to some matters.

But for the most part, having this many Federal crimes means that we ought to

have a Federal—that is, a thoroughly national—police force. No one devoted

to our Constitution could embrace such a prospect cheerfully, and I do not.

Even creating the FBI many decades ago—an organization which soon became

a small elite unit—was greeted with skepticism when it first occurred. The

passage of the Mann Act in 1910 was a profoundly contentious issue because

it, for the first time, set up a Federal criminal standard. It deeply divided

Congress. On what grounds, people argued, should prostitution become a

Federal crime? The answer given, of course, was that it could become one if

prostitution affected interstate commerce. And so was created an odd Federal

task—assigning a few FBI agents, mostly rookies, to the task of trying to follow

suspected prostitutes across State lines. In short order, the Federal courts,

including the Supreme Court, began to brood over the vague language embodied by Congress in this statute—words like “debauchery” or “other immoral

purposes”—that are undefined. The courts began to expand the Mann Act so

it would now be a Federal offense for a woman voluntarily to cross a State line

to have sex whether paid or not, or to move to a location where debauchery

might occur, or to accompany a vacationing Mormon family who happened to
3

James Q. Wilson

be polygamous.1 When a State court gets carried away in this respect, one can

do something about it—if only by moving to a different a State. When Washington does it, the only alternative is Canada.

Federal criminal laws now imply the creation of a Federal police force. No one

wants to do it, of course, but we have a way of drifting into situations that no

one intends. Even if we hold back from a drift in that direction, the effort at

federally managing the crime problem cannot, so far as I can tell, help us solve

many of our real problems. Despite Federal involvement, crimes are getting

harder, not easier, to solve. Clearance rates are not going up, and many are

going down. Most offenders commit crimes in or near their own back yards,

creating local neighborhood, not national, problems. An increasing proportion

of serious juvenile offenders are heavily armed and contemptuous of the

juvenile court system. Many neighborhoods have critical problems even in

cities that have modest or declining crime rates.

An alternative to creating a Federal police force is to improve the strength of

local ones. I think that is what the program to place 100,000 officers on our

city streets has in mind. Though I am devoted to policing, and though I am

convinced that good cops well deployed make a difference, I am struck by the

absolute inability of Washington to send these officers to the places where

they are needed. The problem is very simple. There are 435 congressional

districts and 50 States in this Union, and each and every one wants its share of

the 100,000 officers. Half the officers, by law, must go to smaller cities. Our 14

largest cities have only 12 percent of the Nation’s population but account for

36 percent of all homicides and nearly half of all robberies. These places could

use all 100,000 officers by themselves. Yet, many of the officers go to small

towns like Midvale, Texas.

In Los Angeles during 1960, there were three violent crimes reported to the

police for every uniformed officer. By 1990, there were 10 violent offenses for

every uniformed officer. Using this rough, admittedly simplistic measure, Los
4

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

Angeles needs a police force of 25,000 today instead of the 8,000 or so it has. My

city, in short, might be able to catch up with where it was 30 years ago if it had

one-sixth of the 100,000 new officers—and if we could persuade our local constituents to pay for their retention when the 6 federally funded years have expired.

Naturally, Washington has an important duty to investigate real interstate

crimes, both blue-collar and white-collar, all crimes involving interstate

conspiracies, and all international crimes that touch our borders. And there

are Federal reservations and buildings it must guard. But it seems to me its key

role ought to be to do the one thing local authorities cannot and will not do

on their own. That is to design and test new crime-control strategies. Cities

and States will not do this, not simply because it costs money—money that

they, by and large, do not think they have—but because they would be providing a free good to other cities and States. Good demonstration projects are

expensive and take a lot of time. How does a mayor or Governor justify

spending that money and taking that time when one or the other of two bad

things will happen: Either the new program won’t work, thus embarrassing the

city or the State and the mayor or the Governor; or it will work, but the

benefits will go without charge to every other city and State in the country?

The Federal Government has a unique opportunity to be the research and

development (R&D) arm for law enforcement. It is a task that no city or State

will undertake in any meaningful way, and it is also one that with a few exceptions private foundations will not support. I have spent many years trying to raise

money for this cause from private sources, including foundations for police and

criminal justice research. I have had, on occasion, some good allies, but generally

to no avail. Foundations support causes not evaluations, at least in this area.

When I speak of a Federal R&D effort, I trust everyone here understands that I

am not talking about pure or academic research. There is a need for that, too,

but it often gets funded by Federal assistance through entities such as the

National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the
5

James Q. Wilson

various National Institutes of Health. I am speaking of the real-world testing of

new ideas, especially those developed by practitioners in the field—ideas that

cannot, I am sorry to say, be tested by the practitioner who developed them.

No good idea will be seriously evaluated by anyone who has a patent on it. A

test requires objectivity, technical skills, and a long time horizon. A practitioner is subjective (he or she must struggle to get the idea launched in an often

hostile environment), is skilled at creating ideas but not necessarily at testing

them, and has a time horizon shaped by tomorrow’s newspaper story or next

month’s budget hearing, not by the 2 or 3 years that an adequate testing in the

field involves.

Happily, there have long been a few people in Washington who have understood this view, such as James “Chips” Stewart in the Reagan administration

and Jeremy Travis in the Clinton administration. Of late, largely as a result of

the 1994 Crime Act, the Department of Justice has said, I hope with congressional support, that it will spend a significant fraction of its new crime-control

money on demonstration projects. I would think it would be even better if

Congress, in reauthorizing this agency, placed in that reauthorization a mandate that set aside for research a fixed percentage of the money that Congress

would later appropriate for law enforcement. While I am committed to a

Federal demonstration role, I am well aware of how hard it will be to get

meaningful results.

People sometimes compare the low level of funding for crime or violence

research with the high level of such funding for cancer, stroke, or AIDS. This

difference is very large—indeed it is vast, but this is not simply the result of

unequal interest groups besieging Congress. Doctors, in fact, tend to do better

work than criminologists. And for good reason: Doctors are more likely to

learn useful things that their own profession can put into practice than are

criminal justice researchers. There is both a demand problem—what should

the Federal Government ask for?—and a supply problem—what are competent

social scientists willing to produce?
6

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

Health research may lead down many blind alleys, but treatments and even

cures often emerge. And when they emerge, they enter into a well-organized

market of eager producers and consumers. Compare that record with the

history—a long and generally sad one—of much criminal justice research.

These are ideas that have had their brief place in the sun. I think we can all

remember random preventive patrol? Claims made on behalf of “scared

straight?” Remember the arguments used for boot camps? And shock incarceration? And intensive probation? And remedial education? And job training and

supported work projects? And making police response time faster? To be sure,

some of these things, done by a few gifted people, may have made a difference,

but by and large, the research has failed to provide adequate support for their

general applicability.

We now are committed to a new wave of good ideas, of which communityoriented policing leads the list. I am a believer in it. I support it, but I have to

confess that my belief rests at present more on faith than on fact. We hear of

many cities engaging in promising starts, and then retreats, cutbacks, and

hostility. For every San Diego or New Haven where it seems to have been a

success, we recall a Cincinnati or a Houston where it fell apart. For every patrol

officer who fell in love with community policing there is a lieutenant who thinks

it is just the fad of the day. The famous 100,000 police officers to be paid for by

the Federal Government are supposed to support community policing, but that is

like saying they are supposed to walk to Europe. A good idea, maybe, but we lack

a clear road, and, in any event, 100,000 officers aren’t enough to make a difference even if they get there.

Despite all of these reservations, I think the Federal R&D role is the right one.

Go back to community policing for a moment. Why did it begin to command

our attention? It began to command our attention because the National

Institute of Justice (NIJ) supported a project in Newark, New Jersey, to test the

efficacy of foot patrol. Most police chiefs at the time believed that foot patrol

would not have an effect on the crime rate. The NIJ study found out that they
7

James Q. Wilson

were exactly right: It did not have an effect on the crime rate. It just made the

people in Newark feel better. Out of the contrast between a crime rate that

was stable and an improving public morale came an insight. How people feel

about their city may be as important as what the city in fact does. If people feel

better about their city, they will be encouraged to use public spaces in ways

which, in the long run, may actually drive down the crime rate but in the

meantime allow them to enjoy what is in fact the right of every citizen: to walk

peacefully with some degree of comfort and confidence around the streets of

their own cities.

We have, after all, learned about a lot of things that don’t work, and we

wouldn’t have done that if somebody had not been doing an evaluation. We

used to think that random preventive patrol deterred crimes and that quick

police responses prevented crime. We now know those ideas are not correct.

As a result, the police have been encouraged to look in new directions. Good

police around the country are using specialized preventive patrol, and undercover operations, and they are dealing with police responses more by evoking

from the community a definition of problems to be resolved rather than

waiting for citizens to dial 911.

To me, the critical issues are two: If you think as I do that R&D is the central

role the Federal Government should play in this area—nearly to the exclusion

of many other things it now tries to do—how should this work be financed and

directed? And, what should it study? I do not think this study should be

directed from the U.S. Department of Justice. There are many people in this

room from the Department of Justice, but I don’t think the work should be

directed from that agency. I admit that today we have an excellent NIJ director. There have been a few good ones before him, but counting on that continuing is like expecting flowers to bloom through asphalt pavement. Occasionally it happens, but it is not the best way to grow a garden. DOJ is an

organization of lawyers, and lawyers do what lawyers are supposed to do: They

investigate, sue, and prosecute. If anyone doubts the gap that exists between
8

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

empirical science and legal research, he has never set foot on a university

campus. I have served on the campuses of three great universities, and in each

and every case the gap between law school research and empirical social

sciences was a vast and unbridgeable divide. The best social scientists—there

are a few good ones—operate on campus in almost compete isolation from law

schools, and the best law professors—and there are many of them—return the

compliment. And if you think universities are an odd exception to a general

pattern of compatibility, you have not understood how most judges treat

empirical science when it is introduced into their courtrooms. Scientific

nonsense acquires evidentiary standing in ways that satisfy nobody but the

appeals court judges who later rule on the matter.

NIJ ought to be part of a federally supported larger whole, which is generally

committed to scientific alliances and the maintenance of rigorous analysis. I

leave it to Washington insiders to select that spot, but I do not think the

Justice Department is that spot. As to the second question: It is a very difficult

problem to prescribe in advance what the research agenda should be. There are

many important issues—for example, can anyone show that community

policing, somehow defined, really works? Can anyone show that if it works it

can be made to continue to work? That research area will persist for years.

There are other important technological areas that are being researched for

the first time in recent years.

But one issue especially concerns me, and I would like to raise it to the top of

the agenda if I can. That is the problem of juvenile criminals. Criminal justice

and social science know about adult offenders. Adult crime rates, including

adult homicide rates, seem to have declined in the 1980s, and we have tried to

study why. But the rate at which juveniles commit crimes, especially homicide,

went up, and we are not sure why. The rate of offenses is higher on the average

for young people than it is for older people. Many people are being sent to

prison—for perfectly good reasons—at a time when their own crime rate is

beginning to decline. In every society, the crime rate peaks in the teenage

years among males. We send the people to prison 10 years later.
9

James Q. Wilson

This gap indicates that something is not working. We know that today juveniles have become a smaller fraction of the whole population. We expected

that their crime rate would go down as the adult rate generally went down, but

it didn’t. That has become for many years the most worrisome feature of local

society. Most of what we know about the effects of punishment on offenders,

whether in terms of deterring them or incapacitating them, we know only

about adults. We have interviewed them constantly. Our sense of adult

behavior has been elaborated by everything from general discussion to sophisticated quantitative models. We don’t know anything of the sort about juveniles. Some people think that juveniles are immune to the criminal justice

system because they are so impulsive as to give no thought to the consequences of their actions and so reckless as not to care what society or the larger

community thinks of them. Scholars have argued that imprisoning a juvenile

only makes matters worse because he becomes indoctrinated to gang activity or

a criminal lifestyle.

We actually know next to nothing about whether any of these arguments are

true. We have interviewed adult prison inmates but not, to the same degree,

juvenile ones. We can construct the criminal careers of thousands of adult

offenders but of far fewer juvenile ones. One of the very few efforts to find out

what difference incarceration made on juvenile offenders was done in Chicago

in the 1970s.2

 The authors followed the careers of a few hundred serious delinquents and found that the more serious the penalty imposed by the court system,

the lower the rate of their subsequent offending. This finding was strikingly

similar to that of two other studies done in the preceding decade, using very

different institutional treatments in quite different communities.3,4 Questions

can be raised about such findings: Why did their crime rate go down? Did they

just get smarter? Did they evade police detection or adopt forms of crime that

were harder to detect? As near as I can tell, in the intervening 20 years virtually

nothing has been done to try to answer these questions.
10

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

We know that States and counties differ in how they handle juveniles, but we

have almost no idea as to whether those differences in treatment make a difference in crime rates. The chief of the Family Court Division of the New York

City Law Department has recently published a troubling and unhappy account

of how that city handles juveniles.5

 The family courts have faced an exploding

caseload since the late 1980s, but the penalties imposed even on the most

vicious hoodlums rarely have exceeded 18 months. That is because New York

State law limits penalties for persons under the age of 16 to 18 months. The law

governing investigations is even more restrictive. The police cannot ordinarily

search a home occupied by a young offender without either a warrant or the

parents’ consent, but the family court cannot issue warrants. When a youngster

turns 16, a different set of rules apply. They can be tried as adults, but the courts

can, and often do, make these persons into “youthful offenders,” a status that

keeps the potential sentence very low.

Now contrast this with what the Los Angeles Times has reported about juvenile

offenders in the State of California. The newspaper surveyed young inmates of

the California Youth Authority and came to the conclusion that juveniles

were actually serving longer terms than adults sent to prison for similar offenses. Juveniles, for example, served 60 months in California for homicide,

while adults served only 41 months.6

 Let us assume that New York and California do in fact differ that dramatically. Does this difference make a difference?

Will one system produce more or less crime than the other system? Are the

people in either State safer or more at risk because of what appear to be great

differences in how these systems work? We do not know. As far as I know no

one is trying to find out. As the population once again becomes younger—the

elementary schools of Los Angeles are filled to capacity with persons eagerly

awaiting the junior high school years in which the legendary 6 percent of them

will become hopeless offenders—we know that crime rates are very likely to go

up, and we ought to care.
11

James Q. Wilson

There are many obstacles to doing research of this sort—some are legal, some

are technical. These obstacles are serious, but scholars have had to cope with

serious matters in the past dealing with adult offenders. I believe that, with

good will and adequate support and direction, they can do the same with

juveniles.

An equally important evaluative effort is needed for the causes of juvenile crime,

which are not well understood. Criminological research has cited almost any

defect that a social scientist can find in American society as a cause for juvenile

crime. In all societies, juveniles commit more crimes than adults. And in all

societies, as near as we can tell, the juvenile crime rate has been going up.

Whatever the cause is, it may not be a uniquely American phenomenon.

The new welfare reform bill has created a splendid opportunity to investigate

what suspect is the most serious cause of juvenile crime, and that is the weakness in the family structure. The new welfare reform bill requires underage,

single-parent mothers either to live with their own parents or under adequate

adult supervision as a condition of receiving Federal aid. No one knows what

“adequate adult supervision” means. It must be supposed to mean something

other than supervision by her own parents. Often the young woman’s predicament is the result of the failure of her parent or two parents to supervise her

adequately.

A wonderful opportunity exists for cities, counties, and States to provide a

variety of new mechanisms as alternative “families” for such persons. Singleparent moms would have to live in alternative homes or shelters as a condition

of receiving aid. They and their newborn children would experience true adult

supervision from caring adults, who worry about the future of those children.

Such efforts should be run by private organizations. Various church and

synagogue organizations could take on the task of supplying alternative homes

if the Federal Government were willing to direct its welfare money in that

direction. It would then be up to NIJ and other bodies to find out what works.
12

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

Can we change things for the children of young unmarried teenage moms in

such a way that we reduce the rate at which these young people grow up on

the mean streets of our cities with only guns as their friends?

To me, the hardest task is not to create the agencies, encourage the practitioner

links, or design the research. The core problem is to persuade members of Congress

and their constituents that they are doing something about crime by spending

money on R&D evaluation. People believe they know what should be done about

crime, just as they believe they know what plays the Washington Redskins should

call. It is very hard to persuade them that, in fact, they don’t know and ought to

find out. Maybe the only way to do it is to smuggle an evaluation program, written

in very small type, into the next bill that increases the number of Federal offenses

to 6,000, imposes the death penalty on 50 more crimes, closes the border to illegal

immigrants, and promises an end to wife abuse.

Question-and-Answer Session

Patrick Murphy, U.S. Conference of Mayors, Washington, D.C.: I certainly

agree that we need to have much more research, and yet the problem is the

“non-system” of policing we have—17,000-plus local police departments. I

describe this to foreign police administrators, and they say, “But of course they

are coordinated by your State police agencies.” Federal police are coordinated

by the FBI, but that does not occur locally. We are all devoted to our system of

local police, but it seems to me that the Federal Government and the States

could do more, in addition to research, to coordinate the work of these agencies for criminal intelligence, support of planning, and better exchange of

knowledge. Would you comment on the system problem?
13

James Q. Wilson

JQW: I certainly would encourage dissemination of intelligence, a real improvement in suspect identification, and dissemination of information. But, I

am not encouraged among what I see abroad as “systems.” Since 1980, the

adult crime rate has been dropping more or less systematically in all cities

across the United States. During this same period, in countries that have a

unified system like England and Sweden, for example, crime rates have been

going up dramatically. Today, the robbery rate in England is as high as ours,

and the auto theft rate is twice as high; in the Netherlands, the burglary rate is

twice as high. The advantage of a unified system is that you get coordination.

The disadvantage of the coordinated system is that you may coordinate it

around a bad idea.

To me, the desirable consequence of the American system, messy as it is, is in

what we have learned about how to improve the criminal justice system.

Rogue police chiefs, backed up by brave or indifferent mayors, have tried new

ideas against the advice of other police officers and have made them work. So

we have to try to strike a balance between a nonsystem and risk of bad action

if we have a full system. With the American genius for making something out

of nothing in our Constitutional order, we can do that. I would resist, as a

matter of principle, converting our nonsystem into anything that looks like a

European system.

Questioner (not named): Professor Wilson, for the purposes of this question,

place yourself on the Supreme Court. Last week you heard arguments on the

Brady Act. How would you vote and why?

JQW: As a Justice on the Supreme Court I would try to vote on the basis of

what the statute requires and what the Constitution mandates. In Congress, I

would have probably voted for the Brady Bill with little hope that it would

make a significant difference. Gun control is a serious matter that cannot

adequately be handled by Washington policies directing the way in which
14

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

guns are sold in federally licensed gun stores. The problem is to figure out ways

to keep guns out of public places; they are usually stolen in the first place.

With respect to the Supreme Court question and arguments and briefs, I

haven’t thought of it as a constitutional matter—I have been too preoccupied

with its limitations as a practical matter. I would prefer that you asked me

what I would do in Congress rather than what I would do in the Supreme

Court.

Roger Conner, American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, Washington, D.C.: I was discouraged to hear intensive supervision probation in

your list of things that, while useful, have not necessarily reduced or prevented

crime. As a way to address juvenile crime, what do you think of more intensive

and close supervision of probation to reduce reoffending in this group?

JQW: I think that’s a possibility. To me, one of the things that explains

juvenile crime is that many youthful offenders lack any involvement with a

mature adult who might give a kind of guidance. What they most need is to

have a mature adult inserted into their lives on a continuing basis. One way

for that to happen is to be born into a two-parent family that is reasonably

successful. Failing that, and we are increasingly failing that, perhaps we can

design and apply an ad hoc parent.

I am open to the possibility of using intensive probation for first-time or early

juvenile offenders; this may well avoid their repeated involvement in crime.

The experiment in intensive supervision probation that I was referring to, as

evaluated by the RAND Corporation, was focused on adults. At that stage, it

didn’t seem to make much of a difference. A different story might be true if we

focused on early juvenile offenders, where there is some reason to expect to

alter, by the presence of a mature adult in their lives, the prospects of their

continued offending.
15

James Q. Wilson

This is being tried in the country. Many things are being tried that I don’t

know about. I haven’t seen an evaluation of it and I would very much like to.

Samuel Dash, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C.:

Professor Wilson, in your address you did not make any mention of the criminal drug problem in the United States, its relationship to crime, and whether

you think that the Federal Government plays a more effective law enforcement role than the local and State organizations. Since drug offenses are

covered under Federal law enforcement and the Federal Government claims a

greater and greater role in this area, do you think Federal efforts are more

effective, at least there, than local and State prosecution?

JQW: I do think the Federal Government has a major role in drug enforcement. I had that in mind when I referred to interstate commerce and international trafficking. The Federal Government has become deeply involved in the

drug problem. I think that making better use of Federal resources to deal with

the drug problem is a critical need. Even so, the critical problem in drug abuse

is the demand for drugs. Demand reduction is fundamentally a local matter.

(Yes, I strenuously defend the illegality of drugs.)

Who is using drugs? We know from many studies that a very high proportion

of the people arrested have been using drugs in the preceding 72 hours, as

revealed by the customary drug tests. Most of these people will be placed on

probation or sentenced to confinement and after that possibly given parole.

This is a readymade group of people, already under the authority of the criminal justice system, who can be told that their permission to be on probation or

parole is contingent upon their subjecting themselves to frequent (meaning

several times a week) random drug testing, and that the failure to satisfy these

tests would bring them back into the criminal justice system for increasingly

longer periods of time. That is a local responsibility—something that local

police and probation authorities have to do. They are often financially
16

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

underequipped to do it, although some promising starts have been made with

respect to drug courts.

Although I believe the Federal Government has a crucial role to play, and it is

largely on the supply side, I think the key to the drug problem is on the demand

side. If we can make it extremely difficult for those who are already in the

criminal justice system to gain access to drugs, I think demand will be reduced.

People will, I hope, be driven into treatment programs, and the supply of drugs

will fall correspondingly.

Questioner (not named): Dr. Wilson, you mentioned the disparity between

medical research and crime research. There is a perception in the medical and

legislative communities that the research on violent crime is being intimidated

or suppressed by certain groups. In your perception, is that the case?

JQW: Yes, if you want to think about the research on violent crime generally,

in all aspects, there is a substantial degree of suppression. If you wish to discuss

the genetic bases behind crime—which we know to a certainty exist, because

males always commit 5 to 20 times as much violent crime as females (and not as

a result of particular childrearing practices)—mention this fact, especially in this

city, and you will discover that you are the object of an intimidating drive,

launched by a small number of people, who will either silence you or prevent the

Federal Government from funding you. Most of the available research that bears

on genetic, biological, or early childhood effects on crime is from abroad. Even

abroad, it is increasingly difficult to pursue such questions.

Other aspects of the causes of violence (and there are in fact many aspects to

the causes of violence) are encouraged to be researched, and therefore there is

a kind of imbalance in our body of knowledge. Politically acceptable causes

attract research support; politically unacceptable causes do not attract interest.

That is, in my view, gravely unfortunate.
17

James Q. Wilson

Adrian Curtis, Justice Management Division, U.S. Department of Justice,

Washington, D.C.: The Attorney General always says that youthful offenders

should be reached before they become youthful offenders. Everyone would

prefer not to be mugged or to deal with the consequences afterwards. Crime

legislation has provided authorization to fund crime prevention. It hasn’t been

very strongly supported by the Congress or by the public. Do you think it

would be a good move to put more money into prevention efforts? Or demonstration programs? Or do you think it is an issue to be dealt with locally?

JQW: I think the Federal Government has a major role to play in prevention. I

think the problem is with what has been described in the past as a prevention

program. It is, of course, a caricature to describe prevention programs as those

involving “midnight basketball,” but that slogan has caught on because it is not

refuted by any evidence that we know of for any better prevention practice. We

have had a lot of efforts at supported work projects, many of them using very

rigorous evaluation methods. If you place juvenile offenders in job training and

supportive work environments and, after 18 months, compare their offending

rates to those of youths who did not experience this, no difference exists.

Although remedial education programs are sometimes reported to be successful, the body of research suggests that they don’t make a difference. To me, the

critical years in a child’s life are zero to five. If you have a prevention effort,

that’s where you have to aim it. The government and the public understand

this. Everyone who has been a parent and has watched his or her children

grow up in such remarkably different ways—begin to express their character

and interact with their parents—knows how critical that period is. If we are

going to have an effective prevention program, I think we have to say that

those are the critical years, and we have to focus our imagination on those

years. We have to develop, with Federal support and evaluation, programs that

will provide differing ways of managing that period of life. We don’t really

know what the best programs are, but there are lots of experiments out there
18

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

(none of them really being evaluated by anyone). So we have something to

build on.

If we focused our prevention efforts around the core issue of the family, and

took advantage of the great popular and political support for family issues, we

could move the prevention program ahead. But if we just talk about “prevention,” people will think we mean supported work projects, remedial education,

or midnight basketball, and it won’t succeed.

