SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS Tables
Page 1 TOP OF DOC
67–348
2000
PREVENTING AND FIGHTING CRIME: WHAT WORKS?
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIME
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
OCTOBER 2, 2000
Serial No. 144
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
Page 2 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office
Superintendent of Documents, Congressional Sales Office, Washington, DC 20402
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois, Chairman
F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, Jr., Wisconsin
BILL McCOLLUM, Florida
GEORGE W. GEKAS, Pennsylvania
HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas
ELTON GALLEGLY, California
CHARLES T. CANADY, Florida
BOB GOODLATTE, Virginia
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
BOB BARR, Georgia
WILLIAM L. JENKINS, Tennessee
ASA HUTCHINSON, Arkansas
EDWARD A. PEASE, Indiana
CHRIS CANNON, Utah
JAMES E. ROGAN, California
LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina
MARY BONO, California
SPENCER BACHUS, Alabama
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
DAVID VITTER, Louisiana
Page 3 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
JOHN CONYERS, Jr., Michigan
BARNEY FRANK, Massachusetts
HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
RICK BOUCHER, Virginia
JERROLD NADLER, New York
ROBERT C. SCOTT, Virginia
MELVIN L. WATT, North Carolina
ZOE LOFGREN, California
SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas
MAXINE WATERS, California
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
ROBERT WEXLER, Florida
STEVEN R. ROTHMAN, New Jersey
TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin
ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York
THOMAS E. MOONEY, SR., General Counsel-Chief of Staff
JULIAN EPSTEIN, Minority Chief Counsel and Staff Director
Subcommittee on Crime
BILL McCOLLUM, Florida, Chairman
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
BOB BARR, Georgia
Page 4 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
GEORGE W. GEKAS, Pennsylvania
HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas
CHARLES T. CANADY, Florida
ASA HUTCHINSON, Arkansas
ROBERT C. SCOTT, Virginia
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
STEVEN R. ROTHMAN, New Jersey
ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York
SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas
GLENN R. SCHMITT, Chief Counsel
DANIEL J. BRYANT, Chief Counsel
RICK FILKINS, Counsel
CARL THORSEN, Counsel
BOBBY VASSAR, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
HEARING DATE
October 2, 2000
OPENING STATEMENT
Page 5 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Canady, Charles T., a Representative in Congress from the State of Florida, and presiding chairman, Subcommittee on Crime
WITNESSES
Abraham, Lynne, District Attorney, City of Philadelphia, PA
Coleman, Patrick J., Deputy Director of Policy and Management, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Program, U.S. Department of Justice
Fox, James, Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, College of Criminal Justice, Boston, MA
Fry, Bruce C., Social Science Analyst, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Holton, John, director, National Center for Child Abuse Prevention Research, Chicago, IL
Johnson, Byron R., director, Office for the Study and Prevention of Domestic Violence, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Mauer, Marc, assistant director, The Sentencing Project, Washington, DC
McGarrell, Edmund F., director, Crime Control Policy Center, Hudson Institute, Indianapolis, IN
Page 6 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Reynolds, Morgan, director, Criminal Justice Center, National Center for Policy Analysis, Washington, DC
Tolan, Patrick, director, Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois-Chicago, Chicago, IL
Wexler, Chuck, executive director, Police Executive Research Forum, Washington, DC
Wilson, John J., Acting Administrator, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency, Office of Justice Program, U.S. Department of Justice
LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
Abraham, Lynne, District Attorney, City of Philadelphia, PA: Prepared statement
Coleman, Patrick J., Deputy Director of Policy and Management, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Program, U.S. Department of Justice: Prepared statement
Fox, James, Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, College of Criminal Justice, Boston, MA: Prepared statement
Fry, Bruce C., Social Science Analyst, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Prepared statement
Page 7 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Holton, John, director, National Center for Child Abuse Prevention Research, Chicago, IL: Prepared statement
Mauer, Marc, assistant director, The Sentencing Project, Washington, DC: Prepared statement
McGarrell, Edmund F., director, Crime Control Policy Center, Hudson Institute, Indianapolis, IN: Prepared statement
Reynolds, Morgan, director, Criminal Justice Center, National Center for Policy Analysis, Washington, DC: Prepared statement
Tolan, Patrick, director, Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois-Chicago, Chicago, IL: Prepared statement
Wexler, Chuck, executive director, Police Executive Research Forum, Washington, DC: Prepared statement
Wilson, John J., Acting Administrator, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency, Office of Justice Program, U.S. Department of Justice: Prepared statement
APPENDIX
Material submitted for the record
Page 8 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
PREVENTING AND FIGHTING CRIME: WHAT WORKS?
MONDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2000
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Crime,
Committee on the Judiciary,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a.m., in Room 2237, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Charles Canady presiding.
Present: Representatives Charles T. Canady, Asa Hutchinson, and Robert C. Scott.
Staff Present: Daniel J. Bryant, chief counsel; Veronica L. Eligan, staff assistant; and Ly Nguyen, minority counsel.
OPENING STATEMENT OF PRESIDING CHAIRMAN CANADY
Mr. CANADY. This hearing of the Crime Subcommittee will now come to order.
I would like to begin by presenting a statement to the subcommittee which the chairman of the subcommittee, my colleague from Florida, Representative McCollum, has asked that I present to the subcommittee.
Page 9 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
This afternoon's hearing provides us with the opportunity to ask a too infrequently asked question: What works to prevent and fight crime? To help us answer that question, the Crime Subcommittee will have the benefit of input from people who actually know something about reducing crime.
A significant reduction of violent crime over the last 8 years is a well-known and well-documented fact. What is not so well known is the explanation for this drop in crime. The witnesses who will be testifying today are not in agreement as to all of the factors responsible for the decline. Demographic trends, sentencing reforms, innovative policing, and the economy are among the many causal factors identified as helping to explain the drop.
Once all of the responsible factors are identified, the next challenge for us is to determine what the Federal Government's role should be in promoting approaches that are proven to be effective in reducing crime.
We have made great progress at the Federal level. However, Washington cannot and should not try to do it all. The Federal, State and local partnership in fighting crime is one that necessarily involves limited strategic Federal assistance. Often that assistance is simply a matter of the Federal Government getting out of the way of States as they man the front lines in fighting crime. The district attorney in Philadelphia, Lynne Abraham, will be testifying as to one such important way Congress helped to get the Federal Government out of the way, by reining in activist Federal judges who were taking over State and local prison systems and imposing population caps resulting in violent convicts being released back onto the streets without serving a day in prison.
Page 10 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
When it comes to early prevention efforts involving shaping the character of young people so they will grow up into law-abiding citizens and not lawbreakers, often the last thing that local community prevention efforts need is the Federal Government with all of its red tape and regulations to get involved. Unfortunately, a Federal check often does more harm than good to some of the innovative efforts pursued by local communities.
On the other hand, there continues to be a role for limited focused Federal assistance. Federally funded research, training and technical assistance and disseminating information about best practices continue to be obvious examples of how the Federal Government can be a constructive partner. Doing a good job of policing our borders and combating interstate crime are other obvious examples of the Federal role in crime fighting. Our witnesses will identify a number of other promising areas for Federal Government involvement as well.
Consequently, this hearing is not an academic exercise. It is an opportunity to better formulate the proper Federal role in assisting States and localities prevent and fight crime. The hearing is timely because even though crime has been dropping for most of the decade, criminologists point out that crime is still high by historical standards.
In short, we should be encouraged by the dramatic results we have seen in the last 8 years. However, we owe it to our children and families to remain committed to an effective, balanced effort to keep our streets safe. We would be remiss if we attempted to claim victory and relaxed at this critical stage. Together we can continue the trend, protect our neighborhoods and deliver much-needed resources to our communities. Our children and families deserve nothing less.
Page 11 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We look forward to this hearing and to the testimony of our witnesses. I would now like to recognize Mr. Scott for his opening remarks.
Mr. SCOTT. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank you for holding this hearing on what actually works to prevent or reduce crime. And although I note with certain irony that we are holding the hearing on what works to prevent or reduce crime at the end of a very active 2 years of new crime bills passing out of the subcommittee, I believe it is important still to get on the congressional record a compendium of what the research and documentation shows as to what actually works. Perhaps in the next Congress we can use the information as guidance for what we can do to address crime in the next Congress.
We are already doing a lot to reduce crime. The United States is the world's most prolific incarcerator. The international average incarceration rate is about 100 people per 100,000 population. The United States rate is over 600 per 100,000, either first or second place. In inner cities, the incarceration is not the international average, but 3,000 per 100,000, 30 times the international rate. And yet there is no research to show that more incarceration will have any effect on the crime rate over and above what we are already doing.
The reality is, however, that despite the absence of any empirical information showing that increased incarceration brings about crime reduction, there is little likelihood that any of the punitive sentencing provisions now in our laws will be repealed. So calling for more prison time may be politically popular, and most policymakers are loath to be viewed as soft on crime. So the relevance of knowing what actually works at this point is not to undo what we are doing, rather to guide our efforts when we want to do more to prevent or reduce crime to ensure that the next dollar spent on crime reduction will be spent in a cost-effective manner.
Page 12 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Fortunately, we know what works to prevent and reduce crime in a cost-effective manner. There are now reams of information which show that a compendium of services beginning with teen pregnancy prevention and prenatal care, parental training, Head Start, quality education, recreational programs, dropout prevention programs, job training, and guaranteed college scholarships, will significantly reduce the incidence of crime.
Head Start programs have been studied, for example, and have demonstrated their effectiveness. Those with the Head Start opportunity have a higher high school graduation rate, lower teen pregnancy rate, and lower involvement in crime. Similarly, the Job Corps program deters crime. About 75 percent of Job Corps participants move on to a job or full-time study. They earn about 15 percent more than those who do not participate in the program, and not surprisingly, Job Corps participants are about one-third less likely to be arrested than nonparticipants.
Drug courts programs have been studied, and like offenders who are sent to jail for drug violations compared to those who were sent to drug rehabilitation programs, the drug rehabilitation program was significant in reducing recidivism rates. Incredibly those programs not only reduce crimes, they save money. Studies of the Head Start program, for example, estimate that between 4 and $7 dollars are saved for each dollar spent in Head Start by reducing the future costs of remedial education, welfare and crime. Studies of the Job Corps program estimate about $1.45 in future expenditures on participants are avoided for every dollar spent on the Job Corps program. Drug programs show that it is not only more effective to send people to rehabilitation, but significantly cheaper than sending them to jail.
But despite all of the clear evidence that there are more cost-effective approaches in reducing crime than simply adding to our incarceration rate, we continue to spend unlimited billions trying to incarcerate our way out of crime. In so doing, we pay a heavy price in both finances and lost opportunity to reduce crime.
Page 13 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
For example, in Virginia a few years ago, we abolished parole. The House of Delegates in considering the bill estimated that the cost of the sound bite, ''Abolish parole for truth in sentencing,'' was about $2.2 billion in construction and about a billion a year in annual operations. Now, there are 11 congressional districts in Virginia, and for that amount of money, we had an opportunity where we could have built about 200 $1 million Boys and Girls Clubs in every congressional district in the State. And with operation money, we could have run those Boys and Girls Clubs, we could have guaranteed a college education for every child that could get in but couldn't afford to go, and double Head Start and provide a summer job for every poor youngster in the State looking for a summer job, and then hire 200 police officers in every congressional district in the State, and then double the budget for local mental health, mental retardation, and substance abuse services, and double job training under the Job Training Partnership Act, and still have enough money to provide $750 more a month for every foster care child in the State. Or we could abolish parole, even though the supporters acknowledged that it would not make a statistically significant difference in the crime rate. The estimate was about 3 percent reduction. That is within the margin of error in a political poll.
So it is clear that in addressing crime, we have a choice. We can initiate cost-effective ways of reducing crime or we can play politics, but we can't do both. We can either do what has been proven to reduce crime in a cost effective manner, or we can play politics as usual, creating slogans that sound good but do nothing to reduce crime.
We have an impressive group of witnesses today who will provide us with a review of our crime policy choices and their likely consequences. At the conclusion of this hearing, we will see not only what the research and documentation shows, but will also show what research we need to also conduct to make sure that we are going in the right direction.
Page 14 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
There is, I think, no question that additional research in crime policy needs to be done. So I look forward to the testimony, and I thank the chairman for convening the hearing.
Mr. CANADY. Thank you, Mr. Scott.
We will now go to our first panel. Our first witness is Lynne Abraham, District Attorney for the City of Philadelphia. Ms. Abraham has served in this capacity since 1981. She previously served as a common pleas court judge from 1980 until 1991 and as a municipal court judge from 1976 until 1980. She is a member of the National District Attorneys Association and chairs its Victims' Rights Working Group, Governmental and Legislative Liaison Committee. Ms. Abraham also serves as the legislative chairperson of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association. She has provided invaluable testimony to this subcommittee on a number of occasions. We are very glad to have her with us here today.
Next we would like to welcome Patrick J. Coleman, Deputy Director of Policy and Management, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs at the U.S. Department of Justice. In his capacity as Deputy Director, Mr. Coleman manages policy analyses, bureau communications, strategic budget planning and human resource development. Previously Mr. Coleman was the resident practitioner at the Bureau of Justice Assistance after serving at the Iowa Department of Corrections as senior administrator.
Our next witness will be John J. Wilson, Acting Administrator for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention within the Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. Mr. Wilson served as senior counselor for OJJDP from 1974 until 1992 when he joined the office as its full-time legal counsel. Before coming to the Department of Justice, he was a program administrator and case worker at the Michigan Department of Social Services.
Page 15 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Our final witness on this panel will be Bruce C. Fry, Social Science Analyst, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Fry currently manages several projects related to substance abuse, mental health, and criminal justice and serves as project officer for the family drug treatment court initiative. Prior to joining HHS, he was the senior principal in the firm of Johnson, Basin & Shaw where he was project director for the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment's national demonstration programs treating offenders and institutions and the community.
I want to thank all of you for being with us here today. I would ask that you do your very best to keep your opening statements to 5 minutes. Your entire written statements will, without objection, be made a part of the permanent record of the hearing. We are very pleased to start with Ms. Abraham.
STATEMENT OF LYNNE ABRAHAM, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, PA
Ms. ABRAHAM. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I am delighted to be back before you again.
In 1995 I testified before this very subcommittee asking the help of Congress in alleviating a terrible problem that happened in Philadelphia, and that is the takeover of every jail and prison facility by a Federal judge. This created such havoc in Philadelphia that I and other interested and like-mined prosecutors came before Congress and as a result of that, the Prison Litigation Reform Act was passed. Thus, just a few weeks ago, the Federal judge who had held our prison hostage for all of those years, not only did she take the opportunity to cite the Prison Litigation Reform Act, but I note in passing that the United States Supreme Court just recently held that part of the Prison Litigation Reform Act before it was constitutional, was not a violation of the separation of powers, and that the process before them fulfilled every appropriate requirement.
Page 16 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I will make my remarks regarding Prison Litigation Reform Act part of this record and will subsequently forward that testimony to you. Needless to say without Congress's intervention, Pennsylvania and other courts throughout the country would have been under the thumb of Federal judges, and now this bold and innovative and visionary legislation which Congress passed has been of enormous help in giving the public the sense that crime doesn't pay big time. Formerly our prisoners felt that crime paid in a big way because of this disastrous prison cap which we suffered.
Our first obligation, obviously, as members of the government is to provide the public with safety. America's prosecutors are thoughtful and intelligent, hardworking, honorable, innovative, and nobody has more day-to-day common sense, rubber-meets-the-road solutions to some of the issues before this great committee than America's prosecutors. We are the laboratory and the crucible within which innovative crime prevention programs are being tested, experimented with, and ultimately are taking shape. And the Prison Litigation Reform Act is really just one of those.
Besides the Prison Litigation Reform Act of which I am extraordinarily grateful for Congress in its intervention in giving us relief, we found in the District Attorney's Office of Philadelphia what works in crime reduction are the following programs that I am going to spend 2 minutes on, with the committee's permission.
I am going to leave aside for some other time my personal and our experience with hard time for violent and repeat offenders because I think that doesn't address itself to the issue at hand today. But in our office, I formed the Public Nuisance Task Force, which is a broad-based multiagency task force in the communities, to rid the communities of various public nuisances. This involves civil asset forfeiture of offending licensees of stop-and-go liquor establishments, smoke houses, bordellos and the like, and a real community involvement; and it has worked tremendously well in Philadelphia in ridding various neighborhoods of drug nuisances.
Page 17 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We are now experimenting with a youth violence reduction project which was a transplant from the Boston experiment and Reverend Eugene Rivers, which we have found very helpful. We have taken the two most violent districts in Philadelphia where our youth have the most likelihood of either killing or being killed and flooded that area with case workers, social workers, pastors, job training, probation, really supervision of where the probationers are needed on the street at odd hours, police involvement, every component of our health and welfare issue, to try to save these kids from killing or being killed.
Our drug courts offer promising results, as does PNTF, Public Nuisance Task Force, and our youth violence reduction project. Our drug courts have shown us with a certain population we can and do make great headway with drug offenders who will first plead guilty conditionally to their crime and then get job training, counseling, mental health intervention, job placement and very, very strong probation, court, district attorney, and public defender intervention to make sure that they don't reoffend while in this program; and using the carrot and stick for these offenders is extremely helpful.
Our truancy project offers us great help. District attorneys are assigned to truant parents. We find truant parents are not really taking care of their truant kids, and we found that sensitizing parents, court visitation and home visitation is helpful in trying to get these truant kids back into school because truancy is one of the precursors to violent crime.
For our targeted youthful nonviolent offenders, our youth project, our Youth Assistance Project, or YAP as we call it, has diverted juveniles to monitoring and mentoring with community-based triumvirates of judicial officers, men and women from the community who sit in judgment of these young offenders who sign a contract with us, a contract that they will go in front of a committee of citizen volunteer/judicial officers, agree that they committed the offense that they committed, understand the impact of their crime, write an essay, do community service, engage in very strong mentoring and monitoring over a long period of time, and we have found that this youth aid panel project has, over the course of the more than 11 years it has been in existence, has a more than 80 percent success rate, which means that these kids never reoffend. It is not for everybody and it doesn't work in every single case, but it does have an effect.
Page 18 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We have used training for bar owners when alcohol has played a role in an accident. We have trained these licensees and their bartenders how to watch for and observe the signs of drunkenness, and obviously the threat of removing their license and permanently barring them from it is a very strong incentive and makes them more responsive.
We have partnered with pastors across the broad spectrum of religious leaders in Philadelphia who will come into court and voluntarily take over the case of a young offender whom the pastor believes he can monitor, mentor, put into job training and make him or her a responsible citizen. And obviously by partnering with other law enforcement agencies and our police, our United States attorneys, sharing intelligence, cross-designating district attorneys as assistant U.S. attorneys, we have done a tremendous amount with Operation Cease-fire/Operation Exile Gun cases. Strong Federal incentives to gun-carrying criminals is really a very important component.
So whether it is community prosecution with district attorneys in the community, our elder justice project with elder victims assigned attorneys from the voluntary bar of the bar of Philadelphia, with assistant district attorneys, victim advocates and other support groups to make sure that elders, which are a booming crime-prone population—they are the ones most seized upon by criminal offenders because they appear to be the most vulnerable—elders are now getting a sense that justice does work for them.
Finally, as an innovative project that I started as district attorney, I formed two 501(c)(3) operations. I believe I am unique in that respect. One is called I Lead, where we take grassroots community-based leaders and put them through a 2-year training project of how to be the next generation of community-based leaders. It is supported by the First Union Foundation and other foundations in Philadelphia, and these community-based leaders who did not know how to effectively engage in dialogue with their governmental counterparts, systems analysis, and systemic approaches to crime fighting, are learning how to take back their own communities in a very positive way; and Urban Genesis, my second foundation which concentrates on after-school programs such as Kids Building Bridges, sponsored through the YMCAs of north Philadelphia and Abington, which provides kids with after-school mentoring, community participation with kids from other neighborhoods, computer-based training and the like. Library books, after-school arts program, scholarships to summer camps and the like are some of the projects that Urban Genesis has engaged in.
Page 19 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So America's prosecutors are grateful for the help that Congress has given in listening to all of the things that we are engaged in and especially for their role in the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which I will speak to later if the committee has any questions to ask of me about that, and I thank the committee very much.
Mr. CANADY. Thank you, Ms. Abraham.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Abraham follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF LYNNE ABRAHAM, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, PA
Good Afternoon.
I am Lynne Abraham, the District Attorney of Philadelphia. I am also a member of the Board of Directors of the National District Attorneys Association. I am delighted that the Subcommittee on Crime invited me to speak today about innovations in crime control.
In 1995, I testified before this Subcommittee asking for your help to solve a terrible crime problem in Philadelphia. A federal judge had effectively seized control of our bail process and was ordering the wholesale release of prisoners. Congress responded to my concerns and passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The critical crime control measure brought tremendous relief to us in Philadelphia. For this I visionary legislation, I am extremely grateful.
Page 20 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Over the last 25 years, we in law enforcement have seen a dramatic change in prisoner release practices. In 1970, there were no prisons or jails under sweeping court orders. By 1990, 508 municipalities and over 1,200 state prisons were subject to court orders or consent decrees, many of which contained prison population caps. Unfortunately, the federal courts, often with the intention of improving prison conditions, intruded unnecessarily into the state criminal justice systems and completely undercut their ability to dispense justice and protect the public.
A Justice Department study of 79,000 felony probationers found that 49% of them were rearrested for another felony within their state while on probation. Half of these arrests were for a violent crime or a drug crime. Another study shows that 35% of all persons arrested for violent crimes were, at the time of their arrest, on parole, probation or pre-trial release. All too often these chronic violent offenders are on the street because of pressure from the federal courts.
From the day I took office as District Attorney, I tried to rid the City of Philadelphia of a prison cap that had gutted the Philadelphia criminal justice system and has convinced our residents that crime pays big-time. After inmates in our local prisons filed a lawsuit complaining about the prison conditions, a federal judge, who made no finding of any constitutional violation, began overseeing what became a long-term program of wholesale releases of up to 600 criminal defendants per week to keep the prison population down to what she considers an ''appropriate level''.
In this same federal lawsuit there had never even been a trial. In fact, a different federal judge recently found that the conditions in even Philadelphia's very oldest and most decrepit facility—Holmesburg Prison—were still constitutional. Unfortunately, a prior mayoral administration did not even put up a defense to this lawsuit—it simply folded its cards and agreed, under pressure from the federal judge, to enter two consent decrees providing for the ongoing release of huge numbers of inmates.
Page 21 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
These two consent decrees mandated federally ordered releases of criminal defendants awaiting trial. Instead of individualized bail review, where Philadelphia judges would consider all of the factors relating to a defendant's dangerousness and risk of flight, we had a ''charged-based'' system for determining who may enter the prisons. In other words, the only question asked was ''what is the defendant charged with today''? If the defendant was charged with what the federal judge called ''non-violent crimes,'' he would not go to jail no matter how dangerous he was and no matter how obvious it was that he would flee and not show up for his trial. Some of these so-called non-violent offenses included stalking, carjacking, robbery with a baseball bat, burglary, drug dealing, vehicular homicide, manslaughter, terroristic threats and gun charges.
These criminals could not be detained pretrial no matter how many times they failed to appear in court. In this absurd system a drug dealer carrying a loaded Uzi was deemed nonviolent. The defendant's prior convictions, his history of failing to appear for court, his mental health history, his lack of ties to the community, even if he was in the country illegally, and his drug or alcohol dependency were deemed completely irrelevant under these federal decrees.
Unfortunately, criminal defendants knew the system and knew that Philadelphia judges no longer had any power to compel their appearance for trial. The federal interference with our state bail system was catastrophic:
Before the federal prison cap began, Philadelphia had approximately, 18,000 outstanding bench warrants (that is, arrest warrants issued when a defendant fails to show up for trial and becomes a fugitive). At the height of the prison cap, we had almost 50,000 bench warrants and virtually no one out on the streets looking for these fugitives. Why bother—if arrested, they would all be released again to the streets because of the cap.
Page 22 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In an eighteen-month period, thousands of defendants who were on the street because of the prison cap have been arrested for new crimes, including 79 murders, 959 robberies, 2,215 drug dealing charges, 701 burglaries, 2,748 thefts, 90 rapes, and 1113 assaults.
The rate of failure to appear in court was higher for prison cap defendants than for defendants released under our traditional state court bail programs. A 1992 study established the following failure-to-appear rates: drug dealing 76%; burglary 74%; theft 69%. By contrast, the failure to appear rate for aggravated assault—a crime for which defendants cannot be released under the prison cap—was just 3%. The fugitive rate nationally for defendants charged with drug dealing is 26% in a year. In Philadelphia, however, our FTA rate of 76% was three times the national rate.
But these statistics do not reflect the incalculable losses our community suffered because criminals confidently believed that the criminal justice system was powerless to stop them. Unfortunately, prison caps cause needless financial losses to our citizens and businesses. Businesses suffer thefts, losses not covered by insurance deductibles, increased security and surveillance costs, and increased insurance premiums. How can we hope to attract retail businesses to urban areas when store owners know that professional thieves and burglars have a ''get-out-of-jail-free card?'' Prison caps are not simply a law enforcement issue—they are, in turn, inextricably tied to the financial viability of a city.
Following the prison cap, Philadelphia became an attractive terminus in the drug trade. The Philadelphia International Airport became a favored location to send out-of-state couriers. Under the prison cap, we could not hold a drug smuggler in prison unless he was caught with more than 50 pounds of marijuana or more than 50 grams of cocaine. Drug organizations did need not even have to suffer the inconvenience of putting up any money to bail out the courier—none was required.
Page 23 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
One case involving a drug dealer out of jail because of the prison cap exemplifies how prison cap orders can help turn urban locations into drug dealing free zones. Undercover detectives from Montgomery County, which is adjacent to Philadelphia, arranged a drug deal in a parking lot along the road that forms the border between Philadelphia and neighboring Montgomery County. Before the deal took place, the defendant tried repeatedly to move the sale to the Philadelphia side of the street because, as, the defendant explained to the undercover detectives, he could go to jail in Montgomery County but not in Philadelphia. The defendant nevertheless completed the deal on the Montgomery County side of the street and, yes, he did go to jail there. He would not have been placed in custody had he completed his drug deal on the Philadelphia side of the street.
While the prison cap permitted defendants to commit more crimes and to thumb their noses at our court system, one must keep in mind that individualized bail review—as opposed to the cap's ''charge-based'' system—is also essential for reducing the overall costs to the criminal justice system. I would like to provide you with an example that I believe demonstrates the problem. A 29-year-old trained helicopter mechanic with no prior record became involved with drugs and started committing burglaries in Philadelphia. If processed under our state bail programs, he probably would have been released without any bail for his first and perhaps his second offense. But certainly by his third offense, he would have been put in jail and then released promptly through a conditional release program, which would have required him to participate in drug treatment and to stay out of trouble. If this had happened, he would have been a candidate for probation at sentencing. His total time in jail would have been a few days, and he would still be working and paying taxes.
Page 24 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But this did not happen. This defendant could not be held in jail under the federal prison cap until his tenth burglary. With ten felonies, this defendant was no longer a candidate for probation. Instead, he was convicted and sentenced to a maximum term of ten years in the state prison, at a cost to the taxpayers of approximately $30,000 per year. He can now get drug treatment in prison, but it is less effective as it is comes after the addiction has become long-term.
The consent decrees in this case raised extremely disturbing questions about whether any federal court ought to so intrude into one of the most basic functions of state government—its criminal justice system. The federal judge in charge of the Philadelphia cap controlled 224 million dollars in bond funds for the construction of a new state prison and the new state courthouse, even though there is not a single prison bed in the courthouse. The federal judge insisted that the bond indenture contain language requiring her approval of routine construction matters. Every single construction change order has required federal court approval. For example, the Philadelphia court system wanted to expand one room in the courthouse for court interpreters. This change, if done during the construction phase, would have cost $5,000. But the federal judge did not like the proposal, so she rejected it. The change instead was completed post-construction—at a cost to Philadelphia taxpayers of approximately $30,000.
The federal court micro-managed the Philadelphia criminal justice agencies. There were debates over the placement of flag poles on our prisons, whether the state judges' new chairs should be scotch-guarded, the candle watt power of the light fixtures, and the choice of art work at the prisons. The fundamental question is who should be in charge of the debate—the federal judge or state officials?
Page 25 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
This case raised a most disturbing aspect of federal consent decrees in prison conditions lawsuits. With a consent decree, one state political administration can arrogate unto itself powers it does not have under state law. It can make political decisions, embody them in the federal court order, and then insulate that policy from change by the next duly elected administration.
For these reasons, the National District Attorney's Association, a bipartisan organization of prosecutors from across the country, unanimously endorsed a resolution recognizing the severe, adverse effects of federal prison conditions litigation and strongly urging Congress to adopt provisions curbing federal court intervention through prison litigation. And Congress listened. In 1996 Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act.
The Prison Litigation Reform Act limited the power of federal judges to enter intrusive consent decrees. It also established strict limits on prison cap orders. Now a prison cap order can no longer be entered by a single federal judge. Rather, only a three-judge panel has such power. More importantly, the PLRA precludes the entry of a prison cap unless it is absolutely the last resort. It requires federal courts to look for safe alternatives that do not endanger the public.
On the eve of the Act's passage, the federal judge in Philadelphia finally agreed to end Philadelphia's infamous prison cap. And finally, just a few weeks ago, she terminated the entire case, citing the PLRA. There is no doubt in my mind that this case ended, and the threat of a future prison cap ended, because Congress took strong action.
The PLRA reflects a common sense and cost-effective approach to fighting crime. The PLRA did not cost taxpayer dollars. Rather, it was a no-nonsense crime fighting measure that prevented federal courts from needlessly interfering in state and local criminal justice systems. In fact, the PLRA saves states millions of dollars that can now be devoted to other crime fighting measures. The PLRA contains provisions designed to limit frivolous prisoner lawsuits. In just 2 years, the PLRA cut the number of prisoner lawsuits in half. See William C. Collins and Darlene C. Grant, The Prison Litigation Reform Act: In the Two Years Since its Enactment, PLRA Has Had a Dramatic Impact on Inmate Litigation, Corrections Today, August 1998 at p. 60 (publication of the American Correctional Association) (copy enclosed).
Page 26 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Many other states have successfully terminated prison consent decrees that needlessly hampered prison security measures and proper prison operations. For example, Alabama has terminated 22 federal court consent decrees. The state of Pennsylvania terminated a decades-old consent decree that interfered with prison security searches, hampered prison administrators' responses to riots, and needlessly restricted innovative programs.
Quite simply, the PLRA finally allows states to run their prisons without unnecessary interference by federal courts. And despite the dire predictions of law professors, and prisoners advocates, the federal courts have retained the full power to fix actual constitutional violations. As a result, the federal courts and the United States Supreme Court have upheld the constitutionality of the PLRA against all challenges.
Mr. CANADY. Next, Mr. Coleman.
STATEMENT OF PATRICK J. COLEMAN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF POLICY AND MANAGEMENT, BUREAU OF JUSTICE ASSISTANCE, OFFICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAM, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Mr. COLEMAN. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Scott, members of the Subcommittee on Crime. I serve as Deputy Director for Policy and Management at the Bureau of Justice Assistance, but today I represent the Office of Justice Programs and its component agencies. This afternoon I will describe some of the OJP programs that are effectively preventing and fighting crime and how OJP-funded research and evaluation has and will continue to shape the formulation of public safety policy and programs, with the one exception of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which my colleague John Wilson will address in his remarks.
Page 27 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
First of all, the Chicago Project of Human Development is one example of the Justice Department's commitment to basic research into the causes and correlates of crime. This is a long-term study to learn more about the factors that contribute to delinquency and criminal behavior. Initial findings strongly indicate that when residents share a willingness to help each other, monitor children's play activities and intervene in preventing acts of juvenile truancy or delinquency, rates of violence decrease. This and other research indicates that there are community risk factors or root causes of crime such as joblessness, absence of economic opportunity, public health risks, abuse of alcohol and other drugs, or poor education that require multifaceted solutions. Through this and other studies, we continue to see that the key to successful prevention is a collaborative approach involving not only the criminal justice system but also a community, social, cultural, educational, faith-based and economic system.
