When crime strikes innocent children, women and men, in all but a handful of cases there is absolutely nothing our civil justice system can do to restore the devastation and destruction that has occurred. Government programs to compensate victims of crime, such as California's program, while proclaimed by politicians as important statements of policy and commitment, these programs are provide minimal immediate support and little long term assistance.
In a small percentage of cases, those who profit from operating businesses in locations that are known by the profiteers to be magnets for crime are held responsible for the emotional and financial aftermath for survivors of criminal conduct. Even where criminal conduct has occurred because of mental disability, insurance carriers today exclude from liability policies any damage caused by policyholders who lack the mental ability to govern their conduct in accordance with reason and are found guilty of crime. Once the criminal justices system has sentenced the wrongdoers, those who are the survivors of crime are routinely left to suffer their injuries, losses and emotional suffering by themselves.
Although the rate of crime per 100,000 citizens has not fluctuated greatly in the last 30 years, newspapers and television revel in reporting crisis, conflict, catastrophe, corruption and crime. Because crime news is readily available, even on slow news days, it is the commonly used to fill otherwise empty pages and the 17 minute news slot on the televised evening news. Americans routinely are barraged with crime reports from obscure hamlets in the outback that no one ever heard of or will hear of again, because that particular crime story will keep viewers attuned to the program and the commercial.
The news media has publicized crime and has made it a top concern in every poll of the American public in recent years. There is widespread anger over crime and the criminal justice system, but efforts to prevent crime so far have been a failure because while citizens and political leaders are ready to simply use "common sense" and be "tough" on crime, no one is taking the time to be "smart" about it.
Those who have studied crime, America's top sociologists, criminologists and experts in penology have been ignored in the public debate, because they do not have a public relations budget and listening to them is not as easy as listening to the neighbor whose answer to crime is "lock them up." This is the easiest and simplest answer when looking at individual criminals at a micro level of analysis. But the implications of that public policy in a country of 250,000,000 people calls for an overview or macro understanding of crime is long overdue.
All the literature and our accumulated wisdom confirms that the chief causes of crime are racial discrimination and the creation of an underclass of non-white Americans.
Few are willing to discuss the race issue directly. White America has developed a special set of code words to replace the Jim Crow language of the past and to mask its racial antipathy. In the place of "nigger" American culture has substituted "inner city, gangs, thugs, minorities, welfare recipient, fatherless families, urban, and lower socio-economic." These are the new code words to describe obliquely the American underclass of black and brown young men who predominate in prisons across the U.S.
Crime is in large part a function of youth. Visit any court house in a major metropolitan area on Monday morning and visit the courtroom where the arraignment calendar is called. The court room and hallways regularly filled with brash young men ranging in age from 18 to their late twenties, predominantly non-whites, who are unemployed.
While many believe that crime can be 'solved' by incarcerating this population, society is still left with someone without marketable skills who can and will return to crime to support themselves. There are breakthroughs in solving the problem of crime that are achieving success because they clearly address the root cause of crime in the United States: widespread racial discrimination. Consider the evidence.
Race and Crime
Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie notes that the U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and that for every 100,000 citizens, 407 are in prisons or jails. That is nearly double the rate of 230 a decade ago. By comparison, the British rate is 100, the French 92, and the Norwegian, 47. The U.S. out paces even the former Soviet Union locking up citizens.
In his novel, Black Rage, William H. Grier explains "the root cause of prejudice is the unwillingness of white Americans to accept blacks as fellow human beings." It is this prejudice that results in ghettos, unemployment, substandard education, and poor health. That these factors cause crime is not open to doubt. So it is no surprise that in the United States 3,109 blacks are in prison for every 100,000 blacks, while in South Africa there are only 729. The rate of incarceration for blacks in the U.S. is nearly eight times the national average of 407 per 100,000 citizens.
Unemployment in a Sink or Swim Society
In the words of a famous sociologist, "in a sink or swim society, people thrash before they go down and the thrashing is violent crime."
Violence is worst in our poorest black and brown communities, where the children of poor families are not educated by schools that warehouse them until they drop out. These people need basic educational skills so they can compete for jobs that have a future. It is the reason unemployment rates are so high in the ghetto.
Sixty percent of black males ages 20-24 were unemployed in 1992, and half of all black men aged 16-24 had no work experience at all.