Janie Jeffers, President’s Crime Prevention Council, Washington, D.C.:

Professor Wilson, through your lens, you paint a bleak picture for juveniles.

What you saw as perhaps a glimmer of hope, as a result of the Crime Act

legislation, was the group homes, etc. Where do you see the support for the

family, to shore up the family—not to replace the family in what would be at

best an artificial and short-lived kind of activity? You spoke about prevention

related to children between 0 and 5, but I’d like to hear where you see the

family needing support, what interventions you think are appropriate, and

what kinds of research in those areas should be done to avoid supplanting the

purpose and need for families.

JQW: I wish I knew the answer to your question, but I do not. The growth in

single-parent families cuts across all the Western industrial nations. The rate is

highest in the United States, but it is very large in Western Europe, England,

France, and Japan. It is being driven by profound changes in Western culture.

It is, in my view, the final working out of the 18th century enlightenment. If

you really believe in the emancipation of the individual, there will come a

time when men will feel themselves freed from the responsibility of maintaining families. Men are a difficult species. It has taken many years of hectoring,

bloodshed, religious indoctrination, cultural pressure, etc., to get them to take

care of the women they made pregnant and the children to whom the women

have given birth.
19

James Q. Wilson

If you really believe in emancipating the individual right down to the grassroots,

and we have seen this in Western cultures, you will see the removal of the man

from this family role. The best idea I can come up with is to change the way we

raise at-risk children so that they will grow up in an environment during their

formative years in which they value a family experience and see men and women

working together to help raise them. As they get that formative experience, it

will guide them into a desire to repeat that experience in their adult lives.

Whether that will work or not, I don’t know. Relative to the pressures that are

working against the family, I don’t think there are any simple policy remedies. I

don’t think tax rate changes, or forced financial support, or even tightening the

divorce laws (although there are worthwhile ideas in some of these initiatives for

change) will make a big difference. They are like small handfuls of sand thrown

in the face of a gale wind.

Unless we face the fact that we are dealing with a profound cultural transformation throughout the West and attempt to change the influences on young people

so that they will attempt to stand against that force, then I don’t think we will

succeed.

Ted Gest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C.: Could you give

us some idea of the scale you are talking about when you say “more research?”

Everybody in this room thinks we need more research on crime. Are you

saying that we need as much research as we have for various diseases? But

other people would point out that we already are doing more research through

the 1994 Crime Bill and the National Science Foundation. Are you recommending a massive increase—a sort of modern day “Manhattan Project” on

crime, or are you speaking about targeted modest increases in specific areas?

JQW: My remarks this morning would have had greater force before the passage

of the 1994 Crime Act. I think there has been a significant increase in research.

The National Institute of Justice now has resources and commitment that it has

never enjoyed in the past. That is all good. I’m not confident that we need a
20

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

dramatic increase in funding. We don’t have that many good researchers in this

field. The few we have are very busy. More will be recruited, just as in the

aftermath of the passage of the Law Enforcement Assistance Act. That opened

up Federal research efforts. The criminological effort was revitalized when

operations research, industrial micro-economics, etc., elbowed into this area

with a new way of looking at things.

I would like to see Congress make permanent, if nothing else, the present

commitment to research and demonstration efforts, by authorizing programs

that set aside a given fraction of however much money Congress may choose

to appropriate for the purpose of aiding significant Federal or local programs.

I don’t call for a Manhattan Project. I would be satisfied with the present level

of resources if we could make it permanent so that the next administration,

whatever it is, would not find it so easy to change.

Morris Thigpen, National Institute of Corrections, U.S. Department of

Justice, Washington, D.C.: Would you mind commenting on the sentencing

practices that we are seeing across the country today? What do you think of

those in your own State of California—the “three strikes and you’re out” laws

and the whole truth-in-sentencing push that is occurring?

JQW: It’s difficult to comment on sentencing policies without taking into

account the enormous public frustration with what is perceived to be our current

sentencing policy. In California, the sentencing policies before “three strikes”

were lamentable. If you illegally kill another human being in the State of

California—not as an accident—from manslaughter to first-degree murder, your

average time in prison would have been less than 4 years. The public may not

understand certain details, but they don’t like that. So when someone came

along with three-strikes legislation, people wanted the legislators to vote for it.

We have had a lot of problems with this three-strikes bill. It focuses heavily on adult

offenders. It reserves serious penalties for the second and third strike. It is somewhat

unclear as to what prior offenses should count as a strike. Local district attorneys are
21

James Q. Wilson

displaying a considerable amount of unstudied variance in how they define a prior

strike and therefore in the proportion of people that they send to prison.

Our problem is not simply to defeat these measures; it is to come up with

something that is better. California hadn’t done that. California didn’t take

the killing of another human being very seriously except in very high-profile

cases—freeway strangling or whatever. If we do that (and many large States in

the country do), we have a problem.

I don’t know how to put that genie back in the bottle. Rather than modifying

the three-strikes bill, I would prefer if something other than it had been passed

in the first place. I would strongly prefer that people mobilize their answers on

how we handle juvenile offenders, who are eventually going to turn into those

persons who are eligible for three-strikes. The only way to do that is to show

the public that we know enough about the subject so that we can direct their

attention effectively.

Misguided in some aspects as these laws are, we have to realize that we didn’t

give the people any alternative to choose.

Betty Chemers, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,

U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: The juvenile justice system

is clearly under great stress, with more and more juveniles being waived to the

adult court. Do you think the juvenile court has outlived its usefulness?

JQW: I wish I knew the answer to whether the juvenile court has outlived its

usefulness. My sense is that the juvenile court is many different things in many

different States. In California it is in serious trouble. I believe in New York State

it is approaching total collapse. In Indiana, as a matter of fact, it is working

rather well.

We don’t know what juvenile courts are doing. I believe that the essential
22

premise of the juvenile court deserves serious reexamination. The central

premise of the juvenile court is that the court would stand in loco parentis. It

would replace the parents for children who were runaways, truants, shoplifters,

or engaging in activities indicating a failure of parental supervision. It was not

invented at a time when 13-year-olds carrying Uzis were mowing down innocent babies on street corners.

How should the juvenile court be reshaped, if that is its role? Some of its

functions should be split perhaps into several parts. It should be a State agency

that acts in loco parentis, and it should not limit its attention to youngsters

who have already shot, or mugged, or stolen at large. It should turn its attention at the first sign of difficulty to people who begin to experience problems,

where parents are doing a poor job. But other functions of the juvenile court

should be shifted to a different kind of entity. Not necessarily the court, but a

different kind of entity that has the task of identifying early on who the repeat

offenders are. Not after their first arrest or conviction, but after a second time

or a third time. Once you pass that transition—the third standard deviation—

you are very likely to become a chronic serious offender. We need to identify

those people as early as possible and to deal with them by increasing the

magnitude of penalties they face from at least the second offense on. Every

time they do something again, the penalty gets worse.

I don’t think the juvenile courts are doing this. I think they waive juveniles out

of the system for the first, second, or third serious offense. Then finally, they

unload on them and put them in incarceration until they are 25. That’s not the

way we raise our children. We don’t ignore their misdeeds until finally they burn

down the house. In our daily lives, we use moderate rewards and penalties in

raising our children so that they become habituated to a life of decency. The

juvenile court does not follow the principles of decent family life.

The court was founded on the principle of acting in loco parentis. We need

juvenile courts that will be much more heavily funded than the present ones

are, will take very seriously the first signs of repeat offending among juveniles,

and will be very serious about the penalties they impose.

What, If Anything, Can the Federal Government Do About Crime?
23

Why Can’t We Make

Prohibition Work Better?

Some Consequences of Ignoring

the Unattractive*

Presentation by

Peter Reuter, Ph.D.

University of Maryland

February 11, 1997

Washington, D.C.

United States drug policies are punitive (in both rhetoric

 and reality), divisive (certainly by race, probably by age,

and perhaps by class), intrusive (in small ways for many individuals and in large ways for some groups), and expensive ($30

billion annually). Even more distressing, the Nation has a drug

problem more severe than that of any other rich Western

society, whether measured in terms of the extent of drug use,

dependence on expensive drugs, drug-related AIDS cases, or the

level of violence and corruption associated with these drugs.

*This paper is derived from a lecture at the April 1992 American Philosophical

Society 1992 meeting, which was originally published as “Hawks Ascendant,”

Daedalus 1992. That paper was updated and delivered as a lecture at the National

Institute of Justice (NIJ) series Perspectives on Crime and Justice in February 1997.

The paper based on the NIJ lecture was published in the Proceedings of the American

Philosophical Society, Vol. 141, No. 3, September 1997, and is reproduced here with

minor stylistic changes. The research reported here was supported by a grant from

the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center. It draws

heavily on work done jointly with Robert MacCoun, who provided valuable

comments on the paper.
24

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

Many contend that the problems are a consequence of our policies. Either it is the

harshness of those policies that has generated the disease and violent crime that

surround drug use (the standard liberal critique),1

 or it is the lack of effective

stringency that explains why drugs are so widely used and available (the hawks’

critique).2

 Yet this may give too much credit to the role of policy, a common

fallacy in modern American discussions, particularly in the Nation’s Capital,

whose business is precisely policy. Whether or not there is an epidemic of experimentation with a particular drug, what fraction of experimenters goes on to

become dependent, and the severity of health and crime consequences of dependence may be much more shaped by factors other than policy. Certainly when

comparing America’s drug problems with those of other nations, most of the

relevant differences appear to be rooted in broader features of societies. For example, the United States is characterized by greater hedonism, weak informal

social control, a higher propensity for risk taking, inadequate provision of health

care for the poor, unequal income distribution, and a high level of criminal

violence generally. It is also more intimately connected with cocaine- and opiumgrowing regions such as Colombia and Mexico. All these factors promote use of

illicit psychoactive drugs and/or worsen the problems associated with that use.

If policy is only moderately important in controlling drug use, then perhaps we

can mitigate the harshness of our policies with little risk of seeing an expansion

of drug use and related problems. Reducing our drug policy problems (i.e., the

adverse consequences of the policies themselves) is worth a good deal, though

it would obviously be even more desirable if we could also reduce our drug

problem.

It is hard to be highly prescriptive, to say what good drug policy would look

like, because one consequence of politicians’ treating drug control as a moral

crusade has been an absolute lack of interest, bordering on gross negligence, in

assessing the consequences, good or bad, of the emphasis on punishment. We

cannot say, even approximately, whether locking up more drugdealers or

seizing lots of assets has any substantial effect on drug prices or whether higher

prices would have much effect on American drug usage or related violence.
25

Peter Reuter

There is no credible basis for describing a policy that would reduce, in any

important dimension, the extent of America’s drug problems by, say, one-third

in the next 5 years.

What I will offer is a set of reasonable conjectures, but a central message of this

paper is that without systematic evaluation of the consequences of drug enforcement and punishment, the current stagnation of drug policies will almost

certainly continue.

Characterizing American Drug Policies and Problems

Policies. The most striking characteristics of the U.S. response to illicit drugs

in the last decade have been its scale and punitiveness. The Federal Government spends about $15 billion annually on drug control. State and local

governments probably spend at least as much.3

 Thus drug control is a $30–35

billion government program in the mid-1990s, massively up from about $6–7

billion in 1985. By comparison, the figure for all public law enforcement

expenditures was about $110 billion in 1996.

The intended punitiveness is reflected in budgets. About three-quarters of the

national drug control budget is spent on apprehending and punishing drug

dealers and users, with treatment getting about two-thirds of the remainder.

State and local governments are even more enforcement oriented than the

Federal Government. Budgetarily they exhibit a disdain for prevention, even

though this is primarily a school-based activity, which seems naturally to flow

from local governments.

The total punishment levied for drug control purposes has increased massively

since 1981, when the concern with cocaine became prominent. The number of

commitments to State and Federal prison have risen approximately tenfold

over the same period. By 1994, there were almost 400,000 people in prison or

jail serving time for selling or using drugs. The comparable figure for 1980 was

about 31,000 (see exhibit 1).
26

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

At the State level, one striking feature is the large number of persons being imprisoned for drug possession felonies. This does not include possession with intent to

distribute, which is classified as a distribution offense. Approximately 50,000 were

sentenced to State prison in 1992 for nondistribution offenses, mostly simple

possession; some may have been plea bargained down from distribution charges.

Sentencing figures are of themselves insufficient to show that enforcement has

become more stringent. That depends on the ratio of sentences (or years of prison

time) to offenses. Imprisonment may hardly have kept up with the growth of drug

markets. The number of offenses might have risen as rapidly as arrests, sentences, and

years of prison time between 1980 and 1985, when cocaine consumption was still

expanding rapidly. But from 1985 to 1995 it is very likely that the number of offenses

(transactions) and buyers and sellers was essentially flat. The risk of being imprisoned

for a cocaine or heroin user or seller went up very sharply, perhaps nearly tenfold.

How risky is drugselling or drug possession? The aggregate data suggest that in

1994 a cocaine user had an 8-percent risk of being arrested; for a heroin user

the figure may have been 10 percent. For drugselling, Robert MacCoun and I

estimated in a study of the District of Columbia, that in 1988, street dealers of

Exhibit 1: Trends in Drug Enforcement, 1980–1994

1980 1985 1990 1994

Drug Arrests 581,000 811,000 1,090,000 1,350,000

 Heroin and 70,000 240,000 590,000 635,000

 Cocaine (12%) (30%) (54%) (47%)

 Distribution 104,000 192,000 345,000 370,000

 Only (18%) (30%) (31%) (27%)

Inmates 31,000 68,000 291,000 391,000

 Local Jails 7,000 19,000 111,000 137,000

 State Prisons 19,000 39,000 149,000 202,000

 Federal Prisons 4,900 9,500 30,500 51,800

Sources: Uniform Crime Reports, Correctional Population in the United States. Jail figures are author’s estimates.

Numbers are rounded to the nearest thousand except for Federal prison populations.
27

Peter Reuter

drugs faced about a 22-percent probability of imprisonment in the course of a

year’s selling and that, given expected time served, they spent about onethird of their selling career in prison.4

 These figures on sellers are somewhat

higher than crude calculations at the national level for more recent years.

Does this make drugselling appropriately risky? One-third of a career in

prison seems quite a lot. On the other hand, the risk per sale is very small

indeed. In our Washington, D.C., study a seller who worked 2 days a week at

this trade made about 1,000 transactions in the course of a year. His imprisonment risk per transaction was about 1 in 4,500; by that metric, drugselling

is a great deal less risky than, say, a burglary or robbery. Another way to

assess the risk is to look at aggregate figures. It is estimated that American

users consume 300 tons of cocaine per annum. If these are sold in 1-gram

units, this represents 300 million transactions, which result in fewer than

100,000 prison sentences. This generates a prison risk for a single cocaine

sales transaction of about 1 in 3,000.

The punitiveness of American drug policy is not simply captured in numbers.

It is also an element of rhetoric and other programs. The 1996 Presidential

candidates competed, albeit briefly and unconvincingly, in efforts to demonstrate their toughness; no other aspect of drug policy merited a mention.

Senator Dole accused the administration of failing to make adequate use of the

military, particularly in the interdiction campaign. President Clinton responded by proposing that teenagers be drug tested when they apply for a

driver’s license. More recently, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in what was

billed as a major address on domestic policy initiatives, proposed life sentences

for those trafficking across State boundaries and death sentences for the

second offense.

Even the new Federal welfare reform package includes its very own antidrug

clause. Unless a State affirmatively opts out, it must deny Federal benefits to any

applicant who has been convicted of a post-1996 drug felony. As a deterrent, it
28

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

presumes a peculiar long-sightedness on the part of offenders. It can reasonably

be called spiteful, though it is not as mean-spirited as Senator Gramm’s original

version, which imposed loss of a wide range of public benefits for any drug

conviction. It certainly serves no welfare goal to cut off those convicted at age

18 for simple possession of small amounts of crack, as in California, from a right

to welfare at age 35.

What Has Toughness Accomplished?

Toughness should raise prices, make drugs less accessible, and reinforce messages that drugs are disapproved of and harmful. This should lead to less drug

use and eventually fewer drug-related problems. In fact, illegal drugs are

remarkably expensive, not universally accessible, and generally feared. Nevertheless, it is striking that, notwithstanding sharply increased stringency, prices

are declining, many of the young see drugs as quite easy to get, and the fear of

the most widely used drug (marijuana) is declining.5

Illicit drugs are very expensive by most measures. Marijuana is a cultivated

weed like tobacco, but while a cigarette costs, even with excise taxes, hardly

10 cents, an equivalent amount of marijuana costs $5 or more. Heroin, a

processed agricultural good like sugar, is vastly more expensive than gold,

costing about $5,000 per ounce (wholesale), compared to gold’s $400.

All the same, cocaine and heroin prices have fallen steadily since 1981. By 1995,

after adjusting for inflation, they were only about one-third of their 1981 levels.

For marijuana, prices rose steadily and substantially from 1981 to 1992 and then

fell in the next 4 years back to their 1981 level. Even more surprising is Jon

Caulkins’ finding that crack cocaine, singled out for tough sentencing both at

the national level and in some major States (e.g., California), is no more expensive at the retail level than powder cocaine in terms of price per pure milligram.
29

Peter Reuter

This failure of cocaine and heroin prices to rise with tougher enforcement is a

major analytic and policy puzzle. Declining demand, reduced labor market

opportunities for aging drug user/sellers, a decline in violence engendered by

few new entrants and lower margins, and the locking up of criminal users are

just some of the possible factors contributing to this. None of these has been

subject to systematic examination.

If enforcement did not raise prices for the drugs, then it might still have been

successful if it lowered availability. The only long-term data come from the

annual survey of high school seniors and suggest otherwise. For example, 80 to

90 percent of the students reported that marijuana is available or very available

to them—figures that have been stable for two decades. The percentage of

seniors reporting that cocaine was available or readily available was 46 percent

in 1995, compared to 30 percent in 1980, though down somewhat from its 1989

high of 55 percent. The finding that marijuana is perceived as more available to

high school students than alcohol or cigarettes has been widely reported.

Drug use was estimated to be half as prevalent in 1995 as in the early 1980s,

but it is now growing, albeit very slowly. In 1995 the percentage of those over

twelve who reported using an illicit drug in the previous month was 6 percent,

compared to 14 percent in 1981.6

 The numbers dependent on cocaine and

heroin have been fairly stable over a long period of time—at about 2.5 million.

It seems likely that the severity of the Nation’s drug problem as measured by

the related violence and health costs has also been fairly stable over that

period of time, though declining somewhat since about 1990.

In some cities it appears that local enforcement has driven open-air markets

indoors. Driving around with police in Washington, D.C., one certainly observes

much more circumspect behavior than was true in the late 1980s. This may be a

major accomplishment. Open-air markets not only ease access for users moving

from experimentation to regular consumption, they also breed violence and

disorder.7
30

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

In summary, increasing toughness has not accomplished its immediate objectives of raising prices and reducing availability. Drug use has declined, but the

most proximate cause, as reported in the high school senior survey, seems to be

a shift in attitudes as to the risks and approval of use of specific drugs. Though

enforcement might influence those perceptions, there is no correlation between crude measures of toughness and those perceptions.

But toughness clearly has had other consequences as well.

Divisiveness. It is hard to analyze drug enforcement in contemporary America

without reference to race.8

 In 1992 blacks (12 percent of the general population) constituted two-thirds of admissions to State prison for drug offenses,

compared to slightly less than one-half for all nondrug offenses. A similar

disproportion existed for Hispanics; 10 percent of the population, they constituted 25 percent of all those sent to prison for drug offenses.

The origins of this disproportion are a matter of controversy. The standard

critique is that the population of drug users is predominantly white; differences

in prevalence rates for drug use (even crack) are far too modest to overcome the

vastly larger white population. Therefore, drugdealers should be primarily white.

This argument is at best incomplete. Sellers are a select group of users; they are

likely to be poorer and more deviant than users generally, since selling is risky

and widely condemned. The urban poor are disproportionately minority.

Racism may play a role, but a lot is driven by the police responsiveness to

concerns about drugselling and the violence and disorder around inner-city

markets. Focusing on those involved in the street selling of expensive drugs

(essentially anything other than marijuana) is likely to generate disproportionate numbers of arrests among poor, young, central-city males, who are tempted

into this business both by the unattractiveness of their legitimate economic

opportunities and the accessibility of these selling opportunities.9

 These

populations are again disproportionately minority.
31

Peter Reuter

Drugselling has indeed become a common activity among poor and minority

urban males. For Washington, D.C., my colleagues and I estimated that over

one-quarter of African-American males born in the 1960s were charged with

drugselling between the ages of 18 and 24.10 Most were charged with a drug

felony, and most will be convicted of that offense.

But it is what happens after arrest that generates much of the controversy. In

particular, the disproportion in sentences for crack offenses, for which arrests are

overwhelmingly of blacks and Hispanics, has been a major political issue. This,

together with the difficulty of articulating any credible grounds for maintaining

the current Federal disparity, has increased suspicion in the black community

that drug enforcement is an instrument of continuing white oppression. Tom

and Mary Edsall report that focus groups in the early 1990s found that many

blacks believed that drug enforcement was part of an effort by the white community to oppress blacks.11

Nor is this the only division in society arising from tough drug policies. For the

young, the growing harshness of rhetoric and policy regarding marijuana—

arrests for simple possession having doubled in the last 5 years—reduces the

credibility of government generally. The claims about marijuana’s dangers in

both public rhetoric and school prevention programs seem grossly exaggerated

and indeed lack much scientific basis. For Department of Health and Human

Services (DHHS) Secretary Donna Shalala to say, as she did in a recent

meeting, that marijuana is comparable to crack in its dangerousness, is to

disparage science and reason.12

Marijuana is not good for health but represents less threat in that respect than

do alcohol and cigarettes; no one dies of the acute effects of marijuana and

even the long-term effects are surprisingly modest. The negative effects of

marijuana use on adolescent development are clearer but still modest. These

are not arguments for legalization (indeed, they argue more for prohibition of

cigarettes and alcohol), but they create a tension when so much emphasis is
32

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

placed on the health effects of the only one of these substances that is not

legally promoted and is disproportionately consumed by the young.

Intrusiveness. A whole array of legal innovations has been justified by the

need to end the “scourge of drugs,” to use President Bush’s memorable 1989

phrase. Drug-dealer “profiling” by police has allowed them to undertake

numerous searches with barely plausible cause; most of those searched are

again either minority or young or both.13 Drug testing of Federal employees

(such as those in the Executive Office of the President) for purely symbolic

purposes has demeaned public service. Some States require that candidates for

State offices be tested for drugs for symbolic purposes; the Supreme Court in

1997 unanimously ruled against this requirement for Georgia. Preventive

detention, a particularly chilling power, has been extended in the context of

the Controlled Substances Act.

Drug policy is clearly getting harsher in this respect. Some jurisdictions are

contemplating testing welfare recipients for drug use and disqualifying those who

cannot remain drug-free. Abe Rosenthal of The New York Times, the most

prominent of the columnist drug hawks, quickly pounced on President Clinton’s

proposal that all teenage applicants for driver’s licenses be subject to a drug test,

suggesting that this was not nearly enough, and that the logic and facts spoke to

the need to do random tests of young adults as well, since they are the highest

risk group.14

The Punitive Cycle. The response to emerging drug problems in this country

is invariably punitive: the first twitch is to raise the statutory penalty for some

offense. This was true in 1996 when methamphetamine showed signs of

moving out of its long-established western base in San Diego, Dallas, etc. It

has not yet happened for marijuana at the Federal level, somewhat surprisingly, but various States are moving in that direction. For example, the

Virginia Senate recently passed an increase in maximum sentences for marijuana

possession offenses; a second conviction can result in a 4-year prison sentence.
33

Peter Reuter

This is truly a vicious cycle, since the argument for raising the sentence for

offenses involving a particular drug are mostly that the current sentence is less

than that for other drugs, which encourages sellers to pick that drug. This

systematically generates sentence inflation. Indeed, many in Congress responded to the claim of imbalance between crack and powder cocaine by

suggesting dramatically increasing penalties for powder. In May 1997 the U.S.

Sentencing Commission, defeated in its previous effort at reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine by lowering the crack

penalties, made recommendations that would increase the powder penalties,

while trying again to lower the disparity.

The intrusive and divisive elements of our policies are not inherent in prohibition. Even harsh punishment is not inherent in prohibition; consider how

lightly we enforce laws against prostitution.15 However, they arise remorselessly

out of the logic of drug scares, under the assumption that tougher policies will

make a difference. There is some understanding that racial disparity and the

loss of civil liberties are not trivial harms but this rubs up against the unquestioned assumption that another major goal is importantly served by these

measures, namely reductions in drug problems.