The National Comprehensive Communities Program is an excellent illustration of how effective crime prevention strategies can be. Funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance from 1994 through 1997, CCPs continue to be supported with State, local and private funding. These programs bring together residents of neighborhoods that are most affected by crime, along with local officials to identify public safety issues and formulate crime-fighting strategies.
One example is Hartford, Connecticut. CCP funds were used to establish 17 neighborhood problem-solving committees, or PSCs, made up of community members and organizations, law enforcement officials, social services and area merchants. The PSCs worked to resolve root causes of crime, and as a result of this increased level of community participation, in 1998 the city of Hartford created a community court, only the second of its kind in the Nation at that time. Among other innovations, the new court emphasized offender restitution. Consequently, those convicted of misdemeanors in that court have provided over 25,000 hours of community service to Hartford's neighborhoods.
Page 28 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
According to the National Crime Prevention Council with the broader picture of the CCP cities, violent crime in CCP sites has decreased significantly, falling 48 percent in Fort Worth, Texas, 32 percent in New York City and 24 percent in Hartford, Connecticut.
OJP administers several major initiatives that combine drug treatment with criminal justice sanctions and incentives. One of the most widespread and effective programs is drug courts. Research has shown that combining criminal justice sanctions with substance abuse treatment is highly effective in breaking the cycle of drug use and crime. Compared to traditional courts, drug courts typically involve prompt, graduated sanctions, regular drug testing of offenders and the prospect of reduced charges or shorter sentences for those who successfully complete treatment. In addition, NIJ's, National Institute of Justice, evaluation findings show that specialized drug courts are working to reduce substance abuse and that the rearrest rates are lower than the rates for other groups of offenders.
Another initiative informed by research and evaluation that has enhanced the safety and security of communities across the Nation is the Weed and Seed Program. OJP funds law enforcement projects to weed out drug dealing, gang activity and violent crime, and to seed the targeted area with education, drug treatment, social services and employment opportunities. Started in 1991, Weed and Seed has grown from three programs to over 200 sites today. According to a 1999 National Institute of Justice evaluation of eight jurisdictions, targeted areas within these sites saw a significant decrease in violent crime between the year before Weed and Seed was implemented and 2 years afterward.
Programs funded under the Violence Against Women Act have helped improve the criminal justice system's response to victims of domestic violence, and in doing so have removed the potential for future violence in these situations. One such program, the STOP program, has demonstrated the importance of encouraging police victim advocates, prosecutors, and courts to establish a coordinated public response to the serious problems of domestic violence. For example, as a result of receiving Federal STOP grants, the U.S. Attorney's Office here in Washington, DC, has charged and tried 76 percent more domestic violence cases with dramatically higher conviction rates. A recent study indicates that violence against women by intimate partners fell by 21 percent between 1993 and 1999. Such results suggest that programs such as the STOP program are very effective.
Page 29 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Experience and research have shown a tremendous need for prison-based drug treatment and continuous care in the community. According to Justice Department statistics, about half a million offenders are released from prison or jail each year and return to our communities. Without close monitoring with services, about two-thirds of released offenders will reoffend and be reincarcerated.
In light of this data, OJP has begun testing two approaches to help communities more effectively supervise offenders following incarceration. The first initiative is a reentry court that supervises released offenders using judges instead of traditional parole boards. The second approach involves reentry partnerships where law enforcement, corrections, and the community work together to prepare for and manage the reentry process.
The bottom line is that there are approaches to crime prevention that work. Furthermore, crime prevention is a wise and cost-effective investment. A study conducted by the Rand Corporation shows that in order to achieve a 10 percent decrease in violent crime, it costs eight times more to increase incarceration, now at $228 per capita, than it does to adopt incentives for young people to complete school.
Although Americans are beginning to experience a greater sense of security and well-being, too much crime still occurs, and resources for preventing and reducing crime are limited. Therefore we must continue to formulate our criminal justice policy and practices not on assumptions but on sound data. This is the course that the Office of Justice Programs will continue to follow.
Page 30 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you for allowing me to discuss these important issues today, and I will be happy to answer any questions when you get to that point.
Mr. CANADY. Thank you, Mr. Coleman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Coleman follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF PATRICK J. COLEMAN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF POLICY AND MANAGEMENT, BUREAU OF JUSTICE ASSISTANCE, OFFICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAM, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Scott, and Members of the Subcommittee on Crime. Although I serve as the Deputy Director of Office of Policy and Management at the Bureau of Justice Assistance, today I represent the Office of Justice Program and its component agencies. I am happy to have this opportunity to describe some of the OJP programs that are most effective in preventing and fighting crime.
This afternoon I will speak briefly about the Office of Justice Programs-funded programs including the Chicago Project on Human Development, the Comprehensive Communities Program (CCP), Drug Courts, Weed & Seed projects, Violence Against Women programs, and Offender Reentry programs. I will describe how each of these programs is helping to develop the nation's capacity to prevent and control crime, administer justice, and assist crime victims. Finally, I will discuss—very briefly—how OJP-funded research and evaluation has and will continue to shape the formulation of public safety policy and programs. You may notice that I will not describe some of the very successful work being done in this area of juvenile justice. I will leave this discussion to my colleague, John Wilson, the Acting Director of the OJP's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Page 31 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
CHICAGO PROJECT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
The Chicago Project of Human Development is an excellent example of the Justice Department's commitment to basic research into the causes and correlates of crime. OJP's National Institute of Justice, in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health, is supporting this 8-year study to learn more about the factors that contribute to delinquency and criminal behavior, such as individual personalities, family relationships, school environment, and the community itself. Initial findings from the project strongly indicate that neighborhood cohesiveness is more effective in reducing crime than externally-imposed solutions, such as police crackdowns. In other words, when residents share a willingness help each other, monitor children's play activities, and intervene in preventing acts of juvenile truancy or delinquency, rates of violence decrease. This and other research indicates that there are community risk factors, or root causes of crime, such as joblessness, absence of economic opportunity, public health risks, and poor education, that require multifaceted solutions. The Chicago Project is expected to provide invaluable information about the origins of delinquency, substance abuse, and criminal behavior, so that community leaders and other policy makers can design effective strategies for preventing and reducing crime.
Through this and other studies we continue to see that the key to successful prevention is a collaborative approach involving not only the criminal justice system, but also a community's social, cultural, educational, religious, and economic systems. The findings of the Chicago Project and other research also consistently demonstrates the high correlation between crime and the abuse of alcohol and other drugs,(see footnote 1) and the benefit of imposing immediate sanctions upon offenders.(see footnote 2) This research-based understanding has and will continue to inform the development of crime reduction and prevention strategies that involve the active participation of community leaders, law enforcement, prosecutors, court officials, medical, mental health and substance abuse treatment professionals, victim advocates, and other citizens concerned about the safety and integrity of their neighborhoods.
Page 32 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
COMPREHENSIVE COMMUNITIES PROGRAM (CCP)
The national Comprehensive Communities Program is an excellent illustration of how effective crime prevention strategies can be when they are based in research and program evaluation. Funded and administered by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) from 1994 through 1997, CCPs continue to be supported with state, local, and private funding. The goal of these programs is to bring together residents of crime-affected neighborhoods and local officials so they identify public safety issues and formulate crime-fighting strategies.
In Hartford, Connecticut, CCP funds were used to establish 17 neighborhood Problem Solving Committees (PSCs). These PSCs were made up of members of neighborhood and tenant associations, faith-based organizations, social clubs, as well as local law enforcement officials, social service agency staff, and area merchants. A representative from each PSC participates on a city-wide Community Planning and Mobilization Committee, which addresses issues that concern all 17 of the represented neighborhoods. As the result of this increased level of community participation, in 1998, the City of Hartford created a community court, only the second of its kind in the nation. Among other innovations, the new court emphasizes offender restitution; consequently, those convicted of misdemeanors have provided over 25,000 hours of community service to Hartford's neighborhoods. The committees also were instrumental in establishing an ACTION line for citizens to register complaints about crime and disorder problems in their neighborhoods. By 1999, the ACTION line had logged over 1,000 calls, and 87 percent of the complaints were closed after follow-up by city staff. NIJ's research documents the tremendous success of the Comprehensive Community Program—such strong community partnerships were formed that many of these programs continue to expand, long after the federal funding has run out. According to the National Crime Prevention Council, violent crime in CCP cities has decreased significantly—falling 48 percent in Fort Worth, 32 percent in New York City, and 24 percent in Hartford.
Page 33 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
DRUG COURTS
Research has shown that combining criminal justice sanctions with substance abuse treatment is highly effective in breaking the cycle of drug use and crime. Many studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of treatment, particularly treatment in prisons, or other long-term residential settings followed by aftercare treatment in the community. OJP administers several major initiatives that combine drug treatments with criminal justice sanctions and incentives for good behavior. One of the most widespread and effective programs is drug courts. Compared to traditional courts, drug courts typically involve prompt, graduated sanctions; regular drug testing of offenders; and the prospect of reduced charges or shorter sentences for offenders who successfully complete treatment. This approach uses the coercive power of the court to force abstinence and alter behavior of offenders. As an alternative to traditional incarceration or probation, drug courts offer an effective, and less costly means to reduce drug use and recidivism.
To study the effectiveness of this specialized type of court, OJP's National Institute of Justice awarded two research grants to examine four of the older drug courts in the country. Initial findings show that specialized drug courts are working to reduce substance abuse, and the rearrest rates of drug court participants are lower than the rates for other groups of offenders. Research funded by OJP's Drug Courts Program Office also indicates over 90% of the graduates retained or obtained jobs; and that for every tax dollar spent on drug courts, $2.50 was saved in prison and residential treatment costs. Evaluations of drug court performance conducted by Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) in 1998 and 1999 indicate that drugs courts are effective in curtailing drug abuse among nonviolent offenders, reducing the burdens imposed on the criminal Justice system by drug-related cases, and helping offenders become law-abiding, drug-free, and self-sufficient members of their communities. As of June, 2000, there were 533 operating drug courts with more than 293 communities in the planning stages. Drug courts exemplify the genius of allowing basic research and common sense inform the development of an innovative model that can be replicated in other communities. At every juncture, evaluation and the dissemination of information about drug courts was and is supported by OJP's Drug Courts Program Office.
Page 34 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
WEED AND SEED PROJECTS
Another initiative, based in research and evaluation, that has enhanced the safety and security of 200 communities across our nation is the Weed & Seed program. OJP funds law enforcement projects to weed out drug dealing, gang activity, and violent crime and seed the targeted area with education, drug treatment, social services, and employment opportunities. Begun in 1991, Weed & Seed has grown from 3 sites in 1991 to over 200 sites today. These programs have tremendous community and neighborhood support. In addition, Weed & Seed projects have been independently evaluated and determined to work in reducing crime and improving the vitality of neighborhoods. According to a 1999 NIJ evaluation of 8 sites, five of the targeted areas within these sites saw a significant decrease in violent crime (homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) between the year before Weed & Seed was implemented until the second year of implementation: Stowe Village in Hartford saw a decrease of 46%, Crawford-Roberts in Pittsburgh, 24% and Central District in Seattle, 10%. Finally, the evaluation indicated that the small amount of federal funding provided to Weed and Seed sites, and the program's emphasis on the direct involvement and decision making of community members, stimulated a much greater investment of local resources in cleaning up neighborhoods and making them more safe.
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT PROGRAMS
Programs funded under the Violence Against Women Act have helped improve the criminal justice system's response to victims of domestic violence. NIJ's evaluation of the Violence Against Women Office-funded, Services, Training, Officers, Prosecutors (STOP) program has demonstrated the importance of encouraging police, victim advocates, prosecutors, and courts to establish a coordinated public response to the serious problem of domestic violence. Preliminary results show increasing numbers of victims are being served, and more perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence are being arrested and convicted as a result of STOP grant programming. For ''ample, the U.S. Attorney's Office here in Washington reported that they charged and tried 76% more domestic violence cases. Even more dramatically, their rate of domestic violence convictions increased by 324%! Nationally, violence against women by intimate partners, including husbands and boyfriends, fell by 21 percent from 1993 to 1999. On the basis of research and evaluation, we have recommended that Violence Against Women Act programs continue to promote collaboration among law enforcement, prosecutors, advocates and courts. Our evaluation data also indicates, however, that we need to make the distribution STOP funds more flexible, lengthen the time frame for spending these dollars, expand funding to include sexual assault projects, and promote projects for women from under-served communities.
Page 35 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
OFFENDER REENTRY PROGRAMS
Experience and research has also shown a tremendous need for prison-based drug treatment and post-incarceration supervision and follow-up treatment. OJP is developing approaches to help offenders stay crime and drug-free when they return to their communities following incarceration. The objective of these efforts is to hold offenders accountable for their behavior, to reduce recidivism and to increase public safety. According to Justice Department statistics, about half a million offenders are released from prison or jail each year and return to our communities. Too often, these offenders do not receive the close supervision, drug treatment, and other services they need. Many reoffend. In fact, without close monitoring, about two-thirds of released offenders will reoffend and be reincarcerated—thus creating a substantial and continual threat to the safety and security of surrounding communities. In light of this data, OJP has begun testing two approaches to help communities more effectively supervise offenders following incarceration. The first initiative is a reentry court, where the judge, prosecutor, in partnership with law enforcement and correctional officers set up a reentry plan, monitor offenders' behavior, and apply sanctions and incentives.
The second approach involves reentry partnerships, where law enforcement, corrections, and the community work together to prepare for and manage the reentry process. Under this initiative, reentry plans are developed for individual offenders based on a network of community resources, including employment, housing, substance abuse treatment, family counseling, and other services. This comprehensive approach draws upon the resources of a broad range of partners, including corrections agencies, community police, treatment providers, and community-based organizations. The offender, the offender's family, the victim, and the community all work together to develop a comprehensive strategy for managing an offender's reentry to community life. Eight states are participating in this initiative—Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, Vermont, and Washington.
Page 36 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
CONCLUSION
The bottom line is there are approaches to crime prevention that work. Furthermore, crime prevention is a wise and cost effective investment. A study conducted by the RAND Corporation shows that it costs almost 8 times more to reduce crime by increasing incarceration ($228 per capita) than by adopting incentives for young people to complete school ($32).
Today, I have briefly described a few of the programs that are helping to decrease levels of crime, violence, and drug abuse in many communities across our nation. I have pointed out that research and evaluation is a high priority for OJP—from basic research such as the Chicago Project on Human Development to the testing of new ideas like drug courts and reentry programs.
Although residents are beginning to experience a greater sense of security and well-being, we are all keenly aware that too much crime still occurs, and that resources for preventing and reducing crime are not unlimited. Thus, we must continue to formulate our criminal justice policy and practices, not on assumptions about what we think will work, but upon sound data from objective research and program evaluation. This is the approach that will lead to the most effective policy planning and implementation, and this is the course that OR will continue to follow.
I look forward to working with you, Mr. Chairman, and the Members of this Subcommittee to explore crime fighting and prevention strategies and to disseminate information about what works to state and local communities. This concludes my formal statement. I would be happy now to answer any questions you or the Subcommittee Members may have.
Page 37 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. CANADY. Mr. Wilson.
STATEMENT OF JOHN J. WILSON, ACTING ADMINISTRATOR, OFFICE OF JUVENILE JUSTICE AND DELINQUENCY, OFFICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAM, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Mr. WILSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Scott. It is my pleasure to discuss what works in addressing juvenile crime. I am accompanied by Betty Chemers, the Deputy Administrator for OJJDP Discretionary Programs. As you are aware, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, OJJDP, was established by Congress in 1974 as the primary Federal agency responsible for addressing the issue of juvenile delinquency and later the problem of child victimization. Although the nature and extent of delinquency and child abuse have changed considerably since the office was established 26 years ago, we continue to provide national leadership and to support an array of activities designed to help States and local communities to implement prevention, early intervention, and graduated sanctions programs that work to improve the juvenile justice system.
OJJDP's work is organized into a cycle of activity. First we use what we have learned from our research, evaluation, and statistical activities to develop model demonstration programs. If evaluation proves these programs to be successful, such as one-on-one mentoring, we help communities to replicate them through direct funding and training and technical assistance. We keep the public and policymakers informed about the issues surrounding delinquency and effective programs through our comprehensive information dissemination activities.
Page 38 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
This cycle of activity reflects a critical Federal role in supporting State and local efforts to address the needs that they have identified in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
There is another step in the process that is important, one to which the bulk of OJJDP's resources are dedicated. And that step is the direct funding that we provide States and localities through our formula and block grant programs so they can implement what works at the State and local levels, and we help them to evaluate those programs. Although our discretionary programs get a lot of attention, it is really through the careful investment of formula and block grant funds, in conjunction with State and local matching resources, that we see improvement in juvenile justice system practice and infrastructure.
My written testimony details much of what we have learned about juvenile offenders and delinquency and how that research contributes to preventing and controlling juvenile crime. Using findings from longitudinal research and studies of juvenile offenders, OJJDP has developed a scientific research base that lays the groundwork for sound policy and program development and for the implementation of a continuum of proven prevention, intervention, and graduated sanctions programs. We believe that research must be the foundation to any successful strategy to combat juvenile crime and victimization because it allows us to fully determine the scope of the problem and the most cost-effective ways to address it.
One tangible outcome of OJJDP's research program is our Comprehensive Strategy for Serious Violent and Chronic Juvenile Offenders. As described in my written testimony, the Comprehensive Strategy is a blueprint for establishing a continuum of care to meet the needs of America's children while protecting the public. It is based on decades of research, evaluation and statistical studies about justice, public health, and youth-development issues. The Comprehensive Strategy calls for significant investment at the front end of the system, recognizing that prevention is a science, and that there are many proven prevention programs that help keep children from becoming involved in the juvenile justice system and becoming tomorrow's adult criminals.
Page 39 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Our Guide for Implementing the Comprehensive Strategy has been an enormously important resource for States and local communities as they undertake a strategic planning process to identify and implement the best mix of programs to meet community needs. OJJDP is currently in the process of revising the guide to reflect the most up-to-date information.
My written testimony also describes a number of promising and effective programs, including our gold standard Blueprints for Violence Prevention. These 11 model programs, Blueprints programs, have been proven effective in preventing and reducing adolescent violent crime, aggression, and substance abuse. The Blueprints program has made a major contribution to identifying what works to address juvenile delinquency. However, these programs reflect just the tip of the iceberg in terms of identifying the many promising and effective programs that exist and also tailoring identified programs to specific local needs.
I mention this because neither the Blueprints nor any other program represent the final solution to eliminating delinquency and child victimization. We cannot just put a one-size-fits-all bandage on the problem and wait until it heals itself. Rather, we need to strategically use programs like the Blueprints as part of a balanced, comprehensive, and community-wide approach; and this is an important point because while today's discussion may include mention of specific effective programs—and there are many of them out there which have been rigorously evaluated and many more promising programs—it is really community involvement that is the key to success in delinquency prevention and control.
I appreciate the opportunity to join in today's discussion. Thanks in large part to the commitment of Attorney General Janet Reno, we have come a long way in bringing the problems of delinquency and child victimization to light and in making the needs of this Nation's youth a priority. I look forward to working with you and the committee to continue to build upon the progress that we have achieved. I will be pleased to answer any questions that you may have.
Page 40 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. CANADY. Thank you, Mr. Wilson.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wilson follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF JOHN J. WILSON, ACTING ADMINISTRATOR, OFFICE OF JUVENILE JUSTICE AND DELINQUENCY, OFFICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAM, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Scott, and members of the subcommittee. It is my pleasure to be here today to discuss the significant issue of what works in preventing and controlling crime, particularly juvenile delinquency. As Acting Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), I am pleased to describe OJJDP's research and evaluation projects and the programs that have proven effective in preventing and responding to delinquency.
A logical starting point in this discussion is identifying what we know about juvenile offenders and how that research can contribute to preventing juvenile crime.
Since 1986, OJJDP has sponsored three longitudinal studies—collectively referred to as the Program of Research on Causes and Correlates of Delinquency'to improve understanding of serious delinquency, violence, and drug use by examining how individual juveniles develop within the context of family, school, peers, and community. Samples of inner-city youth were selected in three cities: Denver, CO; Pittsburgh, PA; and Rochester, NY. The studies involve repeated contacts with the same juveniles, including face-to-face private interviews every 6 to 12 months for a substantial portion of their developmental years. On average, 90 percent of the juveniles in the sample population have been retained in the studies.
Page 41 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Researchers in all three sites use the same core measures to look at: delinquent behavior, drug use, juvenile justice system involvement, community characteristics, family experiences, peer relationships, educational experiences, attitudes and values, and demographic characteristics.
Many findings of the Causes and Correlates studies reinforce earlier knowledge and beliefs about the roots of delinquency and violence. But, our knowledge is also being advanced in many important new directions. Some of the major findings of the Causes and Correlates research (much of which has been reported previously) include:
Childhood maltreatment is associated with later behavior problems. A history of childhood maltreatment is associated with an increased risk of at least 25% for engaging in a host of adolescent problem behaviors, including serious and violent delinquency, drug use, poor school performance, mental illness, and teenage pregnancy. In addition, a history of maltreatment nearly doubles the risk that teenagers will experience multiple problems during adolescence.
Less serious problem behaviors precede more serious delinquency. Disruptive and delinquent behavior in boys generally escalates in a well-defined, predictable manner. Researchers identified three distinct developmental pathways: authority conflict (e.g., defiance and running away); covert actions (e.g., lying and stealing); and overt actions (e.g., aggression and violent behavior). Individuals may proceed along single or multiple developmental pathways toward serious antisocial behavior.
Some of the newest findings of the Causes & Correlates research indicate that:
Page 42 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Multiple family transitions, such as moving, and parents divorcing or remarrying, put children at a higher risk for delinquency. Youth in these urban samples experienced a substantial number of transitions in adolescence. Researchers found a consistent relationship between a greater number of transitions and a higher level of delinquency and drug use.
Early involvement in drug use and delinquency is highly correlated with becoming a teen father. Even when researchers controlled for other variables, they found a number of problem behaviors—engagement in early sexual intercourse (before age 16), gang membership, chronic involvement in violent behavior, and chronic drug use'substantially increased a boy's likelihood of becoming a teen father. Chronic drug use alone more than doubled the probability of teen fatherhood. Other significant risk factors for teen fatherhood included being raised in a family on welfare, and drug exposure (having been offered drugs or having witnessed a drug deal).
Teen fatherhood does not result in young males becoming more responsible and law-abiding. Some hypothesize that becoming a father might encourage young males to become more responsible and assume the tasks of helping to establish and support a family. In fact, researchers found that fathering a child is associated with an even greater increase in delinquent behavior. Teenage fathers were more likely to have had a court petition alleging delinquency, to be drinking alcohol frequently, to be involved in drug dealing, or to have dropped out of school.
In recent years, OJJDP has also sponsored the work of two important study groups—the Study Group on Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders and the Study Group on Very Young Offenders.
Page 43 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Serious and violent juvenile (SVJ) offenders comprise a small, yet dangerous population in our country. While their numbers tend to be small, these juveniles account for a disproportionate amount of crime in our communities. In 1995, 22 distinguished researchers collaboratively examined the current research on risk and protective factors, the development of SVJ offending careers, and effective preventive and intervention programs for these offenders. The Study Group found that most SVJ offenders are male and usually display early minor behavior problems that lead to more serious delinquent acts. The majority of SVJ offenders tend to have multiple problems such as substance abuse and mental health difficulties in addition to truancy, suspension, expulsion, and dropping out of school. Further, SVJ offenders are disproportionately victims of violence. Specific findings include:
Actual delinquency careers of SVJ offenders are quite different from what is officially recorded. While first juvenile justice system contact for serious male offenders was at age 14.5, researchers found that the actual delinquency careers of these offenders started much earlier. On average, more than 7 years elapsed between the earliest minor problem behaviors and the first court appearance for an offense.
Many SVJ offenders are never arrested, and the majority of violent juveniles have only one officially recorded violent crime as a juvenile. Juvenile courts do not routinely deal with offenders below the age of 12, either because they are not detected or not referred to court. Potential SVJ offenders are often not identified as such at their first appearance in court because their first arrest is typically for a less serious offense.
There are effective treatments for delinquent juveniles, both in the community and in institutional settings. Programs with the most success for juveniles in the community were those which focused on enhancing interpersonal skills, provided individual counseling, and encouraged a commitment to changing behavior. Interpersonal skills training was also a focus of the most effective programs in institutional settings. Other effective institutional models were small, family-style group homes administered by ''teaching parents,'' who developed positive relationships with the juveniles, monitored their progress in school, and provided individual counseling and support as needed.
Page 44 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
As I noted, the Serious and Violent Offenders Study Group found that most chronic juvenile offenders begin their criminal careers prior to age 12, and some begin as early as 10 years of age. This led to the development of a Study Group on Very Young Offenders made up of 39 researchers who collaboratively examined what is known about the prevalence and frequency of very young offending under age 13. The group focused on identifying whether young offending predicts future delinquent or criminal careers, how juveniles are handled by various systems, and the best methods to preventing very young offending and persistence of offending. The Study Group found that:
Action can be taken to prevent child delinquency and its escalation to chronic criminal behavior. The best way to prevent any type of delinquency (including child delinquency) is to focus on risk and protective factors. Child delinquency risk factors, like risk factors applicable to older juvenile offenders, exist in the individual child, the family, the peer group, the school, and the neighborhood in which the child lives. For very young offenders, the most important risk factors are likely to be individual (e.g., birth complications, hyperactivity, impulsivity) and family (e.g., parental substance abuse, poor child rearing practices). Protective factors that can buffer or off-set the impact of risk factors might include prosocial behavior during the preschool years and good cognitive performance. Ultimately, those with many risk factors and few protective factors are at highest risk of becoming serious, violent, and chronic offenders.
Primary prevention and early intervention efforts should be emphasized. There are several well-evaluated primary prevention programs geared toward conflict resolution and violence prevention that focus on enhancing children's problem-solving and interaction skills. Programs that seek to educate children about the causes and destructive consequences of violence have been shown to significantly reduce aggressive behavior. Several effective programs also exist that focus on reducing early persistent disruptive behavior among children. Some are known to reduce the risk of later, more serious, offending.
Page 45 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
OJJDP also supports a large body of activity in youth gang research, programs, training, and evaluation. Knowledge about how and why juvenile gangs emerge is critical to designing programs that prevent juveniles from becoming involved in gang activity. OJJDP's research also tracks the prevalence of juvenile gang activity nationally and the community factors that work to reduce and eliminate gangs. These efforts include the Comprehensive Community-Wide Approach to Gang Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression; the Rural Gang Initiative; the Gang-Free School Initiative; and the Gang-Free Communities Initiative.
Based on what our research has told us about juvenile offenders and what is likely to work in preventing or reducing juvenile offending, OJJDP has developed or supported a number of programs to address these needs. Let me highlight a few of these programs.
OJJDP's Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders (1993) reflects the continuum of activity occurring among OJJDP's research, demonstration, technical assistance, evaluation, and dissemination efforts. Through initial surveys and research on risk-focused prevention, OJJDP develops community-based demonstration programs that incorporate the six major principles shown to be effective elements of a successful delinquency prevention and control program:
Supporting the family as children's first and primary teacher;
Enhancing the role of core institutions (e.g., schools, businesses, religious institutions) in developing capable, mature, and responsible youth;
Page 46 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Recognizing that delinquency prevention is the most cost-effective approach in combating youth crime;
Intervening immediately and effectively when delinquent behavior first occurs;
Establishing a system of graduated sanctions that responds to the needs of each juvenile offender while providing for community safety; and
Targeting the small segment of serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders who commit a disproportionately high percentage of violent juvenile crime; placing them in secure facilities if necessary; and providing intensive aftercare services.
OJJDP's Guide for Implementing the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders provides communities with tools and proven programs that can be used to implement a ''continuum of care'' based on a strategic planning process. The Comprehensive Strategy has been pilot tested and is being implemented in 42 sites in eight competitively selected States across the country. OJJDP is evaluating the Comprehensive Strategy in five sites, taking what is being learned to improve programs and structure effective training and technical support for communities implementing the Comprehensive Strategy. OJJDP is sharing the results of this work with the field and local communities.
The prevention component of the Comprehensive Strategy calls for coordinated efforts among the juvenile justice system and other service systems to establish a system of support that encourages positive youth development and provides alternatives to delinquent behavior. OJJDP's Title V Program (Incentive Grants for Local Delinquency) embodies the key elements of what the research has shown to be effective in preventing delinquency and provides critical resources to communities to implement a broad range of programs established in a local delinquency prevention plan.
Page 47 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
OJJDP's Title V Community Prevention Grants Program helps local communities that have undertaken a rigorous planning process to implement comprehensive delinquency prevention plans. OJJDP has provided intensive training and technical assistance to nearly 7,000 community leaders and planning team members since 1994. Under Title V, funds are awarded to local jurisdictions to implement prevention plans over a three-year period. Each community that receives funds must have established a Prevention Policy Board to develop its coordinated plan. A 50-percent matching requirement encourages communities to collaborate and share resources. In the past six years, 885 communities have received awards to implement delinquency prevention plans, with over $40 million in matching funds contributed from State and local sources.
OJJDP is supporting a long-term, national-level evaluation of the Title V program and is seeing some encouraging results. For example, in Jacksonville, Tennessee, schools reported a 27 percent increase in overall grade averages in one school year among the 57 students who consistently participated in a multiagency prevention program. Use of alcohol among the participants dropped from 43 percent before the program to 18 percent after the program. Vandalism cases in the targeted area dropped from 84 in the first year to 64 in the second. The Family Access Network—school-based centers for child and family services in Bend, Oregon—improved measured behaviors in 11 percent of the second graders served by its mentor program, and, at one school, the Network's peer mediation training program reduced discipline referrals by 75 percent. A Title V funded law-related education program in Layton City, Utah, found that among the nearly 1,500 participating students, there were 293 fewer thefts than in the control group that did not participate in the program. Gang membership among the participants was reduced by nearly half, from 82 to 45 members in one school year.
Page 48 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In 1996, the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV), at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with funding from the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, designed and launched a national violence prevention initiative to identify and replicate effective violence prevention programs. The project, called Blueprints for Violence Prevention, has identified 11 prevention and intervention programs that meet a strict scientific standard of program effectiveness. Program effectiveness is based upon an initial review by CSPV and a final review and recommendation from a distinguished Advisory Board, comprised of seven experts in the field of violence prevention. The 11 model programs, called Blueprints, have been effective in reducing adolescent violent crime, aggression, delinquency, and substance abuse. Another 18 programs have been identified as promising programs. To date, more than 500 programs have been reviewed, and the Center continues to look for programs which meet the selection criteria which includes (1) Evidence of deterrent effect with a strong research design; (2) Sustained effects over time; and (3) Multiple site replication. Also considered in the criteria are (4) Mediating factors analysis; and (5) Costs-Benefits of the program. The 11 Blueprints programs are:
Prenatal and Infancy Home Visitation by Nurses
The Incredible Years Parents, Teachers, and Children Training Series
The Bullying Prevention Program
Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS)
Page 49 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Big Brothers Big Sisters of America
The Quantum Opportunities Program
Multisystemic Therapy
Functional Family Therapy
Midwestern Prevention Project
Life Skills Training
Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care
OJJDP began supporting the Blueprints Initiative in April 1998, by providing grant opportunities through CSPV for training and technical assistance for a two-year period (three years for Life Skills Training) to sites desiring to implement the Blueprints programs. CSPV has contracted with the designers of the Blueprints program to provide a package of training and technical assistance, and CSPV is conducting a process evaluation to ensure program fidelity at each site. Technical assistance includes help with choosing a program and planning for program implementation. The technical assistance component also provides expert assistance in implementing a Blueprints program including training, on-site technical assistance visits to troubleshoot problems, and regular telephone consultation. A total of 112 sites (including 290 schools) have been selected to receive this assistance.
Page 50 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Another common element of the programs I've highlighted—the Comprehensive Strategy, Title V and Blueprints—is that they involve the entire community in supporting prevention and intervention efforts. OJJDP uses these programs and others to increase local communities' capacity to prevent and reduce juvenile crime. In addition to these comprehensive efforts, OJJDP is continuing to focus research and programs on specific trouble areas such as gangs, substance abuse, mental health, juvenile confinement, and gun violence.