Unemployment is not due to laziness or unwillingness to work. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that young black men want to work, but they want fair treatment and to be paid the same as their white counterparts. Unable to compete for jobs because of poor education, money is made "on the street" selling drugs and in crime.
New Proposals
California's Blue Ribbon Commission On Inmate Population Management notes that "the criminal justice system in California is out of balance and will remain so unless the entire state and local criminal justice system is addressed from prevention through discharge of jurisdiction" and that "insufficient prevention efforts . . . exist."
Even though drug and alcohol abuse is a major cause of imprisonment, no significant programs are available for substance abusers while they are confined and there is no meaningful employment training.
Unemployment is a major problem among parolees and contributes to their likelihood to recidivate.
In other states programs have been successful in rehabilitating offenders.
The Vera Institute of Justice in New York started "supported work" in the 1970's to teach basic job skills to addicts. The result was "a marked reduction in arrests and increased employment, were so encouraging that the project was repeated on a larger scale by other agencies."
The movement to "smart punishment" or "intermediate penalties" in cities like Phoenix where judges have non-prison sentencing options ranging from outright release to close supervision. These programs are also referred to as "intensive probation" and include constant checks of probationers with surprise drug checks and for those who fail a trip to state prison. The idea is catching on because while it is more expensive than regular probation, it is much less expensive than imprisonment and fewer probationers commit new offenses while under intense supervision. In Georgia, which pioneered the idea, only 1 in 5 was arrested while under scrutiny, far lower than the average rate of 50 percent or more for those on traditional probation.
Teaching Middle Class Skills
Other programs, like the Perry Preschool Project, show that working with very young poor children will help them do better in school, hold jobs, not be on welfare, and be less likely to be arrested or convicted of a crime.
These programs are doing what families and schools have not accomplished, but even though programs like Head Start have proven to help young children get the most out of school, it is not in use throughout the United States. Expanding the program to cover all needy preschoolers would cost $8 billion and, as part of an effort to create jobs and to put the unemployed back to work, there might be some hope for a nationwide effort to save these children.
By far the most exciting programs for disadvantaged youths are those that help them cross class lines and to give them a chance to compete with the children of middle class families.
The Argus Learning for Living Center in the South Bronx provides tutoring in reading and also provides counselling to develop marketable skills, to build self-esteem, and teach positive attitudes.
The Chicago Area Project is a similar program for high-risk teenagers and gives advice about how to handle problems at school, work and at home.
One program in Los Angeles that is gaining recognition is Rites of Passage which is directed at black and brown youngsters and teaches them middle class skills to successfully complete educational programs and fight for jobs.
Originally ROP was intended to teach teenage fathers how to become men by changing values they learned on the street that led them to the juvenile justice system. The street teaches a young boy that if he wants to be certified as a "man" he must have money, must be violent, must be sexually active, and must survive having gone to jail. Many young blacks believe in a stereotype that white young men don't have problems because they live in a society that protects them. This attitude develops into a belief that life is hopeless and results in hatred against whites. Because young boys learn very early in life to communicate "hurt" as anger which leads to violence, ROP teaches young men to master their anger avoid acting out in rage. ROP is effective because it allows young blacks to acquire the educational and job skills that will later prevent them from being involved in drugs, alcohol, gangs, and crime.
The Future
In a country that is spending billions on prisons and experiencing no reduction in crime, intensive counselling provides a realistic, less costly, and more efficient approach that in time will be recognized as an efficient choice by a country that is facing a huge national debt.
ROP, and programs like it, must be implemented to give black and brown children the chance taken from them by a society that penalizes them for not being white. Rather than "thrashing" themselves to death the emphasis on modifying values and learning middle class social and economic skills is designed to provide a foundation to achieve economic freedom.
Prison cells cost $75,000 to build and every year it costs $25,000 to keep an inmate in custody. Spending the same amounts on providing job skills and teaching work values provides the chance that people who would be in prison will become productive and begin paying taxes instead of being supported by taxpayers. The Perry Project was estimated to save substantially more money than it cost, because it led to less dependency on welfare, fewer child support payments, and a savings in tax dollars that otherwise would have been spent on court costs and the correctional system.
Programs like ROP, Head Start, Perry Preschool Project, CAP, and the Argus Learning for Living should be the main emphasis of crime prevention efforts, in addition to new sentencing approaches like the Vera Institute of Justice program and intensive probation. Anti-crime programs for youngsters at risk should be made a part of preschool and school program for one simple reason: they are cheaper than the alternatives.