Comparing the U.S. and Western Europe

Perhaps we suffer no more from illicit drugs and clumsy drug policies than

other developed countries with more wealth than self-control. Rob MacCoun

and I have been studying the experiences of 10 Western European countries,

all of which have had significant problems with heroin and marijuana; some

have also experienced cocaine or methamphetamine problems.16

European innovations in tolerant drug policy, such as the Dutch coffee shops

and the Swiss heroin maintenance trials, attract a fair amount of attention in

the United States. But most Western European drug policy is firmly in the

prohibitionist legal framework and, with respect to drugselling, these countries
34

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

are, by their standards, aggressive both in enforcing the laws and in the length

of sentences served by traffickers. They are, with Sweden and France as interesting exceptions, very much less aggressive towards drug users than is the

United States. They are, again with the exception of Sweden and France,

strong supporters of needle exchange programs and other efforts to reduce HIV

risk behaviors among intravenous drug users. As the British Advisory Council

on the Misuse of Drugs famously said in 1987, “Drugs are an important problem. AIDS is a more important problem.”17

None of these countries has a problem with illicit drugs comparable to that in

the United States, mostly because they have not experienced a major epidemic

of cocaine use. The highest reported figure we have been able to find for lifetime

marijuana use among high school seniors is 36 percent in Spain, compared to

more than 50 percent in the United States in recent years; for most European

countries the figure is closer to one-quarter. Heroin addiction in some countries,

notably Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, approaches the U.S. rate of about 2–3 per

1,000 population. But if one adds in cocaine, the U.S. figures for the prevalence

of addiction are at least twice that of any European country.

Even starker is the difference in violence, though this is all impressionistic. I

interviewed a senior Zurich police official during the period when the city

allowed drugsellers and buyers to operate openly in a park, called the Platzspitz,

near the train station. The official was complaining about how bad the crime

situation had become because of the drug market. He showed me a list of the

31 major crime incidents in the park in 1990. The list included a fight with a

policeman and precisely one homicide. This for a park in which many hundreds of drug dealers and buyers, using heroin and some cocaine, congregated

every day! Similarly, in other European cities the drug market generates theft

and disorder but not high levels of violence.

AIDS related to intravenous drug use has been a significant problem in some

European countries, with France, Italy, and Switzerland the most badly
35

Peter Reuter

affected. But neither in terms of the fraction of intravenous drug users who are

HIV-positive, nor in the fraction of the population that is HIV-positive, as the

result of drug use, do the figures for any European country approach those for

the United States.

Should we attribute the smaller drug problems in Europe to their policies? Rob

MacCoun and I see little basis for this. Take the violence for example. The

low level of violence in crime generally, perhaps itself the result of the small

number of guns, is more plausible a factor than any policy action by police or

the criminal justice system. The absence of a significant cocaine epidemic can

hardly be attributed to enforcement; prices are now down near to U.S. levels

despite increasing seizures. The greater strength of families in Southern

Europe, the better safety net for those who are long-term unemployed, and the

smaller fraction of young males growing up in poor female-headed households,

are plausibly more important. It is hard to do any formal testing with the

available data, but this seems to us a reasonable interpretation.

Interestingly, the choice of drug policy by nations is more influenced by views

about the role of government, as well as by views about what constitutes the

drug problem. For example, the Swedish population accepts a paternalistic

state and will tolerate highly intrusive rules, including compulsory drug

treatment even without an arrest. In Spain there are no criminal penalties for

the possession of small amounts of any psychoactive drug; this represents less a

decision about drug policy than a response to the long experience with the

authoritarian Franco regime, which has created a strong suspicion of any laws

that allow the government to regulate private conduct. Europeans generally

see illicit drugs as primarily a personal and health problem, a position consistent with the lower levels of drug-related violence. The U.S. public sees illegal

drugs as a crime problem; almost all speeches and most newspaper articles refer

to “drugs and crime.” For a nation that sees crime as something to be solved by

punishment, that is enough to sustain a set of laws and programs that make

toughness their centerpiece.
36

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

A Role for Research

Clearly there are policy alternatives to our current regime, even if we stick with

prohibition. For any proposal involving less harshness the central issue is assessing the consequences of a highly punitive approach. At a minimum it would be

useful to say whether longer prison sentences, more drug seizures, or more

intensive money-laundering investigations can increase prices or reduce availability, and what effect these changes would have on drug use by current or

prospective users and on drug-related problems. Not a single empirical paper

attempts to answer that question. The closest one gets is a paper of 25 years ago,

which found that higher prices for heroin increased property crimes in Detroit.18

There has been a little progress lately in estimating the price elasticity of demand for various drugs and various populations19 but that is just a small first step.

Oddly enough, we can say a great deal more about the effects of treatment and

prevention, which account for no more than 20 percent of this Nation’s public

expenditures on drug control, than about the consequences of enforcement.20

Even more oddly, that is the result of the dedication to punishment; any other

program that is not punishment has to justify itself against the suspicion that it

is kind to criminals (treatment) or is too diffuse (prevention). Since punishment is what drug users and drugsellers deserve, there is little need (in the eyes

of politicians and perhaps the public) for these programs to demonstrate their

effectiveness. Thus, the National Institute on Drug Abuse has a research

budget of $450 million; research on drug enforcement has to fight for its share

of the National Institute of Justice’s (NIJ’s) paltry $30 million annual budget,

albeit that money is tripled by various evaluations and earmarks. Twenty

million dollars is certainly far too generous an estimate of the funding for

research related to drug enforcement.

One can usefully adapt a complaint of the public health research world to

explain this situation. Prevention advocates object that whereas surgical

procedures only have to be safe and medicines safe and effective, prevention
37

Peter Reuter

programs have to be demonstrated safe, effective, and cost-effective. The

corollary for drug enforcement is that it doesn’t even have to be safe, let alone

effective or cost-effective. Drug enforcement has become a crusade, and

crusaders scarcely need a map, let alone evaluation.

The Federal enforcement agencies sponsor no research themselves, notwithstanding Federal program expenditures of about $10 billion. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may

generously be called nonanalytic; more accurately, they are anti-analytic. Not

only do they lack any capacity for internal policy analysis, they seem to lack

even the ability to contract with external research organizations. The DEA’s

inability to report price data in a meaningful way, despite gathering about 5,000

observations each year, is symptomatic of this. Surely no other Federal agency in

the 1990s would report the highest and lowest figures as a range, without any

measure of central tendency. To report that the price for marijuana went from a

range of $25–$450 in 1993 to a range of $40–$450 in 1994 is to simply inform

the world that these data are irrelevant.

Clearly a large research and analysis program is needed that has the depth and

durability to develop more credible measures of the intensity of treatment and

the size of the drug problem in a particular community. We need to take

account of the enormous variation in the intensity of enforcement and severity

of sentencing that seems to exist across cities and States. For example, in

Texas in 1992 the median prison sentence for those convicted of drug trafficking was 10 years, compared to only 2 years for those in Washington State. It

should be possible to build on the improvements in the drug data indicators

being developed by various Federal agencies.

Why is there so little research on drug enforcement? Surely part of the answer

is simply that there is, as James Q. Wilson noted in a recent lecture,21 shockingly little research on crime control generally. But another factor, I conjecture, is a curious confluence of liberal and conservative interests. Those who
38

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

support tough drug enforcement see no gain in evaluation; Peter Rossi’s oftcited comment, “If you don’t like a program, evaluate it,” is highly relevant.

Liberals find the whole effort distasteful enough that they simply want nothing to

do with it; in particular, they don’t want to evaluate it for the purposes of making

it work better. They would much rather focus on the programs in which they have

faith and in which they passionately believe, namely prevention and treatment.

Conclusion

But a society that deliberately averts its eyes from an honest assessment of a

massive and frequently cruel intervention that sacrifices so many other goals

for the one desideratum of drug abstinence can scarcely expect to find a wellgrounded alternative. I am struck by the lack of any nuanced debate about

drug policy, beyond the ungrounded and polarizing legalization shouting match

and the banal and marginal discussion of how the Federal drug budget should

be spent. Welfare reform, public housing policies, and income support generally may do more to affect drug abuse and related problems than those programs that claim to explicitly target them, yet there is rarely any serious

discussion of their role in drug policy.

In John LeCarré’s The Honourable Schoolboy, George Smiley finds some evidence that a prominent Chinese businessman in Hong Kong may be a Communist spy. Launching an investigation in Hong Kong is both politically

sensitive and expensive, so he has to convene a meeting of the Foreign Office,

Treasury, and other agencies to get authorization and funds. The Foreign

Office is aghast; if the investigation were to become public and the businessman were innocent, it would be a major political embarrassment. On the other

hand, the Governor in Hong Kong entertains and trusts this businessman, and

indeed may recommend him for knighthood; it would be equally embarrassing

if it turned out that he was a spy! They become increasingly panicked and

press Smiley for a judgment; is he a spy? Smiley inscrutably says he cannot
39

Peter Reuter

answer without doing the investigation. The end of the story is of course that

they give him the money and the authority, because the answer must be found.

That is the situation we face with respect to drug policy. If we want to know

the answer as to whether we can make prohibition less expensive, divisive, and

intrusive—and maybe reduce the American drug problem—then we can’t

expect anyone to give a persuasive answer who is not provided the money and

authority to find out what our tough enforcement actually accomplishes.

Doing less rarely attracts much support for dealing with a problem that still

concerns large parts of the community. But this may be the only responsible

recommendation that can be made now. Locking up drug offenders for

shorter terms, worrying more about the racial disparities in sentencing

policies, and giving up fewer of our civil liberties for unlikely reductions in

drug problems may be the best one can do at the moment. That would mean

less intrusive, divisive, and expensive policies and perhaps little increase in

drug problems.

Researchers are always inclined to think that learning and understanding are

important for policy. The failure of the repeated findings that drug treatment

has a very high benefit-cost ratio to make a policy impact22 is a sober reminder

that the political decisionmaking here is driven by other considerations. But

we might actually see something approximating a reasonable discussion of the

alternatives in front of the Nation if a more credible base of empirical analysis

was available. In its absence we are doomed to rhetorical debate.
40

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

Question-and-Answer Session

Adrian Curtis, Justice Management Division, U.S. Department of Justice,

Washington, D.C.: Based on the Maryland State Legislature’s consideration of

the same kind of legislation that Virginia has passed and your testimony to

Congress, what kind of reaction do you get from elected officials when you talk

to them about “less may be better?”

P. R.: I don’t have enough one-on-one contact with elected officials to answer

that. Because the Nation still believes that drug crime is near the top of the list

of domestic problems and because of the ease with which people can be persuaded that being less tough is a danger to the Nation in terms of worsening

the problem, I think that the political gains associated with this are very slight.

I make no claims that this is a politically feasible path. I am a policy analyst

more than a political analyst.

In terms of policy, one can make a case that we punish beyond reason. You

asked me whether that is sellable; I can’t say much to that.

That unreasonable disparities in sentencing exist is something that many

officials accept as a problem. And that was the one issue on which a real

leadership for reform could be found in Congress. But it is striking how hard it

is to identify leaders in either the Senate or the House who support anything

more than marginal shifts in drug policy. Most of the debate is about whether

we should spend more on treatment and less on enforcement, which is not the

right way to think about this problem. Each program should be evaluated on

its own merits.

Beyond that, it is striking how little high-level nuanced discussion takes place

about drug policy in Congress. I have that sense about State Houses too,

although I don’t track them closely.
41

Peter Reuter

Samuel Dash, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C.: In

your talk, you touched from time to time on violence related to severe and

aggressive drug enforcement, and you made some comparison briefly between

Europe and the United States. Other than our being known as a violent

community, to what extent have the studies shown what people often believe,

as you do, namely that aggressive drug enforcement has increased street crime

like burglaries and other types of theft offenses with violence? Do you have

evidence of that?

P. R.: The answer is no; I do not have evidence. But I don’t quite believe the

proposition you attribute to me. I want to be careful about what it is that

policy accomplishes. Three kinds of violence are related to drugs: 1) the

psychopharmacological effects of the drugs themselves, 2) economic compulsive violence (some of which has to do with crime by users who commit crimes

to earn the money to purchase expensive drugs), and 3) the violence that

occurs in the course of drug distribution.

Some years ago, I wrote that because of our very intense enforcement, we have

generated more violence in the markets, particularly on the dealer side. That is,

by being very tough, we create lots of uncertainty in the market. We move

people around a lot, so that market-sharing arrangements are very transient. Just

the fact that lots of dealers go off to prison from time to time means that everybody’s “looking for new connections” all the time because the old connections

may be lost.

The FBI puts out a figure each year on the percentage of homicides that are

drug related. I don’t think that figure ever reached as high as 10 percent. It is

now down around 5 percent. It is a figure that has little credibility, in part

because the process that generates it only allows one “cause” per homicide.

It’s unclear to me whether enforcement is in fact an important part of the

source of violence, as opposed to the fact that a unique confluence of crimino-
42

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

genic forces affect American drug markets: Young, poorly educated males with

lethal weapons, enormously valuable commodities, and large quantities of

cash. It’s the fact that one can hold in his hand something that’s worth many

thousands of dollars that really makes this market different. It may be that the

extent to which the police “churn” this market or shape it is really much less

important than the confluence of those factors. But we are now in the area of

conjecture in the absence of data beyond a couple of studies in two cities, I

think in New York and the surrounding areas, for just 1 or 2 years.

James Austin, National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Washington,

D.C.: There is a policy that has been floating around that I would call “coerced treatment” for probationers and parolees. If they fail drug tests, they are

jailed for a certain period of time. What is your opinion of that policy, and is

there any evidence that it would work?

P. R.: You are talking about Mark Kleiman’s proposal of “coerced abstinence.”

Kleiman, a close collaborator of mine over many years, has been advocating for

some years (with increasing success in terms of catching public policy interest)

the notion that a very large share of all the heroin and cocaine in this country

is consumed by people who are in the hands of the criminal justice system—

whether on pretrial release, probation, or parole. They are on conditional

liberty. The public assumes that a condition of that liberty is that they are drug

tested from time to time since their criminal activity is presumed to be related

to the use of expensive drugs. In fact, the criminal justice system does a great

deal of drug testing. What it doesn’t do much is something consistent based on

testing positive.

Kleiman believes that graduated sanctions are a way to provide a structured

and efficient set of incentives to staying drug-free. The first time an offender

tests positive he spends overnight in jail; the second time he spends two nights

in jail, etc. An argument can be made that if this were universally applied the

consumption of heroin and cocaine could soon be substantially reduced. I

think it is a very insightful idea.
43

Peter Reuter

NIJ has funded an evaluation of something close to this in the Washington,

D.C., court system. Preliminary results suggest that a substantial number of

people on pretrial release respond to those incentives, either seeking treatment

on their own or without treatment. They can substantially cut back on their

consumption of heroin and cocaine.

How universally that may work in the quagmire that makes up the U.S. criminal

justice system I don’t know. But it is certainly worth testing, and it is something that

could arguably make a big difference to our drug problems in the next 5 years. That

would be high on the list of such alternatives, but it is speculation at this stage.

Eric Sterling, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Washington, D.C.: Peter,

I was wondering if your proposal for research and investigation is one that also

might be directed to foundations. Most of this audience is a public sector audience. In thinking about all the possible research proposals to test the questions

that you have raised, it might be useful if your remarks were reprinted in the

Chronicle of Philanthropy, because the question so often asked is, “What works?”

You are asking the question what works in the area of enforcement, and the

answer is, “We don’t know.” What body of research proposals and questions

have been put together that could be presented to a grants administrator saying,

“Here’s a whole group of tests that we think ought to be made.”

P. R.: First, let me again go back to the comment Jim Wilson made in December, which is how little foundations are interested in crime control generally.

Jim Wilson, of course, sits on many boards and can talk to any foundation

president that he cares to call. He said, however, “I have many allies, but I

have never been able to get a substantial body of continuing support for

research related to crime control out of foundations.”

The foundations are, in general, a liberal wing of the American community,

and they also find drug enforcement distasteful. I think that there is very little

interest in funding research. It’s also fair to say that this is the kind of research
44

Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

that more appropriately should be done under government auspices. There is

frequently need for access to data that can only be obtained in our current

policy regime if there is Federal sponsorship.

To bring up a case of acute interest to me, DEA collects data on drug prices; it

is called STRIDE [System to Retrieve Information From Drug Evidence] and is

a very large and interesting dataset for analytic purposes. It is now available

only to Federal grantees. With a foundation grant, one cannot access those

data. I think that STRIDE should be a public dataset, but other data exist that

are appropriately unavailable to anyone other than Federal grantees.

James Boden, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the

President, Washington, D.C.: I’d like you to comment on allowing the medicinal use of marijuana in California. It seems to me you indicated one of the few

opportunities to generate some agreement on prevention rather than enforcement

may be in the marijuana area. Marijuana has been to some extent de-vilified.

P. R.: Marijuana is the “cutting edge” drug for policy reform. One could

almost imagine this country 5 years from now with a different set of laws on

marijuana. It takes a lot of imagination, but it is possible. This is inconceivable

with heroin, cocaine, and other drugs. Proposal 215 was significant in that it

signaled general discontent with marijuana policy as it now stands. About half

of those who voted for it voted on the basis that they wanted more general

reform with respect to marijuana, and about half believed it was medicine.

Marijuana may or may not have medicinal uses. It is, in fact, a question for

biomedical research, and it is a question that has been on the table for a long

time. There has been a real reluctance to do this, in part I think, because it

represents biomedical research’s unease with the notion that smoking a

naturally occurring weed could possibly be the best therapy that modern U.S.

science could come up with. That’s a very important factor, but obviously

there was a real disinclination on the part of the policy world to allow research
45

Peter Reuter

that would make a centerpiece of the drug war look as though it had some

potentially good effects. The unwillingness to do research about the possible

medicinal uses of marijuana is one of the minor casualties of the drug war. I

have no idea whether research on this topic would produce a positive result.

But I think that doing credible research in the near future may do something

to move the issue of medicinal use of marijuana away from drug policy. They

are really not related. Cocaine is a Schedule II drug and is used as a topical

anesthetic in a few operations; that is not a matter of controversy. The notion

that marijuana might have medicinal purposes, precisely because it is this stage

in history, generates a great deal of controversy. I think it should probably be

separated from the issue of drug policy reform.
47

James Q. Wilson

The Legitimation of Criminal

Justice Policies and Practices

Presentation by

Mark H. Moore, Ph.D.

Kennedy School of Government

Harvard University

March 11, 1997

Washington, D.C.

My subject is the legitimation of the criminal justice

system in the United States. It is a subject that I take

extremely seriously because it is easily taken for granted that

the system will be seen as legitimate, and, as a consequence,

fail to do the work that is necessary to legitimate the system

in the eyes of the citizens who observe it, are subject to it,

and seek to use it.

We citizens ask a great deal from criminal justice agencies.

We ask them to protect us from criminal attack—and not

just from the reality but also from the fear. When criminal

attacks occur, we want criminal justice authorities to soothe

our indignation by catching the crooks and giving them their

just deserts (at the same time according them the full protection of their constitutional rights). We expect them to

achieve these ambitious goals without reaching too deeply
48

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

into our pockets for money or intruding too deeply into our privacy and freedom. We also want reassurance that whatever money and authority is entrusted

to them will be used fairly, that they will allocate effort toward those in need

rather than those with ability to pay, and that they will enforce the law without

fear or favor. Increasingly, we ask them to take a step further and, in the words

of Attorney General Janet Reno, “help to reweave the fabric of community.”

My purpose today is to discuss how criminal justice agencies—the police, the

prosecutors, the public defenders, the courts, and correctional agencies—can

meet these ambitious goals. In discussing this topic, I’ll adopt a managerial

perspective. That is, I’ll adopt the point of view of those who manage these

agencies and look for some concrete ways to use the resources entrusted to them

to accomplish their broad and diverse goals. But my focus will not be on the

common concerns of management: the downward and inward management of

personnel policies and procedures. It will instead be on the efforts criminal

justice agencies can and must make to legitimate themselves in the eyes of the

citizens they serve. This includes a focused effort on the particular set of encounters that criminal justice agencies have with citizens, in particular:

1. Ensuring quality in their individual encounters with citizens, not only

when they are providing “service encounters” to “clients” who appeal to

them for help, but also when they engage in what I would describe as an

“obligation encounter”—when they ask clients to stand still for the orderly

processes of justice to be visited upon them.

2. Rendering their organizations transparent and accountable to citizen

“overseers” and their representatives, who demand assurances that the

agencies are achieving their complex purposes in an appropriate way.

3. Engaging citizens as “coproducers” of crime control and justice in operations designed to help criminal justice agencies achieve goals that they

cannot achieve by themselves alone but which must include citizens in a

variety of different capacities.
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M a r k H. M o o r e

Finally, and most important, is the effort to extend the effect of all three of these

kinds of citizen contacts by offering a kind of moral leadership that teaches

people what it is that justice requires in a democracy and, through that device,

“to help reweave the fabric of community” that is gradually becoming tattered.

In short, I am going to be much more interested in how managers of criminal

justice agencies engage external actors through political and legal processes

than in how efficiently they give direction and control to their employees. My

argument is that in the past the goal of enhancing the legitimacy of criminal

justice agencies and the specific efforts that are required to accomplish this

goal have been badly neglected and to some degree misdirected. I will also

argue that this failure has weakened not only the standing of the criminal

justice system in the eyes of the community but also, as a consequence, the real

performance of the criminal justice system. Finally, I will argue that much of

the increased focus on community justice should be understood as increased

efforts to legitimate criminal justice agencies and capture the substantive

operational benefits that come from such efforts.

Let me start, however, by recalling the important work that the 1968

President’s Crime Commission did in framing society’s understanding of the

operations of criminal justice agencies and in setting an agenda for reform.

One of the most enduring products of the Crime Commission’s work was the

image of the criminal justice system as a large funnel that channeled criminal

justice cases through a tangle of institutional complexity and local variability

to their ultimate disposition. This image exemplified how criminal justice

agencies were supposed to operate.

Everyone understood, of course, that this was not a “system” in the sense that

the agencies were being explicitly directed toward a particular objective by

some coherent centralized authority. It was only a system in the far more

limited sense that the different agencies were linked together through a

process in which one agency’s “outputs” became the next agency’s “inputs.”
50

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

Thus, police had as an output the arrest of offenders. This, in turn, became

input for prosecutors and public defenders. They then developed cases as their

output, which went on to become the input to courts and so on. This operational interdependence was thought to require some coordinated planning, if

not central direction and control.

This so-called system of criminal justice was judged to be valuable to society in

two broadly different ways. First, the system was an instrument of practical

purposes, thought to be accountable for the efficient and effective reduction of

crime largely through four distinct mechanisms: deterrence (both general and

specific), incapacitation, and rehabilitation. That practical goal and those

practical means were what the system as a whole seemed to be designed to do,

and that was what the citizens who paid to support the system wanted as a result.

That’s frame one, the practical frame.

But the criminal justice system was also considered important in a wholly

different way, not only as a practical instrument for achieving specific results,

but also as an instrument of justice—a way of holding offenders accountable

for their crimes and also protecting their constitutional rights. It is important

to understand that the second idea, the criminal justice system is in place to

produce justice, not just to control crime, could constitute a stand-alone justification for criminal justice system processing. From this point of view, the system

did not have to show that it was producing any practical effect, such as reducing crime; it was enough that it produce justice. Views about what constitutes

justice vary widely of course, both in general and in individual cases, but the

point is that creating justice is a different idea than that of controlling crime.

Further, the production of justice could constitute a separate and complete

justification for the operations of the system.

Now these two evaluative frames defined two different ways in which the

individual agencies in the criminal justice system (and the system as a whole)

could legitimate and justify itself in the eyes of the citizenry. The system could
51

M a r k H. M o o r e

legitimate itself as an effective and efficient means of reducing crime. Or, it

could establish itself as an important instrument of justice, a means for ensuring

that citizens lived up to their responsibilities to one another and to the society.

Since both were important, the goals of reform were to advance on both fronts

simultaneously: to make the criminal justice system more efficient and effective

and to make it fairer and more just.

Like all useful social conceptions, the paradigm constructed by the President’s

Crime Commission highlighted some important features (such as society’s

response to crime) at the expense of others that were equally or more important parts of a more complex, underlying reality. Such simplification is

inevitable in a democratic policymaking process, of course. It may even be

helpful insofar as the simplification does not emphasize everything that exists,

but instead focuses on those areas needing improvement. And it is entirely

possible that the Crime Commission focused society’s attention on the

problems that were most important to attend to at the time its members did

their work. There certainly was then, as there is now, a great deal to be done

in improving the efficiency, effectiveness, fairness, and justice of America’s

criminal justice system.

Still, hindsight can be used to see what particular features of society’s response

to crime were underemphasized in the Crime Commission’s conception and

are candidates for special emphasis today in current efforts to reform and

legitimate the criminal justice system.