OJJDP also monitors trends regarding juvenile victims and offenders with other agencies within Justice and across government. Key findings from these and other research and evaluation efforts have spurred the development of some new major new research initiatives, such as the Girls Program Evaluations and Girls Study Group and research on American Indian and Alaska Native juveniles. We anticipate that this research will help reduce the increasing number of female offenders and tailor programs specific to their needs. We expect that the American Indian and Alaska Native juvenile research will produce the same type of results among those young people.
For too long in this country, we've based criminal and juvenile justice policy and practice on our assumptions about what we thought would work, rather than on sound data that tell us what, in fact, is working or is promising. My testimony today demonstrates that we have moved into a new era of data and knowledge-based programming, which draws on data from national evaluations, as well as feedback from local programs. OJJDP and all the bureaus and offices of the Office of Justice Programs share a deep commitment to ensuring that we use research to inform our programming, to help determine where we should be investing taxpayer dollars, and that we focus on what works.
Page 51 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you.
Mr. CANADY. Mr. Fry.
STATEMENT OF BRUCE C. FRY, SOCIAL SCIENCE ANALYST, CENTER FOR SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Mr. FRY. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Scott, and members of the subcommittee. Dr. H. Westley Clark, Director of CSAT, was unable to attend today and he asked me to provide testimony in his place. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify.
Today I will focus on the issue of substance abuse treatment and other services for adult offenders who are leaving prison and reentering our communities. CSAT is highly supportive of providing treatment for substance-abusing offenders in the community. The Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant provided $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2001 to States. In 1997 about 35 percent of all admissions to treatment under the block grant were from criminal justice or driving under the influence referral sources.
In fiscal year 2001, SAMHSA is planning to allocate $10 million from its Targeted Capacity Expansion Program for use in the reentry partnership initiative and reentry court program in collaboration with the Departments of Justice and Labor, as Mr. Coleman described. This collaboration is a cost-effective use of resources to reduce crime, improve public safety, and improve public health.
Page 52 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
When incarcerated in our State prisons and jails, offenders are unlikely to receive appropriate substance abuse treatment. A SAMHSA study found that 45 percent of State prisons and 68 percent of jails have no treatment of any kind. More seriously, in most cases where treatment is provided, it is minimal. Only 22 percent of all prisons provide a treatment in segregated settings, which research shows is the most effective approach.
These statistics only address whether there is any treatment in the facilities, not whether there are enough treatment slots in each of these facilities. About 70 percent of persons in State prisons need treatment. Since most are not treated in prison, when they leave prison they are at extremely high risk of relapse and are likely to commit crimes again and again until caught and put back in prison.
Substance abuse treatment for offenders in the community has been extensively studied and evaluated over the past several years and the results are consistent and clear. As CSAT's NTIES study shows, treatment works, reducing crime and recidivism, making America safer.
Several recent studies have reached the same conclusion and I would like to mention three. Dr. Harry Wexler and his colleagues studied recidivism outcomes for offenders who received treatment in a therapeutic facility in Amity Prison in California, and then they received additional treatment and after-care in the community. There was a randomly assigned comparison group. Dr. Wexler found that 3 years after release from prison, 27 percent of offenders who received in-prison treatment and treatment after prison had recidivated, while 75 percent of offenders in the comparison group had gone back to prison.
Page 53 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In Texas, Drs. Knight, Simpson, and Hile conducted a similar study for offenders who received therapeutic community treatment in the Kyle Prison, then spent 3 months in the community-based residential after-care program, and finally received 12 months of outpatient counseling. This study examined reincarceration records for 394 nonviolent offenders during the 3 years following prison. Twenty percent of those who completed both in-prison and community treatment were reincarcerated compared to 64 percent of the after-care dropouts and 42 percent of the untreated comparison group. Furthermore, high-severity after-care completers were reincarcerated only half as often. Knight and his colleagues concluded treatment benefits are more apparent for offenders with more serious crime and drug-related problems.
Finally, in Delaware another study has been conducted on offenders who received similar treatment. Dr. Inciardi and his colleagues found that 3 years after completion of prison, 31 percent of offenders who had community-based treatment and after-care had recidivated, while 71 percent of the comparative group had returned to prison.
The results from these and others studies send a consistent and powerful message: Treatment and after-care in a community following treatment in prison substantially reduces recidivism, thereby substantially improving public safety. According to ONDCP's Year 2000 National Drug Control Strategy, approximately 5 million drug users needed immediate treatment in 1998, while 2.1 million received it. Although we do not have specific statistics on how many substance-abusing offenders do not receive treatment, it is reasonable to assume that treatment shortage for offenders is severe.
CSAT is involved in a great deal of programming for substance-abusing offenders, the details of which you can find in my written testimony. Mr. Chairman, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear today.
Page 54 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. CANADY. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Fry follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF BRUCE C. FRY, SOCIAL SCIENCE ANALYST, CENTER FOR SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the sub-committee. I am Bruce Fry, a Social Science Analyst for the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency. Dr. H. Westley Clark, Director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency, was unable to attend today, and he asked me to provide testimony in his place. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify about the issue of substance abuse treatment and other services for offenders who are leaving prisons and reentering our communities.
CSAT is highly supportive of providing treatment for substance abusing offenders in the community. The Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant provided $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2000 to States for substance abuse prevention and treatment. In 1997, about 35% of all admissions to treatment under the block grant were from criminal justice or DUI referral sources. Obviously, this is a major commitment to the treatment of substance abusing offenders.
In FFY 2001, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is planning to allocate $10,000,000 from its Targeted Capacity Expansion Program for use in the Reentry Partnership Initiative in collaboration with the Departments of Justice and Labor. We believe that this a cost-effective use of resources to reduce crime, improve public safety, and improve public health.
Page 55 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Ex-Offenders Returning to the Community Need Substance Abuse Treatment
A disturbingly high percentage of offenders are high on drugs or alcohol when they commit crimes. Under the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program funded by the Department of Justice, detained arrestees in at least 23 urban jurisdictions throughout the United States are tested periodically to determine the extent of illegal drug use. In 1999, sixty-eight percent of detained arrestees tested positive for one or more illegal drugs. Those arrested are not tested for alcohol use. If they were, the percentage of persons who are high when arrested would clearly be greater than 68 per cent.
When incarcerated in our state prisons and jails, these offenders are unlikely to receive appropriate substance abuse treatment, although the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment program operated by the Department of Justice is substantially increasing the availability of treatment in state prisons. Earlier this year SAMHSA's Office of Applied Studies issued a report analyzing whether treatment is provided in correctional settings. Forty-five percent of state prisons and 68% of jails have no treatment of any kind. More seriously, in most cases where treatment is provided it is minimal. Only 21.8% of all prisons provided treatment in segregated settings, which research shows is the most effective approach. Finally, please note these statistics only address whether there is any treatment in these facilities—not whether there are enough treatment slots in these facilities.
It is estimated that about 70 percent of persons in state prisons need treatment. Since most are not treated in prison, when they leave prison they are at extremely high risk of relapse, and are likely to commit crimes again and again until they are caught and put back into prison, where the cycle begins all over again.
Page 56 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Substance Abuse Treatment for Offenders is an Effective Public Safety Strategy
Substance abuse treatment for offenders in the community has been extensively studied and evaluated over the past several years, and the results are consistent and clear. As CSAT's NTIES study shows, treatment works, reducing crime and recidivism, thereby making America safer for its citizens. Several recent studies have reached the same conclusion. They are important enough to mention briefly.
Dr. Harry K. Wexler and his colleagues studied recidivism outcomes for offenders who received treatment in a Therapeutic Community in Amity Prison in California, and then received additional treatment and aftercare in the community. There was a randomly assigned comparison group. Dr. Wexler found that three years after release from prison 27% of offenders who received in-prison treatment and treatment after prison had recidivated, while 75% of offenders in the comparison groups had gone back to prison. There were 478 felons in the study.
In Texas, Drs. Knight, Simpson, and Hile conducted a similar study for offenders who received Therapeutic Community treatment in the Kyle Prison, then spent three months in a community-based residential aftercare program, and finally received 12 months of outpatient counseling. This study examined reincarceration records for 394 non-violent offenders during the 3 years following prison. Twenty percent of those who completed both in-prison and community treatment were reincarcerated, compared to 64% of the aftercare dropouts and 42% of the untreated comparison groups. Furthermore, high-severity aftercare completers were reincarcerated only half as often as those in the aftercare dropout and comparison groups (26% versus 66% and 52%). The findings support the effectiveness of intensive treatment when it is integrated with aftercare, and the benefits are most apparent for offenders with more serious crime and drug-related problems.
Page 57 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In Delaware, yet another study has been conducted on offenders who receive prison-based Therapeutic Community treatment, and then additional treatment and aftercare for up to two years in the community. Dr. Inciardi and his colleagues found that three years after completion of prison, 31% of offenders who had community-based treatment and aftercare had recidivated, while 71% of the comparison group had returned to prison.
The results from these and other studies send a consistent and powerful message. Treatment and aftercare in the community following treatment in prison substantially reduce recidivism, thereby substantially improving public safety.
Recently state governments in Delaware, California, and some other states have responded to this research by expanding the availability of treatment for offenders in prison and in the community. California, for example, is creating a statewide system that moves offenders who have received treatment in prison directly to treatment and aftercare in their community of origin. However, it is still relatively unusual for offenders to receive prison-based treatment which is then coordinated with community based treatment and aftercare.
What are the Essential Elements of Comprehensive Treatment Programs for Ex-Offenders in the Community?
The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment has been developing and implementing programs in the community for offenders for several years. Our largest program has been the Criminal Justice/Juvenile Treatment Networks, a $35 million demonstration project at seven sites throughout the country. This project and other work has helped us identify what we believe are essential elements to effective treatment for offenders in the community. These elements are:
Page 58 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Close collaboration between key stakeholders in the community, including, among others, the courts, law enforcement, probation and parole, social service agencies, employment and job training agencies, public health agencies, and substance abuse and mental health treatment providers. Usually formal coordinating committees need to be created in order for this collaboration to be successful.
A comprehensive assessment of the offender.
An individualized services plan.
Case management, using a team case management approach. Team case management is critical. There must be close working relationships between, for example, the case manager, the parole officer, and the treatment provider. This team approach results in a united front to the offender, who is often skilled at playing the system, setting one agency against the other. In some jurisdictions parole or probation officers are even co-located with clinical case managers in order to maximize collaboration.
A continuum of substance abuse treatment, from residential treatment to group and individual counseling.
Drug testing.
A complete range of support services, including primary health care.
Page 59 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Support in obtaining a GED or other necessary education.
A strong job training, placement and retention program, preferably one in which employers essentially ''guarantee'' job slots for program participants.
A continuum of supervision.
Aftercare or continuing care programs, including peer support groups.
There is Not Enough Treatment Available for Ex-Offenders
As stated in the Office of National Drug Control Policy's year 2000 National Drug Control Strategy, a significant treatment gap—defined as the difference between individuals who would benefit from treatment and those receiving it—exists. According to estimates drawn from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), the Uniform Facility Data Set (UFDS), and other sources, approximately five million drug users needed immediate treatment in 1998 while 2.1 million received it. Though we do not have specific statistics on how many substance abusing offenders do not receive treatment, it is reasonable to assume the treatment shortage for this population is severe. More importantly, even when treatment is available, it is often not coordinated with treatment that was provided in prison. This lack of management and clinical coordination can substantially reduce the effectiveness of treatment.
Collaboration Among Systems is Essential for Maximum Effectiveness
SAMHSA is excited about our collaboration with the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice in the Reentry Initiative because we believe that, working together, we can create more efficient and effective programs than if we develop our programs separately. At the community level we regularly hear justified complaints about ''stove pipe'' funding, and that in order to create comprehensive, integrated services, community providers have to seek money from too many sources with inconsistent rules and restrictions. This Reentry federal collaboration intends to minimize the difficulty local communities have in getting the resources they need to supervise, treat, and provide services for ex-offenders who are returning to the community. The benefits of this program include fewer crime victims, fewer ex-offenders returned to expensive prison cells, and an increase in drug-free, healthy and productive tax-paying citizens.
Page 60 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. Chairman, attached to my testimony are examples of collaboration between the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services on substance abuse issues which I do not have time to go over today but believe that you should know about.
Conclusion
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear today. I will be pleased to answer your questions regarding SAMHSA's activities with respect to the issue of substance abuse treatment and other services for offenders who are leaving prisons and reentering our communities.
Attachment
EXAMPLES OF COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE AND THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, SAMHSA/CSAT, ON SUBSTANCE ABUSE ISSUES
Technical Assistance and Training for the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment for State Prisoners Grant Program
The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT) has an interagency agreement with the Corrections Program Office (CPO), Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, to provide technical assistance and training to develop residential treatment programs for juvenile and adult offenders in all 50 States and U.S. territories. The CPO administers the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) for State Prisoners Formula Grant Program which provides funding for the development of substance abuse treatment programs for adults and juveniles in State and local correctional facilities, or residential facilities where the client is under the jurisdiction of a correctional agency. Under this interagency agreement, which is funded by the Department of Justice, CSAT: (1) helps plan, and participates in, national policy conferences and regional workshops; (2) provides expert TA and training in areas such as MIS design and development, clinical treatment, modified therapeutic communities, community aftercare, drug testing, case management, and cultural and gender-specific services; (3) provides relevant literature and publications for distribution at conferences and workshops; (4) identifies lead States, State networks, and exemplary projects that can be used as ''mentor'' resources by RSAT grantees; and (5) provides the Department of Justice with advice, information, and reports on all aspects of the treatment and sanction continuum for juvenile and adult offenders.
Page 61 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
National GAINS Center For People With Co-Occurring Disorders in the Justice System
The GAINS Center collects data, develops knowledge, conducts analyses of state-of-the-art practices, disseminates information, and provides technical assistance designed to influence the range and scope of services provided in the criminal justice system for individuals with co-occurring substance abuse and mental disorders. A major emphasis is on systems change and the development of new models of integrated services for a population that has been historically underserved. Begun in 1995, this project is a collaboration between the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA's) CSAT and Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) and components of the Department of Justice, including the National Institute of Corrections, the Office of Justice Programs, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Drug Court Treatment Survey
The Drug Court Treatment Survey is a collaborative project executed through an interagency agreement between CSAT and the Drug Court Program Office at the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The main objective of the project is to identify the treatment options available to the courts, as well as what kinds of treatments were asked for and provided to the court clients. The final report, ''Treatment Services in Adult Drug Courts: Report on the 1999 National Drug Court Treatment Survey,'' is targeted for publication in June 2000.
Correctional Administrator's Guide to Performance Based Drug Control
Page 62 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
CSAT and the CPO are jointly funding and publishing a guide on effective practices for substance abuse treatment, drug testing, interdiction (controlling drug availability), and sanctions in prisons. The guide will include a review of the relevant research, a description of state drug policies, how to establish a comprehensive program, implementation and system integration, and monitoring and evaluation. This publication will be released later this year.
Activities Following the National Assembly: Drugs, Alcohol and the Criminal Offender
SAMHSA and several other Department of Health Human Services (DHHS) agencies joined the Department of Justice and the Office of National Drug Control Policy in co-sponsoring the National Assembly: Drugs, Alcohol and the Criminal Offender in December 1999. As a follow up to this meeting, DHHS, including SAMHSA, the Department of Justice and ONDCP are working together to assist States in planning similar events and to provide technical assistance on effective services for substance abusing offenders. These and other post-Assembly collaborative efforts are being facilitated by a Subcommittee of ONDCP's Interagency Demand Reduction Working Group. A SAMHSA staff member co-chairs this group, and CSAT staff are key participants.
Substance Abuse Treatment In Adult And Juvenile Correctional Facilities Survey
SAMHSA's Office of Applied Studies recently released the report ''Substance Abuse Treatment In Adult And Juvenile Correctional Facilities''. This first time survey on substance abuse treatment in the nations's adult and juvenile correctional facilities provided information on the number of facilities providing treatment, the number of inmates receiving treatment, and the types of treatment services offered. In designing and conducting this study, OAS collaborated with various Department of Justice entities, including the Bureau of Prisons, the CPO, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Page 63 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Family Drug Treatment Court Initiative
Family Drug Treatment Courts are an adaptation of the criminal drug court process to Family and Dependency Courts, combining substance abuse treatment, parenting and children's services with the legal processing of neglect and abuse cases. The CSAT Family Drug Court Initiative provides funding and technical assistance for the development of pilot family drug treatment courts, emphasizing innovative clinical interventions, and develops linkages with other Federal and professional organizations with an interest in family drug treatment courts. CSAT is a primary sponsor, along with the Drug Courts Program Office in the Department of Justice, of the National Association of Drug Court Professional's annual Juvenile and Family Drug Court Conference. CSAT now intends to conduct a national evaluation of Family Drug Treatment Courts over the next three years. Discussion in underway with the Drug Court Program Office, Department of Justice to participate in the evaluation.
In Addition to the Above Collaborative Efforts with Various Entities of the Department of Justice, the Following SAMHSA Programs Involve Collaboration with the Criminal Justice System at the State and Local Levels:
Criminal/Juvenile Justice Treatment Networks
CSAT's Criminal/Juvenile Justice Treatment Network program fosters sophisticated ''systems change'' to provide a continuum of accountability, rewards and sanctions, and case-managed treatment for substance abusing clients involved with the criminal/juvenile justice systems. Grants were awarded to a lead juvenile or adult justice agency, which works with a Local Coordinating Council to ensure that appropriate linkages and agreements were made between metropolitan justice agencies (courts, probation, jails), treatment network staff, and related health, mental health, and social services agencies. Building on these linkages, each Network develops integrated services through uniform screening and assessment protocols, coordinated supervision and case management, MIS tracking and management systems, and cross-training. Seven Criminal/Juvenile Justice Networks have been funded since 1995.
Page 64 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Criminal Justice Diversion of Individuals with Co-occurring Mental Health and Substance Abuse Disorders Program
CSAT and CMHS support nine projects in local, county, and Statewide sites to evaluate the effectiveness of diverting individuals with co-occurring disorders from incarceration to treatment. This Knowledge Development and Application (KDA) Program involves collaboration with the Justice system at the State, county and local levels. It will determine when diversion works, for whom, and under what circumstances, making it possible for all levels of government to allocate resources more effectively.
Targeted Capacity Expansion Grant Program
Fourteen grantees target criminal justice populations, and more grantees serving criminal justice populations will be announced in early October.
Mr. CANADY. I want to thank all of the members of this panel for your excellent and informative testimony.
I have a brief question for Ms. Abraham and I appreciate your comments about the Prison Litigation Reform Act. I think that is important legislation and I am grateful that we are making some progress in achieving the desired results through that legislation. I want to ask you a more general question about the type of Federal assistance that you find to be most helpful to you at the local level.
Page 65 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
What are the characteristics of Federal assistance that you find most helpful? Do you tend to support programs that are narrowly targeted for a particular purpose, or would you prefer broader grants of authority and funding that give you more flexibility? Any general comments that you have on that subject.
Ms. ABRAHAM. Two thoughts come to mind, Mr. Chairman. The first thing is that we are a valuable resource to Congress and you are to us. The idea that you would consult with us, ask our input on very important legislation, is key to having Congress have thoughtful legislation that passes the litmus test of does this have a reasonable and rational relationship to the problem being addressed and will it work as a practical matter. So consultation, communication give-and-take is extremely important.
On the rubber-meets-the-road end of it, I find that when Congress announces a program of crime prevention, and you send out these books, I understand the need that Congress has to make sure that the money is well spent and doesn't go up the flu or down the tube, but the dollars are so few and the need is so great that by the time we look at these big packets and the time limits, it is not practical on a basis of even trying to get the money, and the requirements are so tough. And then the time limit is so short that the matching grant part, time limit part, and the bureaucracy of it makes trying to find out what works very difficult.
All of the programs that I mentioned to you that we are doing are done just on the existing dollars, and that is very tough to do. The more innovative we can become means that we would have the backup, the Federal dollars, and the oversight and the communication between us to see how it works. But the way that it works right now, I don't care what your focus is, narrowly targeting or concept, the way that the programs come to us now makes the competition for money so keen that it is even difficult to step up to the plate; and so these anecdotal remarks of what works and what doesn't never sort of coalesces into a broad-based approach of what can be adapted from one jurisdiction to another.
Page 66 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
So I would welcome any attempt by you or any other branch of our Congress to try to do innovative and creative programs on crime prevention, but not under the current system that makes it impossible for us to succeed because the onus is on us to get the dollars.
Mr. CANADY. Thank you. I think that is advice that we need to bear in mind. Congress does face a difficult task. We have a responsibility to make certain that money that we provide is spent appropriately. I think that is not only something that we have a right to do, it is something that we have a responsibility to do. If we are raising the money and it is being spent because we are levying taxes on people to raise it, that responsibility for the use of the money goes along with that. But I think there has to be a balance and I think we need to look at ways of being more flexible and focusing on the end result rather than the kind of bureaucratic maze that is so difficult for people to negotiate their way through.
Let me turn to Mr. Wilson. One of the things that struck me in your testimony was the comment that community involvement is the key to success and delinquency prevention. I think that is more or less a direct quote.
I would like for you to expand on that, if you could, to first explain if the key to success and delinquency prevention is community involvement, what is the key to community involvement? And then to expand on what the elements of community involvement are, how is community involvement manifested?
Mr. WILSON. The best example of community involvement is our Title 5 Community Prevention Grants Program which has been in existence for 7 years. It is actually a discretionary program which OJJDP has administered as if it were a block grant program. In other words, we set aside a certain amount of money based on the juvenile population in each State. The way the program operates is that we don't fund communities to do planning. What the statute requires is that communities who want to access that money have to form community planning teams that will formulate comprehensive delinquency prevention plans. What we do is provide extensive training and technical assistance to any community that wants it on such issues as how to mobilize the community; how to involve key leaders in the community in prevention programming; how to put together prevention planning teams, the elements of which are specified by the Congress in title 5; and how to do risk and protective factor focused prevention planning so that you are identifying the resources that you need to fill gaps in services. It is based on identifying who are the children at risk in your community, what are your existing resources, where are the gaps in services, and what can you do to expand existing programs or create new programs that fill those gaps so that you have a continuum of prevention services that are targeted at the right kids.
Page 67 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
As has been mentioned, we are never going to have the resources in juvenile justice to bring programs to scale, so what we try to do is help communities to make maximum use of their existing resources through a strategic planning process, whether it is prevention or whether it is the full continuum of services under the comprehensive strategy.
We now have funded 885 community prevention grants around the country, and I think that the mobilization of those communities in virtually every State is part of the explanation for why we have seen decreases in juvenile crime and delinquency over the past 4 or 5 years. It's on account of that, and a lot of other efforts. But, it is community ownership of the problem that I think is most critical.
Mr. CANADY. Thank you, Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Scott is now recognized.
Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Abraham, you mentioned drug courts as a strategy that has led to significant reduction in recidivism. Part of the drug court process is referral to drug rehabilitation services. Do you have enough places to refer defendants to?
Ms. ABRAHAM. Not nearly enough as we would like to, especially those that are outcome based. We want to see the results and they have to be good results. Obviously channeling the individual with the right program is really important. It is like making a match. Not every program matches every offender, and that is a big problem.
Page 68 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Also I think there is a tremendous amount of risk on local prosecutors trying to define the population they are willing to take a chance on with drug treatment. The public and Congress and everybody else, understandably, is not very tolerant of a person we take the, ''soft approach'' to, who then goes out and commits a horrendous crime. So it needs very careful monitoring and careful selecting and matching up the right offender with the right program to get the desired result.
But with the people that I have attended graduation ceremonies, it is a tough, long process. These people have fascinating stories to tell, and each one of them is interesting and unique, and that is really what we need to target, those interesting and unique people who really want to get off drugs; because I can tell you as a statement of fact, Representative Scott, it is tougher to be in a really tough drug treatment program with a judge on your case, literally and figuratively, every day, with the prosecutor on your ankles, and the treatment providers, and the work, and every other provider at you, than to go to jail and sit there and do dope and watch television. It is harder to be in drug treatment. There has to be a carefully controlled group of people whom you are selecting, because some of them are just not ready for it.
Mr. SCOTT. And with all of those limitations and all of those problems, you still found that the drug court strategy, the result is a significant difference?
Ms. ABRAHAM. Thus far in our targeted approach it has worked. Over the long haul it is premature, but I am hopeful as a prosecutor, because I would rather prevent the people from committing crimes than have them in jail.
Page 69 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SCOTT. Mr. Coleman, you mentioned a significant reduction in violence against women. What was done to produce those results?
Mr. COLEMAN. A combination of things. Actually there is more detail in the written statement that I submitted. The STOP program supports funding for officers' programs, prosecutors' programs, treatment and the ''S'' is eluding me, but it is a formula program which provides support to the States, which are then administered by the State to make subgrants to local jurisdictions to determine how best to use the money in those jurisdictions.
Mr. SCOTT. Was this a very expensive program?
Mr. COLEMAN. I don't have the dollar amount but I can get that for you.
Mr. SCOTT. You indicated the reentry court and reentry panels. Have you shown a reduction in recidivism with the use of that strategy?
Mr. COLEMAN. Both reentry courts and reentry partnerships are in the first or second year of implementation. What we have done is used research available that was cited by Bruce Fry and John Wilson regarding the effectiveness of certain approaches to treatment interventions. Ms. Abraham also made reference to long-term treatment approaches and the necessity of work, social service, treatment, upon reentry. So we have used the existing research to try to build partnerships or build court processes that will integrate those known successful approaches to working with offenders coming back from institutions. It is too early to say, but the National Institute of Justice has just let a Request for Proposal to do evaluation of the reentry partnerships. So we will be evaluating that and letting you know what the results are at the earliest possible time.
Page 70 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SCOTT. How long will it take for you to give us some results?
Mr. COLEMAN. That is a good question, and I don't know the length of time, the longitudinal nature of the evaluation, but I can get that answer for you.
Mr. SCOTT. Mr. Wilson, you indicated that you give grants based on juvenile populations. Do you have any formulas that are based on juvenile crime, not just population, or are most of yours based on population as the factor?
Mr. WILSON. Most of the formulas are based on population. In this case with the title 5 prevention program, it is based on population subject to juvenile court jurisdiction. We are trying to prevent delinquency. But generally the crime rates, like in the accountability block grant program, play a role in determining funding at the local level—but from the State level, not in what goes to each State.
Mr. SCOTT. What is the size of most of these grants?
Mr. WILSON. Well, they are not very large. In the 7 years that the title 5 program has been in existence, the total funding has been $180 million. So it is an average of about $25 million a year. The grants range from several hundred thousand dollars in the smaller States to whatever California gets, I don't recall, $7 million, something like that.
Mr. SCOTT. Several hundred thousand to the smaller States?
Page 71 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. WILSON. Right.
Mr. SCOTT. So that money would have to be divided up within the State?
Mr. WILSON. Within the State, right; to the local jurisdiction.
Mr. SCOTT. You mentioned Blueprint programs. Could you mention some of these so we can have an idea of what you are talking about? The Blueprint programs are based on your analysis of the research of what kinds of strategies will actually reduce crimes?
Mr. WILSON. The Blueprint programs include a range of programs from prevention through programs for juvenile offenders. It includes the nurse home visitation program, which is a prenatal care program; there are several parenting programs; life skills training program, to give kids the life skills they need to be successful; school violence reduction programs; mentoring; and several programs to address drug prevention. There's also an employment program, Quantum Opportunities, that is designed to prevent kids from dropping out of school.
I mentioned multisystemic therapy earlier, which is a treatment program for kids who are engaged in at-risk and delinquent behaviors; and a foster care program to improve the services to children in the foster care system.
So there is quite a range of different types of programs, and there are 18 other Blueprints programs that are in the ''highly promising'' category that just need to meet one more of the criteria to be qualified as Blueprints programs. So we are working with the Blueprints people. Hopefully, we can get some further evaluation of those programs.
Page 72 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SCOTT. Thank you.
Mr. Fry, you indicated several studies had shown a dramatic decrease in recidivism amongst those who had had drug treatment coming out of prisons. Are you aware of any studies that do not show a dramatic decrease when that drug rehabilitation is available?
Mr. FRY. I am personally not aware of any other studies over the years that do show reductions. They may be in existence, but clearly the consensus in the field when you review the literature is that by far and large, the results are a substantial decrease in recidivism when you appropriately combine treatment and follow the offender through all the steps and provide proper supervision.
Mr. SCOTT. What portion of prisoners coming out of prison have access to this kind of service?
Mr. FRY. Again, we don't have specific statistics on that. You heard me describe the percentages of prisons that provide any treatment at all, and therefore prisons that provide, for example, therapeutic communities, which is more intensive treatment, are a very small percentage. And actually with regard to approaches, the technique of linking prisoners to the community in a seamless way—even, for example, in Texas they drive people directly to the program—those types of programs haven't been as common and they are starting to be developed more.So I would say that by and large there are a large percentage of persons who even receive treatment in the community.
Page 73 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
As I said, the block grant provides a large amount of treatment. That isn't necessarily linked. So it is a small percentage.
Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. CANADY. Thank you. Again I want to thank all the members of this panel for your contribution to today's hearing, and we will now move to our second panel.
Our first witness on the second panel this afternoon will be Dr. Morgan Reynolds, Senior Scholar and Director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis. Dr. Reynolds is also Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University and author of the Reynolds Report, an annual study on the actual time criminals spend in prison for their crimes. He serves as consultant to the National League of Cities, U.S. Department of Labor, and the National Labor Relations Board. He is extensively published in various journals and has provided extremely valuable testimony to this subcommittee over the years.
The next witness will be Dr. Chuck Wexler, Executive Director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a membership organization of law enforcement chiefs from the larger police agencies in the country. Prior to joining PERF, he worked as an assistant to the Nation's first Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and also headed the Professional Development Division of International Associations of Chiefs of Police.
Our next witness will be Dr. Edmund F. McGarrell, Director of the Crime Control Policy Center at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana. Dr. McGarrell is also a faculty member in the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University where he served as chairperson from 1996 until 2000. He has been a fellow in the National Center for Juvenile Justice and was formerly the Codirector of the Washington State Institute for Community Oriented Policing. He has done research in the past supported by the National Institute of Justice and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Page 74 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Next we will hear from Dr. John Kingsley Holton, Director for the National Institute for Child Abuse Prevention Research, a program to prevent child abuse America. He is a social psychologist who has specialized in urban education, juvenile delinquency, infant mortality and child abuse. He formerly served as the site director for the Harvard School of Public Health's Project on Human Development in Chicago neighborhoods. He has served on the faculty of DePaul University and the Illinois School of Professional Psychology.
Next we will hear from Dr. Byron R. Johnson, distinguished Senior Fellow and Associate Director of the Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society and Director of the Office for the Study and Prevention of Domestic Violence, both at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Johnson's research focuses on quantifying the effectiveness of faith-based organizations that confront various social problems. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Health Care Research.
Our next witness is Dr. James Fox, Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice at the Northeastern University College of Criminal Justice. He has published numerous journal and magazine articles and newspaper columns primarily in the areas of multiple murder, juvenile crime, school violence, workplace violence and capital punishment. As an authority on homicide, he appears regularly on national television and radio programs as well as other media outlets.
Our next witness is Dr. Patrick H. Tolan, Director of the Institute for Juvenile Research and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also a licensed clinical psychologist and a certified school psychologist in Illinois. His areas of expertise include child and family development, prediction and prevention of antisocial and violent behavior, and prevention and evaluation methodology.
Page 75 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Our final witness on this panel and for this hearing will be Marc Mauer, Assistant Director of the Sentencing Project, the national organization which develops alternative sentencing programs and conducts research on criminal justice issues. Mr. Mauer has directed programs on criminal justice reform for 20 years and has served as a consultant to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, to the National Institute of Corrections. He is also a member of the American Bar Association's Committee on Race and the Criminal Justice System.
I want to welcome all of you here for today's hearing. I would ask that you do your best to keep your remarks in your opening statement to no more than 5 minutes. Your entire written statements will, by unanimous consent, be made a part of the permanent record of this hearing. So I thank you and we will begin with Dr. Reynolds.
STATEMENT OF MORGAN REYNOLDS, DIRECTOR, CRIMINAL JUSTICE CENTER, NATIONAL CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. REYNOLDS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to start out, I think, with some obvious things and perhaps go to some less obvious. It has been said that the first duty of a scientist is to state the obvious.
First, government's core duty is to provide for the public's safety and that means protection of life and property. And this public safety, of course, is a sine qua non of civilization and economic progress and so on. And second, incentives matter.