First, the central drama evoked by the funnel image was whether a particular

case and an associated offender would make it all the way through to the end

of the process—that is, to prison. This diagram thus suggests that the whole

point of the exercise was to incarcerate offenders. That was the event at the

end of the line toward which everything else was proceeding. This orientation

ignored two important facts, however. One is that most cases do not make it

all the way through the system. Consequently, an important, overlooked issue
52

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

is what is to be done with cases that remain unsolved or offenders who are not

convicted? The second fact is that most of the criminal justice system’s concrete work or cost occurs both before and after the moment of adjudication.

The community must cope with the fact that many cases cannot be resolved

and that most offenders are returned to the community sooner or later. That

important reality—that we live with crime and with offenders—was obscured.

Second, because the funnel image made the processing of cases to imprisonment

so important, it naturally tended to focus attention on serious criminal cases—

primarily adult felonies. These are the kinds of cases that are worth elaborate

scrutiny. Lesser cases such as misdemeanors or juvenile offenses are judged not

worth the trouble of such elaborate processing or the expense of a prison

sentence. Besides, a sharp focus on serious offenses and offenders seems closely

allied to the goals of producing an efficient and fair criminal justice system.

After all, efficiency and effectiveness demand that scarce resources be reserved

for the most serious offenses and offenders. Fairness demands that the aggressive use of state authority be limited to crimes that are not only prohibited but

intrinsically bad. That leaves little room for discretionary decisions by officials

of whether and how to press charges. Thus, the focus on serious crime ensures

consistency and integrity, as well as economy, in the enforcement of laws.

Third, the image presented a fundamentally reactive view of crime control and

thereby underemphasized some potentially important preventive opportunities.

Of course, the Crime Commission did not entirely ignore prevention. Deterrence, after all, is a preventive concept that seeks to dissuade people from

committing crimes by threatening them with bad consequences if they do.

Incapacitation and rehabilitation, too, can be seen as preventive ideas. They

may not prevent a potential offender’s first crime, but they may well have an

effect on future offending. And given the importance of criminal recidivism and

overall patterns of crime, preventing future crimes by those who have already

committed one is an important preventive contribution. The Crime Commission

also insisted that the root causes of crime include poverty, economic inequality, and
53

M a r k H. M o o r e

racism, and that crime can only be reduced significantly by alleviating these broad

social conditions—the ultimate preventive argument.

Still, in retrospect it seems that the Crime Commission could have noted more

prominently some important opportunities for preventing crime that lie

between the limited reactions of the criminal justice system, on one hand, and

broad social actions directed at the root causes of crime, on the other. Worth

mentioning are some interventions that now go under the label of “situational

crime prevention” and focus on reducing opportunities for criminal offending;

others, now called problem-solving or order maintenance, focus on intervening in the circumstances that tend to spawn crime. And there are some important interventions that the criminal justice system can make that might alter

the trajectories of youthful offenders, such as more effective enforcement

against domestic violence and child abuse and neglect, or more determined

and sustained responses to early juvenile offending, which were mentioned but

not emphasized in the Crime Commission report.

Perhaps the most important omission of the Crime Commission however was

that, in focusing attention on the publicly supported agencies of the criminal

justice system, it necessarily deemphasized the role that private individuals and

institutions of civil society—families, community groups, churches, merchant

associations—play in controlling crime, both by themselves and as adjuncts to

the criminal justice system. The funnel diagram did not emphasize the central

role played by victims and witnesses in activating and focusing the attention of

criminal justice agencies on particular crimes, nor did it point to the important

role played by citizens who make individual and collective efforts to guard

their own property and intervene with fellow citizens who are behaving badly.

Similarly, the Crime Commission did not draw attention to the role that local

merchants play in seeking to enforce orderly conditions on the streets that

front their stores or in providing jobs to neighborhood kids. It did not emphasize the role of church groups in giving support to single parents struggling to

supervise and raise their children. Such private efforts were viewed as beyond
54

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

the boundaries of the criminal justice system—efforts that might be having an

effect on levels of crime and disorder but were largely independent and beyond

the reach of the agencies of the criminal justice system. This omission was, in

my view, particularly important given the points made above—that the fate of

many offenders is not to be taken from the community and that eventually

offenders are returned to the community for handling there.

The last omission of the Crime Commission and the one most closely related

to the subject of this talk is its outright dismissal of the notion that important

sources of legitimacy for the criminal justice system exist beyond the pursuit of

efficiency and lawfulness. To the Crime Commission, a kind of legitimacy

rooted in moral passion and political responsiveness was viewed with great

caution. Behind moral passion, they saw the lynch mob. Behind political

responsiveness, they saw the threat of political control by the powerful

against the weak. Thus establishing important links between criminal justice

processing and moral passion and politics was viewed not as a way to anchor

and legitimate the system but instead as a way to expose the operations of

the criminal justice system to powerful tides of ignorance and bias. It was

something to be avoided rather than sought out. To do its work, the Crime

Commission believed it was better that the agencies of the criminal justice

system be insulated from both moral passion and politics. Their legitimacy

was to be established in law and professional competence rather than in

responding to the moral passions of individuals and politicians.

The paradigm constructed by the Crime Commission proved to be powerful.

Over the next two decades, agencies of the criminal justice system pursued

the agenda laid out for them with great enthusiasm. They made significant

progress in increasing their professionalism and technical knowledge and in

reducing racial and class biases in system operations. By rights, this progress

should have increased the standing and overall effectiveness of the system.

Instead, they decreased. The popular legitimacy of the system faded even as the

system was becoming fairer and more effective. Legislatures took discretion
55

M a r k H. M o o r e

back from the hands of sentencing judges. Community groups demanded the

establishment of civilian review boards and the removal of civil service protections of police chiefs. Increasingly, citizens turned to private security arrangements to meet their desires for security. The criminal justice system, even as it

became fairer and more professionally competent, was becoming increasingly

irrelevant to citizens’ efforts to guarantee their own security and satisfy their

appetites for justice. The system’s role in producing social justice seemed less

and less important. So the question that faces us now 30 years after the Crime

Commission’s report is this: “How can we restore the standing and effectiveness of the criminal justice system as a social institution that can both guarantee our safety and help us understand our obligations to one another in a

conception of justice?”

The loss of popular legitimacy for the criminal justice system produces disastrous consequences for the system’s performance. If citizens do not trust the

system, they will not use it. If citizens do not use the system, the expensive

apparatus we have constructed will be largely useless because the system

depends fundamentally on citizen mobilization. Moreover, to the extent that

confidence in the system is maldistributed, with poor minorities more suspicious of the system than the wealthier majority, the capacity of the system to

act fairly is undermined, and with that, its future legitimacy, effectiveness, and

capacity to teach what we owe to one another. To the extent that the system

is viewed as inefficient or unjust, its ability to mobilize citizens to comply with

laws voluntarily will be undermined. Without popular legitimacy supporting

criminal justice operations, instead of having a collectively established criminal justice system helping to enforce a widely shared conception of a just moral

order, we will live in a world of gated communities, each with its own conception of right conduct, and each enthusiastically excluding citizens of other

communities. To avoid this result, we must find a way to restore the popular

legitimacy of the Nation’s criminal justice system.
56

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

Legitimacy can be viewed as an abstract value, an ideal to be achieved. From

this vantage point, what particular individuals and groups actually think about

the system and its operations is irrelevant. Of importance is the extent to

which the system can realize a particular set of values such as fairness or

efficiency. Its success in doing so would be registered through technical

professional evaluations, not in popular sentiment. Alternatively, one can

think of legitimacy as something that exists in the minds of citizens. From this

vantage point, legitimacy resides in people’s views of the criminal justice

system, not in performance or comparison to an ideal.

From an operational and managerial perspective, the kind of legitimacy that is

important, I would argue, is the second—the kind that exists in the minds of

citizens the system is supposed to serve. That may be very different from the

first kind of legitimacy and may require different kinds of performance. Indeed,

the big worry is that the ideals that many think should define legitimacy are

not embraced by ordinary citizens. In that case, of course, one would face a

stark choice between legitimating the system through political responsiveness

(which threatens the ideals of justice), on one hand, and trying to make the

system meet the ideal standards of efficiency and fairness, on the other.

However, the fact is that many of the system’s most important ideals are

embraced by the populace. Citizens, too, like procedural fairness. They like a

sense of proportionality. They like efficiency and economy. And even if they

didn’t like those things (which give us an enormous advantage), we as leaders

and managers of criminal justice agencies would need to help citizens learn to

love them because, in the end, the system cannot operate without the support

of the citizenry for its fundamental values.

This, then, is the problem to be addressed. How can we enhance the popular

and moral legitimacy of the system while enhancing the legitimacy that comes

from being technically proficient and aligned with important legal virtues such

as fairness and restraint.
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M a r k H. M o o r e

My answer to this is simple: As managers of criminal justice agencies, we must

pay attention to the quality of the interactions we have with citizens as clients,

as overseers, and as coproducers of justice. In managing these interactions, we

must stand for the important democratic values of fairness and restraint. This

seems to be consistent with the challenge of establishing community justice

and using the Nation’s criminal justice institutions to reweave the fabric of

community.

Let me explain why. Gary Abrecht, writing to America’s corporate executives

about how to improve the performance of their organizations, develops the

idea that success lies in paying attention to the quality of what he calls “moments of truth”—the particular moments when customers encounter an

organization’s operation and begin forming impressions about the company

and its product. From my point of view, labeling such mundane events as being

put “on hold” when one calls to order a product as a moment of truth seems a

little grandiose. But even in the commercial world, this grandiosity helps to

focus attention on the details of these all-important customer contacts.

The “moments of truth” concept to me seems more appropriate when we are

talking about the ways the Nation’s criminal justice agencies might legitimate

themselves in the eyes of the citizens they serve. There really are important

moments of truth—i.e., when, as clients, citizens encounter the criminal

justice agencies asking for help or being obliged to stand still; when, as citizens,

they contemplate the work of the criminal justice agency and decide whether

it is performing well or badly; and when, either as part of a community-based

patrol or as a part of a jury, they are asked to participate in the production of

justice. Those three moments of truth are what we have to pay attention to.

The most obvious points of contact between citizens and criminal justice

agencies consist of those moments when citizens call the system for help. We

imagine victims and witnesses calling the police for emergency aid or demanding justice from prosecutors. This is, of course, an important client group that
58

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

criminal justice agencies must serve. If anyone is a “retail customer” of a

criminal justice agency, it must be these individuals. And it doesn’t take much

experience in a radio patrol car or even in a prosecutor’s office to learn that

many citizens want things from criminal justice agencies other than the

prosecution of criminal cases. We all know that citizens call the police for

many things other than the response to serious crime. One of the most important ideas associated with community-oriented policing is to view these

noncrime calls for services as worthy of response, rather than as distracting

nuisances. The idea is that these calls may represent opportunities to intervene

early in situations that have become criminal matters. Or even if they are not

that, they may present an opportunity to establish a relationship with a citizen

that can become a “bankable asset” in the future. Similarly, prosecutors have

figured out that they must attend carefully to victims and witnesses to maintain their cases through the long process of adjudication in felony cases, and

they must give close attention to less serious crimes adjudicated in misdemeanor courts.

Agencies of the criminal justice system have important “retail” contacts with

another group of clients as well: Those who become the focus of enforcement

efforts. This group includes alleged criminal offenders, as well as those who

have been stopped for traffic offenses or asked to cooperate in some kind of

crowd control. It has long been accepted that there is little chance of pleasing

these clients of the system and little prospect that they could become supporters. Unlike the clients identified above who need help from criminal justice

agencies, these individuals are obligated to do something they did not choose

to do or are being punished for doing something they ought not to have done.

As recipients of obligations and penalties rather than services, these clients are

unlikely to be satisfied. In any case, it is doubtful that satisfying them should

be the goal of the enterprise. Consequently, with respect to these encounters,

the only goal is to satisfy others that the encounter proceeded properly—that

there was in fact reasonable suspicion, that the stop was made in accord with

the law, or that a sentence was handed down without fear or favor.
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M a r k H. M o o r e

More recently, however, this pessimistic view of how we ought to interact even

with our “obligatees” has changed. Some believe that arrestees, defendants, and

prisoners can tell the difference between being treated badly and well, fairly and

unfairly, and that this difference ought to matter to those who manage criminal

justice agencies. There was a remarkable moment in my life about 10 years ago

in New South Wales. We were talking about how to use surveys to measure the

quality of police service that the New South Wales Police was delivering to the

citizens of Sydney. We talked about doing both a general population survey and

a survey of those who called the police. Then someone in the group asked

whether we should survey arrestees. Everyone laughed, and conversation moved

on to another topic. But about 10 minutes later one of the hardest-nosed cops in

the room said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about that question of whether we

should survey arrestees. At first I thought it was really a dumb idea. But I’ve got

guys in my command who, no matter whom they arrest and under what circumstances, the suspect comes into the station house bloody and mad. With other

guys, no matter whom they arrest, the suspect is clean and calm. I think the

difference matters. I’d like to know what arrestees experience as well as the

people who call us.” So, it may be important to try to satisfy those we obligate as

well as those we serve. After all, most of those we arrest, prosecute, and imprison

will spend the bulk of their lives as citizens, not as arrestees, defendants, or

inmates. And we may need their support as well as the support of those who are

victims and witnesses.

It is also worth noting that citizens want things from criminal justice agencies

both as groups and as discrete individuals. Particularly important are groups that

form around residential communities. Sometimes there are particular interest

groups that become important as well, such as small business associations or

women who fear domestic violence or parents of teenagers who fear drugs and

gangs. One can easily imagine that it might be important to think of such groups

as having “accounts” with criminal justice agencies and that it would be important for those who manage criminal justice agencies to attend to the character

and quality of the relationships they are maintaining through those accounts.
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The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

From my perspective, what is important about these encounters with clients,

both those receiving aid and those receiving obligations (and individuals as

well as groups), is that all such encounters leave a residue of experience and

feelings and that these in turn become the bases for enhanced or diminished

legitimacy of the system. Citizens, like customers in commercial transactions,

remember when they have been treated well and badly, and they respond with

more or less loyalty and interest. They may even come to identify and value

the aims of those who treated them well and learn to suspect and despise the

aims of those who treated them badly. Their interactions with the criminal

justice system are opportunities for communicating values as well as for building support and legitimacy for criminal justice agencies.

While the most intense moments of truth between citizens and criminal

justice agencies may occur when citizens have discrete transactions with the

system that involve their particular interests, the most common moments of

truth may be when citizens hear something about the performance of the

system and form a view of whether it is performing well or badly. These are the

moments when they interact with the system as overseers, not as clients or

coproducers. The views of citizen overseers are important not only because

they affect their willingness to support the criminal justice system with taxes

and grants of authority, but also because their views about whether the system

is just may affect their willingness to obey the law. Citizens want to know that

the system has written rules that are fair, that the laws are enforced fairly, that

the system can respond to some important differences among individuals, and

that the whole system is designed to operate to good effect.

The views of citizen overseers may be profoundly influenced by concrete

experiences they have had as clients of the system. Citizen overseers may also

base their views on the experience of their friends and family. For this reason

client contacts are very important. When we were doing some work with the

Mollen Commission on controlling police corruption, I remember meeting and

interviewing one of the most corrupt and brutal cops that the Commission had
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encountered. I interviewed him knowing that the New York City Police

Department was working very hard to develop community policing and

establish better working relations with poor communities in New York. I had

the sense that this one cop could single-handedly wipe out the day-to-day

diligent efforts of hundreds of officers trying to establish better working relationships in communities. My heart sank as I realized how vulnerable the

overall legitimacy of the system was to the destructive influence of a relatively

small number of bad encounters between officers and citizens.

The point I want to make is that if we wish to engage citizens as effective

overseers of criminal justice systems, it is important for us to find ways to make

our operations transparent and to present them in a comprehensive, consistent,

and reliable way. Many in the criminal justice world have been reluctant to take

on such a responsibility for fear that their operations would become too exposed

and too vulnerable to political interference. However, I think that a lot of

people have had the opposite experience: When they’ve made the effort to

expose and be open about their operations, they win support and enthusiasm

from the citizens. This can then stand them in good stead on occasions when

the system fails. It takes a certain amount of courage to decide to make one’s

organization’s workings visible and accountable to citizens, but that openness is

crucial to getting the most from the particular moment of truth when a criminal

justice agency interacts with a citizen-overseer rather than a client.

The third way that citizens make contacts with criminal justice agencies is

through their important role as coproducers of justice. Victims and witnesses are

important coproducers as well as clients and customers of the system, and their

efforts are essential to making the system work. (One can even imagine that

some offenders are coproducers in the sense that they must work diligently on

their own if rehabilitation is to succeed.) Here are some of the many other ways

in which citizens can become coproducers: They serve on juries; they organize

themselves in block groups; or they serve in sentencing councils to provide

mentoring to kids or to help monitor offenders released in communities. Indeed,
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The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

families of offenders might turn out to be important allies in efforts to reduce future

offending, and not only in juvenile cases. The notion of people in the communities

as coproducers is being advanced currently by those concerned about community

justice. People are inventing new ways to engage citizens in the concrete operations

of the system; in doing so, they not only increase the power and impact of the system

but also its standing with communities.

These contacts with citizens as coproducers, if managed well, provide an

opportunity to increase the legitimacy of the system. Each contact forms an

impression; each contact provides an opportunity to express and advocate for a

particular set of values through the operations of the system. When the police

arrest a suspect and read him his rights in front of victims and witnesses, when

prosecutors explain how a particular case will be handled and why, when

defense attorneys explain the case against their client, or when citizen-jurors

are given their instructions by a judge, certain lessons about the basic values of

the criminal justice system are taught: Measured indignation about criminal

offending tempered by respect for the rights of citizens, the need to share

responsibility in the exercise of social control, and the ambition to be fair. It is

from this material that a constituency for justice and a criminal justice system

can be constructed.

Aristotle observed that the first virtue of a state was the quality of justice it

could produce among its citizens. Justice has a large meaning in that idea:

Right relationships among individuals and among individuals, society, and the

state. Within this broad notion of justice, right reactions to criminal offending

are only one small topic. But in many ways the handling of criminal justice

issues provides the most exacting test of justice, the hottest crucible, the place

where our commitments and understanding to one another are tested most

severely. An important base for all other interactions may be established based

on the quality we can produce in these particularly demanding relationships.

Rightly understood, I believe it is the task of criminal justice agencies to take

on the burden of producing quality justice in society’s response to crime and
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M a r k H. M o o r e

criminal offending. It falls to the Nation’s criminal justice agencies to teach

two of the hardest lessons that citizens in democracies must learn. The first

lesson is the most obvious: It is wrong to give offense to other citizens, that

one has to be restrained and respect other people’s lives and properties. The

second lesson is far less obvious but potentially as important: Namely, it is

wrong to take offense too easily or to respond to offense disproportionately.

The second lesson requires of us that we be tolerant. In many ways it is much

more difficult to be tolerant than to be offended when we are attacked. However, by building a constituency for these values of neither giving offense nor

taking offense easily, we increase the legitimacy of criminal justice institutions

and enhance their efficiency. We also accomplish the broader goal of reweaving the fabric of a liberal community—“liberal” in the old-fashioned sense. We

can come to understand what we most fundamentally owe to one another.

After all, it is in the interstices of social interaction created by the restraint we

impose on ourselves and the wide latitude we give to others that the maximum

of liberty and security is found. And it is this maximum we seek through the

various initiatives of the community justice movement. If we are to produce

justice, we must learn to love it and teach it. That is what the movement to

create community justice is all about.

Question-and-Answer Session

Jenni Gainsborough, National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Washington, D.C.: I enjoyed everything that you said

and agreed with it. The importance of establishing legitimacy is fundamental

to the criminal justice system. I wonder how you deal with two groups that

seem to me to be largely responsible for undermining legitimacy of the system:

Politicians and the media. It seems to me that most people’s contact with the

system is not through the everyday meeting with the police officer, being

arrested, or any of the other things you talked about. What they know about
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The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

crime is what they see on the 6-o’clock news and what their politician tells

them. That certainly is completely contrasted to what you were saying about

tolerance and understanding of the necessity for justice. Is there anything we

can do at that level?

M. M.: This has to do with how criminal justice agencies manage their relations

with citizens as overseers, both through elected politicians and through the media.

You and I could both do a very discouraging analysis. (Norval Morris will complain

probably about the way politicians have shamelessly exploited the crime issue for

electoral advantage and how inadequate the media coverage of crime and the

criminal justice system turns out to be with its emphasis on individual lurid cases

and official misconduct, rather than trying to present to the citizens an accurate

picture of what happens in society.) I share your diagnosis. The question is, Do I

have anything useful to say about what can be done to improve the quality of

those interactions?

I think the first idea is that one may be able to crash through some of the false

impressions created by the media by doing a better job in all of the thousands

of individual encounters with citizens as clients and as coproducers. Instead of

trying directly to build a constituency for justice at the wholesale level through

the media, it may be possible to do it at the retail level by trying to get people

to understand and benefit from each individual transaction in the criminal

justice system. That would be statement number one.

Statement number two would be that if the criminal justice system organizes

itself to be responsive to groups as well as individuals, it might be able to find

another important point of contact between itself and the citizens—a separate

channel of communication between its operations and citizens. That contact

may build support for the agency and establish a basis for communicating

appropriate values. So far, I’m arguing for the idea that we actually try to use

these encounters that occur between criminal justice agencies and citizens to

get our message through the welter of noise and falseness that is out there.
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M a r k H. M o o r e

I think many police organizations were quite startled to discover the success of

the citizen academies. It turned out that if a police agency invited citizens to

come and ride in police cars and see what was going on, they responded with

an enormous amount of intelligent interest and reason. I think a lot of other

agencies are beginning to take a lesson from that particular “book.” So my first

answer is “Don’t do it at the wholesale level, do it at the retail level.”

The next statement is this: “To the extent that you are going to do it at the

wholesale level, I think it’s very important for criminal justice agencies to take

leadership roles in getting their message out. I would advocate that police

chiefs, corrections officials, chief justices, and others engage more actively in

political discussions about the purposes of the system and back up their ideas

about how the system ought to operate with relatively accurate and faithful

accounting of what their organizations are doing. We might find an initial

reluctance among citizens to have their public officials—particularly officials

from criminal justice agencies—being as prominent as I’m recommending, but

this might gradually yield to appreciation for the leadership that they can

provide.

I think that the substantive values to which leaders of the criminal justice

agencies commit themselves are very important. It is very tempting for leaders of

criminal justice agencies, particularly police and corrections, to commit themselves to what one might think of as technical, instrumental goals associated

with reducing crime rather than justice goals that are associated with structuring

relationships properly throughout the society and delivering high-quality services to citizens. So I hope that the people who lead police and correctional

agencies will commit themselves to a set of values that is associated with the

production of quality justice rather than with mere crime control.

Jim Boden, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President, Washington, D.C.: You talked a little bit about the decrease of the legiti-
66

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

macy of the criminal justice system in recent years. Would you address briefly what

effect the role of drug policies and our emphasis on drug control has had on that?

M. M.: This is a good question. I think 2 or 3 weeks ago you had a speech from

my colleague, Peter Reuter, on drug control policy. I’m in favor of laws against

cocaine and heroin use, and I’m perfectly willing to commit the authority and

resources of the Nation’s criminal justice system to trying to reduce the easy

availability of these drugs in our Nation’s communities.

Having said that, I want to acknowledge that this is a very, very expensive use

of the criminal justice system in the sense that it chews up a great deal of

authority and money as a means of preventing an increase in the rate of drug

use and abuse. We have a particular responsibility in this area to use the

authority of the state, which I think of as a scarce and valuable commodity,

with effect and fairly. I think we have been a bit indiscriminate in the way that

we have used authority in the drug war. I don’t want to eliminate our efforts

altogether, but I would like to see us make a more sustained effort to focus on

the places where it would do a lot of good and not cost us so much—and where

we can be relatively sure, not only in our eyes but in the eyes of the citizenry,

that the laws are being brought to bear with effect and fairness. What I worry

about is that we have used authority a little too indiscriminately in drug policy.

Ted Gest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C.: I won’t use this

forum to try to rebut the criticism of the news media, but I will ask a question to

try to make some of your comments a little more specific. Referring to former

Police Commissioner Bratton of New York, who essentially has expressed the

thesis (you can rephrase it if I haven’t expressed it correctly) that over the years

law enforcement got into a syndrome where it said, “We can’t do much about

crime so we won’t try to take a leading role.” How much of that do you agree

with, and how much would you apply that thesis (to the extent that you agree

with it) to the rest of the justice system? Are there any models that Mr. Bratton

and his supporters have put out that might be appropriate for the courts, correc-
67

M a r k H. M o o r e

tions, etc., to try to be more aggressive in their roles in the justice system and in

reducing crime?

M. M.: Let me say a couple of things to that. First, I would be pretty satisfied

with a criminal justice system that only delivered justice, and I would hope that

whatever crime control benefits that I got from that happened as a residual

effect. In my view, the principal justification for the system lies in the quality of

the justice we produced, rather than in the crime control effect. That’s the first

statement I’d make.