Page 76 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Now, the other side in the criminology trade claims, for example, that sanctions are ineffective. One problem they have is let us imagine that we offered large prizes, large financial rewards, bounties, if you will, for the successful commission of crimes, success defined as not being injured or killed yourself in a commission of a crime. Now, I would predict that we would have a gigantic outburst of criminal activity in that instance.
Three, prison does work as just a generalization to reduce crime, but the other side in this debate claims that it is either (a) ineffective entirely; or less extreme (b) that it is not as effective as we might like. Yes, there is something to that latter proposition, it is not as effective as we would like. But the explanation may not be really embraced or grasped by the other side of this debate, and that is criminals, many criminals do not fear punishment. Deterrence depends on fear of consequences. So this is just the old wisdom that if punishment is not swift, certain, and severe, if these negative consequences aren't reflected rather immediately back upon the criminal, crime flourishes. So I say that I am turning the table on people who find no merit in these backward customs of punishing evil.
Now, everyone, it is true, agrees that prevention is preferable to prison. We are all on the side of the angels there. Yet we have got to acknowledge that arrest, conviction and prison is a vital backbone to these softer alleged remedies. It is the sine qua non, if you will, of government's core duty in protecting life and property.
Furthermore, a great deal of effective prevention amounts to improved performance by the traditional criminal justice system; for example, better policing. The broken windows theory of disorder management is a great deal of effective prevention or decentralized policing in which you build partnerships with the community rather than having a paramilitary occupying force and benchmarking best practices for crime control, and we know that there has been in the nineties tremendous progress in well-known places along this line.
Page 77 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Another point I want to make is that government is a very poor substitute for civil society in civilizing youths. We heard a lot of talk in our earlier panel about all these successful therapeutic federally-financed programs. Well, the best crime reducer of all is the intact family, schools, churches, civic organizations, and real jobs, private enterprise jobs, not government-created work, which is a phony that all youths see through.
So I can point to decades of evidence that failure of our Great Society programs is a monument to government's ineffectiveness. One of the members of the prior panel talked about the fact that we have limited resources. Well, I would like to see them get unlimited resources and see what a mess they would make of it.
Let me quote one criminal, to offer a little reality to all this government ''pie in the sky.'' Here is a teenager in England, quoted in the London Times a couple of years ago. He says, ''In a funny way, I reckon tougher punishment s for young people would work better than counseling. People like us just see that as a sign of weakness, an easy option.''
Okay. Finally, we hear that Europe has a lower imprisonment rate. True. But in a way, I would say that they are making the same mistakes we did, in that Europe's crime rates over the last decade or two have gone up sharply. England has some higher crime rates than we do now, including robbery, and they are going to pay a very large price in the sense that we did.
In the U.S. we have had the opposite experience, in that crime has gone down as imprisonment has gone up. It ain't pretty. It is sad. It is expensive, but in a way the burden on the criminal justice system is much greater when we have got cultural dysfunction that is much larger than it was 20 and 30 years ago.
Page 78 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you for your attention. I will be happy to discuss this further.
Mr. CANADY. Thank you Dr. Reynolds.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Reynolds follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF MORGAN REYNOLDS, DIRECTOR, CRIMINAL JUSTICE CENTER, NATIONAL CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS, WASHINGTON, DC
My name is Morgan Reynolds and I am Director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. I appreciate the invitation to testify before the subcommittee today on the question of whether or not punishment works to reduce crime.
The answer is obvious to most Americans—yes, of course punishment reduces crime. Punishment converts criminal activity from a paying proposition to a nonpaying proposition, at least sometimes, and people respond accordingly. We all are aware of how similar incentives work in our lives, for example, choosing whether or not to drive faster than the law allows. (How many of us in this room, for example, have run afoul of law enforcement on a traffic charge?). Incentives matter, including the risks we are willing to run. This is only a commonsense observation about how people choose to behave. Yet controversy over the very existence of a deterrence and incapacitation effect of incarceration has raged in elite circles.
Page 79 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The first duty of a scientist, it's been said, is to point out the obvious. The logic of deterrence is pretty obvious, but I must point to evidence too, which is overwhelming, for the negative impact of punishment on crime. Evidence ranges from simple facts to sophisticated statistical and econometric studies.
Even experts who disagree with each other about some aspects of criminal justice are in agreement about deterrence. For example, when Forbes magazine asked John Lott, senior research scholar at Yale Law School and author of More Guns, Less Crime, ''Why the recent drop in crime?'' he responded, ''Lots of reasons—increases in arrest rates, conviction rates, prison sentence lengths.'' And Daniel Nagin, a Carnegie-Mellon University professor of public policy who co-authored an article in the Journal of Legal Studies critical of Lott's work on concealed carry laws, says in The Handbook of Crime and Punishment, Oxford, 1998, ''The combined deterrent and incapacitation effect generated by the collective actions of the police, courts, and prison system is very large.''
In sharp contrast to the situation ten years ago, experts who assert the contrary are fighting a rearguard action. Crime rates have fallen 30 percent over the last decade while the prison and jail population doubled to two million. Most people are able to connect these dots (The New York Times aside), and even the academy has caught on. As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, truth passes through three stages, first, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Simple, everyday facts about crime are easy to explain from an incentive-based perspective and hard to explain from any other perspective:
Page 80 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The cops are never around when you need them (because criminals are not stupid enough to commit crimes in front of the cops).
When the police participate in a labor strike or ''sick out,''crime sprees break out (and in the aftermath of natural disasters, looting runs riot unless the Guard is called up).
Prison and jail officials daily manage two million less-than-model citizens living in close quarters with few incidents (order is sustained because inmates heed incentives).
Given the avarice of man, the hard reality is that the threat of bad consequences, including public retribution posed by the legal system, is vital to secure human rights to life and property against predation. If men were angels, as James Madison said, we'd have no need of government.
The sad part about prisons is that the most effective crime reducer is the intact family. But government policies have gone far to undermine the family, intensifying the crime problem (welfare, taxes, no-fault divorce, etc.). As internal restraints (character, morality, virtue) degrade, we lamentably rely on external restraints to protect civilization, at least in the short run. As Edmund Burke, English political philosopher, said, ''Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without . . . men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.''
Criminality is purposeful human behavior. The testimony of criminals provides perhaps our strongest evidence that, in the vast majority of cases, lawbreakers reason and act like other human beings (also a fundamental proposition in the justice system). Criminologists Richard Wright and Scott Decker interviewed 105 active, nonincarcerated residential burglars in St. Louis, Mo. Burglar No. 013 said, ''After my eight years for robbery, I told myself then I'll never do another robbery because I was locked up with so many guys that was doin' 25 to 30 years for robbery and I think that's what made me stick to burglaries, because I had learned that a crime committed with a weapon will get you a lot of time.''
Page 81 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Burglars also choose their targets by considering both risks and rewards. For example:
Burglars avoid neighborhoods that are heavily patrolled or aggressively policed: ''You got to stay away from where the police ride real tough.''
Nine out of 10 burglars say they always avoid breaking into an occupied residence: ''I rather for the police to catch me vs. a person catching me breaking in their house because the person will kill you. Sometimes the police will tell you, 'You lucky we came before they did.' ''
Realistically enough, burglars perceive the chance of being apprehended for a given break-in as extremely slim, partly because they efficiently search the master bedroom first (cash, jewelry, guns) and do not linger inside the target.
Only after World War II did scholars begin to statistically study the effects of deterrence. Today a large body of scholarly literature generally confirms the value of punishment in the prevention of crime.
Perhaps the most widely cited is Isaac Erhlich's 1973 study of punishment and deterrence in the Journal of Political Economy. Using state data for 1940, 1950 and 1960, Ehrlich found that crime varied inversely with the probability of prison and the average time served.
Page 82 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
More recently, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt estimated that for each 10 percent rise in a state's prison population, robberies fall 7 percent, assault and burglary shrink 4 percent each, auto theft and larceny decline 3 percent each, rape falls 2 1/2percent and murder drops 1 1/2 percent. On average, 10 to 15 nondrug felonies are eliminated for each additional prisoner locked up, saving social costs estimated at $53,900, well in excess of the $30,000 it costs annually to incarcerate a prisoner.
Scholars also ask which provides the greater deterrent, certainty or severity of punishment? One provocative study involving prisoners and college students came down firmly on the side of certainty. When tested, both groups responded in virtually identical terms. Prisoners could identify their financial self-interest in an experimental setting as well as students could. However, in their decision making, prisoners were much more sensitive to changes in certainty than in severity of punishment. In terms of real-world application, the authors of the study speculate that long prison terms are likely to be more impressive to lawmakers than lawbreakers.
Supporting evidence for this viewpoint comes from a National Academy of Sciences panel which claimed that a 50 percent increase in the probability of incarceration prevents about twice as much violent crime as a 50 percent increase in the average term of incarceration.
Nonetheless, severity of punishment also remains crucial for deterrence. ''A prompt and certain slap on the wrist,'' criminologist Ernest van den Haag wrote, ''helps little.'' Or, as Milwaukee Judge Ralph Adam Fine wrote, ''We keep our hands out of a flame because it hurt the very first time (not the second, fifth or 10th time) we touched the fire.''
Page 83 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Distinguishing between the deterrent and incapacitation effects of prison is empirically difficult, but economists Daniel Kessler and Levitt cleverly separate the two using California data on sentence enhancements. Proposition 8, which imposed longer sentences for a selected group of crimes, reduced these crimes by 4 percent within one year of passage and by 8 percent within three years after passage. These immediate effects are consistent with deterrence since there is no additional incapacitation impact in the short run.
If the United States, with so many people in prison, has one of the world's highest crime rates, doesn't this imply that prison does not work? Scholar Charles Murray has examined this question and concluded that the answer is no. Instead, the nation has had to imprison more people in recent years because it failed to do so earlier (the war on drugs also plays a role). Murray compared the record of the risk of imprisonment in England to that in the United States.
In England the risk of going to prison for committing a crime fell by about 80 percent over a period of 40 years and the English crime rate gradually rose.
By contrast, the risk of going to prison in the U.S. fell by 64 percent in just 10 years starting in 1961 and the U.S. crime rate shot up.
In the United States, it was not a matter of crimes increasing so fast that the rate of imprisonment could not keep up. Rather, the rate of imprisonment fell first by deliberate policy decisions. By the time the U.S. began incarcerating more criminals in the mid-1970s, huge increases were required to bring the risk of imprisonment up to the crime rate. It is more difficult to reestablish a high rate of imprisonment after the crime rate has escalated than to maintain a high risk of imprisonment from the outset, Murray concluded. We've experienced the same phenomenon in Texas, where crime rocketed up in the 1980s while punishment plunged.
Page 84 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
However, both the U.S. and Texas experiences showed that it is possible for imprisonment to stop a rising crime rate and then gradually begin to push it down. The American crime rate peaked in1980, a few years after the risk of imprisonment reached its nadir. Since then, as the risk of imprisonment has increased, with few exceptions the rates of serious crimes have retreated in fits and starts to levels of 20 or more years ago. My own research for the NCPA (www.ncpa.org) shows that expected punishment has had an inverse correlation with crime rates for both Texas and the nation.
Juvenile offenders, due to their youth and immaturity, pose a special challenge to the criminal justice system. In the past, many judges and social workers have argued for less stringent treatment of such offenders, with ''prevention'' taking precedence over detention. The focus tends to be on so-called root causes, rehabilitation and nonpunitive approaches. Yet there is a close connection between lack of punishment and the forming of criminal habits. Recent studies note the effectiveness of punishment for juveniles, not just adults. Between 1980 and 1993 juvenile crime rose alarmingly, and as the states toughened their approach during the 1990s, it declined just as steeply.
Likewise, in his study of criminal justice in England, Charles Murray found that in 1954 the system operated on the assumption that the best way to keep crime down was to intervene early and sternly. Crime was very low, and the number of youths picked up by the police went down by about half as children matured from their early to their late teens. Today, however, a widespread assumption in England (as in the United States) is that youthful offenders need patience more than punishment. England's traditionally low crime rate is now very high, and the number of youths picked up by the police roughly triples from the early to the late teens.
Page 85 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The need to hold the individual juvenile criminal responsible for his actions does not make incarceration the sole option. For example, Anne L. Schneider found in six random-assignment experiments involving 876 adjudicated (convicted) delinquents in six American cities that victim restitution and incarceration both lowered reoffending while probation did not. Victim restitution meant monetary restitution, community service or work to repay the victims.
Believers in rehabilitation regard punishment as primitive or counterproductive. For example, Alvin Bronstein, former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, contended that releasing half the nation's prisoners would have little or no effect on the U.S. crime rate.
A major obstacle for such sunny optimism is the existence of what might be called the criminal personality. Perhaps the most important work on this subject is the three-volume study by the late Samuel Yochelson, a physician, and Stanton Samenow, a practicing psychologist. After interviewing hundreds of criminals and their relatives and acquaintances, the two researchers concluded that criminals (1) have control over what they do, freely choosing evil over good, (2) have distinct personalities, described in detail as deceitful, egotistical, myopic and violent and (3) make specific errors in thinking (52 such errors are identified).
Yochelson and Samenow assert that the criminal must resolve to change and accept responsibility for his own behavior. Hardened criminals can reform themselves, but Samenow estimates that only 10 percent would choose to do so. He avoids the word ''rehabilitation'' when describing chronic criminals: ''When you think of how these people react, how their patterns go back to age 3 or 4, there isn't anything to rehabilitate.''
Page 86 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Careful studies of well-intended but soft-headed programs continue to find little payoff. In the case of street gang crime, Professor Malcolm Klein found that typical liberal-based gang interventions have failed to manifest much utility. They appeal to our best instincts, but are too indirect, too narrow or else produce boomerang effects by producing increased gang cohesiveness.
The truth is that changing criminal behavior by means other than deterrence is always problematical. A comprehensive scientific evaluation of hundreds of previous studies and prevention programs funded by the Justice Department found that ''some programs work, some don't, and some may even increase crime.'' The report was prepared by the University of Maryland's Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice for the Justice Department and mandated by Congress. Still, too little is known and the report calls for 10 percent of all federal funding for these programs to be spent on independent evaluations of the impact of prevention programs.
Public opinion strongly supports the increased use of prisons to give criminals their just desserts. The endorsement of punishment is relatively uniform across social groups. More than three-quarters of the public see punishment as the primary justification for sentencing. More than 70 percent believe that incapacitation is the only sure way to prevent future crimes, and more than three-quarters believe that the courts are too easy on criminals. Three-quarters favor the death penalty for murder.
Still, the public holds out some hope for rehabilitation, too. About 60 percent express hope that services like psychological counseling, training and education inside prison will correct personal shortcomings. Such sentiments are more likely to be expressed on behalf of young offenders than adults, and by nonwhite respondents.
Page 87 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Despite continuing calls for a ''better way,'' what criminals need most is evidence that their crimes do not pay. Neither criminals nor the rest of us ''drive a car 100 miles an hour toward a brick wall, because we know what the consequences will be,'' as author Robert Bidinotto puts it. Punishment flat works. It's unpleasant and expensive, yes, but among other virtues, it supplies the convict with a major incentive to reform. Even career criminals often give up crime because they don't want to go back to prison. The old prescription that punishment be swift, certain and severe is affirmed by modern social science.
As expected punishment plunged during the 1960s and 1970s, crime rose astronomically. When expected punishment began rising in the 1980s and 1990s, crime leveled off and began falling. With the well-publicized success of no-nonsense police tactics like those in New York City, few observers today doubt that the criminal justice system can have a major impact on crime. Does that mean that everything has been done perfectly over the last decade? No, there is plenty of room for improvement in the future, but that is another subject. I recommend the NCPA www.ncpa.org for rational policy proposals on crime. Naturally, I'd be happy to entertain questions from committee members.
Mr. CANADY. Dr. Wexler.
STATEMENT OF CHUCK WEXLER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, POLICE EXECUTIVE RESEARCH FORUM, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. WEXLER. Good afternoon. I thank the chairman and members of the subcommittee for this opportunity to appear before you on behalf of the Police Executive Research Forum members, PERF. PERF is a Washington-based nonprofit organization whose members are progressive police professionals who lead law enforcement agencies in the country's largest jurisdictions and who serve more than half the Nation's population. It is an honor to be before you.
Page 88 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I understand that my complete written statement will be included in the record.
The debate over what works to prevent and fight crime has been dominated by a tug-of-war between two schools of thought. On the one hand are those who advocate strongly for intensified enforcement efforts, tougher consequences for criminals, and longer prison sentences through mandatory sentencing. At the other end of the spectrum are those who underscore the need to attack root causes of crime alone through prevention efforts such as after-school and at-risk mentoring programs and building neighborhood partnerships.
What we have learned is that both approaches by themselves have fallen short. Focusing almost exclusively on enforcement can be a short-term fix with perhaps long-term negative consequences, and a sole reliance on preventive programs is unresponsive to immediate neighborhood concerns of significant violence and fear.
Police, like other organizations in the criminal justice system, have frequently found themselves torn between these extremes and perceived as either overly aggressive or soft on crime.
Our experience in examining the successes in policing over the past decade is that neither approach by itself is ultimately effective, but that aspects of both approaches, pursued in concert, are necessary for long-term crime reduction. Effective policing requires a blend of enforcement and prevention strategies, as demonstrated by those communities that have generally enjoyed the greatest crime reductions and community support.
Page 89 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
From San Diego to New York, Minneapolis to Boston, and in smaller cities and towns around the country such as Stamford, Connecticut and Lowell, Massachusetts, police have significantly changed how they manage resources and partner with communities. Over the past decade, we have come to recognize that preventing future crime is a function of actions the police take now and the corresponding messages that are sent to the community.
Successful efforts share a common element, an effective balance of enforcement with prevention. Let me give you a few examples to demonstrate what I am talking about.
In Boston, Police Commissioner Paul Evans, while recognizing the value of his own officers' work in reducing gang-related youth violence, is careful to always acknowledge that the enforcement strategies his Department implemented would have fallen short but for considerable community involvement. Efforts like mentoring, job outreach programs, and the significant involvement of the faith community complemented the enforcement effort.
Likewise, the Reverend Jeff Brown and Reverend Gene Rivers, leaders of the Ten Point Coalition, openly acknowledge that the police focus on violent offenders sent the message to potential offenders that acts of violence would not be tolerated. That was an important complement to the ministers' work. Preventing future violence meant doing something about present conditions by partnering with the community. Homicide detectives, ministers, and priests learned they had more in common than apart. Since full implementation in 1995, the homicide victimization rates of those ages 24 and under has fallen by more than 70 percent.
Page 90 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We talk about Minneapolis. Minneapolis is a city not traditionally associated with high rates of violent crime. It experienced a sudden upsurge in homicides, earning it the title of ''Murderapolis'' by the New York Times. The response there was on two avenues: enforcement and community involvement. The city joined forces with the private sector, and corporate stakeholders such as Honeywell and General Mills played a significant role. PERF helped facilitate a task force of local, State, and Federal officials to focus enforcement efforts on gang-related violence. Police-probation partnerships were formed, and in less than 6 months, a strategy was in place that sent out a strong message that acts of violence would have immediate consequences.
At the same time, corporate and community leaders initiated job development and mentoring programs that provided alternatives for at-risk youth and supported the enforcement strategies. Homicides declined by about 30 percent. Both the enforcement effort and the corporate community intervention were part of an overall city-wide strategy called Minnesota HEALS. Following up this effort, the police chief of Minneapolis, Robert Olsen, adopted a management technique called CODEFOR, which was originally pioneered by the New York City Police and called Compstat. This system uses computer mapping to focus resources on hot spots. It has proven to be a highly effective crime reduction strategy. Similar efforts have been done in Lowell, Massachusetts and Stamford, Connecticut which are in my full testimony.
But in line with all of these crime reductions, one of the insights we learned long ago, and highlighted in the last year or two, was that it was necessary to balance effective crime reduction with building trust and democratic principles in the community. We convened a meeting in Washington with a number of major city chiefs and community leaders. And symbolic of that was what John Timoney, the Philadelphia Police Commissioner, said; ''to solve the issue of race we have to deal openly with it. If we don't accept that race is an issue, then everything that flows from that will just be an academic exercise.'' So we recognize that building trust is as important as reducing crime.
Page 91 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We also did that in the area of clergy-police collaboration, bringing in a number of ministers and priests with police chiefs at Catholic University to make the same point.
We know that smarter policing is behind all of these strategies and we have talked about what they did in New York city with Compstat. We know that today partnerships with probation officers, with prosecutors, with mental health providers, community leaders, government agencies and so forth all make a tremendous difference. The PERF Chief Barney Melekian from Pasadena was before this committee a few weeks ago talking about the role that police play in dealing with the issues of those who are mentally ill.
I hope I have given you some sense of what we think is important. Now, you are probably asking, what is the Federal role here? This sounds like a lot of local initiatives; how can the Feds play a role? Well, first of all, we applaud your interest in this topic and we strongly appreciate Federal support for various law enforcement programs. It has made a huge difference in the successes of them today, and indeed the successes I outlined above may not have occurred but for Federal support. Unfortunately, research and development on this scale is often beyond the financial reach of most local police agencies. It was Federal dollars, after all, that effectively revealed the advantages of community policing through the early project funds from the Bureau of Justice Assistance and NIJ. NIJ and the COPS office funded, in part, the Boston Police Department's involvement in Operation Cease-Fire.
Modest Federal investments in research and implementation, particularly discretionary funding focused on innovative programs, can result in far-reaching changes that build communities across the Nation.
Page 92 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
A significant catalyst for change has been the Federal investment by the COPS office in local police agencies to support officers engaged in true community policing. I am including with my testimony the short description of several police agencies that have successfully used COPS money.
The support of Congress and the administration in funding police officers have given local police departments the resources to implement community policing projects, programs and problem-solving strategies. It has made a real difference and we are grateful for it. Together with support from other Federal sources such as Weed and Seed, local block grant funds, and so forth, all of these programs have made a difference.
While great challenges remain for policing in the new millennium, we can continue to reduce violent crime while also building community trust. We have learned a great deal about how police can effectively prevent and reduce crime, and much of that credit needs to go not only to our Nation's hardworking and committed police officers who patrol our communities, but to Congress, which has consistently provided the national leadership and support for effective policing.
Thank you.
Mr. CANADY. Thank you Dr. Wexler.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wexler follows:]
Page 93 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
PREPARED STATEMENT OF CHUCK WEXLER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, POLICE EXECUTIVE RESEARCH FORUM, WASHINGTON, DC
Good Afternoon. I thank the Chairman and Members of the Committee for this opportunity to appear before you on behalf of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) members. PERF is a DC-based nonprofit organization whose members are progressive police professionals who lead law enforcement agencies in the country's largest jurisdictions and who serve more than half the nation's population. It is an honor to be before you.
I understand that my written statement will be included in the record.
INTRODUCTION
The debate over what works to prevent and fight crime has been dominated by a tug-of-war between two schools of thought. On the one hand are those who advocate strongly for intensified enforcement efforts, tougher consequences for criminals, and longer prison sentences through mandatory sentencing. At the other end of the spectrum are those who underscore the need to attack ''root causes'' of crime alone through prevention efforts such as after-school and at-risk youth mentoring programs, and building neighborhood partnerships.
What we have learned is that both approaches by themselves have fallen short. Focusing almost exclusively on enforcement can be a short-term fix with perhaps longer term negative consequences, and a sole reliance on preventative programs is unresponsive to immediate neighborhood concerns of significant violence and fear.
Page 94 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Police, like other organizations in the criminal justice system, have frequently found themselves torn between these extremes and perceived as either overly aggressive or too soft on crime. Our experience in examining the successes in policing over the past decade is that neither approach by itself is ultimately effective, but that aspects of both approaches, pursued in concert, are necessary for long-term crime reduction. Effective policing requires a blend of enforcement and prevention strategies, as demonstrated by those communities that have generally enjoyed the greatest crime reductions and community support. From San Diego to New York, Minneapolis to Boston, and in smaller cities and towns across the country such as Stamford (CT) and Lowell (MA), police have significantly changed how they manage resources and partner with communities. Over the past decade, we have come to recognize that preventing future crime is a function of actions the police take now and the corresponding messages that are sent to the community. Successful efforts share a common element: an effective balance of enforcement with prevention.
Some examples are illustrative:
Boston
Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans, while recognizing the value of his own officers' work in reducing gang-related youth violence, is careful to always acknowledge that the enforcement strategies his department implemented would have fallen short but for considerable community involvement. Efforts like mentoring, job outreach programs and the significant involvement of the faith community complemented the enforcement effort. Likewise, the Rev. Jeff Brown and Rev. Gene Rivers, leaders of the Ten Point Coalition, openly acknowledge that the police focus on violent offenders sent the message to potential offenders that acts of violence would not be tolerated. This was an important complement to the ministers' work. Preventing future violence meant doing something about present conditions by partnering with the community. Homicide detectives, ministers and priests learned that they had more in common than apart. Since full implementation in 1995, the homicide victimization rates of those ages 24 and under fell by more than 70 percent.
Page 95 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Minneapolis
Minneapolis, a city not traditionally associated with high rates of violent crime, experienced a sudden upsurge in homicides, earning it the title of ''Murderapolis'' in a 1996 New York Times column. The response there was also along two avenues—enforcement and community involvement. The city joined forces with the private sector, and corporate stakeholders such as Honeywell and General Mills played major roles. PERF helped facilitate a task force of local, state and federal officials to focus enforcement efforts on gang-related violence. Police-probation partnerships were formed, and in less than six months, a strategy was in place that sent out a strong message that acts of violence would have immediate consequences. At the same time, corporate and community leaders initiated job development and mentoring programs that provided alternatives for at-risk youth and supported the enforcement strategies. Homicides declined by about 30 percent. Both the enforcement effort and the corporate community intervention were part of an overall citywide strategy called Minnesota HEALS. Following up this effort, the Minneapolis Police Department, led by Chief Robert Olson, adopted a management technique called CODEFOR, which was originally pioneered by the New York City Police and called Compstat. This system uses computer mapping to focus resources on hotspots. It has proven to be a highly effective crime reduction strategy. A similar approach was used in Nashville and there, too, it appeared to yield significant crime reductions.
Lowell and Stamford
Smaller cities have found the effectiveness in this balance as well. Lowell, Massachusetts, experienced a 60 percent decrease in crime over the past six years. According to Ed Davis, Lowell's Superintendent of Police, the police and prosecutors were always good at apprehending and prosecuting offenders. But in 1994, faced with high crime rates, they recognized the need to address why crime was occurring in the first place. Using more thoughtful enforcement techniques, both criminal and civil, they focused on problem locations and, in one typical example, permanently closed down a bar that had been the source of continuing problems. At the same time, police officers began to view their job more broadly. Officers now routinely mentor high-risk youth. These strategies have made Lowell one of the safest cities of its size in the country.
Page 96 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Stamford, Connecticut, offers another good example. The police department there began to use daily crime analysis that identifies problem locations so that police could be deployed more thoughtfully and quickly. This was coupled with long-term strategies encouraging close collaboration with community social service agencies. For example, the police department, under Chief Dean Esserman, recently created a summer camp run by police officers at a city high school. Since the mid-'90s Stamford has seen a 50 percent decline in crime.
BUILDING TRUST
In the wake of these unprecedented crime reductions, there was disappointment in some communities around the country that relationships with police agencies remained strained. We believe that successful long-term crime prevention or reduction strategies are contingent on public trust of the police and the support and help of the community. With this in mind, PERF convened a meeting entitled, Balancing Democratic Principles And Crime Strategies to probe the nationwide concern about perceived police misconduct in a number of urban-particularly minority-communities. Prominent police chiefs and community leaders came to Washington to discuss anti-crime measures and police tactics. We found that balancing approaches is critical if police are to maintain or regain the trust of urban communities.
The meeting was instrumental in recognizing the work police still need to do to address race issues. As John Timoney, the Philadelphia Police Commissioner, pointed out, ''to solve the issue of race, we have to deal openly with it. If we don't accept that race is an issue, then everything that flows from that will just be an academic exercise.'' Since then, police in Chicago have held similar high-level police-community forums and have reported success in both addressing both crime and building police-community cooperation and trust. Similar, efforts are planned for Kansas City and Seattle.
Page 97 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Another promising approach we have explored is the potential of faith-based partnerships. Last year, PERF convened a meeting on Reducing Violent Crime Through Clergy-Police Collaboration. With the participation of Boston's Ten-Point Coalition, PERF assembled a group of major city police chiefs, clergy and government officials from around the country here at Catholic University to explore clergy-police anti-violence initiatives. Community leaders and police officials shared their experiences with police-clergy collaboration—a promising strategy to counteract the crime endemic to so many urban American neighborhoods. It is yet another example of how to balance enforcement activity with prevention efforts.
POLICING SMARTER AND THE POWER OF COLLABORATION
In addition to the recognition of the imperative to balance enforcement and community approaches, police have learned to police better through collaboration with other agencies and more thoughtful strategies.
In the past decade, with advances in technology, police became more sophisticated in how to deploy resources effectively. The well-known work of the New York City Police and its Compstat model has encouraged police commanders to engage in problem solving in an environment that brings together all the resources of the department and outside agencies to focus attention on problem locations and crimes. This approach has proven highly effective in such agencies as New Orleans, Philadelphia and Nashville.
Police are working smarter today, recognizing that collaboration can be exceptionally powerful. Whether it is the police teaming with prosecutors, probation or parole officers, schools, mental health care providers and doctors, community leaders, other government agencies at various levels of government or private industry, we are seeing great success in preventing and reducing crime. At the same time, police have become more rigorous in their approach to problem solving, recognizing the importance of gathering and analyzing extensive information and data and devising thoughtful responses. Agencies such as Green Bay (WI), Colorado Springs and Glendale (CA) are but three police departments that have effectively engaged in collaborative problem solving by working with other agencies and the community to address and prevent quality-of-life problems.
Page 98 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Police today recognize that certain populations present a special set of issues. Responding to people with serious mental illnesses is a challenge for police and our communities. Just two weeks ago, PERF member Barney Melekian, the Pasadena (CA) police chief, appeared before this committee to discuss how police can best address the needs of those with mental illness and facilitate their treatment before they hurt themselves or others, and are processed into the criminal justice system. Memphis and Ithaca (NY) are just two of many communities with innovative programs where police work closely with mental health providers to provide compassionate, effective service to the mentally ill.
Applying problem solving to crime reduction has resulted in a shift in the homicide prevention philosophies of many departments. We understand today that homicide prevention strategies can work. In fact, PERF recently compiled a paper outlining 70 police agencies' homicide prevention practices that we share with this committee today.
Domestic violence is a serious problem that police have directly confronted during the past decade and developed innovative strategies. Agencies like Colorado Springs, Duluth (MN) and Appleton (WI) are among the many using collaborative problem-solving models to address this problem.
There is also a special concern about school safety today. Agencies like the Cheektowaga (NY) police department are collaborating with schools, parent organizations, students, neighborhood businesses and residents, and other stakeholders to make our schools safe places through interventions for at-risk youth and their families. We also know that school philosophies, programs, even hours, can affect crime. In Minneapolis, for example, administrators changed school hours to let children out of school one hour later in the afternoon, reducing the amount of unsupervised time they had before parents returned home from work, which helped reduce assaults and burglaries. In St. Petersburg, Florida, several years ago, the police department returned hundreds of truants to school in an intensive truancy-reduction program, resulting in a 20 percent reduction in daytime robberies and residential burglaries. Truancy, suspensions and expulsions are related to public safety, and smart policing recognizes that.
Page 99 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
As we discuss what works and what does not, it is important to state that police recognize that a number of factors have contributed over the past decade to reduce crime. Strong economies that offer greater work opportunities, evolving drug markets and stiffer more certain sentencing likely all contribute to diminished crime. Nevertheless we believe a change in the way police do their jobs has had an impact on reducing crime. After all, it is heartening to recognize that it was not too long ago when there was a perception that whatever the police did made no difference. Today we know that smarter policing does make a difference—a big difference.
FEDERAL ROLE
I applaud your interest in this topic and we strongly appreciate federal support for various law enforcement programs. It has made a huge difference in the successes of today, and indeed the successes I outlined above may not have occurred but for federal support. Unfortunately, research and development on this scale is often beyond the financial reach of most local police agencies. It was federal dollars, after all, that effectively revealed the advantages of community policing through early project funds from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. BJA support made possible San Diego's pioneering work 10 years ago in problem-solving concepts that has yielded a legacy of safer communities around the country. NIJ and the COPS Office funded in part the Boston Police Department's involvement in Operation Ceasefire. Modest federal investments in research and implementation, particularly discretionary funding focused on innovative programs, can result in far-reaching changes that build safer communities across the nation.
Page 100 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Federal support has been critical in helping police across the country in their scramble to keep up with ever-changing technology. NIJ's Office of Science and Technology and the Crime Mapping Research Center are just two examples of federal efforts that help local departments with technology issues, promote regional information sharing, forensic support and technical assistance.
A significant catalyst for change has been the federal investment by the COPS Office in local police agencies to support officers engaged in true community policing. I am including with my testimony a short description of how several police agencies have put COPS money to good use. The support of Congress and the Administration in funding police officers have given local police departments the resources to implement community-policing projects and programs, and problem-solving strategies. It has made a real difference, and we are grateful for that. Together with support from such sources as Weed and Seed, Local Law Enforcement Block Grants, BJA Byrne formula and discretionary programs, NIJ, OJJDP, Office for Victims of Crime, Violence Against Women Office, COPS innovative partnerships, and so many other critical funding sources, police have been better able to staff, equip and support officers using more advanced technologies and other resources.
While great challenges remain for policing in the new millennium—to continue to reduce violent crime while also building community trust—we have learned a great deal about how police can effectively prevent and reduce crime. And much of that credit needs to go not only to our nation's hard working and committed police officers who patrol our communities, but Congress, which has consistently provided the national leadership and support for effective policing.
Page 101 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you.
Attachments
COPS FUNDING: THE PROGRAM'S IMPACT ON PERF MEMBERS
The following are examples of how police agencies across the country have successfully used COPS funding. Every grant recipient has a story to tell, but these selections should serve as examples of the range of efforts undertaken with COPS Office funding and the benefits to their, communities.
Minneapolis Police Department, Chief Robert K. Olson (PERF President):
Having been a police officer since LBJ, and the chief of three departments, I have never seen more positive advancement in the professionalism of law enforcement than with the inception of the COPS Office.
The 81 police officers hired in Minneapolis under this program were the catalyst for a nationally recognized community-oriented policing effort, and have worked to sustain the largest reduction in crime over the last 2 1/2 years. This significant reduction in crime would never have occurred had it not been for the resources offered through the COPS Office. The COPS Office provided the personnel, technical assistance and equipment that allowed us to place significant resources into crime prevention initiatives that directly correlate with this huge drop in crime. We cannot let up the pressure and lose the momentum gained during these last six years.
Page 102 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Arlington County (VA) Police Department, Chief Edward Flynn:
Among the COPS hiring successes that my agency has realized include new hires: for example, an addition to my department's public information unit allowed us to shift a sworn officer to an operations division. This civilian employee brought with her a television production background and knowledge of broadcast journalism that exceeds that which is found in most police officers. That experience has helped us serve our community better and has advanced community policing. Our GIS/mapping hire permitted the department to shift another corporal position to the Operations Division. She arrived with GIS skills and expertise that would have taken months or years for an officer to accrue.
The department continues to work toward upgrading its information management infrastructure. The program will integrate our in-car computers, records management system, and computer-aided dispatch system to give patrol officers better access to information that can advance community policing. It is expected that a portion of this upgrade will be paid for through COPS MORE grant funds.
Boston Police Department, Commissioner Paul Evans:
With COPS funding, our agency developed the 95–96 Strategic Planning & Community Mobilization Project, a citywide endeavor that brought more than 400 stakeholders (including sworn/civilian police department members, citizens, clergy, businesses and nonprofit organizations) together to craft individualized crime prevention plans for each of Boston's 11 neighborhoods. Each of the 11 teams met for more than a year to analyze local problems and create a tailored, community-based response. The project was important as a foundation for Boston's Neighborhood Policing approach.
Page 103 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
COPS funding was also instrumental in the initial implementation of Operation Ceasefire, Boston's successful youth firearms use reduction program. While research and development phases of this approach were funded by other sources, COPS was the first funding agency to commit substantial implementation funding for police and partners. This approach to youth gang violence reduction was enormously successful, reducing Boston's youth homicide rate by more than 75 percent over the course of the funding.
Broken Arrow (OK) Police Department, Chief Carolyn Kusler:
To date, the Broken Arrow Police Department has hired 17 officers under the COPS program, which has enabled the department to reduce beat size, increase traffic enforcement, and add to the number of School Resource Officers assigned to the schools. Because of the increase in staffing, we were able to implement an organizational structure that encourages community policing and provides time to follow through with problem-solving projects. In addition, we have received two School-Based Partnership Grants that have cemented our relationships with the school system and the students who attend. Because the funding comes directly to the agency from COPS, the monies are not diluted by multiple processing and the application process is straightforward and uncomplicated. Furthermore, direct monitoring by the COPS Office ensures that the principles of community policing, partnerships and problem solving are being integrated into the programs they fund. Without this oversight, accountability will suffer.
Colorado Springs Police Department, Chief Lorne Kramer:
The Colorado Springs Police Department has had several successful programs as the result of COPS grants. Two of those success stories include the following:
Page 104 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In 1996, the Colorado Springs Police Department was awarded a grant to enhance community policing to combat domestic violence. Because of the award, a Domestic Violence Enhanced Response Team (DVERT) was supported. The DVERT unit collaborates with 27 local community-based and government agencies. The DVERT unit has produced multi-media training tools and provided on-site training and education to communities across the country. DVERT has been recognized as a national demonstration site for the Violence Against Women Office.
In 1999, Colorado Springs also received a School-Based Partnership Grant through COPS that allowed the department to hire a full-time crime analyst who works directly with the School Resource Officers (SROs). This position has been invaluable to the SROs. The analyst works with the SROs in gathering, processing and disseminating information that pertains to crime trends and criminal activity.
Lenexa (KS) Police Department, Chief Ellen Hanson:
From this grant, the department hired additional officers and formed a Criminal Interdiction Team (CIT) that serviced the business area exclusively. The department contacted and recruited businesses to participate. Once a business signed on, officers trained their staff to spot criminal activity and formed a close working partnership with the CIT. This program prevented many crimes.
Part of what makes this a true success story is that the CIT expertise has been passed on to a new generation of officers. These officers have developed expertise in working frauds, forgeries and other crimes that have spread beyond the traditional retail section to all retail areas of Lenexa. Additional officers have also furthered our efforts to expand the Crime Free Multi-Housing project (creating a safe living environment in apartment buildings and areas) to the very large number of apartment complexes in the city.
Page 105 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
It is safe to say that in this day of doing more with less, these very successful initiatives would not be possible without the assistance of the COPS Office and the positions it has funded.
Lowell (MA) Police Department, Superintendent Edward F. Davis, III:
Department of Justice/COPS funding enabled us to experiment with the latest problem-solving methods that led to increases in safety and public confidence. Prior to the infusion of money from the COPS program, the LPD was seriously underfunded and understaffed, severely hampering our ability to respond to citizens and to maintain safety and order. Our business community was so concerned they explored the costs of hiring private security. Real estate prices for commercial and residential property across the city had bottomed out. The COPS funds contributed to the addition of nearly 100 officers in five years. These officers are better equipped and trained with the help of COPS funding. Our officers are responsive to community needs and concerns while being aggressive crime fighters. The officers and citizens working together have realized a 60 percent drop in crime over six years and revitalized the downtown area spurring business, tourism, culture and sports venues. None of these changes could have been considered had the city not become a safer place. These reforms were made possible with funding from the COPS office.
South Pasadena (CA) Police Department, Chief Michael Berkow:
The COPS money that was received for South Pasedena has helped to support efforts that were not fully realized under a smaller budget, and have helped us make improvements and updates to achieve modern-day standards. Another example involves my former agency: the Coachella Police Department received a problem-solving grant slated for the toughest neighborhood in the city. This grant provided money for a community organizer to work with the church and the police to strengthen the community and get rid of drug dealers. This program has been very successful. The department also received funding to hire five cops, with a waiver on the matching funds. This is a very poor, violent city with lots of problems that got the help it needed. Free COPS training was also provided. This was excellent and allowed the community and the police to work on key problems together.
Page 106 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Redmond (WA) Police Department, Chief Steven R. Harris:
In January 1997, the Redmond (WA) Police Department implemented a program to target the incidents of domestic violence with funding from a COPS grant to hire a police officer and a legal advocate. The Redmond Domestic Violence Unit also partnered with the local social service agency to provide more immediate victim advocacy. In 1998, we received an additional COPS grant that we used to enhance the Domestic Violence Unit. We expanded the unit to include an additional officer and broadened the scope of the program and its reach. We now have a Family Violence Unit (name changed also) that provides expedient follow-up to all cases involving spousal abuse, child abuse and status offenses—like ''running away''—that occur primarily in the home. The Redmond Police Department seeks to proactively reduce the amount of violence and address the issues that lead to violence by promptly prosecuting those cases that are criminal and by providing legal advocacy services and resources to victims by networking with the many agencies who can assist us in this commitment. The agency's 3-person team continues to deliver quality service by participating in a number of partnerships with outside agencies and by providing on-going training. From January 1997 through March 2000, the Family Violence Unit received and reviewed 1, 184 cases; they followed up on 999 of them; and 1,328 victims have been contacted to ensure coordination of services and needs.
COPS funding to get this unit started has had a significant and positive impact on this community to curb the violence that is occurring within the homes of many of our community members.
[NOTE: Additional material submitted by Mr. Wexler, entitled ''Homicide Prevention: A Background Paper for Police Executives,'' by Ron Huberman with Drea Morrozoff, May 2000, is not reprinted here but is on file with the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime.]
Page 107 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. CANADY. At this point the subcommittee will stand in recess, due to the fact there is legislation for which the subcommittee has responsibility on the floor of the House. So we will stand in recess. As soon as that legislation has been dealt with by the House, which we hope will not take long, we will return and resume the subcommittee hearing.
[Recess.]
Mr. HUTCHINSON. [Presiding.] This hearing will come back into session, and I want to thank each of the panelists for waiting.
As was noted, the Judiciary Committee had some bills on the floor, and Mr. Scott and others were there participating in that debate, but we are reconvened now and look forward to hearing your testimony.
I believe we finished with Dr. Wexler and we will pick up with Dr. McGarrell. Dr. McGarrell, you are now recognized for 5 minutes, and let me add here again, I know you have waited very patiently, we do have a long panel, and so if you can present your testimony in 5 minutes and if you need to summarize, then fine, but it would be helpful so we can have everyone testify. Then we will come back for questions and answers. Dr. McGarrell.
STATEMENT OF EDMUND F. McGARRELL, DIRECTOR, CRIME CONTROL POLICY CENTER, HUDSON INSTITUTE, INDIANAPOLIS, IN
Page 108 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. MCGARRELL. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, thank you Ranking Member Scott, members of the subcommittee. I am pleased to be here this afternoon to talk about an exciting approach to intervening with young offenders as they first become involved in the juvenile court system. Specifically what I would like to talk about is the use of restorative justice conferences with youth.
Despite the recent good news of declines in juvenile crime, three decades of increasing juvenile crime have overwhelmed our Nation's juvenile courts with huge caseloads. The result has been what some observers call a triage system. Floods of cases come into the court and the court focuses on the most serious offenses and on those youths who have accumulated long offense records.
Although it is essential that courts do focus on chronic and violent offenders, this prioritization creates some unintended consequence s. For the first, second, or third time a youth whose case is dismissed or diverted, the message can be, well, this was no big deal. Cases are dismissed quickly, victims are not involved, and the youth is not held accountable for the harm he has caused.
The system is particularly tragic for very young offenders coming into court. These young offenders are at extremely high risk of reoffending, but it is precisely these types of youth who tend to be low priorities in our overcrowded juvenile courts. Thus, the dilemma is to find mechanisms to intervene early in the youth's offending career before they become a chronic, violent offender.
Consider the following. The arrest involved a first-time offending youth who had stolen a jacket out of a school locker. Being a first offense, the youth was released and told that if he avoided any more run-ins with the police, the case would be dismissed and his record wiped clean. Now, compare that with the restorative justice conferences that are occurring in Indianapolis. Here, the tenor of the conference changed dramatically when the older sister of the victim explained how the entire family was affected. The sister explained that their mother took a second job each summer to earn some extra funds to take the children clothes shopping for the new school year. Here it was the first week in school, and the new jacket was gone. ''you will never know how much you hurt my mom and our family,'' explained the older sister.
Page 109 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
For victims, restorative justice conferences offer the opportunity to confront their transgressor, explain how they were harmed and ask questions of the offender. The conference ends with a reparation agreement in which the entire group agrees to steps the offender can take to make things right for the victim or the broader community. Typical elements of agreement will include an apology, personal service, or community service.
For the youth, the conference provides an opportunity to be held accountable in a way that is not accomplished from cases that are summarily dismissed or diverted. The conference provides an educational opportunity whereby the youth learns how his actions have affected others, the kind of experience essential for the formation of a conscience.
For the courts, the conferences offer a meaningful response to early delinquency, but without placing unrealistic burden on court resources. Indianapolis has been experimenting with the use of these conferences since 1997, and local officials have cooperated with the research team in conducting a true experiment with randomized assignment. First-time offenders ages 14 and younger are randomly assigned either to a conference or other court-ordered programs.
For victims, the conferences appear to offer a much more satisfying experience. Over 90 percent of the victims say they were satisfied with how the case was handled. This compares to 68 percent of the victims whose cases were handled in traditional court programs. Ninety-eight percent of victims say they would recommend this approach to a friend who was involved in a similar situation. In contrast, only 24 percent of the victims in traditional programs would make such a recommendation.
Page 110 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
For youths, conferences also appear to offer more meaningful response to their offending. Over 80 percent of the youths successfully attend the conference and complete the terms of their agreement. This compares to 58 percent of the control group. In terms of reoffending, 20 percent of the youths had reoffended within 6 months who attended the conference compared to 34 percent of the control group. This represents a 40 percent reduction in rearrest and is statistically significant. We continue to monitor these cases to look for longer-term effect s and the preliminary results are also looking very promising.
Conferences offer the courts and the police the opportunity to partner with the community to address the three principles of restorative justice: offender accountability, addressing victim need s, and community reintegration. The findings from the Indianapolis experiment suggests that conferences can achieve these objectives. We know that much of the Nation's juvenile crime is a product of broken families and strained or nonexistent neighborhood networks and associations. The restorative justice conferences are an attempt to respond to early offending in a fashion that we would hope occurs in strong families and vibrant neighborhoods.
Further, by returning justice to the community, conferences are a more realistic approach to addressing youth crime than expecting the juvenile courts to address that in a meaningful way with the heavy volume of cases that come through the courthouse each day.
Thank you for the opportunity to present these findings.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Thank you very much.
Page 111 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
[The prepared statement of Mr. McGarrell follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF EDMUND F. MCGARRELL, DIRECTOR, CRIME CONTROL POLICY CENTER, HUDSON INSTITUTE, INDIANAPOLIS, IN
SUMMARY
The Problem: In the 1960s, a Presidential Commission on crime decried overcrowding in the nation's juvenile courts. Since that time juvenile crime has increased bringing with it a corresponding increase in caseloads facing juvenile courts. The effect has been a triage system whereby the courts must focus on the most serious offenses and the most chronic repetitive offenders. An unintended consequence is that youthful offenders who have not accumulated a long record are often handled through diversion, victims and the police are frustrated, and offending youths learn that their criminal behavior was ''no big deal.''
One Potential Solution: The Indianapolis Restorative Justice (RJ) experiment was implemented with the goal of addressing precisely this need—more effective early intervention with young offenders coming into juvenile court. In a RJ conference, an offending youth is brought together with the victim for a conference facilitated by a trained coordinator. In addition to victim and offender, a broader group of supporters of both are asked to participate. The conference begins with the offending youth providing an account of their behavior. The victim then has the opportunity to confront the youth and to explain how they were harmed. They also have an opportunity to ask questions of the offender (''why me?''). Next supporters of the victim can explain how they were harmed or reinforce how the offense hurt the victim. The next to speak are the supporters of the offender. They often communicate their own sense of shame about the youth's behavior as well as their concerns about the path upon which the youth may be headed. Finally, the group is asked to reach agreement on how the youth can make appropriate amends to the victim and all parties sign a formal agreement. The contract may include direct restitution to the victim, community service, an apology, or other steps of recompense.
Page 112 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The Indianapolis RJ Experiment: Since September 1997, Indianapolis has been experimenting with the use of RJ conferences as an alternative response to juvenile crime. To date, the focus has been on using conferences as an early intervention. Youths eligible to participate in a conference are ages 14 and younger without having a prior court adjudication. The primary offenses include assault, criminal mischief, disorderly conduct, shoplifting, and theft. The research involves a true experimental design whereby youths meeting the eligibility criteria are randomly assigned to either a conference or another court assigned diversion program. During Phase One of the study, 232 youths have been referred to a conference and 226 youths comprise the control group.
Results:
Among conference cases, over 90% of victims express satisfaction with the way the case was handled. This compares to 68% of victims whose case is handled in traditional programs.
Nearly 100 % of victims would recommend the conference to a friend in similar circumstances. In contrast only 24% of victims whose case was handled in other programs would do so.
Approximately 83% of the youths assigned to a conference successfully complete the conference and satisfy the terms of the reparation agreement. This is significantly higher than the proportion of youths satisfying other court-ordered diversion programs (58%).
For the total sample, 20% of youths involved in a conference re-offended within six months. This compared to 34% for the control group.
Page 113 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
For youths actually completing the restorative justice program, 12% re-offended within six months. For youths actually completing other court-ordered programs, 23% re-offended within six months.
These findings represent 40–45% reductions in re-offending and are statistically significant.
Conclusions and Next Steps:
It is clear that conferences can be successfully conducted in a large, urban, U.S. setting.
Conferences enjoy clear support among victims, youth offenders, and their parents.
The initial findings on program completion rates and on re-offending rates suggest that conferences offer crime reduction benefits.
STATEMENT
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:
Good afternoon Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. I am pleased to be here this afternoon to talk about an exciting approach to intervene with young offenders as they first become involved in the juvenile court system. Specifically, I would like to talk about the use of restorative justice conferences, where youthful offenders are brought face-to-face with their victims, in a setting that includes supporters of both the victim and the youth. Our research is showing that these conferences are doing a much better job of meeting the needs of crime victims while at the same time significantly decreasing the rate of re-arrest among these youthful offenders.
Page 114 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Before discussing the conferences and our research, let me provide some context for why these findings are so important. The last four years have brought some welcome news as we have seen youth offending decline across the United States. As you are well aware, however, the level of juvenile crime remains unacceptably high and generates tremendous costs for victims, neighborhoods, and the youth offenders themselves.
The rise in juvenile crime from the 1960s through the mid-1990s brought increasing numbers of youths into the juvenile justice system. Indeed, from 1972 to 1994 the number of juvenile arrests increased from around 80,000 to approximately 150,000.
Even with the recent decline we are still looking at nearly a 50 percent increase from the numbers witnessed during the 1980s. We also know that juvenile courts in cluding judges, prosecutors, probation officers and the like have not experienced anything near a 50 percent increase in personnel. This means that juvenile court systems that were considered overcrowded in the 1960s and 1970s remain overwhelmed with huge caseloads. The result has been what some observers have called a triage system. Floods of cases come into the court and the court focuses on the most serious offenses and on those youths who have accumulated long offense records.
Although it is essential that courts focus on chronic and violent offenders, this prioritization creates some unintended consequences. For those first, second, and third offense youths whose cases are dismissed, diverted, or placed on the caseload of an overwhelmed probation officer, the message is that the offense was ''no big deal.'' Cases are dismissed quickly, victims are not involved, and the youth is not held accountable for the harm he has caused.
Page 115 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
This system is particularly tragic for very young offenders coming into court. National research has shown that youths who come into juvenile court at very young ages, those fourteen and younger, are at very high risk for repeat offending. Indeed, one study found that about 60 percent of twelve-year-olds that have had a court referral are subsequently returned to juvenile court. By the second offense, over 80 percent will re-offend and be returned to court. Unfortunately, it is precisely these youths that are typically low priorities in the overcrowded juvenile court.
Thus the dilemma is to find mechanisms to intervene early in the youths' offending career before they become the chronic, violent offenders. The unfortunate reality, however, is that given the resource limits of most juvenile courts the courts are unlikely to hold these youths accountable. It is precisely for these youths that the restorative justice conference approach appears most promising.
Consider the following. The arrest involved a first-time offending youth that had stolen a jacket out of a school locker. Being a first offense, the youth was taken to the juvenile intake office. The intake officer explained to the youth and his mother that the youth could participate in a diversion program. Essentially the youth would be released and if he avoided any more run-ins with the police the case would be dismissed and his record wiped clean. Beyond making the original report to the police, the victim was not involved and never learned the outcome of the case.
Now consider the same situation but in a jurisdiction utilizing restorative justice conferences. The intake officer referred the youth to a restorative justice coordinator who made arrangements for a conference involving the offending youth, the victim, and the supporters of both the youth and the victim. The conference was facilitated by a trained and uniformed police officer. At the conference, the youth, sitting across the circle from the victim, heard how the victim had been harmed by the theft. In one such case in Indianapolis the tenor of the conference changed dramatically when the older sister of the victim explained how the entire family was hurt. The victim supporter explained that their mother took a second job each summer to earn some extra funds to take the children clothes shopping for the new school year. Here it was, the first week in school and the new jacket was gone. ''You'll never know how much you hurt my Mom and our family,'' explained the older sister.
Page 116 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
For victims, restorative justice conferences offer the opportunity to confront their transgressor, explain how they were harmed, and ask questions of the offender. The conference ends with a reparation agreement in which the entire group agrees to steps the offender can take to make things right for the victim and/or to the broader community. Typical elements of the agreement include an apology, personal service to the victim, or community service. Through involvement in the conference and through the terms of the agreement the emotional and material needs of the victim can be addressed.
For the youth, the conference provides an opportunity to be held accountable in a way not accomplished when cases are summarily dismissed or diverted. The conference provides an educational opportunity whereby the youth learns how his actions have affected others, the kind of experience essential for the formation of a conscience. Often times a member of the conference agrees to step forward and play a mentoring role with the youth. In situations indicating more significant problems with the youth or the youth's family, referrals can be made to local service providers.
For parents concerned with their youth's misbehavior, the conference can provide a means of support and can reinforce their efforts to teach their children right from wrong. For parents reluctant to play an appropriate parental role, conferences are often venues for other participants to provide lessons in parenting or to play a more active role in the youth's life.
For the courts, the conference offers a meaningful response to early delinquency without placing an unrealistic burden on court resources.
Page 117 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Indianapolis has been experimenting with the use of restorative justice conferences since 1997. Fortunately, the local juvenile court judge, the prosecutor, and local law enforcement have cooperated with our research team in conducting a true experiment in the use of restorative justice conferences. Youths who meet basic eligibility criteria, in this case first time offenders ages 14 and younger excluding serious violent offenses, are randomly assigned to either a conference or another court-ordered program. The randomization provides us with two equivalent groups of youths and victims with which to assess the efficacy of the conferences.
Although at first blush these youths appear to be low-level offenders, it is important to keep in mind that youths who begin their offending careers at such an early age are at significant risk of chronic offending and continued involvement in the juvenile justice system.
The results I will present are from the first two years of the experiment. Approximately 230 youths participated in conferences with a similar number in the control group. The results have been very impressive.
For victims, the conferences appear to offer a much more satisfying experience. Over 90 percent of the victims say they were satisfied with how their case was handled. This compares to 68 percent of the victims whose case was handled through other court-ordered programs. Ninety-eight percent of the victims say they would recommend this approach to a friend involved in a similar situation. In contrast, only 24 percent of victims whose case was handled in traditional court programs would make such a recommendation. Victims in conferences say they were treated respectfully, involved in the process, and that they had a say in the proceedings.
Page 118 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
For youths, conferences appear to offer a more meaningful response to their offending. Over 80 percent successfully attend the conference and complete the terms of their reparation agreement. This compares to 58 percent of the control group youths. In terms of re-offending, 20 percent of the youths attending a conference had re-offended within six months. This compares to 34 percent of the control group. Looking at only the youths that successfully completed the program, 12 percent of those attending conferences had been re-arrested compared to 23 percent of the control group. These figures represent 40–45 percent reductions in re-arrest and are statistically significant.
Our study is continuing and we continue to monitor these cases for longer-term effects. Although we have not released these findings and they should be considered preliminary, the assessment of re-arrest at 12 months is also looking promising. Additionally, local officials recently announced expansion of the project to include young, second-time offenders. We will assess the effectiveness of the conferences for these youths as well.
I have emphasized the use of conferences as an alternative approach to first-time offending with very young offenders in juvenile court. Indeed, it is with this group of youths that we have the strongest research findings. It is important to realize, however, that conferences can be used with a broad range of offending. With more serious cases, it may not be appropriate to use conferences as an alternative to court but it may be a useful adjunct to other sanctions such as probation and even incarceration. In these situations the conference provides minimally a mechanism to address the needs of victims.
Conferences offer the courts and the police the opportunity to partner with the community to address the three principles of restorative justice: offender accountability, addressing victim needs, and community reintegration. The findings from the Indianapolis experiment suggest that conferences can achieve these objectives. We know that much of the nation's juvenile crime is the product of broken families and strained or non-existent neighborhood networks and associations. The restorative justice conferences are an attempt to respond to early offending in a fashion that we would hope occurs in strong families and vibrant neighborhoods. Further, by returning justice to the community conferences are a more realistic approach to addressing youth crime than expecting the juvenile courts to address meaningfully the heavy volume of cases that come to the courthouse each day.
Page 119 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Thank you for the opportunity to present these findings.
Addendum:
FACE-TO-FACE TO RESTORE JUSTICE TO THE COMMUNITY
(Appeared in the Indianapolis Star, May 23, 1999)
What if Littleton's Eric Harris and his parents had been forced to meet face-to-face with Brooks Brown and his family after Harris cracked Brown's windshield? What if the conference included not just the families but Harris's friend, and Brown's old friend, Dylan Klebold?
What if the conference also included school officials and additional students? What if a sheriff's deputy facilitated the conference?
One can guess that the conference would not only have been an opportunity for Brooks to express his anger over the broken windshield but also concerns about being the target of repeated threats. This would also have been an opportunity for Brown's parents to express their concerns over Eric's Web sites.
After such a conference, in which all parties were given the opportunity to discuss their concerns, would there be any doubt that the Harris and Klebold parents and school officials would be on alert for potential problems?
Page 120 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
What if the athletes who apparently antagonized Harris and Klebold had been required to sit across a circle from their fellow students and hear how deeply their behavior had hurt their peers? What if the parents, teachers and coaches were part of this conference?
Restorative justice conferences, used most commonly in Australia and New Zealand, involve face-to-face meetings between offenders and victims, run by a trained facilitator and involving a group of supporters identified by victims and offenders as the key people in their lives.
The conference begins with the offender giving an account of his behavior. The victim then has the opportunity to explain how he was harmed and to ask questions. The supporters then have the chance to describe how they were affected by the behavior and to express concerns they may have.
Conferences are intended to avoid several of the common shortcomings of our juvenile justice and school disciplinary systems. Simply put, the tendency in most court and school systems is to ignore or downplay misbehavior until either a long-pattern of suspensions or offenses have accumulated or a serious crime is committed.
In those situations where the schools and juvenile courts do act, they also tend to remove disputes from the parties involved and place the accused in front of principal or judge, who then doles out punishment. By excluding the direct victims, as well as the supporters of both victim and offender, the disciplinary procedure loses the opportunity for all interested parties to express their feelings about the incident.
Page 121 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In contrast, restorative justice conferences offer an opportunity for early intervention. Rather than school detention or informal probation, the youth will face the person he has harmed and be held directly accountable.
For someone like Brooks Brown and his parents, rather than making a police report and then being excluded from subsequent proceedings, they have the opportunity to be part of the justice process. They also have an equal say in a reparation plan that must satisfy all the participants. This typically includes repair of the harm that occurred as well as assurance that the problems will desist. The conference ends with a ceremony in which the offending youth is accepted back into the community.
The goal of the conference is to convey the message of ''hate the sin, not the sinner.''
In Indianapolis, where restorative justice conferences were initially introduced as an alternative to juvenile court, school officials have found conferencing to be a valuable component of their disciplinary methods. It's been fascinating to see initially skeptical police officers and school administrators participate in a conference and become advocates for this community-based form of justice.
Rather than sweeping youthful misdeeds under the rug or turning them over to professional therapists, restorative justice conferences are based on the principle that those closest to the harmful incident are best suited to deal with it. They are an opportunity to say that wearing swastikas is wrong, that a hate-filled webpage must go, and for athlete harassers to learn how they hurt others.
Page 122 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
They are a concrete opportunity for students, teachers, parents, and police to talk to one another and to agree collectively to future steps that meet the needs of this ''community.''
In our fast-paced, mobile society, where youthful misconduct is too often ignored, conferences offer a chance to take a negative and transform it into an opportunity to establish social ties, teach values, and build community.
Edmund McGarrell directs the Crime Control Policy Center at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis and is associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Dr. Holton.
STATEMENT OF JOHN HOLTON, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL CENTER FOR CHILD ABUSE PREVENTION RESEARCH, CHICAGO, IL
Mr. HOLTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Mr. Scott. I am here on behalf of Felton J. Earls, the principal investigator of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and also a professor of child psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and professor of human behavior and development at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Page 123 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I have been asked by Dr. Earls to offer testimony on the question of this hearing based on the findings of the project, and I will describe the studies and its principal findings to date and offer my own thoughts on conclusions the subcommittee might consider.
The ultimate aim of the project is to improve the life chances of children. It is an interdisciplinary study aimed at understanding this society's causes and pathways of antisocial behavior, juvenile delinquency, adult crime, substance abuse and violence. It has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Department of Education, and the Administration for Children, Youth and Families.
The project is uncommon in both its size and scope, having combined two studies into a single comprehensive design.
The first component of the study is an intensive study of Chicago neighborhoods, their social, economic, organizational, political and cultural structures, and the dynamic changes that take place in these structures over the study's 8 years.
The second part is a series of coordinated longitudinal studies that will follow approximately 7,000 randomly selected children, adolescents, and young adults, looking at the changing circumstances of their lives as well as the personal characteristics that may lead them toward or away from a variety of antisocial behaviors. Our interest centers on violent crime and substance abuse but also encompasses the many forms of juvenile delinquency and adult crime from shoplifting to securities fraud.
Page 124 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
More recently, the project added two elements to this investigation, a study of children's exposure to violence and its consequences, and a study on child care and its impact on early child development. By looking at individuals and their communities and individuals in their communities as both change over time, the project seeks to unravel the complex influences of community, family and individual factors on human development. Why does one community have a high rate of crime, violence, and substance abuse while a similar community nearby is relatively safe? What factors enable some individuals to lead successful, productive lives even in high-risk neighborhoods? Why does one young person experiment only briefly with delinquency while another goes on to a criminal career?
For the sake of time, let me quickly give you some idea of the results and findings to date. Let me take you back to the community design approach taken by this study to contextualize the results and findings.
We came to realize that understanding the etiology of antisocial behavior meant highlighting the importance of the child in context or, said another way, we wanted to understand the challenges facing parents and families raising children in different neighborhoods. And let me say it yet another way: How does one's social status as found in the community impact the social process of raising children that creates disparate outcomes? After all, why should the children of poor people or people of color or non-native English speakers be more likely to perpetuate or become victims of crime than anyone else?
Prior research from the seminal work of Chicago sociologists Shaw and McKay pointed toward an ecological approach as being theoretically important and valid, and thus we labored over the issues of measurement to understand the meaning found in context or simply what is meant by neighborhood. We determined and were able to measure that a community's most important characteristics are far beyond compositional variables like race and class. As the project's initial publication in Science stated, Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls described an informal system of social organization called ''collective efficacy'' which consisted of cohesion, trust and reciprocity among neighbors, combined with shared expectations to intervene for the supervision and protection of children in public spaces.
Page 125 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Collective efficacy better predicted or explained rates of crime and observed disorder than the usual suspects cited in sociology; namely, concentrated poverty, residential instability, and a community's heterogeneity represented by the concentration of immigrants.