The second statement is that I believe (and spend a lot of my working life) in

trying to help the criminal justice system achieve crime-reduction and fearreduction effects as well as produce justice. I don’t think I would have spent as

much of my life on this subject if I didn’t think that criminal justice agencies

could have a very important effect on levels of crime and fear in the society.

So, yes, I do believe that criminal justice agencies can make an important

difference, even in so difficult an area as drug abuse—but perhaps equally in

the areas of crime control and fear reduction.

I think that Commissioner Bratton’s bold statement—reacceptance of responsibility for controlling crime—was a very important moment in leadership of

the criminal justice system. I think it was quite a heroic individual stance—

one that exposed him and his agency to a real prospect of failure and ridicule.

This bold commitment is what I like about it in some ways. It is an interesting

example of the way in which one can crash through the political debate at

some level. Bratton in some sense made himself and his organization transparent. He nominated the terms in which he was prepared to be held accountable

by the public. In doing that, he staked himself out (and with him the rest of

his organization) on the accomplishment of that goal. I think the pressures

that he unleashed actually helped him to run the organization and to increase

its performance and effectiveness.
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The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

A lot of public-sector managers, and particularly criminal justice agency

managers, don’t really understand that accountability is their friend rather

than their enemy. The only chance they have of focusing the attention of the

large organizations they lead is to make themselves accountable and use that

attention to get improved performance. I think Bratton showed us a managerial style and stance as well as a particular set of programmatic activities that

can plausibly be effective in controlling crime.

Yes, I believe that the criminal justice system can control crime; I believe it

should accept crime control as one of its important responsibilities. But I

would add to the important responsibilities that it should accept the responsibility to guarantee the quality of justice and reduce fear as well. Third on the

list would be giving quality service to individuals as a way of legitimating all

the other responsibilities.

Ruth Davis, The Pymatuning Group, Inc., Alexandria, Virginia: I’ve been

impressed with the answers you have made to the questions. I’d like to get

down to what I call the street aspects of the criminal justice system. To me,

the criminal justice system is a process—it has an infrastructure and the

attributes of an organization. When one is involved in it, leadership, salesmanship, and management are needed. Most of what we talk about is leadership

and salesmanship. Management is the hard part; that’s where one has to put

the product or service in the market. If one accepts the fact that management

not only has requirements but it has some rights—such as the ability to select

employees (using the word loosely in this regard), the ability to decide which

services can or should be provided, the ability to charge for those services, and

the ability to measure performance and to do something about it—it’s very

difficult for me to see what it is that we are allowing the management of the

criminal justice system to manage. It has the attributes of management in the

school system and everything else. We know a lot more about how to manage

schools, but anything that has to do with the public—the public makes its

own opinion—is very difficult. I have difficulty seeing what we are providing
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to the system that allows for good management, and what it is that we can

really manage in the system as we see it today.

M. M.: That is right up my alley. I like to think a lot about the successful

management of criminal justice agencies. Three comments come to mind.

First, my very first experience in managing a criminal justice agency was

working for the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1974 and 1975 here in

Washington. I remember testifying with my boss on the Hill at one stage, and

one of the congressional representatives said to him, “Mr. Bartels, how many

people work for you?” And he said, “About half.” It was a wonderful remark,

got the same laugh there as he got here. But there was hell to pay when he

went back to the office.

Jack Maples who worked with Bratton said to me, “I have an enormous advantage over you in understanding how to manage criminal justice agencies. I know

something you don’t know.” I said, “Well, what’s that?” And he said, “Most cops

don’t work most of the time.” That was Maples’ (not my) view. I take the point

that there is a sense out there that officials in criminal justice agencies are not

working hard and are shielded by civil service and union protections.

Let me say three things about the possibility of managing even in those

circumstances. First, it is important to remember that the civil service and

union protections arose because of pretty sloppy and miserable management

in those agencies. It was perfectly appropriate for employees who were being

asked to do hard jobs or were being badly treated by their organizations to get

both civil service and union protections. So I don’t begrudge them that

protection—I understand at least some of its sources.

It has always been my view—I realize it is an ideal view—that authority is a crutch

in management—the thing that bad managers rather than good managers use. Good

managers (like good cops) are people who learn how to accomplish things with

minimum use of authority. So one hardly even notices that they are in positions of

authority. Everything seems so right or it seems so inevitable that things be done this
70

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

way that one just goes ahead and does it. And the mailed fist of real authority never

has to be shown. What I’m saying is that managers are “copping out” when they say,

“We can’t get the job done because we don’t have authority.”

Having said all that, let me make the last statement, which I think is important in relation to the point I was making earlier about Bratton. I’ve spent 25

years of my life not only doing criminal justice stuff, but also studying publicsector management. In school, I learned, like everybody else, that the important and powerful instruments of management were things like organizational

structure, human resource policies, management information systems, and

control systems. I learned a lot about those things. What I gradually came to

realize, however, is that those things weren’t worth a damn without a powerful

external pressure. All those things could do was distribute voltage through an

organizational system. What made an organizational system run was a voltage

generator that existed someplace else. In the world of private-sector management, that voltage generator is the desire for survival, to find a market niche

and beat the competition and to supply goods and services that consumers

want. That desire turns out to produce a lot of voltage going through organizations, which the managers can then effectively deploy, getting the people to

work without having to use authority.

In the public sector, what is the analog? My only answer to that is that I think

political accountability is to the public sector what customer accountability

and competition are to private-sector organizations. If I had to choose between

trying to fix a public-sector organization by fixing its internal control systems,

on the one hand, or making it accountable to a powerful outside body that is

insistently demanding a change, on the other, I would pick the second every

time. In fact, the second is so much more powerful, that if I found myself

running an organization that was going in direction A and there wasn’t any

pressure forcing it to go back in direction B (which I thought was the right

direction), I’d probably work hard to build an outside pressure to move it

toward direction B. That would be a more effective way of getting the job
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M a r k H. M o o r e

done than trying to fix the internal system. The reason is that without that

outside pressure, when I go to ask my troops to do something different, they

look past me and say, “Why?”

Let me make this very concrete. This was a hard lesson for me. I was working

with the Philadelphia Police Task Force. We were doing a review of the

Philadelphia Police Department in the aftermath of two terrible events. One

was the MOVE investigation, in which the police had dropped a smoke bomb

on a house to roust a radical group and the bomb caught on fire and destroyed

a city block. About 20 people were killed. The other was a corruption scandal

that reached just below the commissioner level inside the organization. You

might have thought that this organization would be on its knees with this kind

of dramatic performance failure. So we were trying to fix the police department and work out a basis on which it could reconstitute itself.

We sent out a survey to the citizens of Philadelphia and asked them the following question (fully expecting the survey to come back and tell us that the police

department was bad, which would give us leverage for making important

changes): “On a scale of one to five, what do you think of the Philadelphia

Police Department?” It came back about 4.5. Pretty good, right? Teaching

ratings I’d be glad to have. Then it asked a whole series of discrete questions:

“Do you think the cops are rude?” [Oh yeah, terrible, awful.] “Do you think they

sleep on the job?” [Yeah, sure. We see them sleeping on the job all the time.]

“Do you think they take bribes?” [Yes—a lot of people thought they did.] “Do

you think they sexually harass defendants?” [One-third of the people thought the

cops did that often.] And yet, they rated the department at 4.5!

I was discussing these results with a room full of captains from the Philadelphia

Police Department, and they were all kind of looking down at their shoes,

embarrassed that I didn’t understand. Finally, one guy was goaded beyond

endurance by my ignorance. He looked up at me and he said, “Look, Doc, you

gotta understand; when you’re shoveling shit, you gotta be indulged a little
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The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

bit.” People in the room relaxed a little, and everyone sort of agreed. This was

his understanding—and that of everyone in the room—of the relationship the

agency had to the citizens of Philadelphia. And what’s more, the citizens of

Philadelphia agreed. I suddenly understood. That deal that had been struck

between the citizens of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Police Department

could have been struck (maybe had been struck) in cities throughout the country.

Now if the above is true, there is no leverage for change in that police department. And the only way that the leverage can come for changing the police

department is to have somebody step forward and say, “How about this as an

alternative deal?” When that person steps forward and asks that, it will work

only if he or she is met with a resounding chorus that says, “Yeah, we like

that!” That chorus had better come from outside the department as well as

inside the department, or nothing is going to happen. That’s the moment

when the opportunity for leadership is there.

Bill Burnham, Visiting Fellow, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: To encourage you a little, a story first

about my former employer: When I was in a group saying how many people

worked for the Secretary General of the United Nations, the answer was 10

percent. So you’re batting pretty well!

A point in your main presentation that wasn’t picked up was the enormous

amount of damage a few bad individuals in a system can do. Would you therefore

agree that any effort and any investment of resources by senior management on

finding such people is, in the long run, one of the best uses of resources? (I speak

as a former member of the British Prison Service.)

M. M.: Yes; I believe it’s important to focus attention on people who are

persistent and dangerous offenders both in the citizen population and in our

own organizations. I think it’s terribly important to be able to root them out.

We could go on at great length about controlling corruption in criminal justice

agencies, which is a subject of great interest to me.
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M a r k H. M o o r e

As you know, there is an image out there that there are a few “rotten apples in

the barrel” and that we need to control them. The other notion is that there is

a system of corruption that supports not only those few bad apples at the tail of

the distribution, but also the large number of people interior to the right tail of

the distribution, but still pretty bad actors. You either hear the story that, “We

go after the people at the right tail (rotten apple theory)” or “We go after the

average performance of the organization (the cultural change model).”

I think it is almost silly to have that debate because I think the answer is that

you have to do both of those things simultaneously. Each one helps to reinforce the other. I think it is very dangerous to concentrate exclusively on the

bad guys, because when they get taken out of the system the rest of the organization doesn’t quite understand why. That is, they will react against the

authority. You can be running a class as a teacher, and there may be somebody

in the class who is driving everybody else in the class wild by talking too much

and being a jerk. You will let this go on for a long time hoping that the class

will discipline the miscreant, but the class won’t do it. Then one day you

think, “I’ll be a hero as a teacher and discipline this student so that the other

students can benefit.” Right? I’m always astonished that, in the next 5 seconds,

that first student has become everybody’s best friend, and you’ve become the

biggest jerk in the world. I think that this is a rather common thing that

happens inside organizations. The organization will routinely close ranks

around people who have been singled out for misconduct if one hasn’t built an

organizational climate in which the authority is allied with the people in the

organization and a cultural commitment has been made. That conduct is

something no one wants inside their organization.

Again, making that point more concrete and with more evidence from within

policing (rather than from the weird world of academia): Patrick Murphy,

when he was talking about dealing with police corruption in New York City

always told a wonderful story. Murphy, as you know, had developed a system.

He rejected the advice to concentrate on controlling corruption by setting up a
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Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for Breaking the Cycle of Violence

powerful Internal Affairs Department (IAD) that would investigate the worst

offenders. Instead, he used the centralized IAD as a general staff operation to monitor

“ambient levels” of corruption in a precinct. These reports would then be used as a

basis for discussion with the precinct commanders on what they were doing to

control corruption. He gave the resources for controlling the corruption to the

decentralized precinct commanders rather than leaving it sequestered in IAD.

When asked why it was that he did that, he would give a very eloquent speech.

He said, “Well, in the old days in the New York City Police Department there

would be some corrupt cops, and the people from IAD would come down, walk

into the precinct house, put handcuffs on the officers, and lead them away.

Right after they led them away, the precinct captain would get all the troops

together in the precinct (because morale was now slipping), and the precinct

commander would say, ‘Those bastards from downtown just took Joe and

Willie, two of the finest cops I’ve ever known.’ ” In that moment, the culture

that was supportive of corruption was being advantaged. Authority was aligning itself with the support of corruption and marginalizing the effort at corruption control. Murphy said he wasn’t going to stand for that. He was going to

make the precinct captain put the cuffs on the corrupt cops.

As soon as Murphy’s program was in place inside the New York City Police

Department, things changed fast. The reason they changed fast is that the people

at the captain level, who couldn’t find it in their stomach to control corruption,

left. And that made room for people who thought “thank God, somebody has

finally seen the value of someone like me who is hostile to corruption,” and those

people began coming up through the ranks and taking the captain positions. Once

you have 70 captains focusing on this problem rather than a few people in IAD

trying to make investigations against a “wall of silence,” you’ve got a lot more

social control inside the department than you had before.

So, you don’t always want to go just after the bad guys; you want to go after the

supporting infrastructure as well.

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices
75

Cathy Spatz Widom

Child Victims:

In Search of Opportunities for

Breaking the Cycle of Violence

Presentation by

Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D.

University of New York at Albany

April 8, 1997

Washington, D.C.

We have all read newspaper reports about the deaths

of young children due to child abuse or neglect: Lisa

Steinberg, Jessica Cortez, Emily Hernandez, Joey Wallace,

Nadine Lockwood, and most recently, Elisa Izquierdo. But

what happens to the children who survive? The babies

abandoned on streets or in hospitals, children left unattended

for days without food in filthy roach-infested apartments, or

children brutally abused. These children may not be well

known. Indeed in New York City, no one in the city’s child

welfare administration or the school system noticed the

disappearance of 8-year-old Justina Morales for 15 months,

although she was known to child welfare officials. As we now

know, Justina Morales was murdered in December 1995 and

her body disposed of in a trash can.1
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Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for Breaking the Cycle of Violence

The names of these children appear in distressing newspaper stories like the

case of 16-year-old David Newbury and Mark Rea in Milwaukee, who sexually

assaulted and clubbed to death a classmate. David’s court record revealed

a childhood history of beatings, cruel words, and indifference. Before being

sentenced to life in prison, David told a probation officer, “I lived like I was treated.”2

Today, I have three goals: to briefly describe how childhood victimization and

violent criminal behavior are related, to illustrate promising strategies and

opportunities to intervene, and to suggest some important principles to guide

interventions prior to formulating or proposing new policy. This talk is an

attempt to bridge the world of research with that of policy. You should know

that I do not pretend to be exhaustive here in describing programs, but rather

to illustrate with a few examples.

Over 10 years ago, as Jeremy Travis mentioned, with initial funding from the

National Institute of Justice (NIJ), I began research to address the relationship

between early childhood abuse and neglect and later delinquent and violent

criminal behavior. This is a study of 1,575 children from a metropolitan area in

the Midwest who were followed for a 25-year period after the abuse or neglect

incident. These were substantiated cases of physical and sexual abuse and

neglect, which occurred early in the lives of these children (before age 12).3

Using official criminal records of arrests, we found that childhood victimization increases the likelihood of delinquency, adult criminality, and violent

criminal behavior. At the same time, however, we found that the relationship

is not inevitable, suggesting an opportunity for long-range violence prevention

through appropriate intervention.

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

First, the risk of arrest: Childhood victimization clearly increases a person’s risk

of arrest. To place this in perspective, the odds are almost two times higher

that an abused or neglected child will be arrested as a juvenile for a violent

crime than a control group child.
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Cathy Spatz Widom

Our research was conducted in a metropolitan county area in the Midwest,

using court cases from the years 1967 to 1971. But others have found similar

results. In New York, for example, as part of the Rochester Youth Development study, Thornberry and his colleagues collected information on child

abuse and neglect for the children who were part of their study.5

 They also

found that child maltreatment was a significant risk factor for delinquency.

Similarly, another evaluation by Matt Zingraff and his colleagues, using

maltreated children and two nonmaltreated comparison samples from another

geographic area of the country, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, found

that maltreated children had higher rates of delinquency as well.6

 Thus, in

three quite different prospective studies from different parts of the country

using cases from different time periods, childhood abuse and neglect have been

found to increase a person’s risk of delinquency.

Second, we have also learned that abused and neglected children are arrested at

an earlier age, have more arrests, and are more likely to be repeat violent offenders.7 Abused and neglected children are involved in criminal behavior almost a

year earlier than the control group children. This is important because we know

that age of onset is often negatively correlated with the severity of the disorder.8

Third, there is a cycle of violence. And violence does beget violence. That is,

being physically abused as a child leads to an increased risk of an arrest for

violence. However, our findings indicate that being neglected as a child also

increases the risk of arrest for violence. I’ll come back to this.

Fourth, there are differential patterns for population subgroups. Childhood

victimization seems to have pervasive consequences for criminal behavior and

violence in some respects, that is, it affects females as well as males—and as you

know, females are at low risk for being arrested, particularly for being arrested for

a violent crime. On the other hand, there seems to be a differential impact of

childhood victimization on the criminal consequences for African-American

children as compared with white children.9

 This we do not yet understand.
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Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for Breaking the Cycle of Violence

Fifth and finally, other findings suggest that childhood victimization also has

the potential to affect other domains of functioning. We’ve conducted inperson followup interviews with a subset of the original sample (work supported by the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute on Alcohol

Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the National Institute of Mental Health

(NIMH), and now the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)).10 We have

found that abused and neglected children are also likely to manifest cognitive

and intellectual deficiencies;11 mental health consequences including antisocial personality disorder,12 posttraumatic stress disorder,13 and higher rates of

suicide attempts;14 alcohol abuse for women;15 unemployment; and lower rates

of marital stability.16 These outcomes reported so far most likely represent only

the tip of the iceberg of areas potentially affected in a negative way by childhood victimization.

Enough of the bad news. The good news is that there is an emerging “science of

prevention”17 and that there are some programs that have been shown to be effective.

For the most part, our current system of interventions is highly reactive in

nature, geared toward treatment, rather than proactive with preventive efforts

aimed at reducing vulnerability and risk. In the case of child victims, the

justice system gets the failures of other systems. By the time these children are

treated or seen, it is often after referral by court personnel, when they are

typically manifesting a long history of antisocial behavior.

However, at numerous points in a child’s life and environment there are

opportunities to intervene. This is particularly true for abused and neglected

children and especially those who come to the attention of public officials.18 I

have selected a typical case to illustrate such opportunities for intervention.

This is the case of a male child who was brought to the attention of the courts

through a neglect petition when he was 6 years old. His mother was unemployed and his father’s whereabouts was unknown at the time. He had eight
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siblings, born during an 8-year time period. He was the fifth child. For some

time before the neglect petition, he had been cared for by his maternal grandfather. By the time of his petition, he had been abandoned for some years. At

the age of 7, he was made a ward of the county. During this time, his mother

showed only sporadic interest in him, and indeed, many of the other children

in the family were cared for by other people scattered throughout the city.

Eventually, some of the other siblings were adopted. At age 9, he was picked

up by the police for running away on two separate occasions. He was held

overnight, and the incident was recorded. Then, he was sent to a foster home.

During this time, his mother would take him away from the foster home, take

him out of school, and return him to the foster mother with only the clothes

on his back. At that time, the public school system referred him to the

Children’s Bureau because of the constant disruption of his school attendance

due to his mother’s moving from place to place. At age 12 and again at age 13

he was picked up and charged with being ungovernable. The first time, he was

sent to a group home for a short stay. The second time, he was placed on

probation. By age 20 he was well on his way to becoming a repeat violent

offender. By age 32 he had 13 separate arrests for violence, and by all accounts

he might be considered a dysfunctional young adult. By that time he had spent

several years in correctional facilities.

What promising strategies or programs might have made a difference in his

life? Before his birth, home visitors might have worked with his mother to

improve her parenting skills through public health and family support system

services. Home visitation is one type of program that involves several models.

Some rely on public health nurses who establish contact with mothers during

their pregnancy and provide frequent visits after birth, whereas others rely on

paraprofessionals who meet with the mother after discharge from the hospital.

One reason for using home visitation is to reach families who might not

otherwise have access to services, such as rural families living in isolated areas,

urban poor isolated families, or families who might be unwilling to travel to

service providers, such as abusive or neglectful families.
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Another advantage of the home visitation program is that, after having developed

a relationship with the parent, home visitors can provide services and models for

effective parenting. One program, developed by David Olds and his colleagues,19

uses prenatal and infancy home visitation by nurses to prevent a wide range of

health and development problems, including prevention of child abuse. The

program was based on the premise that nurse home visitors were in an optimal

position to identify and help change factors in the family environment that

interfere with maternal health habits, infant caregiving, and parental personal

accomplishment in the areas of work, education, and family planning. This

intervention was assessed through a randomized trial with 400 first-time high-risk

mothers. Compared with families without these services, home-visited clients had

fewer low-birth-weight babies, fewer reported cases of child abuse and neglect,

higher rates of child immunizations, and more age-appropriate child development.

Now our young man also might have been enrolled in a program for preschoolers at risk for impairment of intellectual functioning and eventual

school failure, such as the Perry preschool project.20 In this project, lowincome, black, 3- and 4-year-olds were randomly assigned to preschool and

control conditions. Children in the experimental group attended high-quality,

cognitively oriented early childhood education for 1 to 2 academic years.

Teachers made weekly home visits, and monthly parent meetings were held.

Longitudinal followup data to age 19 indicate that the Perry preschool children showed lower rates of placement in special education classes, lower grade

retention, better performance on standardized measures of achievement, better

high school graduation rates, and lower rates of welfare assistance than the

children with no preschool. Further followup at approximately age 27 showed

that the preschool program had dramatically reduced the rate of arrests and

chronic offending.21

Another opportunity that we missed for our young man was when the public

school system, recognizing this child’s inschool problems, complained about

the disruptive influence of the child’s mother. Truancy has been increasingly
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recognized as a major problem in our country. A number of communities have

begun to design truancy-reduction programs that often involve schools, law

enforcement, families, businesses, judicial and social service agencies, and

community and youth service organizations. Such programs involve intensive

monitoring, counseling, and other family-strengthening services that are

offered to truants and their families. And in these cases, there is at least

preliminary evidence to suggest that these programs may be effective.22

Although too late for our young man, a series of community-based interventions with children and adolescents, aimed at violence prevention, was initiated in 1992 at various sites across the country.23 Now, these programs are not

designed to intervene with abused and neglected children, yet we hope that

the information obtained from the evaluations of these promising interventions will be helpful.

But for all of these promising strategies (and others not mentioned), we will

need to use caution in moving from small pilot tests such as these to large-scale

prevention trials. It is very tempting to generalize from programs that have

shown promising results. However, it is very important to resist the temptation

since there may be features of experimental projects that are difficult or even

impossible to reproduce in a large-scale social program.

What have we learned from these promising strategies or interventions to help

guide the development of further programs to break the cycle of violence? I’d

like to mention six principles very briefly:

1. The earlier the intervention, the better. Interventions need to be instituted early—before the behaviors have stabilized and become less amenable to

change.24 Early childhood is a period during which the central nervous system

is changing rapidly and profoundly and the attitudes and habits of children are

formed.25 Without interventions, deficits or dysfunctional behaviors at one age

lay the groundwork for subsequent dysfunctional behaviors.26 For example,
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severe malnutrition in infancy or brain damage from physical abuse may lead

to impaired cognitive and intellectual functioning, which in turn affects IQ

and obviously affects school performance, which in turn affects that child’s

ability to function adequately as an adolescent and young adult. Services

should begin early, preferably during the prenatal period or shortly after birth,

and should extend through the early years of a child’s life. Early interventions

should focus on eliminating factors that decrease a child’s capacity for normal

cognitive and neurological maturation. Aiming early intervention efforts at

childhood victims has the potential to influence their behavior before their

first offense.

This is not to say that all childhood victims should automatically become

suspects. But given the increased risks associated with early childhood victimization, police, teachers, and health workers need to recognize the signs of

abuse and neglect and take action to intervene early. Later intervention

should not be ignored, but later interventions are more labor intensive and more

difficult since they must deal simultaneously with the existence of problem behaviors and the prevention of further additional problem behaviors. If earlier identification of abuse and neglect leads to positive interventions then this should reduce

the risk of future violent behavior.

2. Don’t neglect neglected children. Increased attention needs to be paid to

neglected children. Although neglect cases have not received as much attention as cases of physical or sexual abuse, some researchers have suggested that

children who experience neglect may be as vulnerable to long-term problems

and to dysfunctional behavior as are victims of physical or sexual abuse.27 Our

research demonstrated a clear link between neglect and later violent criminal

behavior. These findings are of particular concern since the incidence of neglect

is more than twice that of physical abuse, and neglect cases represent the

majority of the cases taxing the child protection system. In contrast to the

episodic and explosive nature of physical abuse, neglect is a chronic condition

which, in some ways, may be more amenable to intervention strategies.
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Few justice programs address the needs of neglected children. The disproportionate number of these cases has at least two consequences for public officials:

First, they will be called upon to deal with more cases of abuse and neglect,

and second, since childhood victimization in the form of neglect is linked to

later criminal behavior, a larger share of tomorrow’s offenders will be today’s

victims of neglect.

3. One size does not fit all. It is also important to recognize that one size does

not fit all, for families or children. What works for one child in one context

may not work for a different child in the same setting, the same child in

another setting, or the same child in another period in his or her development.