We offer some conclusions as to what collective efficacy might help us understand.
In the process of doing this work, we found that we could measure an informal social organization accurately and that it proved to be more important than race or class taken by themselves. Collective efficacy serves to bond residents and commit them to shared actions on behalf of children. Albeit found across Chicago neighborhoods, collective efficacy is most likely to appear when structural elements enhance residential stability and locate concentrated affluence.
Neighborhoods that are undergoing devolution driven by public policy are likely to suffer an erosion of collective efficacy and hence experience more crime. Neighborhoods segregated by social custom and maintained by social policy, market forces, and other income barriers are likely to experience varying rates of crime regardless of the characteristics of the inhabitants. Without attending to this deep-seated problem of structural inequality, we are spending all of our resources, both our intellectual and monetary, fighting the problem way downstream. If crime is to be prevented, it requires that the opportunity to raise children equally begins with equality embedded in neighborhoods.
Page 126 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
I thank you for your time.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Holton follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF JOHN HOLTON, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL CENTER FOR CHILD ABUSE PREVENTION RESEARCH, CHICAGO, IL
On behalf of the Felton J. Earls, principal investigator of the study, ''Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods,'' and Professor of Child Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Human Behavior and Development at the Harvard School of Public and his team of scientists—Professors Stephen Buka, co-principal of the Harvard School of Public Health, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University, Stephen Raudenbush of the University of Michigan, and Robert J. Sampson of the University of Chicago; on behalf of the staff of the project and especially the participants being interviewed, I thank the Subcommittee on Crime of the House Committee on the Judiciary for extending an invitation to share our findings in hopes that we might assist finding the answer to the complex question of this hearing: Preventing and Fighting Crime: What Works? My name is John Kingsley Holton, and I served as the former site director for the Project from 1993 to 1999. I have been asked by Dr. Earls to offer a testimony on the question of this hearing based on the findings of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. I will describe the study and its principle findings to date and offer my thoughts on what conclusions the Subcommittee ought consider.
Scope & Aim of Study. The ultimate aim of the Project is to improve the life chances of children.(see footnote 3) It is an interdisciplinary study directed at understanding this society's causes and pathways of antisocial behavior, juvenile delinquency, adult crime, substance abuse, and violence. It is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute of Mental Health, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Administration for Children, Youth and Families.
Page 127 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The Project is uncommon in both size and scope, having combined two studies into a single, comprehensive design. The first is an intensive study of Chicago's neighborhoods'their social, economic, organizational, political, and cultural structures, and the dynamic changes that take place in these structures over the study's eight years. The second is a series of coordinated longitudinal studies that will follow 7,000 randomly selected children, adolescents, and young adults, looking at the changing circumstances of their lives, as well as the personal characteristics, that may lead them toward or away from a variety of antisocial behaviors. Our interest centers on violent crime and substance abuse, but also encompasses the many forms of juvenile delinquency and adult crime, from shoplifting to securities fraud (See Appendix A: Additional Studies Conducted within PHDCN).
More recently, the Project added two new elements to this investigation: a study of children's exposure to violence and its consequences, and a study on child care and its impact on early child development. By looking at individuals and their communities—and individuals in their communities—as both change over time, the Project seeks to unravel the complex influences of community, family, and individual factors on human development. Why does one community have a high rate of crime, violence, and substance abuse, while a similar community nearby is relatively safe? What factors enable some individuals to live successful, productive lives, even in high-risk neighborhoods? Why does one young person experiment only briefly with delinquency, while another goes on to a ''criminal career''? Since its inception in 1990, the Project has broadened its scope beyond an exclusive focus on explaining serious delinquency and criminal behavior to include exposure to violence and its psychiatric consequences, quality of child care, characteristics of schooling, and a number of measures of positive youth development into its design (See Appendix B: Scientific Evolution of the Project).
Page 128 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Results/Findings to Date. Let me return you to the community design approach taken by this study before describing our results and findings. We came to realize that understanding the etiology of antisocial behavior meant highlighting the importance of the child in context, or said another way, we wanted to understand the challenges facing parents and families raising children in different neighborhoods. Let me say it yet another way: How does one's social status (as found in community) impact the social process (of raising children) that creates disparate outcomes? After all, why should the children of poor people, or people of color, or non-native English speakers be more likely to perpetrate and become victims of crime than anyone else?
Prior research from the seminal work of Chicago sociologists Shaw and McKay, pointed toward an ecological approach as being theoretically important and valid, thus we labored over issues of measurement to understand meaning found in context or simply, ''what is meant by a neighborhood? We determined and were able to measure that a community's most important characteristics are far beyond compositional variables like class and race. As the Project's initial publication in Science(see footnote 4) stated, Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls described an informal system of social organization called ''collective efficacy'' which consisted of cohesion, trust, and reciprocity among neighbors combined with shared expectations to intervene for the supervision and protection of children (or social control) in public spaces. Collective efficacy better predicted or explained rates of crime and observed disorder than the usual ''suspects'' cited for explaining criminal occurrence, namely concentrated poverty, residential instability, and a community's heterogeneity represented by immigrants. Most importantly, collective efficacy could be identified in poor neighborhoods and in neighborhoods of color, and that as a form of informal social control, residential cohesion, trust and reciprocity could be colorblind and without class privileges.
Page 129 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In another paper(see footnote 5) Sampson, Morenoff, and Earls further described collective efficacy by unpacking what social structures best support it and how it is spatially different across neighborhoods. By examining variations in adults' recognition and knowledge of neighborhood children (''intergenerational closure''), their levels of reciprocal exchange, and their shared expectations for informal social control across 342 neighborhoods, we learned that residential stability and concentrated affluence, more so than poverty and racial/ethnic composition, are the better predictors. Conversely, the presence of concentrated disadvantage is associated with sharply lower expectations for shared child control. The importance of spatial dynamics in generating collective efficacy for children was highlighted as well. An advantage above and beyond a neighborhood's given structural characteristics emerged if it were in proximity to areas high in closure, exchange, and control. And in a segregated city such as Chicago, spatial advantages are much more likely to accrue to white neighborhoods than to black neighborhoods.
The final publication I will cite reexamined the notion that public displays of disorder necessarily predicted the occurrence of crime.(see footnote 6) Using videotaping and subsequent systematic rating of more than 23,000 street segments in Chicago, Sampson and Raudenbush constructed highly reliable scales of social and physical disorder for 196 census tracts. They included census data, police records, and an independent survey of more than 3,500 residents to test a theory of collective efficacy and structural constraints. ''Contrary to the 'broken windows' theory, however, the relationship between public disorder and crime is spurious except for robbery.'' In other words, perception of what appears to be a criminal environment (broken windows) is not always the best predictor of crime activity and the leveling of resource by governments will not necessarily produce reductions in crimes with the exception of robberies.
Page 130 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Conclusions. The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods aims to understand the life course available to and taken by children and their caregivers covering a period from birth to early adulthood. In the process, the Project aims to observe the interaction between boys and girls and their families, schools, community institutions, and neighborhoods. It will note the chances and prospects of such interactions leading to crime, violence, and anti-social behaviors given individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics.
The Project's emphasis on ecological context has produced the concept of ''Collective Efficacy'' and in the process discovered that we could measure informal social organization accurately, and that it proved more important than race and class. While these findings made the news and are now being disseminated widely to various groups (CDC, NIMH, foundations, local CBOs, etc.) interested in community capacity building, the human development side of the research is forging ahead to link what we are learning about neighborhoods to the lives of individual children.
Collective efficacy serves to bond residents and commit them to shared actions on behalf of children. Albeit found across Chicago neighborhoods, collective efficacy is most likely to appear when structural elements enhance residential stability and locate concentrated affluence. Neighborhoods that are undergoing devolution driven by public policy are likely to suffer an erosion of collective efficacy and hence experience more crime. Neighborhoods segregated by social custom and maintained by social policy, ''market forces'', and other income barriers are likely to experience varying rates of crime regardless of the characteristics of the inhabitants. Without attending to this deep seated problem of structural inequality, we are spending all of our resources (intellectual and monetary) fighting the problem way downstream. If crime is to be prevented, it requires that the opportunity to raise children equally begins with equality embedded in neighborhoods.
Page 131 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
APPENDIX A: ADDITIONAL STUDIES BEING CONDUCTED WITHIN THE PROJECT ON HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN CHICAGO NEIGHBORHOODS:
Child Exposure to Violence and PTSD Across Urban Settings Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health
Under the auspices of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, 6000 males and females, having the initial ages of 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, and 16, and residing in 80 neighborhoods in Chicago will be assessed, along with their caregivers, in annual home-based sessions over a four year period. These six age groups constitute separate overlapping cohorts which will be studied simultaneously in a single longitudinal design. The assessments of these children will ascertain the source, frequency and severity of their exposure to violence and the consequences of such exposure for subsequent psychiatric disorder, social, psychological, physiological and academic functioning. An important feature of the longitudinal cohort design is that it is embedded in a community study of the social organization of neighborhoods, schools and families that has yielded multi-level, multi-method measures of ambient violence within each of these social contexts. The consolidation of longitudinal and community designs is the product of several years of advance work by an interdisciplinary group of researchers in which theoretically derived measures of neighborhood social organization have been achieved, the analytic methods for studying multi-level, longitudinal designs developed and tested, and a comprehensive protocol for measuring individual and family level risk factors composed and piloted.
The aims of the study are of both a descriptive and analytic nature. The descriptive goals are to determine the prevalence and correlates of exposure to violence and PTSD in the context of a large urban environment varying markedly in the social class and ethnic group composition of its neighborhoods. The analytic aims relate to an examination of the causal links between exposure to violence and PTSD and other psychiatric disorders, as well as to an investigation of the consequences of such exposure for the cognitive, social, and academic functioning of children. To augment this population-level analysis, a detailed assessment will be conducted of a subsample characterized by exposure to either acute or chronic violence. The focus of this effort will be on understanding the role that adrenal regulation in salivary levels of cortisol, plays in mediating the consequences of traumatic experiences. The study promises to advance current understanding of the causes and prevention of PTSD in children and to improve the planning and efficacy of health and violence prevention activities at the local community level.
Page 132 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The Contribution of Child Care Arrangements to Cognitive and Behavioral Outcomes in Middle Childhood: A Multilevel, Longitudinal Study Beginning in Infancy Funded by the U.S. Department of Education
In 1996, the National Institute of Justice supported an intensive home-based study of over 350 infants as part of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Assessment of this sample at age 6 months (range = 5–7 months) included measurement of infant cognition and temperament, maternal health and social support, characteristics of the home environment, and the quality of parent-child interaction. In this grant we will continue the study cognitive and behavioral development within the context of the Project's multi-level, longitudinal design. Recognizing the increasing amounts of time young children spend in non-parental arrangements, the aim is to broaden the evaluation of children's psychological development from a focus on home environments to include other types of child care arrangements available to and chosen by parents. Our questions are: 1) what factors shape parents' choices about child care and determine how these choices are made; and 2) what is the relative contribution of non-parental child care to cognitive and behavior outcomes in middle childhood. We expect to find instances where non-parental child care reduces the risk for adverse outcomes (protective functions), as well as those in which risks established by virtue of a family's socioeconomic status, neighborhood, and family background are increased by poor quality of non-parental child care.
Child Care Research Partnership Funded by the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families
In this time of welfare to work transition for low-income single parents, the availability, affordability, flexibility and quality of child care have major implications for children's successful transition to school and parent's successful transition to economic self-sufficiency. The proposed partnership of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN; based at the Harvard School of Public Health), the Child Care Division of the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS), and the Children's Services of the Chicago Department of Human Services (CDHS) is intended to bring together three distinctive data bases on low-income families and children. We intend to integrate our data bases in order to study factors related to the supply of different types of early child care services including Head Start, preschool, and different forms of center or family-based day care and their use by low income families. Moreover, we wish to study factors related to the use-supply relationship. We will analyze data on the supply/availability of child care in conjunction with: 1) the PHDCN data on formal and informal social networks in the community (e.g., collective efficacy); 2) demographic characteristics of neighborhood and other community resources; and 3) levels of community violence and victimization. Furthermore, we will examine how parent involvement in the schooling and day care of their children is influenced by the characteristics of those settings and by the neighborhoods and families in which they reside. From this we can see how this involvement influences the child's developmental outcome. Central to this enterprise will be a comprehensive assessment of the school, Head Start, and day care settings that the parents of approximately 900 PHDCN young children from low-income families (i.e., eligible for Head Start or Day Care subsidies) decide to use. If a service is used, we will examine how parents perceive the quality, accessibility, affordability and flexibility of these care arrangements. We will also independently rate the global quality of center and home-based care settings using trained observers. These assessments will be supplemented in Head Start programs with CDHS data from the On-Site Program Review Inventory (OSPRI) and other program data. One particular interest in comparing these three data bases is to determine how parental involvement in the child's out-of-home care or early education program relates to sustainability of positive developmental outcomes as children enter kindergarten and elementary school. We suspect that parental involvement in their child's programs and care and the collective efficacy of neighborhoods to mutually support the child's successful transition to school. We intend to present parents, providers, state and city administrations and child development researchers with the results of our data analyses, and reports of our dialogue sessions on policy as they become available. Our analyses and policy deliberations will be done with respect for parents as the primary advocates for their children in addition to their roles as community citizens and labor force participants.
Page 133 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The Emotional Health of Low-income Children over Time: Influences of Neighborhood, Family, Head Start, and Early School Experiences Funded by the Administration for Children, Youth and Families (Administered through Columbia University's Teachers College and the Harvard School of Public Health)
This study focuses on the emotional health of low-income children and their parents. We are particularly interested in how emotional health is influenced by neighborhood, child care, and family characteristics and how these influences change over the toddler, preschool, and early elementary school years. Of particular interest are those children who are enrolled in Head Start, vis-a-vis emotional health, parental involvement, use of mental health services, coordination of services, and the developmental trajectories of the Health Start children as they enter school. We will work with Head Start staff in Chicago to learn about the needs of their families more generally, especially in the wake of welfare reform (work requirements, need for wrap-around care, child care subsidies).
Six questions to be asked in the Emotional Health Study are as follows:
1) What are the concurrent associations among the various measures of child emotional health and inhibitory control? How well do the constructs of emotional health, as tapped by the observation of the child and mother, relate to the constructs of maternal report of behavior problems, field staff ratings of child behavior during the home visit, and teacher reports of behavior problems/conduct in the classroom? Do these associations vary as a function of selected family or neighborhood characteristics?
Page 134 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
2) How well (and for what subgroups, if any), do the measures of child emotional health predict later behavior problems, mental health (diagnostic and dimensional), and classroom conduct? Is prediction better for some aspects of emotional health than for others? Do these associations vary as a function of selected family and neighborhood characteristics? Do these associations vary as a function of exposure to violence?
3) What are the familial, neighborhood, and individual predictors of emotional problems in the preschool period? Do these differ for various aspects of emotional health?
4) What are the associations between the measures of emotional health collected in the preschool period and attendance in Head Start and other preschool programs? Are these associations influenced by previous child care experiences (i.e., those in the first three years of life, assuming that the majority of children in Head Start are unlikely to begin prior to age three)? For this specific aim, our focus is on how child care factors, such as accessibility, stability, timing of entry, and type, are related to neighborhood and family factors and then how these serve together (with individual characteristics) to influence child emotional health outcomes. A central hypothesis here concerns the extent to which both neighborhood and child care factors influence parental involvement in preschool programs (and decisions related to joining a particular program) and how this is associated with emotional health.
5) Are the measures of emotional health associated with the quality of care received by children in the preschool years? Are these associations in part due to the (proposed) links between quality of care and neighborhood residence and quality of care and HOME environment?
6) Are the factors that predict preschoolers' emotional health, as derived from the preschool battery and the antecedent analyses (specific aims 3 & 4), similar to those perceived as problematic from the perspective of Head Start staff?
Page 135 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We will conduct a series of focus groups with Head Start staff, other child care providers, parents of preschoolers, and community health professionals in our Chicago neighborhoods. These groups will serve as a means to learn about the emotional health needs of low-income children and their families as well as the services that are used by families and by Head Start staff (vis-a-vis referrals and linkages with mental health services).
Application of Discourse Ethics to Evaluating the Impact of Welfare Reform The Stein Foundation
This proposal describes a three-year project in which two groups of low-income mothers are engaged with child development researchers in extended discourse sessions in which both social and behavioral impacts of the welfare to work transition on their children and family life are considered. The work is embedded in and builds on an ongoing large-scale survey research project in Chicago. The project is making significant progress in characterizing neighborhood and family processes linked to youth development, but is restrained by traditions in the field in judging the validity and utility of its findings. The objective of the proposed work is to systematize the discourse ethics approach as a means of extending social science methods and human studies review procedures (e.g., institutional review boards, informed consent) in the context of an ongoing survey research project with disadvantaged and marginalized individuals and families. Following a successful pilot project using discourse procedures with service providers and parents in a Mexican-American community in Chicago (around the theme of sources and measures of stress in children), we will now work more intensively with African- and Mexican-American families. Two researchers and one experienced community worker will engage groups in extended dialogue sessions on the topics of work, child care and family and community life. The purpose of these sessions will be to critically assess the informational utility and ethical implications of research strategies to assess the potential benefits and harm of new welfare reform policies on their lives and that of their children. The procedures followed in these sessions build on the procedures described in the Theory of Communicative Action by Jurgen Habermas which specify the role of argumentation and discourse as a basis for ethical evaluation and political legitimization of science and public policy.
Page 136 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In pursuing the theme of the impact of welfare reform, the discourse sessions will progress through several stages in which mutual trust, shared understanding and shared actions are goals. The current status of each recipient relative to new welfare to work regulations, and the reasons for the engagement of the researchers in discourse procedures will be the focus of the initial sessions, and form the basis for establishing trust. In the second phase the discussion will concentrate on the strategies mothers use to locate child care, and their attitudes and judgments about the adequacy of these resources. The methods being used to measure the quality of child care in the context of the ongoing Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) will be introduced by the researchers. The methods include a parental report measure, a set of observer ratings scales for center-based and family-based child care facilities, and behavioral outcomes that reflect the child's level of development and well-being. Together the mothers and researchers will critically review these methods with the goal of reaching a shared understanding about the validity of these approaches. The final phase of the discourse sessions will be to develop a plan of shared action which will have the objective of presenting the results of this work to government authorities, media and other interested parties. The third year of this proposal will be largely devoted to preparation of a procedural manual for organizing discourse sessions and a series of scientific papers that report the results of this work and its implications.
Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods Youth Internship Program The Turner Foundation
With the World's populations increasingly, and probably irreversibly, urbanized, an unmet challenge is to complete the transformation of cities into habitable places for its youngest citizens. This cannot be achieved without the genuine participation of youth in the process.
Page 137 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The issue of youth participation is highlighted in the United Nation's Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Often referred to as the children's Magna Carta, the UNCRC document has been adopted as a universal framework for developing and monitoring human rights issues that specifically pertain to children and adolescents. These rights are divided into four broad classes: survival, protection, development and participation.
The purpose of this work is to address a child's right to participate in the process of determining what aspects of a given community contribute to a child or adolescent's quality of life. The documentation of the quality of life in a given neighborhood as it has been assessed both by adults and adolescents is then used to determine how an abundance or a lack of quality in a particular neighborhood enhances or adversely affects a child's development.
APPENDIX C: PARTIAL LIST OF PHDCN PUBLICATIONS
Barnes-McGuire J & Earls F. Coercive family process and delinquency: Some methodological consideration. In: J McCord (ed.) Coercion and Punishment in Long-Term Perspectives, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 348–361.
Baker A, Piotrkowski C & Brooks-Gunn J. HIPPY: A multi-site longitudinal evaluation. Early Childhood Quarterly, in press.
Baydar N & Brooks-Gunn J. Profiles of America's grandmothers: Family as a context for health and well-being. Family Relations, in press.
Page 138 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Baydar N, Greek A & Brooks-Gunn J. A longitudinal study of the effects of birth of a sibling over the first six years of life. Journal of Marriage and the Family, in press.
Baydar N. Hyle P & Brooks-Gunn J. Effects of birth of a sibling on young children's socio-emotional, achievement, and self-perception outcomes. Journal of Marriage and the Family 1997; 59: 957–967
Berlin LJ, Brooks-Gunn J & McCarton C. The effectiveness of early interventions: Examining risk factors and pathways to enhanced development. Preventive Medicine, 1998; 27: 238–245
Berlin LJ, O'Neal CR & Brooks-Gunn J. What makes early intervention programs work? The program, its participants, and their interaction. In: LJ Berlin (ed.), Opening the Black Box: What Makes Early Child and Family Development Programs Work? [Special Issue]. Zero to Three, 1998; 18, 4–15.
Brooks-Gunn J. Escape from Poverty: What Makes a Difference for Children? In: Chase-Lansdale PL & Brooks-Gunn J (eds.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Brooks-Gunn J, Berlin LJ & Fuligni AS. Early childhood intervention programs: What about the family? In: JP Shonkoff & SJ Meisels (eds.). Handbook on Early Childhood Intervention. (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press, in press.
Brooks-Gunn J, Britto PR & Brady C. Struggling to make ends meet: Poverty and child development. In: ME. Lamb (ed.), Non-Traditional Families: Parenting and Child Development. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, in press.
Page 139 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Brooks-Gunn J, Duncan G & Maritato N. Poor families, poor outcomes: The well-being of children and youth. In: J. Brooks-Gunn (ed.) Consequences of Growing Up Poor. (pp. 1–17). New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997.
Brooks-Gunn J, Duncan G & Rubello P. Are SES gradients for children similar to those for adults?: Achievement and health in the United States. In: D. Keating & C. Hetzman (eds.) Tomorrow's Children. New York: Guilford Press, in press.
Brooks-Gunn J, McCormick MC, Klebanov PK & McCarton C. Health care use of 3 year-old low birthweight premature childhood: Effects of family and neighborhood poverty. The Journal of Pediatrics, 1998; 132(6) 971–975.
Brooks-Gunn J, Schley S & Hardy J. Marriage and the baby carriage: Historical change and intergenerational continuity in early parenthood. In: L. Crockett & RK. Silbereisen (eds.) Negotiating Adolescence in Times of Social Change: Cross-National Perspectives on Developmental Process and Social Intervention. New York: Cambridge University Press, in press.
Brooks-Gunn J, Smith J, Berlin L & Lee K. Familywork: Welfare changes, parenting and young children. In: GK Brookins (ed.). Exits from Poverty. New York: Cambridge University Press, in press.
Brooks-Gunn J, Fuligni AS, Barth MC & Young KT. Helping children take healthy steps: Abstracts of selected articles on early childhood interventions. New York: The Commonwealth Fund, 1997.
Page 140 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Brooks-Gunn J & Graber JA. What's sex go to do with it? The development of health and sexual identities during adolescence. In: RJ Contrada & RD Ashmore (eds.) Self, Social Identity, and Physical Health: Interdisciplinary Explorations. New York: Oxford University Press, in press.
Brooks-Gunn J & Duncan GJ. The effects of poverty on children. Futures of Children 1997; 7(2) 55–71.
Brooks-Gunn J, Duncan GJ, Leventhal T & Aber JL. Lessons learned and future directions for research on neighborhoods in which children live. In: J Brooks-Gunn GJ Duncan & JL Aber (eds.) Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for children (Volume 1). New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1997: 279–297.
Brooks-Gunn J, Leventhal T & Ruth V. Equivalence and conceptually-anchored research with children of color. In: HE Fitzgerald, BM Lester & B Zuckerman (eds.) Children of Color. New York: Garland Press, in press.
Brooks-Gunn J & Paikoff R. Sexuality and developmental transitions during adolescence. In: J Schulenberg, J Maggs & K Hurrelman (eds.) Health Risk and Developmental Transitions During Adolescence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997: 190–219.
Bryk AS, Raudenbush SW & Congdon R. Hierarchical Linear and Nonlinear Modeling with the HLM/2L and HLM/3L Programs. Chicago, IL: Scientific Software International, 1996.
Page 141 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Buka SL, Birdthistle I. Longterm effects of a community-wide alcohol server training intervention. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, in press.
Buka SL, Satz P, Seidman L & Lipsitt LP. Defining learning disabilities: The role of longitudinal studies. Thalamus (Journal of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities), in press.
Carlson M, Dragomir C, Earls F, Farrel M, Macovei O, Nystrom P & Sparling J. Effects of social deprivation on cortisol regulation in institutionalized Romanian infants. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 1995; (218.12).
Carlson, M and Earls, F., (in press). Social ecology and the development of stress regulation. In Bergman, L., Cairns, R.B., Nilsson, L–G., and Nystedt, L. (Eds.) Developmental Science and the Holistic Approach. Los Angeles: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 229–248.
Carlson M, Earls F. Psychological and neuroendocrinological sequelae of early social deprivation in institutionalized children in Romania. In: CS Carter, B Lederhendler, B Kirkpatrick (eds.) Integrative Nrutobiology of Affiliation, Annals New York Academy of Science 1997; 807: 419–428.
Chase-Lansdale PL, Gordon RA, Coley RL, Wakschlag LS & Brooks-Gunn J. Young African-American multigenerational families in poverty: The contexts, exchanges, and processes of their lives. In: EM Hetherington (ed.) Coping With Divorce: Single Parenting and Remarriage: A Risk Resilience Perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, in press.
Page 142 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Clapper RL, Buka SL, Goldfield EC, Lipsitt LP & Tsuang MT. Adolescent problem behaviors as predicators of adult alcohol diagnoses. International Journal of the Addictions 1995; 30:507–523.
Coldren JR, Markovic JD, McElvain T & Lazer M. A Systematic Process for Accessing and Assessing Agency Records for Longitudinal Research 1995 The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods.
Cox M, Brooks-Gunn J & Paley B. Perspectives on conflict and cohesion in families. In: M Cox & J Brooks-Gunn (eds.), Conflict and Closeness in Families: Consequences for Children and Youth Development. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates, in press.
deHaan M, Gunnar MR, Tout K, Hart J & Stansbury K. Familiar and novel contexts yield different associations between cortisol and behavior among 2-year-old children. Developmental Pyschobiology, 1998; 33,93–101.
Deykin EY & Buka SL. Prevalence and risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder among chemically dependent adolescents. American Journal of Psychiatry 1997; 154: 752–757.
Duncan G & Brooks-Gunn J. Welfare's new rules: A pox on children. Issues in Science & Technology, 1998; 14(2): 67–72.
Duncan GJ, Yeung WJ, Brooks-Gunn J & Smith JR. How much does childhood poverty affect the life chances of children? American Sociological Review, 1998; 63:406–423.
Page 143 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Duncan, G.J., & Raudenbush, S.W. (1998). Assessing the effects of context in studies of child and youth development. Educational Psychologist, 34(1), 29–41.
Earls F. The era of health promotion for children and adolescents: A cross-sectional survey of strategies and new knowledge. American Journal of Public Health, 1998.
Earls, F. (1999). Frontiers of research on children, youth and families. Journal of Community Psychology. 27(5):517–524.
Earls, F. (in press). Men and fathers in the community. In Perspective on Crime and Justice: 1998–1999 Lecture Series. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.
Earls F & Carlson M. Children at the margins of society: Research and practice. In: M Raefaelli & R Larson (eds.) Developmental Issues Among Homeless and Working Street Youth, New Directions in Child Development Series, in press.
Earls, F. and Carlson, M. (1999). Children at the margins of society. In Raffaeli, M. and Laren, R.W. (Eds.). Homeless and Working Children Around the World: Exploring Developmental Issues. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, pp. 71–82.
Earls F & Carlson M. Recovery from profound early social deprivation. In: DM Hann, LS Huffman, I Ledrhendler & D Meinecke (eds.) Advancing Research on Developmental Plasticity: Integrating the Behavioral Science and Neuroscience on Mental Health, in press.
Page 144 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Earls F & Barnes-McGuire J. Understanding and preventing child abuse in urban settings. In: J McCord (ed.) Violence and Childhood in the Inner City. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997; 207–255.
Earls FE & Buka SL. Measurement of community characteristics. In: SJ Meisels, JP Shonkoff (eds.) Handbook of Early Childhood Intervention. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Earls F & Buka S. Technical Report. A Research Report from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods from the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, 1997.
Earls F & Carlson M. Promoting human capability as an alternative to early crime prevention. In: RV Clarke, J McCord, POWikstrom (eds.) Integrating Crime Prevention Strategies: Propensity and Opportunity, Stockholm, Sweden: National Council for Crime Prevention, 1995, pp. 141–168.
Frank DA, Klass PE, Earls F & Eisenberg L. Infants and young children in orphanages: One view from pediatrics and child psychiatry. Pediatrics 1996; 97(4):569–578.
Goldstein R & Buka SL. Perceived effectiveness of alcohol abuse control strategies among problem and nonproblem drinkers. Substance Use and Misuse 1997; 32: 507–554.
Gordon R, Chase-Lansdale PL, Matjasko J & Brooks-Gunn J. Young mothers living with grandmothers and living apart: How neighborhood and household contexts relate to multigenerational coresidence in African-American families. Applied Developmental Science 1997; 1 (2) 89–106.
Page 145 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Graber JA, Lewiston PM, Seeley JR & Brooks-Gunn J. Is psychopathology associated with the timing of pubertal development? Journal of the American Academy of Adolescent and Child Psychiatry, 1997; 36(12): 1768–1776.
Graber JA, Britto PR & Brooks-Gunn J. What's love got to do with it? Adolescents' and young adults' beliefs about intimate relationships. In: W Furman, C Feiring & BB Brown (eds.) Comtemporary Perspectives on Adolescent Relationships. New York: Cambridge Press, in press.
Graber JA, Brooks-Gunn J & Galen BR. Betwixt and between: Sexuality in the context of adolescent transition. In R Jessor (ed.) New Perspectives on Adolescent Risk Behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press, in press.
Gunnar M. Quality of early care and buffering of neuroendocrine stress reactions: Potential effects on the developing human brain. Preventive Medicine, 1998; 27(2):208–211.
Gunnar MR & Barr RG. Stress, early brain development, and behavior. Infants and Young Children, in press.
Hardy J, Astone N, Brooks-Gunn J, Shapiro S & Miller TL. Like mother, like child: Intergenerational patterns of age at first birth across the reproductive age span and their associations with childhood and adolescent characteristics and adult outcomes. Developmental Psychology, in press.
Page 146 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Hardy J, Shapiro S, Astone N, Brooks-Gunn J, Miller T & Hilton S. Adolescent childbearing revisited: The age of inner-city mothers at delivery is a determinant of their children's self-sufficiency at age 27–33. Pediatrics 1997; 100 (5): 802–809.
Holton J. Witnessing violence: Making the invisible visible. Journal of Healthcare for the Poor and Underserved 1995;6(2):152–159.
Jackson A, Gyamfi P, Brooks-Gunn J & Blake M. Employment status, social support, & physical discipline practices of single black mothers. Journal of Marriage and Family, in press.
Jensen PS, Brooks-Gunn J & Graber JA. Dimensional scales and diagnostic categories: Constructing crosswalks for child psychopathology assessments. Journal of the American Academy of Adolescent and Child Psychiatry, in press.
Kalaian HA & Raudenbush SW. A multivariate mixed linear model for meta-analysis. Psychological Methods, 1996; 1(3):227–235.
Kasim R & Raudenbush S. Application of Gibbs sampling to nested variance components models with heterogeneous with-in group variance. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 1998; 23(2):93–117.
Kindlon D & Thompson M. Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. NY: Ballantine, 1999
Kindlon D. The measurement of attention. Child Psychology and Psychiatry Review, in press.
Page 147 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Kindlon D, Mezzacappa E & Earls F. Psychometric properties of impulsivity measures: Temporal stability, validity and factor structure. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 1995; 34(3): 371–377.
Kindlon DJ, Tremblay RE, Mezzacappa E, Earls F, Laurent D & Schaal B. Longitudinal patterns of heart rate and fighting behavior in 9- through 12 year-old boys. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 1995; 34, 371–377.
Kindlon DJ, Wright BD, Raudenbush SW & Earls F. The measurement of children's exposure to violence; A Rasch analysis. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research 1996; 6(161):1–8.
Klebanov PK, Brooks-Gunn J, McCarton C & McCormick MC. The contribution of neighborhood and family income upon developmental test scores over the first three years of life. Child Development, in press.
Klebanov PK, Brooks-Gunn J & McCormick MC. Enhancing maternal social and emotional health via family-oriented early intervention. Developmental Psychology, in press.
Kochanet TT & Buka SL. Patterns of early intervention service utilization: Influential child, maternal and service provider factors. Journal of Early Intervention, in press.
Kochanet TT, Buka SL. Sociodemographic influences on services used by infants with disabilities and their families. Journal of Early Intervention, in press.
Page 148 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Kohen DE, Brooks-Gunn J, McCormick M, Graber JA. Concordance of maternal and teacher ratings of school and behavior problems in children varying birth weights. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 1997; 18 (5) 295–106.
Kuo, M., Mohler, B., Raudenbush, S.L. and Earls, F. (in press). Assessing exposure to violence using multiple informants: Applications of hierarchical linear modeling. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
Larsen MC, White BP, Donella B, Gunnar M. Dampening of the cortisol response to handling at 3 months in human infants: Reactions to sleep, circadian cortisol activity, and behavioral distress. Developmental Psychobiology, in press.
Laub JH, Nagin D & Sampson RJ. Trajectories of change in criminal offending: Good marriages and the desistance process. American Sociological Review, 1998; 63: 225–238.
Laub JH & Sampson RJ. Integrating quantitative and qualitative data. In: J Giele & GH Elder, Jr., (eds.) Methods of Life-Course Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, Sage Publications, 1998.
Laub JH & Sampson RJ. Crime and context in the lives of 1,000 Boston men, circa 1925–1995. In: ZS Blau & J Hagan (eds.) Current Perspectives on Aging and the Life Cycle Volume 4: Delinquency and Disrepute in the Life Course: Contextual and Dynamic Analyses, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1995, pp. 119–140.
Page 149 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Laub JH & Sampson RJ. The long term effect of punitive discipline: In: J McCord (ed.) Coercion and Punishment in Long-Term Perspectives, New York & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 247–258.
Leventhal TL & Brooks-Gunn J. The neighborhoods they live in: Indicators of children's well-being in a community context. In: R P Weissberg, CB Kuster, O Reyes & HJ Wallberg (eds.), Trends in the Well-Being of Children and Youth. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, in press.
Leventhal T, Brooks-Gunn J, Kamerman S. Communities as place,face, and space: Provision of services to poor, urban children and their families. In: J Brooks-Gunn, GJ Duncan & JL Aber (eds.) Neighborhood Poverty: Policy Implications in Studying Neighborhoods (Volume 2). New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1997: 182–205.
McCormick MC, McCarton C, Brooks-Gunn J, Belt P & Gross RT. The Infant Health and Development Program: Interim Summary. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, in press.
Mezzacappa E, Earls F. The adolescent with conduct disorder. In: MD Friedman, DR DeMasso (eds.) Adolescent Medicine: State of the Art Review, 1998; 9: 363–371.
Mezzacappa E, Kindlon D, Saul JP & Earls F. Executive and motivational control of performance task behavior and autonomic heart rate regulation in children: Physiologic validation of two-factor solution inhibitory control. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 1998; 39,525–531.
Mezzacappa E, Steingard R, Kindlon D, Saul JP, and Earls F. Tricyclic antidepressants and cardiac autonomic control in children and adolescents. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 1998; 37,52–59.
Page 150 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mezzacappa E, Tremblay RE, Kindlon D, Saul JP, Arsenault L, Seguin J, Pihl RO & Earls F. Anxiety, antisocial behavior and heart rate regulation in adolescent males. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 1997; 38(4)457–469.
McGuire J & Earls F. Coercive family process and delinquency: Some methodological considerations. In: J McCord (ed.) Coercion and Punishment in Long-term Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 348–361.
Miyazaki, Y. & Raudenbush, S.W. (In press). A test for linkage of multiple cohorts from an accelerated longitudinal design. To appear in Psychological Methods.
Morenoff JD & Sampson RJ. Violent crime and the spatial dynamics of neighborhood transition: Chicago, 1970–1990. Social Forces, in press.
Morris P, Aber JL & Brooks-Gunn J. Young African-American mother's parenting behavior and their preschooler's cognitive performance. Child Development, in press.
Nachmias M, Gunnar M, Mangelsdorf S, Parritz R & Buss K. Behavioral inhibition and stress reactivity: The moderating role of attachment security. Child Development 1996; 67: 508–522.
O'Connor L, Gyamfi P & Brooks-Gunn J. Antecedents and consequences: Racial socialization in black families. In: D Hughes & H Stevenson (eds.). Telling the Untold Story: Racial Socialization Among Ethnic Families of Color, in press.
Page 151 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Raudenbush SW & Kasim R. Cognitive skill and economic inequality: Findings from the National Adult Literacy Survey. Harvard Educational Review, 1998; 68(1): 33–79.
Raudenbush SW & Sampson R. Assessing direct and indirect associations in multilevel designs with latent variables. To appear in Sociological Methods & Research.
Raudenbush, S.W., & Sampson, R. (In press). Assessing direct and indirect associations in multilevel designs with latent variables.
Raudenbush, S.W. (In press). Hierarchical linear modeling for repeated measures data. To appear in Hershberger, Scott, and Moskowitz, Debbie (Eds.), Modeling Intraindividual Variability with Repeated Measure Data: Methods and Applications. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Raudenbush, S.W. (In press). Toward a coherent framework for comparing trajectories of individual change. To appear in Collins, L. and Sayer, A. (Eds.), Best Methods for Studying Change. Washington D.C.: The American Psychological Association.
Raudenbush, Stephen W. and Sampson, Robert J. (1999). Ecometrics: Toward a Science of Assessing Ecological Settings, with Application to the Systematic Social Observation of Neighborhoods. Sociological Methodology, 29, 1–41.
Raudenbush, S.W. (1998, May). [Review of the book A solution to the ecological inference problem: Reconstructing individual behavior from aggregate data by Gary King.] American Journal of Sociology, 103(6), 1770–1772.
Page 152 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Raudenbush SW. Hierarchical linear models to study the effects of social context on development. In: JM Gottman (ed.) The Analysis of Change. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995A.
Raudenbush SW. Hierarchical models. In: S.Kotz (ed.) Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences. New York: John Wiley, in press.
Raudenbush SW. Maximum likelihood estimation for unbalanced multilevel covariance structure models via the EM algorithm. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology 1995c; 48,359–370.
Raudenbush SW. Re-examining, reaffirming, and improving application of hierarchical models. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 1995b; 20(2): 210–220.
Raudenbush SW. Statistical analysis and optimal design for cluster randomized trials. Psychological Methods 1997; 2: 173–185.
Raudenbush SW. Statistical models for studying the effects of social context on individual development. In: J Gottman (ed.) The Analysis of Change, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996.
Raudenbush W, Brennan RT & Barnett RC. A multivariate hierarchical model for studying psychological change within married couples. Journal of Family Psychology 1995; 9(2): 161–174.
Page 153 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Raudenbush SW, Fortiu RP, Cheong YG. Synthesizing results from the Tri-State Assessment. American Statistical Association 1995. Proceedings of the Section on Survey Research Methods, 1, 257–262. To appear in the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics
Raudenbush SW, Fortiu RP, Cheong YG. Inequality of access to educational resources: A national report card for eight grade math. Educational and Policy Analysis, in press.
Raudenbush SW & Willms JD. The estimation of school effects. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 1995; 20(4):307–335.
Reiss AJ. Community influences on adolescent behavior. In: M Rutter (ed.) Psychosocial Disturbance in Young People: Challenges for Prevention. Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 305–332.
Reiss AJ. The role of police in crime prevention. In : PO Wikstrom, R Clark, J McCord (eds.) Integrating Crime Prevention Strategies: Propensity and Opportunity. Sweden: National Council for Crime Prevention, 1995, pp. 89–122.
Reiss AJ. Reflections on policing systems and police cooperation in Europe. In: JP Brodeur (ed.) Comparisons in Policing: An International Perspective. Avebury, 1995, pp. 228–332.
Reiss AJ. Diversion and social control: Alternative measures of crime control. In: G Albrecht, W Ludwig-Mayerhoger (eds.). Diversion and Informal Social Control. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995, pp. 35–46.
Page 154 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Reiss AJ. Crime prevention in urban communities: A western perspective. In: K Miyazawa, S Miyazawa, B Kluwer (eds.) Crime Prevention in the Urban Community. Boston: Kluwer, 1995, pp 3–10; also Annales Internationale de Criminologie, Vol 30, No. 1 and 2.
Roth J, Brooks-Gunn J, Murray L & Foster W. Health promotion and youth development: Synthesis of current program evaluations. Journal of Research on Adolescence, in press.
Roth J, Woods T, Brooks-Gunn J, Foster W, Murray L & Galen BR. Adolescents out of the mainstream: The potential of youth development programs. In: DJ Besharov & KN Gardiner (eds.), America's Disconnected Youth: Toward a Preventive Strategy. Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America, in press.
Sampson, R.J. (1999). What communities supply. In Ferguson, R.F. and Dickens, W.T. (Eds). Urban Social Problems and Community Development. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Sampson, R.J. (1999). A neighborhood perspective on Social Change and the social control of adolescent delinquency. In Crockett, L and Silbereisen, R (Eds). Negotiating Adolescence in Times of Social Change. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sampson RJ. The embeddedness of child and adolescent development: A community-level perspective on urban violence. In: J McCord (ed.) Childhood and Violence in the Inner City. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 31–77.
Sampson RJ, Raudenbush SW & Earls. Neighborhood cohesion—Does it help reduce violence? National Institute of Justice Research Preview, Washington, DC. Abstracted with permission from Sampson RJ, Raudenbush SW & Earls F. Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy, Science, 1998; 277, 1–7.
Page 155 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Sampson RJ & Laub JH. Unraveling the social context of physique and delinquency: A new long-term look at the Gluecks' classic study. In: A Raine, P Brennan, D Farrington & S Mednick (eds.) Biosocial Bases of Violence. (Proceedings of a NATO Advanced Study Institute, May 12–21, 1996, Rhodes, Greece). New York: Plenum, 1997, pp 175–188.
Sampson RJ. Collective regulation of adolescent misbehavior: Validation results from eighty Chicago neighborhoods. Journal of Adolescent Research 1997; 12 (2): 227–244.
Sampson RJ. Unemployment and imbalanced sex ratios: Race-specific consequences for family structure and crime. In: MB Tucker, C Mitchell-Kernan (eds.) The Decline in Marriage Among African-Americans. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995.
Sampson RJ & Laub JH. A life-course theory of cumulative disadvantage and the stability of delinquency. In: TP Thornberry (ed.) Developmental Theories of Crime and Delinquency: Advances in Criminological Theory (Vol. 6), New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1997.
Sampson RJ & Lauritsen JL. Racial and ethnic disparities in crime and criminal justice in the United States. In: M Tonry (ed.) Crime and Justice (Volume 21). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Sampson, R.J and Bartusch, D (1998). Legal cynicism and (subcultural?) Tolerance of deviance: The neighborhood context of racial differences. Law and Society Review. 32 (4):777–804.
Page 156 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey Morenoff, and Felton Earls. 1999. Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children. American Sociological Review 64: 633–660.
Sampson R, Raudenbush S & Earls F. Neighborhood and violent crime: A multi-level study of collective efficacy. Science, vol. 277, August 15, 1997.
Sampson RJ & Wilson WJ. Toward a theory of race, crime and urban inequality. In: J Hagan & R Peterson (eds.) Crime and Inequality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 37–56.
Satz P, Buka SL, Lipsitt LP & Seidman L. The long-term prognosis of learning disabled children: A review of studies (1954–1993). In: BK Shapiro et al. (eds.), Reading Disability: A View of the Spectrum. York Press, 1998.
Schwantz EB, Granger DA, Susman EJ, Gunnar MR, Laird B. Assessing salivary cortisol in studies in child development. Child Development, in press.
Selner-O'Hagan MB, Kindlon DL, Buka SL, Raudenbush SW & Earls FJ. Assessing exposure to violence in urban youth. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 1998; 39(2).
Smith JR, Bastiani A & Brooks-Gunn J. Poverty and mental health. In: H. Friedman (ed.) Encyclopedia of Mental Health. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, in press.
Page 157 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Smith JR & Brooks-Gunn J. Correlates and consequences of mother's harsh discipline with young children. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 1997; 151, 777–786.
Smith J, Brooks-Gunn J, & Jackson A. Parental employment and children. In: R Hauser, B Brown, W Prosser (eds.) Social Indicators of Children. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1997.
Smith JR, Brooks-Gunn J & Klebanov PK. The consequences of living in poverty for young children's cognitive and verbal ability and early school achievement. In: GJ Duncan & J Brooks-Gunn (eds.) Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1997: 132–189.
Stiffman AR, Dore P, Cunningham RM & Earls F. Person and environment in HIV risk behavior change between adolescence and young adulthood. Health Education Quarterly 1995; 22(2): 211–226.
Stiffman AR, Dore P, Cunningham R, Earls F & Farber S. Violence. In: RJ DiClemente, WB Hansen, LE Ponton (eds.): Handbook of Adolescent Health Risk Behavior: New York, Plenum Press, 1995.
Stiffman AR, Earls F, Dore P, Cunningham R, Farber S. Adolescent Violence. In: RJ DiClemente, W Hansen, L Ponton (eds.): Handbook of Adolescent Health Risk Behavior: New York, Plenum Press, 1996.
Tout K, de Hann M, Kipp Campbell E & Gunnar MR. Social behavior correlates of adrenocortical activity in day care: Gender differences and time-of-day effects. Child Development 1998, in press.
Page 158 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Tyrka A, Graber JA & Brooks-Gunn J. The development of disordered eating: Correlates and predictors of eating problems in the context of adolescence. In: M Lewis & A Sameroff (eds.), Handbook of Developmental Psychopathology, Second Edition. New York: Plenum Press, in press.
Wakschlag SL, Pittman L, Chase-Lansdale PL & Brooks-Gunn J. Mama, I'm a person, too: Individuation and young African-American mothers' parenting competence. In: AM Cauce & S Hauser (eds.) Adolescence and Beyond: Family Processes and Development. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, in press.
Yogman MW & Kindlon D. Pediatric opportunities with fathers and children, Pediatric Annals, in press.
Yogman MW, Kindlon DJ & Earls F. Father involvement and cognitive/behavioral outcome of preterm infants. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 1995; 34, 58–65.
Zhao H, Brooks-Gunn J, McLanahan S & Singer B. Studying the real child rather than the ideal child: Bringing the person into developmental studies. In: LR.Bergman & RB. Cairns (eds.), Developmental Science and the Holistic Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press, in press.
NOTE: Additional materials submitted by Mr. Holton are not reprinted here. They are as follows and are on file with the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime:
Page 159 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
1. Sampson, Robert J. and Raudenbush, Stephen. 1999. ''Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods.'' American Journal of Sociology 105:603–651
2. Sampson, Robert J., Morenoff, Jeffrey D., and Felton Earls. 1999. ''Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children.'' American Sociological Review 64: 633–660
Mr. HUTCHINSON. And now Dr. Johnson.
STATEMENT OF BYRON R. JOHNSON, DIRECTOR, OFFICE FOR THE STUDY AND PREVENTION OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, PHILADELPHIA, PA
Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Scott and members of the committee. I have been asked today to talk about the role of religion in preventing crime and I was pleased to hear a number of our witnesses today allude to the role of religion, churches, and members of the faith community in fighting crime.
The reality is what we know about the role of religion is thin, very thin. We have done next to no research on religion; and one of your questions may be why haven't we done more research? And there are a lot of fingers to be pointed at, but in the last 16 years I don't remember seeing one request for a proposal or RFP coming out of Washington that has asked anyone to look at religion as a way of fighting crime. So most of the research that we are doing and we have been doing the last several years has been funded by private donors and foundations.
Page 160 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
If you look at the published research, what little there is in criminology, you will find that most studies never look at religion. The few that do almost always find that it has a beneficial effect. And in the studies that we have produced in the last year, we find that religion is indeed one of the best variables in any of our models that we test, and this is research that has been confirmed by others as well, now being recognized as a protective variable in models keeping children safe even when children come from disordered or bad neighborhoods.
A couple of our studies look at particularly the plight of young black males in poverty, and what we find is that those that are committed to religious institutions and practice their faith are much less likely in spite of all odds against them of avoiding crime, and much more likely to be about positive activities or what we call prosocial activities. So we know that religion is important. We don't know enough because not enough research has been conducted.
And then lastly, I wanted to talk about the role of faith-based organizations. Recently I have been called about three times a day by reporters wanting to know about faith-based organizations and how well they work. And the reality is there is no published study that I am aware of in any referee journal showing the effectiveness of faith-based groups. This is not to say that they are ineffective. It is to say that we just don't know. And so although programs like Teen Challenge are laudable and there are many anecdotes that they work, we don't have any evidence to support that, and as a scientist I am concerned that we are overlooking the possibility of something out there that we should be investigating.
So with that, I would say that we should be cautiously optimistic about the role of the faith community in fighting crime and I look forward to doing more research in this area.
Page 161 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Very good.
And now, Dr. Fox, you are recognized.
STATEMENT OF JAMES FOX, LIPMAN FAMILY PROFESSOR OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, BOSTON, MA
Mr. FOX. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to the subcommittee in regard to strategies for controlling crime in America. Now, I say ''controlling crime'' rather than ''reducing crime'' in recognition of the fact that we now enjoy a period of relatively low crime levels in this country. For example, as we all know, homicide rates have come down for 7 straight years, down by about a third since 1990. The rates now are as low as they have been since the 1960's.
But all good things must pass and many American cities including Boston, Dallas, New York, Los Angeles, among others, are already witnessing increases in local crime levels, including homicide. To some extent, this may represent what I call the criminal justice limbo stick; that is, we just can't dip down any lower.
The most reasonable goal now may be to keep crime levels low rather than setting up unrealistic goals and unrealistic expectations for further declines in the future. Should we succeed in bringing down crime levels more, well, all the better, of course.
Page 162 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Now, many observers, and including Dr. Reynolds at the end of the table, have attributed the tumbling crime rates largely to increased levels of incarceration. The population count in our prisons, of course, stormed past the 1 million mark a number of years ago, and they have not looked back since. Yet the academic research literature is not so clear in assigning cause and effect to the incarceration/crime connection. Indeed, prison populations were also expanding in this country in the 1980's when crime levels were soaring through the roof, and as my colleague, Mr. Mauer, to the left here will indicate, States with the largest growth in incarceration were not necessarily the winners in the national crime drop competition.
Undeniably, locking up dangerous and violent felons does keep them off the streets and therefore directly impacts the crime rate, but at what cost? What are the long-range consequences, for example, of taking money away from school construction to pay for prison construction? Furthermore, the overinvestment in prisons has a diminishing impact in the long term. Most of the incapacitative effect of incarceration occurs during the early phase of an offender's sentence, while he is young and ruthless, not in the later years as he is aging; and we therefore are wasting our correctional resources, scarce though they may be, on a graying prison population. And whatever deterrent effect that there is on potential offenders is not enhanced by lengthening the prison terms. We do know that the key to deterrence is certainty, not severity.
Even more frightening is the fact that the other shoe does drop eventually. The more felons we send to prison today, the more ex-cons return to society tomorrow with bad attitudes and inadequate skills. They may be unprepared for earning a paycheck but more than willing to give pay-back against all of us.
So my plea here today is that we not lose sight of the precious balance between punishment and prevention. We know that prevention works from early childhood enrichment programs for disadvantaged youngsters to after-school care for idle and bored teenagers in the prime crime hours after school, to mentoring for at-risk youth, to in-home training for high-risk parents. All these things work and at a cost far less than building prison cells. Numerous randomized experiments have demonstrated the potential for these kinds of programs to reduce youth involvement in crime and other antisocial activities.
Page 163 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Now, there are several important principles about prevention that we must keep in mind. First, no prevention strategy can be 100 percent successful. Sadly, it has been the case that valuable prevention programs have been scrapped in this country because of a few highly publicized graduates who turn out bad despite our best efforts.
Secondly, prevention programs do not work for all kinds of offenders. This was the big mistake in this country in the widespread and indiscriminate use of juvenile boot camps. It is not good for all kids.
Third, replications of successful prevention strategies are only as good as the people involved and the integrity of the implementation. The Boston Youth Crime Program, which has worked wonderfully in Boston, doesn't necessarily translate elsewhere with different people involved.
Finally, the best prevention strategies are those that put an emphasis on the word ''pre'' and ''prevention.'' they target children before the point at which they are seduced by the thrills and glamour of drug use and gang membership, but then, of course, we have to be patient and not expect that the return on our investment will occur for years, until these youngsters mature into their adolescence and are not as violent as their predecessors were.
Now that crime rates are low, there seems, unfortunately, to be a certain sense of complacency that is settling in across America. Crime is down but definitely not out. This is an ideal time that crime rates are low to build for the future, and I don't mean building prison cells. We cannot cease in our efforts, especially in the area of youth crime, because we have a new crop of teenagers every 5 years, and each new cohort is looking to express their own need for excitement and thrills and passion for rebellion. In addition, this next generation of youngsters will see an expansion, an expansion of the teenage population as the so-called ''baby boomerang generation,'' that is, the children of the baby boomers, mature into adolescents. Without a continued attention to the needs of children, we could experience another wave of youth violence that could be so bad that someday we will look back on the 1990 s and say, boy, those were the good old days.
Page 164 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Now, the hopeful news, and there is some hopeful news, is that there is still time to stem this tide, to avert another wave of youth crime that John Hulio and I have been predicting for many years, but we must act now while this baby boomerang generation is still young and impressionable and will be impressed by what a teacher, a preacher, or some other authority figure has to say. But you know, if we just sit back and wait until these children, this next large generation of kids reaches their teenage year s and another crime wave is upon us, it will be far too late to do much about it except to fill those prison cells that we are building right now. I will conclude here.
It is far easier and considerably less expensive to build a child than rebuild a teen. It is better that we prehabilitate than rehabilitate. Let me close quickly by anticipating the concerns that many Americans have about spending large sums of money on crime prevention programs. It does take money, absolutely, but the choice is ours: Either pay for the programs now or pray for the victims later.
Thank you for your patience.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Fox follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF JAMES FOX, LIPMAN FAMILY PROFESSOR OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, BOSTON, MA
Thank you for the opportunity to address this subcommittee in regard to strategies for controlling crime in America. I say controlling crime—rather than reducing crime—in recognition that we now enjoy a period of relatively low crime levels. For example, the U.S. homicide rate, after falling throughout the 1990s, is as low now as it has been since the 1960s.
Page 165 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
But all good things must end, and already many American cities—Boston, Dallas, New York, Los Angeles—are witnessing increases in local crime levels, including homicide. To some extent this may represent a criminal justice limbo stick, and we can't dip much lower. The most reasonable goal now is to work at keeping crime levels low rather than setting up unrealistic expectations for further decline. Should we succeed in reducing crime levels further, all the better.
Many observers have attributed the tumbling crime rates largely to increased levels of incarceration. Yet the academic research literature is not so clear in assigning cause and effect. Indeed, prison populations were also expanding during the 1980s when levels of violence soared through the roof.
Undeniably, locking up dangerous and violent felons keeps them off the streets and therefore directly impacts the rate of crime. But at what cost? What are the long-range consequences, for example, of taking money away from school construction to pay for prison construction? Furthermore, the overinvestment in prisons has a diminishing return over the long-term. Most of the incapacitative effect of incarceration occurs during the early phase of an offender's sentence while he's young and ruthless, not in the later years as he ages and we, therefore, waste scarce correctional resources on aging prison populations. Furthermore, whatever deterrent effect that incarceration has on potential offenders is not enhanced by lengthening prison terms.
More frightening, the other shoe does drop eventually. The more felons we send to prison today, the more ex-cons return to society tomorrow with bad attitudes and inadequate skills. They may be unprepared to earn a paycheck but more than willing to exact payback against society.
Page 166 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
My plea is that we not lose the precious balance between punishment and prevention. We know that prevention works—from early childhood enrichment programs for disadvantaged youngsters to after-school care for idle and bored teenagers, from mentoring for at-risk youth to in-home training for high-risk parents—and at a cost far less than building prison cells. Numerous randomized experiments have demonstrated the potential for these types of initiatives to reduce youth involvement in crime and other anti-social behaviors.
There are several important principles about prevention that we must keep in mind, however. First, no prevention strategy can have a 100% success rate; Sadly, valuable prevention programs often get scrapped because of a few graduates who turn out bad despite our best efforts. Second, prevention strategies do not work for all kinds of offenders; This was the mistake in the widespread and indiscriminate use of juvenile boot camps. Third, replications of successful prevention strategies are only as good as the people involved and the quality of implementation. Finally, the best prevention strategies put the emphasis on the ''pre.'' They target children before they are seduced by the thrills and glamour of drug use and gang membership. But then, of course, we must be patient, and not expect that the return on investment will occur for years, that is until these youngsters mature into their adolescence and are not as disruptive as their predecessors.
With crime rates now at a low point, there unfortunately seems to be a certain cloud of complacency settling in over America. Crime is down, but definitely not out. This is an ideal time to build for the future—and I don't mean prison cells.
We cannot cease in our efforts, especially in the area of youth crime prevention, because we have a new crop of teenagers every five years—with each new cohort looking to express its own passion for rebellion and thirst for excitement. In addition, the next few years will bring an expansion in the teenage population as the so-called ''baby-boomerang'' generation (children of the babyboomers) matures into adolescence. Without continued attention to the needs of children, we could experience another wave of youth crime that would make the 1990s look like the ''good old days.''
Page 167 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The hopeful news is that there is still time to stem the tide—to avert another wave of youth crime. But we must act now while this baby-boomerang generation is still young and impressionable, and will be impressed with what a teacher, a preacher, or some other authority figure has to say. If we wait until these children reach their teenage years and the next crime wave is upon us, it may be too late to do much about it (except to fill those prisons we're now building). Indeed, it is far easier and considerably less expensive to build the child than to rebuild the teen. It is better to ''prehabilitate,'' than need to rehabilitate.
In closing, let me anticipate the concerns that many Americans have about spending large sums of money on crime prevention programs. It does take money, absolutely. But the choice is ours, either pay for the programs now or pray for the victims later.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Dr. Tolan.
STATEMENT OF PATRICK TOLAN, DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR JUVENILE RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-CHICAGO, CHICAGO, IL
Mr. TOLAN. Hello. I thank the chairman and Representative Scott and the subcommittee for inviting me to speak. I am the Director of the Institute for Juvenile Research and a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I am also a member of the American Psychological Association's Committee on Children, Youth and Families. In addition to conducting violence prevention studies and the studies of the causes of youth violence, I and my colleagues track and review the current state of scientific knowledge about violence prevention. So I am here to speak about the effectiveness of violence and crime prevention programs.
Page 168 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Violence prevention is a rapidly developing field that has made great strides in the past 10 years. We have progressed from poorly calculated, simplistic, and often misleading statistics to a broadly-based empirical knowledge base. The good news is that it is clear violence prevention works. It works well by comparison to other crime prevention strategies and it is a good return on our investment. We are developing a basic but strong understanding of what works and with whom it works. We are also finding that these approaches prevent other costly problems such as drug abuse, school failure, and early pregnancy.
We are now obtaining some of the first reliable estimates of the cost savings to our society that come from violence prevention, and these look quite positive.
I have five points I want to make for the committee with my time, and I am going to concentrate on the first three. I think those will take my time.
The five things that I want to say are, first of all, violence prevention seems to reduce rates of aggression and violence by a third to one-half.
Second, prevention works but the effect depends much on what is done and how it is done.
Third, prevention is more effective and less costly than punishment and incarceration.
Fourth, objective evaluations with sound scientific control should be used to judge and compare prevention with other strategies, not personal testimonies or simplistic indexes or trend correspondences.
Page 169 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Fifth, the benefits of prevention are easy to underestimate and so therefore we need to take the time and the energy it takes to study prevention appropriately to understand the true effects.
To go to the first point, sound evaluation shows violence prevention program s can reduce rates by one-third or more, and some of the newer programs that build on lessons of prior research are showing larger impact, in some cases cutting rates by one-half. These are impact levels that are as strong as our most successful public health and legal intervention s.
For example, in Congressman Scott's district, a program called RIPPP, a 16-session social problem solving curriculum, has led to a 50 percent reduction in fights at the school, a 59 percent reduction in violence-related suspensions, and a 74 percent drop in weapon carrying at the school.
Our own prevention program, called the Metropolitan Area Child Study, in Chicago, working in some of the poorest urban neighborhoods in the country, has combined family support and skill training to reduce aggression and fighting in high-risk urban schools by one-third. This same program decreased the rate of onset of arrest, that is, the age of people being arrested by eighth grade, by 15 percent. It was also improving the average academic achievement of those who participated.
Second, prevention works but these effects depend on what is done and how it is done. Effective prevention focuses on, one, helping high-risk children use problem solving and self-control skills and helping their parents with behavior management skills; second, aiding schools and communities in setting up and maintaining norms that do not tolerate violence and crime; and third, aiding communities and police to work together to create safety, watch over the youth, and integrate the youth in the community life.
Page 170 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Unfortunately, many of the programs and efforts called prevention, and particularly called violence prevention, are not using these approaches and methods. In a national survey of schools, less than one-half of the programs called violence prevention actually use methods that have proven effectiveness; and in many instances, even when using effective approaches, they weren't applying them correctly. And in many cases, these schools are laboring under unfunded mandates to provide violence prevention, and so they can't provide what they would like to provide even if they know what is effective.
Third, to go to my third point, prevention is more effective and less costly than punishment and incarceration. Scientifically sound comparisons, although few, show that violence prevention reduces future crime more, costs less to deliver, and provides greater cost savings over time and produces a broader set of health and social benefits than treatment or criminal sanctions.
I have included for your consideration a recent chapter we have completed that reviews the few studies that permit comparison of prevention and treatment approaches to punishment and to incarceration, and in each case prevention was more effective.
In regard to cost benefits, I provide the committee with reports from two cost-benefit analysis studies. The first is a careful analysis from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. This is an office that is a nonpartisan office that was set up by that State legislature to provide them with information, and this is a study of many prevention and imprisonment programs. It shows estimates of returns of up to $31 for each dollar invested in prevention, with no comparable cost benefit s for imprisonment, and much lower returns for treatment.
Page 171 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Also I have provided to the committee a report of the Rand Corporation, comparing California's three-strikes policy with several prevention programs. Now, this report has been used to argue that the three strikes works because it notes there will be a drop in crime if you increase sanctions, and certainly if you increase the certainty of sanctions. But the report also shows a greater investment on two of three types of prevention that were compared to three strikes. And if you look at the one that didn't show the cost benefits, there is actually a mistake. It combined two effective programs and made estimates of costs that are much higher than are actually applicable to those programs, and once you make the corrections, that program is much more cost effective, too.
Either of those programs, Home Visiting and Head Start, both of these programs are separately more cost-effective than the three-strikes policy.
Since I have run out of time, I won't go into my other two points, but I want to focus on—and I will submit those for testimony for separate consideration, but I do want to go into some suggestions into where we might go with the research.
We should continue to rely on scientific research and not on anecdotes and examples that people may be able to pull out to support one point or another. What I have talked about is not selective examples, I have picked what the best scientific understanding is at this point.
There are three areas of research that if we can go into it would help us move ahead and be more effective.
Page 172 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We need to conduct a set of large studies which combine interventions that focus on the general population of youth and those that focus on high-risk youths to see how they work together. We haven't been able to do that yet because of the cost of doing those kinds of studies.
Second, we need to require that implemented programs be evaluated within 3 to 5 years of being implemented to see if they work. If they do, let other people know about the good news.
We need to fund research that evaluates how programs need to be implemented to be effective. We currently have a lot of effective programs that aren't being implemented in a way that allows them to be effective at the community and school level.
Thank you.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Thank you, Dr. Tolan.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Tolan follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF PATRICK TOLAN, DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR JUVENILE RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-CHICAGO, CHICAGO, IL
Hello. My name is Patrick Tolan Ph.D. I want to thank this Subcommittee for inviting me to speak. I am Director of the Institute for Juvenile Research and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I am also a member of the American Psychological Association's Committee on Children, Youth, and Families. In addition to conducting violence prevention studies and studies of the causes of youth violence, I and my colleagues track the current state of scientific knowledge about violence prevention. I am here to speak to the question of the effectiveness of violence prevention programs.