Characteristics of the child will influence the extent to which interventions

may be effective. For example, temperament exacerbates in some cases or

minimizes in other cases a child’s level of risk to develop problem behavior.28

We have found that there is a small group of children, less than 7 percent,

within the larger group of abused and neglected children in our sample who

have indications of severe behavior problems at an early age.29 These children

with behavior problems made more placement moves than children without

such indication. And these children with behavior problems are seven times

more likely to be arrested as a juvenile and four times more likely to be arrested

for a violent crime than children without those indications. Now, whether

frequent moves reflect an early predisposition of the child to antisocial behavior

or whether they reflect a response to it, children with numerous placements are

in need of special services and are not well served by routine responses. Rather

than waiting until after multiple placement failures, better identification of these

children prior to placement would permit assignment to specialized treatment

programs based on an assessment of the child’s needs, which includes taking into

consideration the child’s developmental status at the time.

To be effective, interventions need also to recognize that children do not

develop in a vacuum but, rather, in a social context. Characteristics of parents

or caretakers and of the neighborhood and the community in which the child
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lives also exert potent influences on the child’s development. While the first

important influence on the child is the family, children and families are

interacting members of a larger social system including schools and communities.

There is growing evidence that the long-term impact of childhood trauma,

whether it is direct victimization as in child abuse and neglect or witnessing

violence in one’s family or community, may depend on characteristics or

practices of the family or the community in which the child lives.30 This takes

me to the next point.

4. Surveillance is a double-edged sword. One advantage of home visitation

programs is that they can provide a watchful eye in the home. Unusual bruises,

signs of spousal abuse, or indications of drug abuse can be noted by an individual with a trained eye. Similarly, an advantage of better training for police

officers and school teachers to identify child abuse and neglect is the potential

for the provision of services to these children and their families. On the other

hand, surveillance is a double-edged sword associated with potentially serious

negative consequences, particularly when some segments of the population are

at risk for different levels of surveillance. Families who, because of certain

demographic characteristics such as poverty, unemployment, or single parenthood, have frequent contact with public service agencies are more often

exposed to closer scrutiny. Special care needs to be taken, then, in responding

to and handling cases of childhood victims to prevent damage from the

destructive edge of the double-edged sword. Our differential findings regarding

the long-term criminal consequences of abuse and neglect by ethnicity cannot

be ignored. If there are differences in the community’s or system’s response to

abused and neglected children as a function of differences in ethnic or racial

backgrounds, then it is important to identify these differences, particularly if

they relate to subsequent levels of violence in these children. At a minimum,

intervention agents need to be sensitive to the possibilities of differential

treatment on the basis of race or ethnic background and take steps to avoid

such practices.
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5. Interventions are not one-time efforts. Many intervention efforts involve a

single dose of relatively short duration. However, we have learned that programs such as home visitation, the Perry preschool, and Head Start cannot be

viewed as a “single shot in the arm” or a one-time inoculation procedure.

Rather, interventions may require periodic “booster shots” and perhaps more

long-term followup. The original Elmira study, continued through the child’s

second birthday, was associated with definite benefits.31, 32 However, the effects

disappeared when the children were reevaluated at 25 and 50 months of age.33

Perhaps we need to view early childhood intervention programs in the same

way that we view other services to children, such as fluoride treatments. They

may need to be continued with varying intensities at various points in childhood and adolescence.

6. Resources should be accessible. It is not enough just to increase resources,

because accessibility is as important as the resources themselves. Concrete

barriers—such as transportation, language problems, and fragmented services

—may prevent children at risk or their families from taking advantage of

existing resources. But barriers can be psychological as well. According to one

researcher,34 schools that provide free meals for low-income children have

found that these children will not eat the meals if other children or teachers

know they are free. Max Frankel,35 in a column entitled, “Less Medicare, More

Magic,” argued to preserve the universality of social security to avoid the

stigmatization of the elderly poor. Likewise, the potential for stigma associated

with early child and parent intervention programs would be minimized by

universal coverage. Abusive and neglectful families may be more likely to

accept parenting and child intervention programs that are offered to all in the

community rather than targeted ones that might embarrass or stigmatize. This

may be particularly important for intrusive interventions in family life, such as

home visitation programs. Programs offered to all children and all families

would also avoid implications of discrimination as well. Service providers

could determine the intensity of services required depending on the particular

needs of the child, the particular family, and the resources of the community.
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So, what do I conclude? Comprehensive parent and early childhood intervention programs are clearly the option of choice. Estimates of the cost of

home visiting for 1 year are between $1,500 to $3,500 per family. Consider

that the total number of newborns born in Washington, D.C., in 1992 was

10,960.36 If early parent and child intervention services were provided to all

mothers of newborns in the District, the total cost per year would be roughly

$38.3 million, using the higher cost estimate. Assuming that such a program

were to begin in 1998 and continue for 5 years, at the end of that time we

would expect that the entering kindergarten class in the District in the fall of

2003 would show dramatically improved health and academic preparedness.

Even though $38.3 million per year sounds like a lot for a social experiment,

such a program would probably pay for itself. At least in the original Elmira

project, the cost of this early prevention project for high-risk families was

equivalent to government savings associated with lower utilization of Aid to

Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, Medicaid, child protection

services, as well as tax revenues due to maternal employment.37 Furthermore,

these cost savings do not take into account the costs associated with services

for older children and adolescents involving special education, foster care,

court expenses, and juvenile detention and incarceration.38 John Leventhal,39

a pediatrician at Yale, has suggested that home visiting for high-risk newborns

and their families might be covered by medical insurance or managed care

plans similar to the cost of medical care. He cites one report that estimated the

total costs for each form of transplant—kidney, bone marrow, or liver—in the

United States to be about $1 billion per year.40 Home visiting, which clearly

has the same potential to be lifesaving for some children and to improve

markedly the development of many others, is relatively inexpensive per family

compared with transplantation. Leventhal suggests that in the course of a

child’s lifetime, a successful preventive service should be viewed as a modest

investment to ensure that the child’s first few years of life are spent in a safe

and nurturing environment.41
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Universal parent and child intervention programs beginning during pregnancy are clearly preferable. However, if policymakers are not persuaded by

the substantial benefits likely to come from the kinds of intervention

efforts suggested here, then the criminal justice literature indicates that

interventions targeted at abused and neglected children at a minimum are

critical since these children clearly are at high risk for hurting themselves

and hurting others.

Problems with attempts to predict future delinquency or adult offending

often complicate proposals for early intervention. The situation for victims

of child abuse and neglect is different. Abuse and neglect cases are those in

which a decision to intervene has already been made and where public

officials are already involved. Nonetheless, one important unresolved issue

for me is whether targeted intervention strategies can be developed that

protect the privacy of the children and their families and guard against the

potentially negative outcomes associated with increased surveillance.

I have two simple take-home messages. First, there are promising programs

that we should evaluate and build upon. Second, children are able to

change given the chance and a little help. Not all abused and neglected

children grow up to become violent offenders. And while we do not yet

fully understand the factors that make the difference in their lives, we need

to intervene early—and the earlier, the better. This is consistent with

other social goals: reducing crime, increasing educational achievement,

and preventive health care. The cycle of violence hypothesis proposes that

yesterday’s and today’s childhood victims will become tomorrow’s offenders

and perpetrators of violence. Rather than focusing on responses to child

abuse or neglect in court proceedings that “treat” offenders, prevention

efforts should target childhood victims to reduce their risk of becoming

offenders in the future.
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Question-and-Answer Session

Duane Ragan, Office for Victims of Crime, U.S. Department of Justice,

Washington, D.C.: Did you include any of the children who had been in

Head Start?

C.S.W.: I did not include Head Start evaluations in this talk, but certainly

some of the children not in the Perry preschool program would have been in

Head Start. I know there is controversy about the long-term effects of Head

Start, but in some of the work that I’ve seen, the effects have been quite

powerful. I didn’t include them here because I simply didn’t have the most upto-date followups. Also, I really wanted to tie in the connection to the criminal justice community, the issue of reduced arrests and chronic offending.

Christopher Stone, Vera Institute of Justice, New York, New York: Do you

know if there are any child welfare agencies in the country that have held

themselves or are held accountable/responsible for the future development of

the kids who are currently their wards?

C.S.W.: Remember, I’m a researcher; I don’t work in child welfare. There are

child welfare people here. Certainly, Nicholas Scoppetta in New York City now

is trying to take a position, saying that “I’m going to be held accountable for

this.” I suspect that there are people who are doing that. Whether they are

taking as public a stance as Scoppetta, I don’t know. He is certainly getting heat.

Nicholas Scoppetta, Administration for Children’s Services, New York,

New York: The question was directed more toward holding us accountable for

the future consequences of abuse and neglect. What I’ve been talking about is

holding the system accountable for delivering what we are supposed to be

doing, not simply the nobility of our intentions.
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C.S.W.: Well, you see, I think that, if you don’t have the kinds of slippages

that you are having in the agency, if you are able to accomplish what you

would like to do and do it early enough in the process when you have these

definite cases of child abuse and neglect, you will see a reduction of problems

in the future. So, if you will be held accountable for dealing properly and

responsibly with those kids, then I think the rest will fall into place.

Edward Cotton, Illinois Department of Children and Family Services,

Springfield, Illinois: I wondered whether, in the early intervention programs,

particularly some of the models that are used nationally, you looked at strategies to use with dropouts. Since these programs are voluntary, the ones we

looked at had extremely high dropout rates—whether at-risk families were

identified in the hospital and said “no” or said “yes” and were never available

after that. I guess I want to put things in perspective. These programs are

voluntary, the dropout rate seems to be very high, and I wondered if you could

discuss any strategies to address that. Because it doesn’t matter if a program is

great if people are not going to come to it or if they drop out of it.

C.S.W.: That’s a good question. One of the things that I cut out of my presentation (but is in the paper) is a talk about some of these barriers. A woman

named Karol Kumpfer42 has done some work on parent-training programs that

I think is creative. One thing that she has been able to do is to get very high

parental attendance rates at her program meetings. One way she has done that

is by really paying attention to some of the nitty-gritty issues like transportation, daycare, and all these other things that will actually enable parents to

attend. That doesn’t get at your issue, which is parents who simply don’t want

to or are not themselves “together” enough. I think (this is the caution that

you heard here in this talk) we need to solve—we need to do some preliminary

work to figure out what is the best way to get parents to enroll, to commit to

being in these programs, and then to be kept involved in these programs.

Because, clearly, if only a very small fraction of the families who are offered

these services are taking the services, most likely those avoiding them are
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going to be the families who are most in need of the services (the most dysfunctional). Before we plunge into major programming—I guess I shouldn’t

have said 1998, then, for the newborns in the District—I think we need some

preliminary work to deal with these very practical issues. But I don’t know, other

than Kumpfer’s work, whether there is other literature that talks about that.

Donald Murray, National Association of Counties, Washington, D.C.: Dr.

Widom, I was very interested in your highlighting the problems of accessibility

to services. In so many of our communities we see a lot of fragmentation where

the community doesn’t have a strategy. In terms of holding the community

accountable, making sure all the players are at the table, we’re excited by what

Governor Hunt in North Carolina is doing. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. At

the county level, half the counties in the State (shooting for the whole State)

have set up boards just to focus on children 0-to-3 years of age. He has put in a

little less than $100 million, but so far the results have been spectacular.

C.S.W.: I certainly hope that someone is evaluating from when the program

began to 5 years from now, so we can learn what were the good things that

were done—what were the things that made a difference—so we can then take

them to another community.

Donald Murray, National Association of Counties, Washington, D.C.: The

central thing is getting the community to come up with a collaborative strategy based on the thinking of all segments of the community. That’s usually not

done. It’s just a very simple idea.

David Lloyd, Family Advocacy Program, U.S. Department of Defense,

Arlington, Virginia: I’m afraid that you picked a poor example: A child that’s

the fifth of eight children with umpteen different fathers already is in a family

that is probably not going to be one that participates in any type of voluntary

early intervention program. It kind of reminds me of Richard Gelles’s call for

removing those children from their families permanently, thinking about
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terminating parental rights early, and moving them into adoption (with the

caveat of ensuring that they receive the treatment services to deal with what

has already happened to them). Too many of those children do not receive

this either in foster families or in adopted families.

But my larger concern has to do with the conflict that we have in child welfare

philosophy. The good news, I guess, is that child abuse and neglect is a low baserate phenomenon. Even if we double or triple the estimates of how frequently it

occurs, it is still a relatively (thank goodness) infrequent phenomenon. Combined with that, we have kind of unitary terms to describe very discrete things

happening. Neglect is not a unitary phenomenon. There are children neglected

for their medical needs, which tend to be rather one-time-only issues. There are

children whose educational needs have been neglected, and it is difficult to

differentiate these children from truants when they hit a certain age level. Then

there is neglect that is clearly poverty related; this probably should not be

considered parental neglect but rather economic neglect or American society

neglect. Then there is parental disinterest, which is, I think, the hardest one to

deal with. It is the lack of attachment. Because we treat all forms of neglect the

same, we don’t really understand the phenomenon very well. Perhaps we would

do better to really study the neglect cases, to really learn from those parents in

the same way that we have interviews with serial killers, to try to learn what

motivates them and to devise better strategies.

The evaluation of Hawaii Healthy Start over a longer time and some other

early intervention programs leads me to a great deal of concern about whether

we will get the payoff for the amount of money that it takes to do this with the

hard-to-reach families, where the propensity for later delinquency and criminal

behavior is the highest. I’m not at all convinced that having paraprofessionals

work in a home where there are eight children of umpteen different fathers is

really going to pay off when we have a low base-rate phenomenon—whether

we are going to see that much change. There are a whole lot of other benefits

from early intervention in addition to reduction of abuse and neglect and
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dealing with the consequences of abuse and neglect. But I think until we get

our minds wrapped around what it is we are really trying to do in child welfare

philosophy, we are going to continue to have a lot of problems in terms of

preventing further delinquency and adult criminal behavior.

C.S.W.: Well, let me respond to that. First of all, although many of my cases

do have multiple fathers for the children in the family, that wasn’t one of the

characteristics of the family that I described here. There were eight children;

you’re probably right—they probably could have been sired by different

people. This case illustrates why I am arguing that it is not enough just to focus

on the child. Successful interventions do not simply focus on a child. If one

reads this literature, if one thinks about child development, it becomes apparent that the child is very much affected by the complicated dysfunctions of

these parents as well as the communities. I think that it is a very important

point. Also, we know a lot more about neglect than we did many years ago.

There are many forms of neglect that the child welfare/child protection system

does talk about. In my own work, however, I’m talking about a simple kind of

neglect—it’s a very powerful one, though. I’m talking about early neglect. We

have eliminated the educational neglect that comes at a later point in time,

especially if that’s the only evidence of neglect. But these are cases of lifethreatening failure to provide services to children: severe lack of food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention. I’m not talking about psychological

maltreatment. My cases are from almost 30 years ago, now.

I think what is important is to recognize the effects of deprivation of these

fundamental needs in early childhood. There was a psychologist by the name

of Abraham Maslow who talked about a hierarchy of needs. At the very

bottom of that hierarchy is the need for security, sustenance, the basic things

in life. If we don’t have that, if a child doesn’t have food, clothing, shelter, or

medical attention, how can that child go to school and be a well-functioning

child? How can such children pay attention or keep their heads up in school?
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We don’t know enough about the linkages and effects because the field of

child maltreatment, in terms of research, is relatively new and vastly

underfunded. But I think that in the case of my research, which connects

neglect of this sort with violent criminal behavior at a later point, we can’t

dismiss the connection.

Marc Mauer, The Sentencing Project, Washington, D.C.: Could you elaborate on what you spoke about as the potential negative consequences of

increased surveillance? Wouldn’t people make the argument that if more

problems are found, the response should be more services? What is the problem with doing that?

C.S.W.: This is something that troubles me a lot. Although I really want to

argue that we need to intervene in the lives of abused and neglected children,

what stops me from endorsing that 100 percent (I don’t know if you picked

that up in my talk) is that we have these very troubling race-specific findings.

Specifically, we find that for the African-American children in our sample

(compared with the (control) African-American children—those are kids who

grew up in the same neighborhoods, the only difference (at least on paper) is

that one group was abused and one group doesn’t have an official record of

abuse), we find that the effects of childhood victimization are really enormous,

very powerful, and much larger than the effects for white children in our

sample who were similarly abused and neglected. We have been trying to find

an explanation for this seeming difference in what should be a general phenomenon. It even seems to affect males and females. So why should it affect

one group?

One of the things that we think about is relevant to something Janet Reno

talks about—seeing a 3-year-old child or a 6-year-old child on the street at the

wrong point in time. The community needs to respond to that child—take

him or her home or whatever needs to be done. That is clearly a child in the

wrong place. One hypothesis is that if we have a neglected child, it means that
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somebody’s not paying attention to that child. That child may be out on the

streets at the wrong time. If one has a child that is out on the streets, that

child has more opportunities to get into trouble and to be picked up by the

cops. And if that child happens to be an African-American, once that child

gets connected to the juvenile justice system, it is very difficult to get out of

the system. The child’s attitudes may change, the child may develop hostilities, all kinds of things. So we are concerned that somehow, by following these

children and their families, we may not be responding to them and giving

them services in the same way.

That’s why I say if we can find a way to target these children with full appreciation of the delicate balance between making things better or worse for

them, then targeting would be the most effective. But I think we need to do a

lot more creative work to figure out how to do that.

Marsha Renwanz, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,

U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: I’ve heard you speak several

times and am always struck by the importance of your findings about neglect

for the reasons that you mentioned, number of cases, etc. Given that we’re

now embarking on this nationwide experiment with welfare reform in the

different States, do you have plans to look at several States in terms of risks of

early neglect—catastrophic neglect for infants and toddlers—that you have

identified? Will those risks be assessed by you or other researchers?

C.S.W.: There is a project that some people are working on in the District of

Columbia to develop a proposal to provide services for abused and neglected

children. The notion is that there will be an evaluation component to it, and

I’ve been asked to help them with the evaluation component. I am way behind

on all the other things that I was supposed to be doing when I was preparing

this talk, so I’m trying to figure out how I can be involved. This is the only

program that I know of, and that is in the infancy stage. But I am sure that there

are lots of people in this room who know of programs in their communities. The
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Cathy Spatz Widom

real question is whether, as I said to the gentleman from North Carolina, there

is a serious evaluation that is planned. And I’m even happy to say, “Let’s have

2 years of this program without an evaluation”; get your program going. Maybe

just collect some base-rate information. But let us evaluate these programs.

Let us not simply run programs without learning something from them in a

systematic way.

Rosemary Chalk, Board on Children, Youth, and Families, National Research Council, Washington, D.C.: I want to pursue the whole issue of

targeted versus universal interventions. David Lloyd earlier expressed his

skepticism about the home visitation approach, based on the results of the

Hawaii effort. I think it’s very important to distinguish the home visitation

model used in Hawaii from that used in the Olds study. There are different

types of skills involved, differences in terms of the timing of the intervention.

Using the Olds model the intervention seems to have the greatest impact on

adolescent first-time mothers, and the impact may have been moderated by

their ability to delay a second pregnancy. So we may not be talking about eight

children in the household, maybe now about four. We know that neglect

occurs in families that have very high numbers of children—that’s often a

family characteristic. The whole issue of spacing pregnancies becomes a key

outcome measure in looking at the effects of some of the home visitation

interventions.

I haven’t heard you say anything about neighborhoods. It may be that one

strategy to use in trying to balance this question of targeting families versus

universal interventions is to look at the kinds of neighborhoods in which cases

of abuse and neglect tend to concentrate and see whether we can think of

some selection criteria. If we have a neighborhood context, we might want to

target the intervention on any first-time mothers in that neighborhood,

regardless of their family situation or individual characteristics. We could use

geographic criteria and look at the role of unrelated adults within that neigh-
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borhood as support systems and as support resources who may be helpful in

maintaining the quality, timing, and dosage of the intervention that would be

offered through some type of organizational approach in its initial stages.

C.S.W.: I’m glad you brought up the issue. I appreciate the point about the

Hawaii program. One of the programs that I didn’t mention follows a model that

uses paraprofessionals versus the public health nurse model—they are very

different. You can imagine different costs associated with them. One thing I

think we need to do is to examine the extent to which these two models may

have different effectiveness. If one were to engage in a larger scale intervention,

I would like to see both models tried and pitted against one another.

I did mention neighborhoods though, and I think that neighborhoods and

communities are terribly important. There is a difficulty in targeting neighborhoods. I thought about saying, “Let’s take six cities: D.C., Detroit, Gary, etc.,”

cities with big crime problems. The difficulty is that, if we target by neighborhood, we are essentially picking African-American and minority communities.

I have a real problem with the issue of stigmatization.

James Comer, for example, in his work and programs on schools, specifically

chose to do his work in the school system. He worked with the entire school

system, so there would not be these issues of unwillingness to accept the

resources that might be offered. I think taking a geographic area that does have

a high crime problem (like D.C.), taking these kids and starting with the

pregnant mother, one is going to get those very high-risk families. As long as

we keep track, do a needs assessment at the beginning of such an experiment,

and then follow through, we would be able to determine whether it is only the

most high-risk mothers and families that are benefiting.

But in the United States 50 or 75 years ago, there were public health nurses going

into communities and doing exactly what David Olds’ program is doing now,

especially in rural or isolated areas. So it is not drawing from the British or drawing

from the French, it is going back to a historical time in the United States.
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Rebecca Burkhalter, Burkhalter Associates, Inc., Washington, D.C.: My

question relates to the fact that many of these children we are talking about as

preschoolers or infants are going to be in the hands of daycare workers more

than anyone else. I was involved in that for many years. One thing that

disturbed me, and I am wondering if it has changed, was the absence of required skills and training in daycare workers. We really said, “Well, if she is a

nice person. . . .” It didn’t matter if she was qualified in early childhood

development. If these people are going to be dealing with high-risk infants,

they need to know something about children. Are we going to require more?

And are we, as a Nation, going to feel that they are regular teachers and not

just daycare workers and babysitters?

C.S.W.: I have no particular expertise to answer the question you’re asking

me. I would rather turn it back on the audience.

Shay Bilchik, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S.

Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: To build upon a couple of points

that were made about the Hawaii Healthy Start model versus home visitation

through nurses (and targeting), right now we are in the middle of a project

with David Olds in which we are replicating some of his work in six different

communities, using that model in a targeted way through the Weed and Seed

Office (partnering with Health and Human Services, the Weed and Seed

Office, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention). We

are finding 100 first-time mothers in those communities to show how we could

interrupt that pathway with delayed subsequent births and less welfare dependency. I know that David Olds is about to come out with a 15-year update on

his original study that hopefully will show even more promising results.

C.S.W.: I’m very excited about that. I can’t wait to see the results. But one

thing that I think we have to remember, getting back to Rosemary’s comment

and others’, is that anything that we can do to help the development of these

children from a very early point is going to have positive benefits. So if we can
98

have fewer low-birth-weight babies for these high-risk mothers, if we can have

better health care—all of these things that one would think we would be able

to do routinely—in turn are going to lead to healthier children, children who

can perform better academically, and that is such a critical life point for these

children. It is a time when they become so susceptible to delinquent peer

groups and all the other bad things. Once they are in that risk category, it is

simply a playing-out of problem behaviors.

Shay Bilchik, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S.

Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: Cathy, the most promising part of

your talk and of the work in this area is that it highlights the gap that exists

between the ideal that you’re talking about and what we are presently providing to these families. For policymakers it is critical to know that the gap is

significant and that there needs to be a substantial investment just to get us to

ground zero in doing this kind of work.

Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for Breaking the Cycle of Violence
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Crime, the Media, and Our

Public Discourse

Presentation by

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

University of Chicago Law School

May 13, 1997

Washington, D.C.

For 17 years after the end of World War II, I wandered

the prisons of England, Australia, the United States, and

a variety of Asian countries. I then found a degree of residential

stability, and for the past 35 years from an excellent base in

Chicago, I have done my best to understand the phenomena

of the treatment and prevention of crime. Now, stimulated

by the invitation to participate in this series of lectures, I am

obliged to give a partial accounting, an apologia. If it proves

a disastrous effort, blame Jeremy Travis; if it attracts your

interest, praise Jeremy Travis.

My plan is to reflect upon the current public and political

dialogue concerning crime and its treatment, to consider the

relationship between knowledge and practice on that topic,

to discuss the extent to which our problems are unique to this

country, and to discuss why it is that we know so much better

than we do.
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It is not easy to try to speak truth to power. Those with power grow confident

that truth is an adjunct of power; they do not welcome the naysayer who

propounds a different truth. Power nowadays resides in Washington, and

Washington purports to know what to do about crime and drugs and sentencing convicted criminals—and uses its power of the purse to try to impose its

ideas on the rest of the country.

Likewise, the national media purport to know the citizenry’s prejudices about

crime and profit by catering to and reinforcing those prejudices. The naysayer

gets rare and brief mention.