Page 173 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Violence prevention is a rapidly developing field that has made great strides in the past ten years. We have progressed from poorly calculated, simplistic, and often misleading statistics to a broadly-based empirical knowledge base. The good news is that it is clear violence prevention works, works well by comparison to other crime prevention strategies, and is a good return on the investment. We are developing a basic but strong understanding of what works with whom. We are also finding that these approaches prevent related problems such as school failure, drug abuse and early pregnancy. We are now obtaining some of the first reliable estimates of the cost savings to our society that violence prevention provides. A basic important step has been to recognize that there are many opportunities for prevention; we can affect rates by targeting the very few youth who are high risk for violence. We can apply efforts that affect the skills and behavior of youth and adults responsible for them in general. Both approaches are useful. This means we have many opportunities but also should be focusing different approaches with different segments of the population.
I want to use my time to make 5 points about prevention of youth violence and crime that I urge you to consider in your deliberations.
1. Sound evaluations show that violence prevention programs can reduce rates by 1/3 or more. Newer programs that build on the lessons of prior research are showing larger impact, in some cases, cutting rates by . These are impact levels that are as strong as our most successful public health and legal interventions. In Congressman Scott's district, a 16 session social-problem solving curriculum, called RIPPP led to a 50% reduction in fights at school, a 59% reduction in violence related suspensions, and a 74% drop in weapon carrying at the schools. Even when effects are less strong, the benefits are very substantial and the cost-benefit is favorable.
Page 174 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
2. Prevention works, but the effects depend much on what is done and how it is done. Effective prevention focuses on: 1) helping children use problem-solving skills; and 2) aiding families in parenting skills. We are learning what is important about making the difference. Unfortunately, many of the programs and efforts called prevention are not using these approaches and methods. In a national survey of schools, less than one half of the programs called violence prevention used methods that have proven effectiveness and in many instances, even when effective approaches were used, they were not being applied correctly. Our own prevention program, the Metropolitan Area Child Study, shows that we can reduce aggression and fighting by 1/3 and produce a 15% drop in rate of arrest by 8th grade in poor, urban communities. This affect requires a combination of school and family programming. This program also led to improved academic performance.
3. Prevention is more effective and less costly than punishment and incarceration. Scientifically sound comparisons, although few, show that prevention reduces future crime more, cost less to deliver, provides more cost savings over time, and has broad health and social benefits. I include for your consideration a recent chapter we wrote that reviews the few studies that permitted comparison of prevention and treatment approaches to punishment and incarceration (Tolan & Gorman-Smith, 1998). In regard to cost benefits, I provide the committee with reports from two cost-benefit analyses. The first is from a careful analysis from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. It shows estimates of returns of up to $31 for each dollar invested in prevention. Also provided is the report of the Rand Corporation comparing California's ''three strikes'' policy with several prevention programs. The report shows greater return on investment for two of the three types of prevention than found for the ''three strikes'' approach. The one approach found to be more costly is a combination of two separate programs, each of which has been effective on its own. When the costs basis is from their original forms, each is also more cost effective.
Page 175 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
4. It should be noted one can always provide a dramatic story that seems to support one's favored approach. These comparisons I refer to are not anecdotes but the best scientific evaluations available to date. Also, one can argue endlessly about the reason for the recent decrease in crime if one merely focuses on corresponding trends in other social indicators. However, showing correspondence of some factor and crime rates can not explain the cause or tell us what to do. It is objective evaluations with sound scientific controls that provide direction about which approaches are valuable and which are most effective. Comparisons with adequate methodology have supported prevention over treatment and treatment over incarceration. All three approaches help reduce crime, but the most effective and efficient use of resources is through prevention.
5. Prevention benefits are easy to underestimate. Prevention means something does not happen that would have otherwise if not for the prevention; it is hard to see that something did not happen. Also, in many instances prevention is relegated to something we will do once the violence problem is under control or if there is money left for it. If we had taken this approach to tuberculosis, we would still have millions dying. The evidence for prevention as the core of preventing crime and increasing the safety of our citizens is as well proven or more than the evidence used to justify public efforts that led to reduced death due to automobile accidents, lead in the air, and child death due to accidents. It is hard to identify a more carefully studied and well-supported policy than prevention and early intervention to lessen violence and increase public safety.
These 5 points suggest that we are poised to apply effective prevention. This is not to suggest that we have all the research questions answered. In fact, we need to capitalize on these basic findings to move forward to a stronger research base and a more full understanding of what work for whom under what circumstances. Three areas of further research can be immediately identified:
Page 176 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
1. Studies of prevention programs that combine general interventions and those focused on high-risk youth. Because of budget constraints, we have not been able to conduct scientific comparisons of programs the scale they would typically be done. Most programs are offered at the school or community-wide level and we know they should be multi-component. However, until now the science has been limited to making comparison of smaller scale versions. In part this is because we were still identifying promising basic elements. However, much of the limitation at this point is budgetary. There is a need for larger scale studies, simultaneously undertaken in several cities. These require teams of investigators across sites and evaluators partnering with local schools and communities. The costs of such studies are small in comparison to expenditures for violence prevention programs, the cost of the problem to our society, or allocations for research for problems with less serious impact. However, they are large in comparison to what has been traditionally budgeted for violence prevention research and evaluation.
2. Prior research has identified a regimen of effective methods and determined that many thought-to-be valuable approaches are not effective. However, only a small portion of the programs and approaches used with our children and youth have been evaluated or build from sound elements. There is need to test a broader range of programs and to infuse funding for prevention programs with requirements for sound evaluation and reliance on proven approaches. As part of this, there is a need to determine how effects vary by local needs and conditions.
3. Effective programs can be ineffective if not properly implemented or if not fit to local needs. There is a need to fund research on the best methods for implementing and adapting the effective approaches so they are provided at the school and community level in a way that permits their benefits to prevail. Such research is important to realizing the full potential benefits of violence prevention.
Page 177 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Now Mr. Mauer.
STATEMENT OF MARC MAUER, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, THE SENTENCING PROJECT, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. MAUER. I guess I get to have the last word on the subject.
I want to speak briefly about the decline in crime in the 1990's, particularly the role of incarceration, and try to assess what we know about the role of incarceration based on some recent research that we have done and other developments in the field.
At first glance, the period 1991 to 1998 shows a 47 percent rise, very substantial, in the use of incarceration in the United States and a substantial decline in crime, 22 percent during this period. This has led some observers to suggest that the rise in incarceration caused the decline in crime. So the question is, how much do we know about that relationship?
Well, the first thing we know is if we look at the 7-year period just prior, 1994 to 1991, we see the opposite trend. We see a 65 percent rise in incarceration and an increase in crime of 17 percent. So what we have over the last 14 years is a continuously rising rate of incarceration, more than doubling over 14 years. The first 7 years we have an increase in crime; the second 7 years we have a decline in crime. This does not suggest incarceration does not have an impact, but clearly it is an ambiguous one at best in terms of these trends.
Page 178 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
We then looked at the period of the 1990's and basically asked the question, did the States that invested most heavily in incarceration get the most benefits in terms of reduced crime? We looked at the States that increased their use of imprisonment above average and below average, and we found that the States that used incarceration or increased it the most actually had less of a reduction in crime than the other States did.
The most extreme example we see is in the State of Texas which actually added 93,000 prisoners in just a 7-year period, a rise of 144 percent in the use of imprisonment. Texas had a substantial decline in crime, 35 percent during that period; and some observers have concluded, it was a very substantial use of incarceration but a significant decline in crime.
It turns out if we look at other larger States—New York, Massachusetts—we see similar or large declines in crime during that period at just a fraction of the increase in incarceration, one-sixth or one-seventh of the rise of incarceration in Texas. This suggests that there are a variety of other factors that are taking place in New York, Massachusetts and around the country that tell us something about why crime may be declining.
We know it has something to do with the economy, something to do with changes in policing, something to do with the drug trade and how young people deal with that, getting guns away from young people. Some of this is going to vary by community or by State, but I think it does show us fairly clearly that we can't just assume that building prisons in a given State will lead to greater reductions in crime. It may or may not be related, but there are a host of other factors available.
The findings we have seen and what we know in other areas about the impact of incarceration should make us very cautious about advocating continued rises in the use of imprisonment for three reasons in particular.
Page 179 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
First, I think we are in a situation now of diminishing returns in terms of how effective incarceration can be in controlling crime. If we had a prison system that was composed of murderers, rapists and armed robbers, incapacitating those people would have a significant impact on the crime rate by getting them off the street. That is not the prison system we have today.
More than half the people locked up today are there for nonviolent, property or drug offenses. Particularly if we look at the use of prison for drug offenders, if you think of the drug trade as sort of a pyramid. You have a relative handful of kingpins at the top of the pyramid, you have a significant number of mid-level dealers, and then you have an enormous level of mules, street dealers. As you expand the use of imprisonment as we have in on the war of drugs, you are going to pick up those street-level dealers rather than kingpins. There are only so many kingpins, and they already go to prison anyway. So as we continue to expand incarceration, it is far more likely we will pick up lower level offenders and have less of an impact on crime.
Secondly, we should be cautious, because building a prison represents a substantial commitment both of public dollars and policy. Every prison that is built is going to last for at least 50 years. Here we are at a time of declining crime that we know is due to a variety of factors. It seems to me we should be studying what those factors are in differing communities around the country and build on those successes. Building a prison offers us no flexibility to respond to changing demographics or changes in policingand it doesn't tell us where we want to be 10 or 20 years from now.
The other reason to be cautious is that we know that the demographics of the prison system are very disturbing to all Americans. Based on research by the Department of Justice, we know that, at current trends, 29 percent of African American males born today can expect to do time in a State or Federal prison. So three of every ten black males can expect to go to prison right now. If we think that prison has been successful in reducing crime, then one is also required to believe that it is all right to expect that three of ten black males will be locked up in prison, and it seems to me that is a very difficult if not contradictory perspective to hold.
Page 180 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
If there is any way that we can avoid these kinds of outcomes through what we have heard about today, through what we know about works in the field, then we have every obligation to try to pursue those.
Thank you very much. I hope you will consider that.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Mauer follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF MARC MAUER, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, THE SENTENCING PROJECT, WASHINGTON, DC
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before the Crime Subcommittee today on the issue of ''Preventing and Fighting Crime: What Works?'' My name is Marc Mauer and I am the Assistant Director of The Sentencing Project, a national non-profit organization engaged in research and advocacy on criminal justice policy. I am the author of numerous policy analyses that have appeared in leading academic and professional journals and frequently consult with policymakers and criminal justice practitioners around the nation.
Two central themes are critical in examining crime prevention and control. First, much is already known about what works and what doesn't work. The problem is more often a lack of political will and resources rather than a lack of knowledge. Second, crime is a complex problem and can only be responded to in complex ways. ''Quick fix'' solutions to the problem are likely to be misguided.
I will focus my remarks today on examining the decline in crime during the 1990s. As is well known, the country enjoyed seven years of declining crime for the period 1991–98, the most recent data available. During this period crime declined by 22%, and violent crime by 25%. These are welcome developments, particularly following the surge of crime and violence of the late 1980s. This decline occurred during a time when the national prison population has increased substantially, rising from 789,610 in 1991 to 1,252,830, a 59% rise in just seven years (and a 47% increase in the rate of incarceration, taking into account changes in the national population).
Page 181 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Many observers have drawn a simple correlation between these two trends—putting more offenders in prison caused the reduction in crime. The Sentencing Project has just completed a study that examines this issue in great detail and concludes that any such correlation is ambiguous at best.(see footnote 7)
National Trends in Imprisonment and Crime
In examining the relationship between incarceration and crime in the 1990s the picture is complicated by the seven year period just prior to this, 1984–91. In this period, incarceration also rose substantially, at a rate of 65%. Yet crime rates increased during this time as well, by 17% nationally.
Thus we see a continuous rise in incarceration for fourteen years, during which crime rose for seven years, then declined for seven years. This does not suggest that incarceration had no impact on crime, but any such connection is clearly influenced by other factors.
A comparison with other nations is instructive in this regard. The United States incarcerates its citizens at a greater rate than any other nation and at a rate 5–8 times that of most other industrialized nations. This differential is in part due to a higher rate of violent crime in the U.S. and in part to more severe criminal justice policies. But the reason why other industrialized nations have less violent crime than in the U.S. is clearly not because they lock up more offenders and thereby reduce crime. We could debate the various factors that contribute to our high level of violence but a failure to incarcerate is clearly not one of them.
Page 182 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Declining Crime in the 1990s
In order to analyze the decline in crime in the 1990s in greater detail we examined the relationship between imprisonment and crime at the state level from 1991 to 1998. The reason for doing so is that national trends often obscure substantial variations among the states in the degree to which imprisonment is utilized as a response to crime. During the seven year period, for example, Texas led the nation with a 144% rise in its rate of incarceration, while Maine increased its prison population by just 2%. The national average increase in the rate of incarceration was 47%.
Our study looked at whether states that increased their prison populations the most experienced the greatest declines in crime. To do so, we analyzed the states that increased their rates of incarceration above and below the national average. The ''above average'' states increased their rate of incarceration by an average of 72% and experienced a 13% decline in crime, while the ''below average'' states saw a 30% rise in incarceration and a 17% decline in crime.
Thus, the states with the highest increases in the use of incarceration, more than double the level of the lower incarcerating states, experienced less of an impact on crime. This held for both violent and property crime, with an even greater differential for violent crime.
An analysis of individual state patterns is instructive as well in cautioning us against drawing simple correlations between these trends. At first glance, the experience in Texas might appear to demonstrate the value of incarceration, since the state saw crime decline by a substantial 35% after its 144% rise in imprisonment. But an examination of these patterns in other large states—California, Massachusetts, and New York—reveals equal or greater reductions in crime with just a fraction of the prison gain of Texas. Massachusetts experienced an increase in incarceration just one-seventh (21%) that of Texas and New York just one-sixth (24%), yet their crime rates declined by 35% and 43% respectively.
Page 183 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
It is possible that the reason for the substantial rise in incarceration in the ''above average'' states is that they began the 1990s with higher than average rates of crime and therefore felt it necessary to imprison more offenders. We found little support for this contention. Of the twenty states that increased their use of incarceration at above average rates, twelve began the 1990s with below average rates of crime. Further, of the ten top states that increased imprisonment, only two were above average in crime initially.
Rising Crime in the 1980s
To explore the relationship between incarceration and crime further we also studied the period of 1984–91 to see whether states that increased their use of imprisonment the most experienced less of an increase in crime. Here we found a modest advantage for the high incarcerating states. The ''above average'' states had more than double the rate of incarceration increase of the ''below average'' states (89% compared to 37%), and experienced 2% less of a rise in crime, 15% compared to 17%.
Whether or not the increased use of imprisonment caused the 2% difference in crime is debatable. But assuming for the moment that it did, the question for policymakers regards whether this represented the most cost-effective means of achieving such a gain. By embarking on such a large-scale prison population increase, the ''above average'' states imprisoned an additional 136,000 more offenders than they would have at the lower rate of increase. At a conservative cost of $50,000 per prison cell and $20,000 for housing, the total cost to achieve this 2% differential in crime was $9.5 billion. If policymakers are committed to spending that sum to have an impact on crime the question then becomes whether the crime reduction achieved by incarceration is greater than would be possible through alternative allocations of public funds. Other approaches to reducing crime would include investments in policing, parole supervision, drug treatment, or pre-school programs. Existing research documents that many of these approaches are more cost-effective than prison expansion.(see footnote 8)
Page 184 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The Relationship Between Imprisonment and Crime
Our analysis of the relationship between incarceration and crime does not suggest that prison has no effect on the problem. Clearly, incapacitating violent and dangerous offenders reduces potential threats to public safety. But this image hardly captures the current experience of incarceration in the United States.
First, the prison system nationally is in fact not comprised primarily of violent and dangerous offenders. More than half the inmate population is imprisoned for a non-violent drug or property offense. To suggest that incarceration may not be appropriate for all these offenders is not to propose to give them a free ride. Rather, the policy question regards what types of consequences should be imposed on these offenders, recognizing that prison is the most expensive option available.
Second, we are not dealing with a static prison population, but one that has seen unprecedented growth over the past quarter century. From a level of 200,000 prisoners nationally in 1972, the population has risen to more than 1.3 million today, with an additional 600,000 inmates in local jails. Whether or not one believes that this was necessary or appropriate, it has particular significance for crime control. Essentially, given the scale of incarceration today we have reached a point of diminishing returns in the crime control value of imprisonment.
To understand why this is the case, imagine a modest sized prison system primarily housing murderers, rapists, and robbers. The crime reducing impact of such a system would be relatively significant. But as the prison system expands, as it has so dramatically over the last thirty years, there are only so many additional murderers, rapists, and robbers to lock up. These offenders almost never avoid a prison term when convicted, and in fact generally receive a lengthy prison term.
Page 185 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
By expanding the use of imprisonment it becomes far more likely that less serious offenders on average will be the ones who are incarcerated. For example, the burglar who commits 50 burglaries a year is more likely to be apprehended and convicted than the one who commits 5 crimes a year. Imprisoning the former ''prevents'' these 50 crimes from taking place, but imprisoning the latter just one-tenth that amount.
Recent research by leading criminologists documents the scale of this phenomenon. In a three-state study of robbery and burglary offenders, the scholars concluded that offenders who were not arrested and remained free averaged 1–3 robberies and 2–4 burglaries a year, while those who were incarcerated had committed these crimes at a rate 10–50 times higher.(see footnote 9)
Similar problems relate to the imprisonment of drug offenders. Drug selling operates under a pyramid structure—a ''kingpin'' on top, a number of mid-level distributors, and a large number of street-level sellers or ''mules.'' For various reasons, the kingpins are difficult to apprehend, but when they are they are almost always incarcerated for a substantial period of time. Thus, when the number of imprisoned drug offenders increases substantially, it is far more likely that the new inmates will be drawn from the lower levels of the trade. In the federal system, research by the U.S. Sentencing Commission concluded that among federal drug defendants in 1992, only 11% were high-level dealers, while 55% were street-level dealers and 34% mid-level.(see footnote 10) There are no comparable data for drug offenders in state prison, but it is highly likely that they are also skewed toward the lower levels since high level dealers are more frequently targeted for prosecution in the federal courts. Overall, the number of drug offenders in state prison increased eleven-fold from 19,000 in 1980 to 237,000 in 1998. In federal prisons, the rise was from 5,000 to 63,000 during this time.
Page 186 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Assessing the Decline in Crime
As we have seen the U.S. prison population rose substantially during the 1990s. But many other social, economic, and criminal justice factors changed significantly during this time as well. These include a healthy economy and low unemployment, the movement toward community-based policing, the decline of the crack cocaine epidemic, reduced access to guns by young people, and behavioral changes by families to reduce the crime risks faced by their children. The degree to which each of these factors contributed to the declining crime rate no doubt is varied across the country, but each has a role to play as part of the explanation.
Our analysis of crime and incarceration does not suggest that incarceration played no role in the reduction in crime in the 1990s, but it does call into question whether massive prison building will always yield more results than a more cautious approach to these problems. Further, prison construction represents a public investment in institutions that can be expected to last for at least fifty years. Thus, there is a diversion of funds from other approaches that offer the advantage of flexibility in regard to targeting specific crime problems in individual communities. With the relative luxury of a lowered crime rate, now is the time to reassess the national commitment to incarceration and to consider whether more broad-based policy approaches would be more successful.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. I thank each of you for your excellent testimony.
Now both Mr. Scott and I will have an opportunity to ask some questions. Let me start it out, if I might. I will recognize myself for 5 minutes.
Page 187 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Dr. Reynolds, I did not have the privilege of hearing your testimony, but Mr. Mauer was talking about the statistics, and I think it was that most people incarcerated are as a result of property crimes or nonviolent crimes, and it is my understanding that 93 percent of persons in prison are violent or repeat offenders. Would you comment on Mr. Mauer's concern that the rate of incarceration has not had the impact on the reduction in crime that some people believe?
Mr. REYNOLDS. I have a son who is a former assistant prosecutor and currently a defense attorney, a criminal defense attorney; and, as he puts it, it takes a lot to get to prison. So it is misleading for Mr. Mauer to say that our prisons are filled with a majority or mostly of nonviolent offenders.
It is true that those there for violent crimes are in the neighborhood in most State systems of about 45 percent in most State systems, we are getting up near the 50 percent mark, but the point is that of those in prison for nonviolent crimes, it takes a lot to get there. In other words, they failed this, that and the other thing. As Lynne Abraham on the first panel said, prosecutors are not just willy-nilly trying to lock up people, and the court systems doing the same.
With respect to Texas, there are a few things being left out of the picture. When everybody points to Texas, they say we are a third-world nation which is not part of the western justice system. I take it personally. They don't know what has been going on down there.
Page 188 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
First of all, in the 1980's, Texas just fell way behind the curve. We went from an average crime rate State in 1980, although 1980 was a very high crime year, to 40 percent above. Then the voters approved two prison bond issues, and it is true we added nearly 100,000 inmates in the prison system, but another thing overlooked here is that it wasn't quite that big a net addition because there were 30,000 felons backed up in county jails. We fell behind the curve. We would have been far better off if we kept prison beds apace with the crime problem. So the 1980's experience make Texas look worse with a 1990's catch-up.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Speaking of the 1980's, what about the observation that prison time increased in the '80's while crime did as well?
Mr. REYNOLDS. There I would refer you to Charles Murray who characterizes that experience more accurately. Crime got out of control beginning in the 1960's, ran up into the 1980's, the early 1980's, while expected punishment fell. Then it started to increase a bit in the '80's, but all it did was in a sense flatten out the crime problem. It showed that it can stop it from continuing its march upward. Then in the 1990's, what we have is a clear march downward. I can remember a criminologist saying in the 1980's the data are faulty, crime has not flattened out. Everybody realizes now we have finally taken a bite out of crime.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Let me go to Mr. Scott. Well, first one more question.
Dr. McGarrell, you talked about restorative justice, which is a concept that we need to look at more. We actually had an amendment that was passed for restorative justice on a House juvenile justice bill that got balled up in conference. What hurdles exist out there that slow down the expansion of restorative justice programs?
Page 189 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. MCGARRELL. I think in many ways it is a new way of thinking about addressing the problem. As I indicated earlier, I think our attention has tended to be at the other end of the spectrum naturally in terms of the repeat chronic offenders. So I think taking a step back and thinking about what could we do to intervene more effectively early on so we start filling in that continuum from initial arrest to repeat offending when incarceration is called for—so I think it is a simply a matter of—I shouldn't say simply a matter but a matter for prosecutors, police officials, local elected officials I think having the opportunity to view a realistic kind of intervention and a meaningful kind of intervention that doesn't necessarily eat up a lot of court resources, but I don't think that message has gotten out there.
I also think one of the limitations that we have is historically we have not done a good job evaluating programs, or we evaluate the model program but we don't look at the widespread implementation of those programs. So I think there is healthy skepticism out there, and so something like restorative justice sounds like the new flavor of the month, and so I think it is a matter of demonstrating impacts. I think the idea is one that can—.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. My time has expired.
At this time, I will recognize Mr. Scott for 5 minutes. Certainly if he needs additional time, we will accommodate that.
Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me just begin by commenting on some of the early comments made that we are choosing between whether we will lock people up or focus on prevention. As I indicated before, we are already locking people up, and we are not going to let people go. So the question we are faced with is, if we are going to spend another billion dollars on crime, where best should it be placed?
Page 190 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
In the eastern half of Richmond and many inner-cities across the country, if we were to lock people up at a rate three times the highest rate recorded by any country on earth, if we were going to try to achieve that rate of incarceration, three times the highest rate of any country on earth, to achieve that rate in the eastern half of Richmond, we would have to let one-third of the people go to get down to that rate. I think in terms of locking people up, it appears that we are getting as much crime reduction benefit out of the incarceration as we could imagine.
It has also been pointed out that if we are a little more deliberate on who we look up and focus on the truly violent criminals and give them longer sentences and the less violent shorter sentences, we will make better use of our incarceration.
Mr. Fox—Dr. Fox, you indicated that—the same as Mr. Mauer did—that there is little correlation between increasing prison beds and a decrease in crime. Mr. Mauer indicated such research. Is your research consistent with that, after a certain level of incarceration, that the benefit of more prison beds did very little to actually reduce crime?
Mr. FOX. First of all, let me be quite clear. The academic research consistently does say that there is an impact of incarceration. It cannot be denied. Most studies sort of put it in the range of 15, 20, 25 percent of the decline that we saw could potentially be attributed to prisons. Not more than that. It is one of the leading reasons of decline but not the number one and certainly not the entire reason.
I think, beyond that, it is rather difficult to say in any precise terms what was the impact of prisons. There are so many variables involved. There is the issue of State by State differences in how you measure them and whether you look at an econometric approach. There are so many statistical issues. We all agree that prisons play a role.
Page 191 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
The only debate here is whether we have gotten the results of expanding prisons, and at this point let's be a little more selective in deciding who should be in prison and who should not, and let's make sure that we are not spending more money than we need to on incarceration.
Mr. SCOTT. Where we are in incarceration, if we spend another few billion dollars, where would it best be put to get the best reduction in crime? Is there any evidence that suggests building more prisons would be a better investment in our resources as compared to what your research shows on prevention?
Mr. FOX. The research shows we have probably gotten what we can get out of prisons. Spending more money will not do the trick. We know that a variety of prevention programs work. There is documentation about various things that work, and that is probably where we should be spending the money now.
We brought the crime rate down. We know that we have concerns for the future, and building prisons will not do that. Investing in after-school programs that we know work, early child enrichment programs that we know work, these will contribute significantly to the future, not building more prisons. Building more prisons will be allowing other problems to fester and build so eventually we will need those prisons because the root problems and causes that we have let fester will grow to the point that we need the prisons.
Yes, we have done all that we can building prisons. We should be spending more money elsewhere.
Page 192 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SCOTT. Mr. Mauer, you talked about prisons and crime. Have you seen any evidence that sentencing schemes such as mandatory minimums or truth in sentencing are more effective than the traditional sentencing in terms of reducing crime?
Mr. MAUER. No, I don't think there is any good academic research that supports that. In fact, there are many injustices and inefficiencies that are created.
The real problem is that we have had such a focus on sentencing policy and practice in recent years. Dr. Fox referred to what is well known, that to the extent there is a deterrent effect of the criminal justice system, it is achieved by the certainty of punishment, not the severity.
If you can get a potential offender to think he or she is more likely to be apprehended, then some of them may think twice about what they are doing. But somebody who is not expecting to get caught is not thinking about whether the penalty is 5 or 10 years, and this is true for shoplifting as much as it is for murder. People don't expect to get caught, and they are not particularly thinking about the penalties most of the time.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Your time has expired, but you will be extended an additional 3 minutes.
Mr. SCOTT. Thank you. I have two more questions.
Page 193 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. Tolan and Mr. Holton—Dr. Holton, someone said by investing in prevention, you reduce not only crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out. Dr. Tolan, can you explain that.
Mr. TOLAN. A number of the programs that were developed to prevent drug abuse also prevent other types of crime, and a number of the programs that were developed with the intention of reducing crime and violence also reduce the number of those children who start drugs and they decrease the rates of teenage pregnancy. A prime example would be the Seattle Social Development Program which worked in elementary schools years in Seattle working with children on problem solving and teachers in how they manage the children's behavior and then with parents about parenting, and it showed effects across those types of problems. So benefits were more general.
Mr. SCOTT. So by addressing the root causes of crime, you also reduce other social pathology?
Mr. TOLAN. Right. The idea is that children who are at risk for one problem are often at risk for several. A number of these problems have the same causes, and by addressing one we are addressing the others.
Mr. SCOTT. Dr. Holton, in the Chicago study you are tracking thousands of children, and that study is still going on as I understand it; is that right?
Mr. HOLTON. That is correct.
Page 194 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SCOTT. Do you have any preliminary results to show why some children in neighborhoods that are essentially equivalent demographically will have a high crime rate in one neighborhood and not in a virtually equivalent neighborhood, what some of the factors may be?
Mr. HOLTON. What we have found, Representative Scott, is that the quality of the neighbors themselves, that is, their levels of trust, cohesion and reciprocity amongst themselves, is essentially a protective blanket that is within a neighborhood.
Mr. SCOTT. And if the neighborhood has that, you would experience lower crime; and if you don't have that?
Mr. HOLTON. Yes. What happens is you have an agreement, if you will, that there will be certain behaviors expected from children and expected from adults that result in both supervision and protection of children, and it gets carried out amongst the neighbors.
Mr. SCOTT. Dr. Johnson, do you see the same kind of effect in the faith-based community, those with strong churches in an area, for example, may have a positive effect on children?
Mr. JOHNSON. It would appear that is the case, but what Dr. Holton is talking about with collective efficacy—he and I have actually had this discussion—how much of the collective efficacy is explained actually by churches. We don't know. Again, the government hasn't seen that as a priority to study, and these are important questions that I think need answers.
Page 195 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Mr. SCOTT. Dr. Holton, will you be able to get that from the information eventually, from the study that you are conducting in Chicago? Will that be one of the variables?
Mr. HOLTON. It could become a variable of interest, particularly if we were able to work with researchers as esteemed as Dr. Johnson and probe that further.
Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Thank you, Mr. Scott.
I want to extend my appreciation to each of the panelists today for their excellent testimony.
I want to thank Mr. Scott for his interest in this and for making sure that we conducted this hearing which I think is very important for the future of crime fighting in the United States.
At this point, this hearing will be adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 6 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
Page 196 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
Material Submitted for the Hearing Record
NOTE: The following were submitted for the record and are on file with the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime:
1. ''Diminishing Returns: Crime and Incarceration in the 1990s,'' by Jenni Gainsborough and Marc Mauer, September 2000.
2. ''Less Hype, More Help: Reducing Juvenile Crime, What Works—and What Doesn't,'' by Richard A. Mendel.
3. Press Release: Preventing Crime.Org, Trying Juveniles as Adults May Backfire, by David L. Myers (available at www.preventingcrime.org).
4. ''The Comparative Costs and Benefits of Programs to Reduce Crime: A Review of National Research With Implications for Washington State'', June 1999, Washington State Institute for Public Policy, Olympia, WA.
5. ''Diverting Children from a Life of Crime: Measuring Costs and Benefits,'' by Peter W. Greenwood, Karyn E. Model, C. Peter Rydell and James Chiesa.
6. ''Treatment of Juvenile Delinquency: Between Punishment and Therapy,'' by Patrick H. Tolan and Deborah Gorman-Smith.
Page 197 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC
(Footnote 1 return)
BJS data indicates that more than 80 percent of prisoners have a history of drug and alcohol abuse.
(Footnote 2 return)
A study of an experimental drug court/drug treatment program in the District of Columbia demonstrated that sanctions should be consistently and immediately applied in order to enhance their effect.
(Footnote 3 return)
PHDCN begins with the premise that crime, particularly acts of violence, is not in the best interests of children. Crimes against persons and/or properties index a quality of life in neighborhoods, cities, and states. Living in a democracy that embraces individual freedoms yet requires a large and expensive presence of police and maintains one of the highest rates of incarcerated citizenry than any comparable developed nation highlights both the continuing problem of crime and our response to it as vistas into the soul of American society.
(Footnote 4 return)
Sampson, Robert J., Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls. 1997. ''Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.'' Science 277:918–24 (attached document).
(Footnote 5 return)
Sampson, Robert J., Morenoff, Jeffrey D., and Felton Earls. 1999. ''Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children.'' American Sociological Review 64: 633–660 (attached document).
(Footnote 6 return)
Sampson, Robert J. and Raudenbush, Stephen. 1999. ''Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods.'' American Journal of Sociology 105:603–651 (attached document).
(Footnote 7 return)
Jenni Gainsborough and Marc Mauer, Diminishing Returns: Crime and Incarceration in the 1990s, The Sentencing Project, September 2000.
(Footnote 8 return)
See, for example, Peter W. Greenwood, Karyn Model, C. Peter Rydell, and James Chiesa, Diverting Children From a Life of Crime, RAND, 1998.
(Footnote 9 return)
Jose A. Canela-Cacho, Alfred Blumstein, and Jacqueline Cohen, ''Relationship Between the Offending Frequency of Imprisoned and Free Offenders,'' Criminology, Vol. 35, No. 1, 1997.
(Footnote 10 return)
United States Sentencing Commission, Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy, 1995, p. 172.