So one who risks playing that naysayer cannot expect a rapturous reception,

rather the contrary. Nevertheless it seems to me clear that the policies of both

political parties about crime and drugs and sentencing are profoundly misguided and that it is my miserable duty to say so. Safer societies are not built

on capital punishment, mandatory minimum punishments, three-strikes rules,

and fierce drug policies that every informed observer knows to be misguided.

Of course, I do not deceive myself that my perspective on truth is truth, but it

is certainly not misled by the temptations of power.

I think it was a French theologian of the Middle Ages who said, “The most

corrupting lie is the truth poorly told.”

That text, in my view, precisely captures the mischief of the public and

political dialogue about crime and its treatment. The media and politicians

alike select and sensationalize dramatic and grossly unrepresentative crimes

and criminals so that emotion dominates reason and social injury overcomes

social protection.

The current political and public dialogue about crime is utterly bereft of sense.

On one side are the mindless punishers, confidently planning to reduce crime

by relying on the supposed efficacy of condign punishment of convicted
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criminals by larger and larger doses of imprisonment and increasing use of the

death penalty. “Nothing else works” is their war cry. On the other side are

those who suggest that only a program designed to eliminate social inequality

can be effective in dealing with crime. But for the most part a malaise compounded of fear, apathy, and inertia prevails, with being “tough on crime”

functioning as a condition precedent to holding elective office.

If ingenuous utopianism is unhelpful, so also is the posture of cynical

dystopianism, which knows that nothing works, nothing can change. Not all

crime is a natural phenomenon. Crime does not consist of inevitable episodes

which can in no way be foreseen or guarded against. The histories of this

country’s prohibition of alcohol and inept treatment of drugs and guns reveal

that the development of violent crime on a scale far higher than in other

comparably developed countries can be stimulated by legislative action.

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

I served on the Police Board of the City of Chicago for 8 years. Each month we

held a public meeting. At every such meeting the superintendent (whoever he

was for the time being—they came and went with the political winds) would

announce the crime statistics, district by district, comparing the last month’s

figures for the current year with the figures for the same month in the previous

year. If crime had decreased in a district, he would compliment the district

commander and his troops on their efficiency, diligence, and great value to the

community. If crime had increased in a district, he would castigate the community for their lack of moral and ethical values and note their need for even

more intensive policing. He never lost; he was always right.

In recent years, legislators advocating increased severity of punishment bewail

the alleged sentimentality of the judiciary and impose mandatory-sentencing

laws, truth-in-sentencing laws, and three-strikes laws to constrain judicial

discretion. Thus excessive severity flourishes. If crime decreases, the legislators
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congratulate themselves loudly on their contribution to social welfare. If crime

increases, they reflect on how much worse things would be had they not acted

and congratulate themselves loudly on their contribution to social welfare.

Like the several superintendents of Chicago’s police, they never lose—they are

always right. Their nostrums are working, and the dosage must therefore be

increased; or their nostrums are not working sufficiently, and the dosage must

therefore be increased.

Recently, the prison population has quadrupled by reason of the current

attitude to punishment and the length of time prisoners are required to serve.

If thereafter crime decreases, prison has “worked” (as some say in the United

States and now in the United Kingdom). If crime thereafter increases, it is

clear that the dosage must be increased and more and longer imprisonment

imposed. Again, whatever happens, it has succeeded; it is the appropriate and

necessary remedy. To think otherwise is to be a maudlin sentimentalist, more

concerned with the wretched prisoner than the injured victim.

Where does the discipline of criminology stand in relation to these police, court,

and corrections scenarios that you all recognize? The answer, I regret, is “on the

sidelines.” Does this mean that knowledge is irrelevant to the field of our interests? I think not. When I came to Chicago 35 years ago, there was an appreciable

gap between knowledge and practice in crime control. In the intervening three

and one-half decades, that gap has grown wider, not thinner, so that it is now a

chasm, a gulf, not merely a gap. Relevant knowledge has been acquired; practice

has degenerated.

What do we know about crime control? Let me make a comparison with the

history of medicine (which is not to suggest that crime is a disease). I choose

the year 1914. In that year a great deal was known about the prevention of

disease: the contributions of pure water, sewage control, general sanitation, the

elimination of rodent infestation, vaccination, anesthetics, and similar diseaseprevention and pain-reduction methods were known and applied. What was
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very much less well known was what to do about a disease or an injury when

one had occurred.

Now consider crime control in 1997. We know a lot about the soil in the

home and in the community in which crime and delinquency flourish. I could

take any one of you to any city, fly you over it, drive you through it, have you

talk to no one, and then ask you to mark on a map those areas with high crime

and delinquency rates. You would do it about as well as the chief of police of

that city. We cannot state the etiology of crime and delinquency in a general,

all-embracing theory, but we certainly are well aware of the environment,

associations, and family conditions in which crime and delinquency flourish.

But, given a criminal or delinquent event, our knowledge of what to do about

it remains scant.

Has medicine changed in the intervening 83 years? It certainly has. Knowledge

of interventions for the relief of suffering from disease and injury has increased

dramatically and, subject to the continuing constraints of inequitable social

systems, is applied with skill and efficacy.

There are many reasons for this phoenixlike mutation of the barber into the

surgeon, but not the least was the gradual emergence of a treatment classification system related to reasonably precisely defined diseases and injuries. This

we lack in criminology. A similar lack in medicine would mean, I believe, that

more than one of every three of us in this room would not be here—we would

be dead.

Lacking serious evaluations of our treatment interventions and lacking clinical

trials, we rely on unreliable, retrospective, statistical matching techniques and

evaluations by partisans (conscious or self-deceiving) of the outcome of the

study. And recently we have been collecting these unreliable studies into what

we pretentiously call megastudies or meta-analyses, multiplying error into

confusion. This is by no means ideologically one-sided: meta-analyses can
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establish that “deterrence works” as well as that “treatment works”; the trick lies

in the spurious belief that adding together a steady flow of faulty studies obliterates their defects. And, in any event, all these outcomes are related to definitions

of the group to be treated and by a diversity of treatments, both so wide as to

defy useful outcome analysis.1

Two of my ideas have been put to the test of independent clinical trials. A plan

for a prison for repetitively violent offenders was tested in the Federal correctional center at Butner, North Carolina; a plan for structured plea bargaining,

involving the victims of the crime should they wish to be involved, was tested in

courts in Dade County, Florida. I had nothing to do with the evaluative processes for either of these experiments. Neither produced the results I had both

hoped for and predicted. The clinical trial in the prison did not reduce recidivism. Only one-third of victims attended the plea bargaining sessions. Were they

failures? Not at all. A great deal was learned from the Butner prison about the

role and organization of prison programs; a great deal about speedy trial and the

needs of crime victims was learned from the Dade County courts. Both were

difficult to run, indeed, in a sense the prison trial broke down early because the

distinctive features of the Butner prison were copied by other Federal and State

prisons (and a few prisons in other countries) before the clinical trial could be

run, so that the researchers lost the control group rather than the treatment

group. But both contributed to knowledge far more than any philosophic study

by an academic criminologist.

It will take decades to develop even the outline of a prevention and treatment

classification system in criminology equivalent to those in medicine; nevertheless

it is the only rational path to the effective prevention and treatment of crime.

But in the meantime we already have enough knowledge to do a lot better

than we now do. Setting the future aside, what of the present? It seems to me

that bad crime control policies have driven out better crime control policies.
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Over the half-century of my observations, the police, the courts, the correctional authorities, and the scholars of criminology have all greatly improved

the quality of their work.

The police have become better trained, less venal, less brutal, less corrupt, and

much more efficient. They have recognized the limitations of their role and their

need for collaboration with the various communities they serve. And slowly they

are coming to understand the need for the closest collaboration with private

police, who, in most industrial countries, outnumber them and are the main

providers of police services for other persons than the poor.

The courts handling criminal matters have been increasingly burdened by swelling

caseloads, but they have developed better case management systems and there is

some improvement (though far from enough) in the appointment of their

support personnel.

The staff of the prisons and probation services are far better trained, far better led, and

clearly more efficient and decent than their predecessors whom I met 50 years ago.

And finally, in this catalog of virtues, scholarship and research concerning the criminal

justice system and the statistical data on which policy decisions should be based have

improved dramatically. We now know a great deal more than we did 50 years ago, not

only about the soil in which crime flourishes but also about what to do about it.

Why, then, given all these advances over the same time period, have problems

of crime in our society grown worse rather than better?

Starkly opposing the encouraging positive developments in the work of the

police, the courts, and corrections that I have listed, one must acknowledge

two powerful negative forces. Legislators, Federal and State, of both parties,

have politicized their interventions on crime control in ways which are almost

uniformly counterproductive and are widely known to be counterproductive.

Cheaply, they buy votes by stimulating the fears of many and sacrificing the
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freedom of others. This process continues today, urged on by distressingly

superficial proposals by the leaders of both political parties. Every informed

student of drug policy, including such tough-on-crime observers as James Q.

Wilson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, acknowledges that mass arrests of retail

drug sellers, source-country eradication programs, and interdiction efforts are

ineffective. Wilson advanced this opinion in the late 1980s. Yet, inexorably,

year by year the budgets for these initiatives increase, and politicians claim to

believe that they work.2

The politicians, Federal and State, have been abetted in this mischief by the

greatly increased attention that the media (print and electronic) pay to

sensational aspects of criminality. For them it is cheap and popular, easy to

acquire and display, and by statistical reality there is always plenty to acquire

and display.

Hence, Gresham’s Law applies: False political promises and the sensationalism

of the media drive out rational policy. As Dean Pound of the Harvard Law

School suggested, if the 18th century was the century of the Enlightenment, and

the 19th century the century of Empiricism, our century has been the century of

Emotionalism.

For many years I have associated with prison administrators, senior police, and

judges and lawyers involved in the criminal courts. A leading impression that

I am left with is that the public perception of crime and its treatment is far

removed from the realities with which the wardens and judges and police daily

deal. Over the last 20 years, the correctional people—prison and probation

administrators—as well as a substantial number of judicial and police leaders

have been radicalized. They believe, as I do, that many of our crime control

policies do more harm than good. But talking with them with a drink in hand

is an experience far removed from listening to them speak in public. In public

they avoid criticism; in private there is little else. Radicals they have become,

yes, but publicly silent radicals.
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And this is true of many elected officials. In private, they will admit that much

of our crime control policy is cruel, wasteful, and ineffective. In public, they

say otherwise. For example, consider the 100:1 difference there was between

sanctions for crack and for cocaine in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. It is

doubtful that any member of Congress believed this extreme distinction made

sense and yet virtually none was prepared to vote to support the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s proposed elimination of the differential.

With few exceptions, the functionaries of the media seem to me to parrot what

is said in public and fail to bring to bear on crime and punishment the cynicism on which they pride themselves.

“Crime does not pay,” I am told. The hell it doesn’t! It clearly pays the newspaper publishers and the TV giants. It pays many of us in this room, even

helping my family somehow to survive on an academic salary. But it pays the

publishers extraordinarily well—and increasingly they rely on it to fill the

airwaves and newspapers.

Crime news is cheap to acquire. For local TV, one camera and one camera

crew led by an inexperienced or about-to-retire reporter suffice to gather the

police handout and have the arrested suspect led disconsolate across the path

of the camera’s eye.

The stereotypes of the criminal and the prisoner in the public’s mind thus

become projections of the exceptional and unrepresentative criminals they have

seen or read of in the daily flood of television and newspaper sensationalism.

Politicians properly caring for their election or reelection, who also wish

responsibly to advance social welfare, require the existence of a reasonably

well-informed public. Here is where the corrupting half-truths of the media

produce the dominating sensationalism of crime news and the false promises of

quick and emotionally satisfying punitive responses to criminals. “The most
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corrupting lie is the truth poorly told.” Populism is pressed on the politicians

in this way, and of all the great cities of the United States, the District of

Columbia—followed closely by Los Angeles—seems to have the disease in

its most virulent form.

Let me give some numerical details to this flood of sensationalism about crime,

this corruption of truth poorly told.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs in this city keeps a record of the

number of crime stories on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening national television news broadcasts. From 1991 to 1995 inclusive, the frequency of crime

stories increased by a factor of four—four times as many in 1995 as in 1991!

For the years 1993 through 1995, crime was at the top of the list of newsstories,

outranking the war in Bosnia, health issues, the economy, and the Federal

budget. In 1996, however, crime fell to second place, being bumped out of first

place by the Presidential campaign. Please note that over these 6 years, this

grossly increasing preoccupation with crime stories came at a time of steadily

declining crime and violence.3

This skewed focus on the sensational aspects of crime is, of course, even

greater in local, as distinct from national, television sound bites.

Aided and abetted by this flood of misinformation, the politicians—Federal,

State, and local—foster the view that the public demands our present “get

tough” policies. This may be true, but it is difficult to be sure, because opinion

polls on that question give a variety of answers depending mainly on the form

of the questions asked. A careful study by Professor Katherine Beckett soon to

be published by Oxford University Press establishes that, when one analyzes

political statements and public opinion polls on given issues in this arena, it

becomes clear that the political statements antedate the opinion polls. They

interact, of course, but there is no “chicken and egg” argument here. It is the

political statements and the way that they are reported that generate changes

in the opinion polls, not the reverse.4
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Heated argument surrounds the question of whether this outpouring of media

violence increases the actualities of violence, but there is no argument whatsoever that it shapes the public stereotype of the criminal and thus leads to

unintelligent public policies concerning the prevention and treatment of

crime and violence.

One quality deeply influencing the political and public dialogue in this country

is the belief that our problems of crime and punishment are profoundly different

from those of other Western industrialized countries. We have far worse problems, I am constantly told, because our vast, racially and ethnically heterogeneous population, dedicated to the protection of individual freedom, generates

crime on a scale far different from those other countries. This thought is regularly offered to justify the unusual severity of our system of punishment.

Until recently there was a pervasive myth that crime in the United States far

exceeded that in other Western industrialized countries, that it was annually

and inexorably increasing, and that its cruel advance could be met only by

unrelenting severity. In the last few years it has come to be appreciated that

since 1990 we have witnessed a decline in the incidence of most categories of

crime, including homicide, but the public still holds to the view that crime in

these Excited States is far worse than in Western Europe, Canada, Australia,

or New Zealand. This belief is wildly wrong, but it is held as an article of faith

by most people.

We have hard data on this—data gathered by identical means in those otherwise similar countries by projects in which the Department of Justice played a

leading role. The blunt conclusions are these: Crime rates in the United States

are slightly on the high side compared with the average of those countries, but

in only two categories of crime are we clearly at the top—homicide and gun

robbery. We do not lead in property crime, theft, robbery, rape, or burglary.

We certainly do lead in homicide and gun robbery—far ahead of the field.5
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As my excellent ex-colleagues Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins demonstrate in a book soon to be published, crime is not the problem. Violence is the

problem. To confuse the two, as we do in our sentencing policies and community protection policies, is a sin against the light, generating inefficiency and

producing cruelty.6

This is an essential insight, highly relevant to shaping our crime prevention

and control measures, but it is only the beginning of what serious, comparative

criminological research could supply. Fifty years ago, from international

comparisons of “two and three strikes and you’re out” laws in continental

Europe and England in the last quarter of the 19th century, and in England

and this country in the first half of the 20th century, I learned of the futility

and the inexorable failure of such legislation. Now we seem doomed to learn

that lesson again.7

We may also lead other countries in this popular “which is the worst” competition in the ingestion of prohibited drugs. It is impossible, however, to make

reliable international comparisons on that topic, because no other country

relies to the extent that we do on the criminal law to reduce the ingestion of

drugs. They all prohibit the usual drugs—no Western country legalizes those

drugs, as some people still seem to believe (and that certainly includes England

and the Netherlands), but none either makes the criminal conviction the front

line of defense. All prefer policies of harm reduction in which criminal proscriptions play their proper, lesser, and supportive role.

By international standards, therefore, our crime problem is not unique; it is quite

ordinary and is likely to stay quite ordinary. What is unique is our problem of

violence and our extraordinary use of imprisonment as a punishment, our

imprisonment rate being over six times that of any of those other countries.

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

point, but it is of central importance.

The human animal, particularly the young adult human male, has a propensity

to violence in all cultures and all ethnicities, yet produces very different rates

of violence. Break these diversities down by categories of crime, age, culture,

instrumentalities of violence, and other relevant distinctions and relate the

disaggregated differences to the role of the criminal justice system, and knowledge of more effective primary and secondary prevention efforts will inevitably

advance.

The neglect of these comparative opportunities between countries and between States within our own vast country encourages emotional rather than

rational responses to the genesis and commission of delinquency and crime.

Research on these issues is urgently needed and requires Federal support. It

should take up the slack of our alleged demonstration projects, which are

generally retrospectively analyzed by their advocates or those close to them

and are widely understood to belong to the skills of Madison Avenue rather

than to social science.

Rudyard Kipling, too often seen as a xenophobe, put the case for comparative

criminological research with poetic power: “And what should they know of

England, who only England know?” Recently, that astonishing Polish poet,

Wislawa Szymborska, put the same thought even more sharply: “Get to know

other worlds, if only for comparison.”

Comparative criminological research should be pursued, not to denigrate or

emulate foreign practice; rather it should be pursued to advance knowledge of

what we do and what we might do better. Volume 21 of Crime and Justice: A

Review of Research, entitled “Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration,” edited by

Michael Tonry, was subsidized by the U.S. National Institute of Justice and the

governments of five European countries. The book brings together data on race,
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ethnicity, and crime in nine countries. It is a model of what comparative research

would produce. It is an opening wedge to a core of policy-related knowledge.

The public and political discourse to the contrary notwithstanding, until the

United States develops responsible policies about drugs and guns, there is little

likelihood of bringing even relative peace to our destroyed inner-city areas. I

do not mean that drugs and guns describe the entirety of the problem. They do

not, but sensible drug and gun policies are conditions precedent to change.

The strident peddlers of cheap and swift solutions to the problems of crime in

this country have become too powerful by far. Rethinking our policies on guns

and drugs is an urgent necessity. I am told that even rational policies now

would take decades to have significant effect. That may well be so, but the

preachments have been made and ignored for many decades already.

Let me add a third item to this preachment—we must also join the rest of the

allegedly civilized world in our punishment of homicide. Capital punishment

has no place. This would have no effect on homicide rates, but it is an important symbol of rationality.

Let me make the case for that also by a comparison with another country,

taken from my storehouse of anecdotage. In October 1958, I was invited by the

Governor-General of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to be Chairman of the Commission

of Inquiry on Capital Punishment. Then and now, Ceylon did indeed suffer a

high homicide rate, a rate which tested the beliefs of an abolitionist. But as we

took testimony and visited the courts, prisons, and villages of that lovely country

and came to learn of its culture, economy, and politics, the reasons for this rate

became apparent and seemed independent of the different likely punishments

for killing.

It became clear that if one action would diminish the rate of these killings it would

have been a precise survey of landholdings. Lacking this, with a testamentary law
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that divided land equally among the male survivors of the deceased owner,

brother fought brother over who owned that coconut tree on or near the border

of their lands. These conflicts were fueled by the liquor laws, which put high

government taxes on alcohol, but did nothing to inhibit the production of

“palmyra toddy,” a vicious, homegrown, fiery beverage. These conflicts found

their instrumentalities of violence in the curved coconut knife. And the whole

mixture was fertilized by racial and religious intolerance between Tamils and

Singhalese. Compared with these pressures, the death penalty was a trivial factor

in the brew that sustained homicide rates in Ceylon.8

Let me leave Ceylon and suggest that similar analysis of homicide in all

countries with abnormally high homicide rates is the clue to an understanding of those rates. In some societies the homicide numbers inflate—in

Ceylon for the reasons suggested above, in Colombia for reasons of political

turmoil and cocaine production and distribution, in the United States . . .

well, why? Could it be the obvious analogs of the coconut knife, palmyra

toddy, and racial intolerance?

The unconscionable search for votes in legislatures, Federal and State, by

increasingly expansive and unenforced laws concerning capital punishment

will have no measurable effect on homicide rates and none on other rates of

violence and crime. With well over 3,000 inmates now on death rows and

about 60 executions a year, the present laws relevant to capital punishment

are fundamentally unsatisfactory to retentionists and abolitionists alike.

Major and, in my view, unwise, Federal initiatives may in time somewhat

reduce the delay between the pronouncement of the death sentence and the

execution, but it remains an exercise in hubris to think that we can distinguish the more wicked homicides from the less wicked homicides and confine executions to the former. I am told that the Archangel Gabriel can

perform this feat. I know I cannot. I know the Supreme Court of the United

States cannot. While we live in a constitutional democracy, there is only

one way out.
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Back to Ceylon to conclude. An eighth-century Buddhist king solved the capital

punishment problem. To increase the symbolic and deterrent effects of execution, he proclaimed that the heads of executed murderers would be set on

pikestaffs high on the castle walls for all to see. Suitably gruesome heads were

then removed from citizens who had recently died of natural causes. Bloody and

contorted, they were indistinguishable from the real things. They were then

exposed high on the castle walls to demonstrate the grim fate of murderers. I can

think of no similar ruse available to us. Again, on this topic we had better join

the rest of the civilized world.

Mine is a traditional preachment. Enact sensible and enforceable laws about

guns, drugs, and the punishment of crime. Learn from such responsible studies

as have been done and from the experience of other countries. It has taken

many decades of emotional and mindless wars on crime and drugs for us to

reach our present absurd situation. It will take decades to get back on track,

but sometime we must take the first steps, and for drugs, guns, and sentencing,

the first steps are obvious and long, long, long overdue.

You say I have devoted this talk to demolition rather than to construction,

to carping criticism rather than to creative suggestions. You are right, but

I make no apology. Our legislatures, Federal and State, have forgotten a

primary obligation—primum non nocere—in the first place, don’t make the

disease worse.

I conclude with a sentence of my mentor and friend, Glanville Williams (who

died last month), one of the 20th century’s two greatest English-speaking

analysts of the criminal law: “Criminal law is an instrument to be used to

further the well-being of society and not to diminish that well-being.”

Do we have the integrity, the political will, indeed the courage, to try so to use it ?
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Question-and-Answer Session

Patrick Murphy, U.S. Conference of Mayors, Washington D.C.: What has

happened in gun control in the past 10 years or so, with the police becoming

vocal, has had impact. Recently, police chiefs have been speaking out more on

some of the social issues. Your superintendent in Chicago, someone I regard

very highly, is very outspoken today on the issue of children. He’s become a

spokesman for a new organization, Stop Crime—Invest in Kids. A number of

chiefs across the country have associated with that, and a smaller number of

chiefs with drug reform. I wonder if it is your view that the opinions and public

positions of the police have an impact on legislators and the public.

N.M.: Matt Rodriguez certainly pursues the possibility of minimizing the

number of ill-educated, poor children who have handguns and automatic

weaponry. That would seem obvious and important and good. It is of course

perfectly true that there has been a great change, particularly in the big-city

police forces. I met with the IACP [International Association of Chiefs of

Police] yesterday, and it is not as enthusiastic nationwide but it is encouraging.

I think the point you are making is that I overstated the impression about not

speaking out.

Well, perhaps. I talk to lots of people about why they are so silent. It’s true that

some of the police chiefs have become less silent and that’s very encouraging and

very important. I wish the press took greater notice of it. Their reply—many of

them—is, “Well, it’s easy for you!” They are quite right. It takes no great courage

to say what you think when you have that wonderful thing called tenure. It’s a

little harder when your job and your family’s health and well-being turns on the

whim of a political superior. But it is encouraging, and I am encouraged by those

changes. I think we should all try to foster them. In relation to guns, there is an
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increasing line of good ideas. Jeremy Travis and James Wilson mentioned that in

the first lecture here, and Jeremy is supporting them.

Ted Gest, U.S. News & World Report, Washington, D.C.: I wanted to ask

you to elaborate a bit on the public opinion polls, if you could. My reading of

them—and I read them pretty carefully too—is that . . . I think you said that it

depends on what question you ask. When you ask the public if they want

higher sentences, they say, “Yes.” When you also ask them (as we at U.S.

News and others have), “Do you favor preventive or rehabilitative approaches,

even in comparison to prison sentences?” They also say they do. So I wonder if

the public opinion is really as one-sided as you make it out to be and if the

problem is that the politicians just don’t act on certain parts of it.

N.M.: Well, you are, of course, right. I had in mind the central importance of

the form of the question, but I don’t think you would deny that it is seen (at

least politically) as a guaranty either of resignation or non-reelection to be

other than “tough on crime.” Part of that, I think, has been fostered by pervasive opinion polls in one form. What I thought was interesting (and I think

you will find interesting) is Katherine Beckett’s book, in which she establishes

that the public statements by politicians seem to antedate what the opinion

polls produce rather than the other way around. Obviously, I’m not suggesting

we not have a First Amendment; it’s the great strength of the country. But I

am wishing that there could be an increase in the number of good reporters

(and there are some very good reporters). But it isn’t the stuff that most people

read. Most people read the “tough on crime” stuff, I think. And most politicians believe that too. I have a storehouse of anecdotage on that, most of it

not capable of being reported.

Vince Schiraldi, Justice Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.: You talked a

little about the need for research, but what struck me was that you talked

about the widening gap between research and practice. I just wonder if our

numbers are not good—if we perhaps don’t already have quite an amount of

research at this time, and what we actually need to do is package and market it
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Norval Morris

better, the way the folks who want to lock more people up do. I wonder if you

could say a little about that. A lot of good stuff exists in books of yours and

other people’s. Most of the public doesn’t get a chance to see it.

N.M.: Let me try and state what I believe more precisely. I think we have a lot

of knowledge concerning the prevention of crime and delinquency—that is to

say, primary prevention. We have a lot of knowledge relevant to that, and I

think we should apply much of it. But the quite different step of trying to

develop a relationship between treatment interventions and crime/criminal

situations has not yet been taken. That will be very important for the future.

So, we can do better with the storehouse of knowledge we have, but to do

really well, we have to begin clinical trials—and there are very few.

In my life, I have been associated with two clinical trials: one in relation to the

Federal prison at Butner, North Carolina, in which a stratified random sample

of inmates sent to a new prison program was compared with a sample of

inmates in a traditional program. Another was in Dade County in five courts,

an experiment concerning plea bargaining. The prison program broke down as

a clinical trial because other prisons appropriately (and early) emulated one of

the things being tested, which was voluntary programming. It simply works

better than compulsory programming. Second, the then-Federal parole board

started giving prisoners predicted release dates subject to good behavior. The

two things we were mainly testing at Butner prison were fixed release dates

and voluntary programming. So we lost the control group and the clinical trial

broke down. But a great deal was learned about running prisons. And much of

it has been applied.

In Dade County, plea bargaining is totally within the control of a prosecutor.

If the prosecutor’s office decides it will not do plea bargaining, plea bargaining

won’t happen. They can stop it; you don’t need legislation. So for the clinical

trial we persuaded five courts in Dade County to notify the alleged criminal

and counsel that there would be a pretrial meeting under the administration of
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Crime, the Media, and Our Public Discourse

a judge (not the trial judge, but a judge), at which the prosecutor would be

present and to which the victim would be invited. At that one meeting, totally

off the record, there would be a decision made of how to settle this question—

by confession, plea, or compensation—and everyone would be heard, including

the victim. We ran it for quite a protracted period; the outcome was entirely

negative, judged by severity of punishment and disposition of cases. They came

out much the same in the treatment group as they did in the control group.

Only about a third of the victims came. I, at first, thought that was bad, but if

a third of victims want to come and do come, and are treated respectably,

that’s fine. The thing that most changed was speedy trial. If there couldn’t be a

settlement at that one meeting, the case was set down for trial. So it was a leap

forward in knowledge. But we ignore this stuff.

So I do believe that the crime/criminal relationship makes up a treatment

entity. Available treatment resources, community-based or institution-based,

make up other entities. We haven’t done the matching.

Samuel Dash, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C.: I

think the last couple of questions and particularly your responses touch on

this but maybe not sufficiently. You’ve been involved enough in empirical

research, and there has been so much empirical research, particularly since

the late 1960s and 1970s, on how to understand crime and how to intervene

in crime. But very little of it called for more than the study and the publishing of the results. I remember when Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter

went to Cleveland to study the Cleveland crime survey. They wrote a

wonderful book, but in the introduction, Frankfurter said, “Prior to our

coming here, there wasn’t an understanding of why the people in Cleveland

couldn’t control their crime. Now that we have been here and given them

the answers, there is no excuse.”

Haven’t you thought (and perhaps you touched on it) that every research

program, particularly those funded by the National Institute of Justice or any

other major foundation, ought to have as part of its methodology a require-
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ment that there be an implementation and evaluation? The books sitting on

the shelves gathering dust don’t really communicate to the people as Frankfurter

naively believed.

Now, I agree—you are quite right—that politics, emotionalism, is the mortal

enemy of research facts. But if it can be shown that this is not only information

in a book, but there is an implementation of it—via a demonstration program

and evaluation—and that this is highly publicized, would this at least be a better

way to go?

N.M.: Sam, there are always such countervailing pressures. The preoccupation

with reducing the incidence of repetition of crime, which I take it is what

people talk about so much in evaluations, is really quite difficult to do. There

are so many other pressures about. You don’t make that same complaint about

medical research. Every serious medical research has some incremental better

understanding about a problem. And mostly, implicitly or explicitly, about

how we can move forward. There aren’t “sort-of solutions” to this “repeating.”

It seems strange, but you didn’t make man. People have all sorts of complex

processes, and crime is going to continue at varying rates (not very serious

rates, actually, except for violence) no matter what we do. What we have to

start doing is less harm. It is a much harder case to make—much harder!

I go back to my analogy of the doctor in 1914. Since 1914, first of all, there was

the cataclysm of the 1914–1918 War, with massive injuries and an extraordinary

range of acquisition of knowledge about what to do and what not to do about

them. But second, there was the beginning of clinical trials. Each month, articles

from the New England Journal of Medicine are featured in the press. . . . I don’t see

anything like that in our field. I’m not making the “crime is a disease” point; I’m

simply talking about the fact that if we want to do better in this field, we have a

lot of knowledge (Frankfurter was right presumably) about how to stop doing

harm, and we are gradually acquiring knowledge about how to do better. But no,

I don’t think people who try to find out facts of issues understand the politics or

understand the other pressures that inhibit change.
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D. Alan Henry, Pretrial Services Resource Center, Washington, D.C.: It

seems that the most current and popular way for legislatures to address the

problem of violence is evidenced by the 42 States that have, within the past 3

years, expanded their laws to target children and to charge them as adults. We

see currently that the House has just passed a bill that would expand significantly the age and the charge groups, which traditionally had been in the

juvenile system, that would be brought into the adult system. I wonder if you

could comment on that, telescope ahead, and tell us how you see the adult

courts and adult correctional systems dealing with this and whether you think

it will address violence.

N.M.: Well, it seems to me a perfect paradigm, an example of politics and

emotionalism dominating good sense. The movement you speak of seems to be

based in part on the belief that the juvenile courts of the United States are

sentimentally lenient. I go periodically to visit the first children’s court in this

country, the Children’s Court in Cook County. It is overcrowded. Its leading

characteristic is the continuance. It doesn’t have anything like the sort of

sentimental care for the child that it is supposed to have. Good people are

working in it. It’s flooded. So all of this about controlling violence in children

by procedures of their trial is an irrelevancy. Trying juveniles as adults is not

even likely to result in more severe punishment. It is a little more severe in the

duration of detention prior to trial. Really, I think it is a perfect example of

spinning wheels to no effect whatsoever, except perhaps some emotional

satisfaction for some people.

Timothy J. Flanagan, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas:

Professor Morris, could you comment a little bit on who’s leading and who’s

following in the public debate about life within prisons? It seems to me the

polls show that the American public still has very strong expectations about

the provision of rehabilitative services within prisons, but the politicians are

only hearing the message of “fewer services” and “tougher prisons.”
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Norval Morris

N.M.: Well, I think that this is one of the problems that has radicalized the

prison administrators. I visit quite a few State prisons, and the general view

that I get from senior people is that they think that roughly one-quarter of the

people in their institutions—these are the crowded inner-city ones—shouldn’t

be there. I think they are probably right. To run the institutions, activities for

prisoners are essential as an administrative matter. And there is no doubt that

some prisoners are assisted as a result of rehabilitation programs, in terms of

cost-benefit. It’s not a huge amount of funds to expend, and the programs do

help some prisoners. The thought that prisons are thus made into country

clubs can only be held by people whose knowledge stops at the front gate.

You have all been kind enough to throw up questions that illustrate my point:

in this field, emotion dominates reason.
123

Notes

Lecture 1: What, If Anything, Can the Federal

Government Do About Crime?

1. Levi, Edward H., An Introduction to Legal Reasoning,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.

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

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

3. Empey, Lamar T., and Steven G. Lubeck, The Silverlake

Experiment, Chicago: Aldine, 1971.`

4. Empey, Lamar T., and Maynard L. Erickson, The Provo

Experiment, Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1972.

5. Reinharz, Peter, “Why Teen Thugs Get Away with

Murder,” City Journal, Autumn 1996, 43–49.

6. Greenwood, Peter W., “Juvenile Crime and Juvenile

Justice,” in Crime, ed. James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersilia,

San Francisco: ICS Press, 1995:104.

Lecture 2: Why Can’t We Make Prohibition Work Better?

Some Consequences of Ignoring the Unattractive

1. See, e.g., Skolnick, J., “Rethinking the Drug Problem,”

Daedalus Vol. 121, No. 3, (1992):133–60.

2. The most articulate statement of this position is contained

in William Bennett’s introduction to the first National Drug

Control Strategy (Office of National Drug Control Policy,

National Drug Control Strategy, Washington, D.C.: Executive Office of the President, Office of National Drug

Control Policy, 1989).
124

Notes

3. Federal figures are published annually in Office of National

Drug Control Policy, National Drug Control Strategy,

Washington, D.C.: Executive Office of the President,

Office of National Drug Control Policy. State and local

figures are available only for 1990 and 1991; see Office of

National Drug Control Policy, State and Local Spending on

Drug Control Activities, Washington, D.C.: Executive Office

of the President, Office of National Drug Control Policy,

1993.

4. Reuter, Peter, Robert MacCoun, and P. Murphy, Money

from Crime, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1990.

5. The best data come from an annual survey of high school

seniors conducted by the Institute of Social Research at the

University of Michigan (Johnston, L., P. O’Malley, and J.

Bachman, Monitoring the Future, Ann Arbor, MI: University

of Michigan).

6. Annual data on drug use in the general population are

provided by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse,

Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human

Services.

7. On this and other enforcement effects, see Kleiman, M.,

Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results, New York: Basic

Books, 1992, Chapter 6.

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

Press, 1994.

9. The most compelling description of this world is provided

in Bourgois, P., In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El

Barrio, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

10. Saner, H., R. MacCoun, and P. Reuter, “On the Ubiquity of

Drug Selling,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology Vol. II,

No. 4 (1995):337–62.

11. Edsall, Thomas, with Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The

Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics, New

York: W.W. Norton, 1991, 237.
125

Notes

12. This comment was reported by two participants at the

meeting of the National Advisory Council of the Substance

Abuse and Mental Health Administration in January 1997.

13. On these matters generally, see Rudovsky, D., “The Impact

of the War on Drugs on Procedural Fairness and Racial

Equality,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1994):237–74.

14. Rosenthal, A., “Job for a President,” The New York Times,

October 22, 1996, A27.

15. On recent prostitution enforcement policies, showing that

most arrestees receive very modest penalties, see Pearl,

Julie, “The Highest Paying Customers: America’s Cities and

the Costs of Prostitution Control,” Hastings Law Journal 38

(1987):769–90.

16. On the problems of comparison, see MacCoun, R.,A.

Saiger, J. Kahan, and P. Reuter, “Drug Policies and Problems: The Promise and Pitfalls of Cross-National Comparisons,” in Psychoactive Drugs and Harm Reduction: From Faith

to Science, ed. N. Heather, A. Wodak, E. Nadelmann and P.

Ohare, London: Whurr Publishers, 1993:103–17.

17. Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, AIDS and Drug

Misuse, London: HMSO, 1987.

18. Silverman, L., and N. Spruill, “Urban Crime and the Price

of Heroin,” Journal of Urban Economics 4 (1977):80–103.

19. For example, Saffer, Henry, and Frank Chaloupka, “The

Demand for Illicit Drugs,” Working Paper No. 5238,

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research,

1995.

20. For a review, see Anglin, M.D., and Y.-I. Hser, “Treatment

of Drug Abuse,” in Drugs and Crime, ed. Michael Tonry and

James Q. Wilson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1990.

21. Wilson, James Q., “What, If Anything, Can the Federal

Government Do to Reduce Crime?” Perspectives on Crime

and Justice Lecture Series, U.S. Department of Justice,

National Institute of Justice, 1996.
126

Notes

22. The most important of these studies, which compares the

costs of reducing cocaine consumption by 1 percent though

treatment or enforcement, is Rydell, C.P., and S.

Everingham, Controlling Cocaine, Santa Monica, CA:

RAND Corporation, 1994.

Lecture 4: Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities

for Breaking the Cycle of Violence

1. Cooper, M., “Girl’s Slaying Spurs Inquiry on City Lapses,”

The New York Times, February 16, 1997, B1.

2. Terry, D., “When the Family Heirloom Is Homicide,”

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

3. Details of the design and description of the subjects are

available in Widom, C.S., “Child Abuse, Neglect, and

Adult Behavior: Design and Findings on Criminality,

Violence and Child Abuse,” American Journal of

Orthopsychiatry 59 (1989):355–367.

4. For further information about these findings, see Widom,

C.S., “The Cycle of Violence,” Science 244 (1989):160–166

and Maxfield, M.G., and C.S. Widom, “The Cycle of

Violence: Revisited Six Years Later,” Archives of Pediatrics

and Adolescent Medicine 150 (1996):390–395.

5. Smith, C., and T.P. Thornberry, “The Relationship

between Child Maltreatment and Adolescent Involvement

in Delinquency,” Criminology 33 (1995):451–481.

6. Zingraff, M.T., J. Leiter, K.A. Myers, and M.C. Johnsen,

“Child Maltreatment and Youthful Problem Behavior,”

Criminology 31 (1993):173–202.

7. Of the offenders in this study, abused and neglected

children committed more offenses than controls (the

average number of arrests was 6.9 versus 4.7, respectively).

Abused and neglected children were also more likely to be

recidivists (having more than two arrests) than nonabused
127

Notes

and nonneglected individuals (17 percent versus 13

percent, respectively), chronic offenders with 5 or more

arrests (20 percent versus 12 percent, respectively), and

repeat violent offenders (9 percent versus 6 percent,

respectively).

8. Loeber, R., and M. Stouthamer-Loeber, “Family Factors as

Correlates and Predictors of Juvenile Conduct Problems

and Delinquency,” in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review

of Research, ed. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1987:29–149.

9. Maxfield, M.G., and C.S. Widom, “The Cycle of Violence:

Revisited Six Years Later,” Archives of Pediatrics and

Adolescent Medicine 150 (1996):390–395.

10. This research was supported in part by grants from the

National Institute of Justice (86–IJ–CX–0033, 89–IJ–CX–

0007, and 93–IJ–CX–0031), the National Institute of

Mental Health (MH49467), the National Institute of

Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (AA09238), and the

National Institute of Drug Abuse (DA10060). Points of

view are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S. Department of Justice or the

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

11. Perez, C.M., and C.S. Widom, “Childhood Victimization

and Long-term Intellectual and Academic Outcomes,”

Child Abuse and Neglect 18 (1994):617–633.

12. Luntz, B., and C.S. Widom, “Antisocial Personality

Disorder in Abused and Neglected Children Grown Up,”

American Journal of Psychiatry 151 (1994):670–674.

13. Widom, C.S., “Exposure to Traumatic Events and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Abused and Neglected Children

Followed-up, 1997,” unpublished report.

14. Widom, C.S., “Childhood Victimization: Early Adversity

and Subsequent Psychopathology,” in Adversity, Stress, and

Psychopathology, ed. B. Dohrenwend, New York: Oxford

University Press, in press.
128

Notes

15. Widom, C.S., T. Ireland, and P.J. Glynn, “Alcohol Abuse

in Abused and Neglected Children Followed-up: Are They

at Increased Risk?” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 56

(1995):207–217.

16. Widom, “Childhood Victimization: Early Adversity and

Subsequent Psychopathology.”

17. Coie, J., N.F. Watt, S.G. West, J.D. Hawkins, J.R. Asarnow,

H.J. Markman, S.L. Ramey, M.B. Shure, and B. Long, “The

Science of Prevention: A Conceptual Framework and Some

Directions for a National Research Program,” American

Psychologist 48 (1993):1013–1022.

18. One report by Meddin and Hansen found that the majority

of abuse cases that were substantiated received no services

at all (Meddin, B., and I. Hansen, “The Services Provided

during a Child Abuse and/or Neglect Case Investigation

and the Barriers That Exist to Service Provision,” Child

Abuse and Neglect 9 (1985):175–182).

19. Olds, D., C. Henderson, R. Tatelbaum, and R. Chamberlin,

“Improving the Delivery of Prenatal Care and Outcomes of

Pregnancy: A Randomized Trial of Nurse Home Visitation,”

Pediatrics 77 (1986):16–28.

20. Berrueta-Clement, J.R.B., L.J. Schweinhart, W.S. Barnett,

A.S. Epstein, and D.P. Weikart, Changed Lives: The Effects

of the Perry Pre-School Program on Youths Through Age 19,

Ypsilanti, MI: High Scope Press, 1984, Monograph No. 8.

21. Schweinhart, L.J., H.B. Barnes, and D.P. Weikart, Significant Benefits: The High Scope Perry Preschool Study through

Age 27, Ypsilanti, MI: High Scope Press, 1993.

22. Garry, E.M., Truancy: First Step to a Lifetime of Problems,

Juvenile Justice Bulletin, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency

Prevention, October 1996, NCJ 161958.
129

Notes

23. Powell, K.E., and D.F. Hawkins, “Youth Violence Prevention: Descriptions and Baseline Data from 13 Evaluation

Projects,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Supplement to Vol. 12, No. 5 (September/October 1996).

24. Coie et al., “The Science of Prevention: A Conceptual

Framework and Some Directions for a National Research

Program,” 1013–1022.

25. Carlson, M., F. Earls, and R.D. Todd, “The Importance of

Regressive Changes in the Development of the Nervous

System: Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Child

Development,” Psychiatric Development 6 (1988):1–22.

26. Widom, C.S. “Understanding the Consequences of Childhood Victimization,” in The Treatment of Child Abuse, ed.

R.M. Reese, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, in

press.

27. Burgess, R.L., and R.D. Conger, “Family Interaction in

Abusive, Neglectful, and Normal Families,” Child Development 49 (1978):1163–1173.

28. Widom, “Understanding the Consequences of Childhood

Victimization.”

29. These behavior problems were noted in the juvenile

probation department records or in the original case

material and indicated that the child had engaged in

chronic fighting, fire setting, destructiveness, or defiance of

authority; had severe temper tantrums, uncontrolled anger,

or sadistic tendencies (as in aggressiveness toward weaker

children); or was extremely difficult to control.

30. Terr, L.A., “Chowchilla Revisited: The Effects of Psychiatric Trauma Four Years after a School-bus Kidnapping,”

American Journal of Psychiatry 140 (1983):1543–1550.

31. Olds, D., C. Henderson, and H. Kitzman, “Does Parental

and Infancy Nurse Home Visitation Have Enduring Effects

on Qualities of Parental Caregiving and Child Health at

25–50 Months of Life?” Pediatrics 93 (1994):89–98.
130

Notes

32. Olds, Henderson, Tatelbaum, and Chamberlin, “Improving

the Delivery of Prenatal Care and Outcomes of Pregnancy:

A Randomized Trial of Nurse Home Visitation,” 16–28.

33. Olds, Henderson, and Kitzman, “Does Prenatal and Infancy

Nurse Home Visitation Have Enduring Effects on Qualities

of Parental Caregiving and Child Health at 25–50 Months

of Life?” 89–98.

34. Masten, A., “Resilience in Individual Development:

Successful Adaptation Despite Risk and Adversity,” in

Educational Resilience in Inner-city America: Challenges and

Prospects, ed. M.C. Wang and E.W. Gordon, Hillsdale, NJ:

Laurence Erlbaun Associates, Inc., 1994: 3–25.

35. Frankel, M. “Less Medicare, More Magic,” The New York

Times, March 9, 1997, sec. 6, p. 30.

36. United States Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of

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

37. The home visitation program in Elmira, New York, was

analyzed and the net cost was determined: $3,173 for 2

years of intervention (including personnel salaries and

benefits, travel expenses, supplies, staff training, and a

modest overhead charge). By the time the children were

age 4, low-income families who had received a nurse home

visitor during pregnancy and through the second year of the

child’s life cost the government $3,313 less than comparison group children. Government savings were estimated as

the difference in utilization of AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid, and child protection services minus tax revenues due to

maternal employment (Olds, D., C. Henderson, C. Phelps,

H. Kitzman, and C. Hanks, “Effect of Prenatal and Infancy

Home Visitation on Government Spending,” Medical Care

31 (1993):155–174).

38. Annual operating expenses per inmate in jails in 1993 were

approximately $15,000 (Perkins, C.A., J.J. Stephan, and

A.J. Beck, Jails and Jail Inmates 1993–1994: Census of Jails
131

Notes

and Survey of Jails, Bulletin, Washington, D.C.: U.S.

Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, April

1995, NCJ 151651) and for State and Federal inmates they

were approximately $18,000, based on average costs per day

(Camp, C.G., and N.G. Camp, The Correctional Yearbook,

South Salem, NY: Criminal Justice Institute, Inc., 1996).

39. Leventhal, J.M. “Twenty Years Later: We Do Know How to

Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect,” Child Abuse and Neglect

20 (1996):647–653.

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

B5.

41. Leventhal, “Twenty Years Later: We Do Know How to

Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect,” 651.

42. Kumpfer, K., V. Molgaard, and R. Spoth, “The Strengthening Families Program for the Prevention of Delinquency

and Drug Use,” in Preventing Childhood Disorders, Substance

Abuse and Delinquency, ed. R. DeV. Peters and R.J.

McMahon, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996.

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

1. Andrews, D.A., I. Zinger, R. D. Hoge, J. Bonta, P.

Gendreau, and F. T. Cullen, “Does Correctional Treatment

Work? A Clinically Relevant and Psychologically Informed

Meta-Analysis,” Criminology 28 (1990):369–404; Lab, S.P.,

and J.T. Whitehead, “From ‘Nothing Works’ to ‘The

Appropriate Works’: The Latest Stop on the Search for the

Secular Grail,” Criminology 28 (1990):405–17; Lipsey,

M.W., “Juvenile Delinquency Treatment: A Meta-analytic

Inquiry into the Variability of Effects,” in Meta-analysis for

Explanation, ed. T.D. Cook, H. Cooper, D.S. Cordray, H.

Hartman, L.V. Hedges, R.J. Light, T.A. Louis, and F.

Mosteller, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992;

Lipsey, Mark W., Juvenile Delinquency Treatment: A MetaAnalytic Inquiry into the Variability of Effects, New York:

Russell Sage Foundation, 1991.
132

Notes

2. Wilson, James Q., “Drugs and Crime” in Drugs and Crime,

ed. Michael Tonry and James Q. Wilson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990; Moynihan, Daniel Patrick,

“Iatrogenic Government—Social Policy and Drug

Research,” American Scholar 62 (1993):361–62.

3. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization in the

United States—1996, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department

of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997; Federal Bureau

of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports—Crime in the

United States—1995, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department

of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1996.

4. Beckett, K., Crime and Drugs in Contemporary American

Politics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

5. van Dijk, Jan J.M., Pat Mayhew, and Martin Killias,

Experiences of Crime Across the World— Key Findings from

the 1989 International Crime Survey, Deventer, Netherlands,

and Boston: Kluwer, 1990; van Dijk, Jan J.M., and Pat

Mayhew, Criminal Victimisation in the Industrial World—Key

Findings of the 1989–1992 International Crime Surveys, The

Hague: Ministry of Justice Directorate for Crime Prevention, 1992.

6. Zimring, F.E., and G. Hawkins, Crime Is Not the Problem:

Lethal Violence in America, New York: Oxford University

Press, 1997.

7. Morris, Norval, The Habitual Criminal, London: Longmans,

Green and Co., 1951.

8. Commission of Inquiry on Capital Punishment, Report of the

Commission of Inquiry on Capital Punishment, Sessional Papers

XIV—1959, Colombo, Ceylon: Government Publications

Bureau, 1959.
Perspectives on Crime and Justice

Videotape Lectures

Videotapes of the lectures presented in this publication are available through the

National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS). Videotapes are ideal for

stimulating productive debate on criminal justice research and public policy issues

and are 60 to 80 minutes in length.

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

James Q. Wilson, Ph.D.

NCJ 164375

Can We Make Prohibition Work Better? An Assessment of American Drug Policy

Peter Reuter, Ph.D.

NCJ 164376

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

Mark H. Moore, Ph.D.

NCJ 164504

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

Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D.

NCJ 164505

Crime, the Media, and Our Public Discourse

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

NCJ 164506

The cost for each videotape is $29.50 in the United States and $33 in Canada and

other countries. Contact NCJRS to order the above videotapes:

National Criminal Justice Reference Service

Box 6000

Rockville, MD 20849–6000

800–851–3420

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