A New Wave of Crime Fighters

Diverse groups unite in quest for ways to deal with lawbreakers

As crime has been dropping in many American cities, a growing number of charities and foundations have begun to focus on a new worry: the exploding cost of the nation’s prisons and jails.

More than 1.7 million people are now held in prisons and jails, five times more than were incarcerated 25 years ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. That’s why corrections spending has more than tripled since 1980, from $9-billion to well over $30-billion.

While activists and experts continue to argue about the role that increasingly tough prison sentencing has played in stopping crime, the high costs of building and maintaining jails have begun to bring non-profit groups from different sides of the political spectrum together in pressing for new ways to keep people from breaking laws.

“Costs could be the issue that finally rallies former opponents,” says Ira Schwartz, dean of social work at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Youth Policy.

Many of the new efforts that seek to bring opponents together emphasize the involvement of neighborhood groups in preventing and resolving crime. One promising approach, criminal-justice experts say, is known as “restorative justice.” Non-profit groups have been instrumental in using the approach to persuade victims, offenders, law-enforcement officials, and others to agree to bypass the courts and collectively figure out how to punish criminals and compensate victims.

Other popular efforts involve “community policing,” in which officers are trained to work closely with neighborhood residents and others to prevent and fight crimes in the areas they patrol. A Boston project in which police have worked with probation officers, teachers, civic leaders, and churches to provide swift punishment to juveniles who commit crimes — as well as offering counseling, summer jobs, and other services to kids who show signs of getting into trouble — is widely credited with virtually eliminating juvenile deaths from gun violence.

The program has won kudos from such disparate organizations as the National Rifle Association, which has been touting the success of the program to its three million members, and the Ford Foundation, which last year gave $100,000 to help spread the effort.

To keep such community-based programs going, many charity leaders say they need to work much harder to build public support. Officials of some liberal organizations are harshly critical of their own efforts to sway public sentiment and want to devote more resources to emulating the communications strategies used by conservative crime-fighting groups and foundations. They say that, in many cases, such organizations have spent less but have been more effective in influencing the public.

“We are catching onto something that’s long overdue: The real battleground is public opinion,” says Eric Lotke, a research associate with the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Alexandria, Va., which promotes alternative sentences and other ways to reduce prison costs.

Mr. Lotke and others say non-profit groups need to supplement their traditional approach of simply creating model crime-fighting programs and hoping that their success wins over the public and policymakers. They say charities need to add hard-hitting publicity campaigns to inform citizens about prison costs, form new grassroots coalitions of voters who agree on the need for new approaches, and educate them about how to press lawmakers and others in the criminal-justice system to support them.

Charities have had a tough time winning money for such efforts, especially from foundations, which award relatively few grants to criminal-justice causes. Only about 1 per cent of foundation grant dollars now go to programs that deal with crime, according to a Foundation Center analysis.

While that percentage has remained unchanged for nearly a decade, the costs of the prison buildup have encouraged some foundations to devote more resources to dealing with the issue. Many have also begun to realize that dealing with crime is central to other issues they already care about, such as spurring economic development in poor areas.

The Joyce Foundation, for example, has made a $65,000 grant to the Sentencing Project. The Washington non-profit group, which seeks to find alternatives to jail sentences, will recommend what the foundation can do to influence public policies related to incarceration. The grant, Joyce officials say, stems in part from the fact that such efforts have a bearing on issues they already deal with, such as the foundation’s grants to prevent handgun violence.

But the rising cost of the prison buildup was also a big motivator. “We were struck by the dramatically increased prison population and its cost, both financial and social,” says Deborah Leff, president of the Joyce Foundation. “If something is having this big of an effect on American society, foundations ought to be taking a look.”

Like the Joyce Foundation, other grant makers are realizing that they may have to take a harder look at crime and criminal-justice issues if they want to accomplish long-standing goals.

The philanthropist George Soros’s Open Society Institute created a new Center on Crime, Communities & Culture nearly two years ago and has so far pumped over $9.6-million into incorporating crime fighting into other neighborhood-renewal efforts.

“We’re looking at crime in the larger context of civil society, as both a symptom and opportunity to strengthen society,” says Nancy Mahon, the center’s director. “We cannot look at the criminal-justice system in isolation anymore. That will not get us very far.”

Most of the Soros money has gone to locally based projects to end crime.

“Essentially what they’re all seeking is to rediscover the community’s role in insuring its own safety,” says Ms. Mahon.

One attempt the Soros center has made to spur more community efforts to deal with crime is through supporting restorative-justice programs. The center has recently made a $30,000 grant to the new Restorative Justice Institute in Sterling, Va., a charity that grew out of Prison Fellowship Ministries, a religious organization.

Many experts are convinced of the potential of restorative justice to not only reduce corrections costs but to reform the criminal-jus tice system in other ways, largely because it appeals to so many groups with differing political views.

“Restorative justice draws support from people across the political spectrum,” says Ed McGarrell, director of the Crime Control Policy Center of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Indianapolis. “Conservatives like the way restorative justice holds criminals responsible and gives the victim a say in how the offender is punished. For liberals, it’s a positive intervention, an alternative to incarceration. There are elements attractive to all.”

Two foundations are so intrigued by the idea that they have provided more than $750,000 to help the center evaluate an Indianapolis restorative-justice program that began operating in September. The center received more than $600,000 from the Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis and $150,000 from the William H. Donner Foundation in New York.

Such evaluations will help charity leaders decide whether to press ahead with restorative-justice programs, but some are already convinced that the idea works, especially for non-violent, juvenile offenders.

The Youth Service Bureau, a Forest Lake, Minn., charity that works with juvenile offenders, says that its restorative-justice program has significantly reduced the number of young people who commit repeat offenses.

The charity has examined the records of 300 youngsters who participated with family members in the program, which was created last year. Through the program, young people work with a committee composed of crime victims and other community representatives to hammer out appropriate punishments for shoplifting, vandalism, assault, and other such offenses. The youngsters are required to listen to victims’ descriptions of how the crime affected them, write a letter of apology, and calculate the costs of their crime by considering how it has affected all of the parties involved.

One 15-year-old boy recently caught stealing a fishing lure that cost only $1.50, for example, thought he had committed only a minor offense. Working with the panel, he realized that the theft actually cost several hundred dollars, due to related costs, such as the expense his parents incurred by taking time off work when he was apprehended for stealing.

Youth Service Bureau officials say that less than 2 per cent of the kids in the new program have committed a second offense within six months of entering the program. That’s better than the 7-per-cent recidivism rate that the charity has come to expect with young offenders who complete community-service projects in another program and much lower than the rate for kids who are incarcer ated.

“With restorative justice, we see so many positive things, and parents say they love it,” says Barbara Swanson, executive director of the Youth Service Bureau. “We need this in every community.”

But not everybody thinks restorative justice is necessarily a good approach. Some experts say that charities need to insure that the programs reduce court caseloads, detention rates, and repeat offenses before non-profit groups press ahead with the idea.

Some victims’ advocates are also worried by the popularity of restorative justice and fear that if it is not applied carefully, many offenders will get off too lightly.

And in a few cases, local law-enforcement officials have been unwilling or slow to refer offenders to restorative-justice programs. Some have expressed doubts about whether such programs would violate laws governing crime enforcement.

In spite of the fact that restorative justice has not been universally endorsed, advocates such as Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project say one of its big draws is that ”it avoids the prison-no prison debate.”

That debate is especially divisive because research is inconclusive about exactly why violent crime has decreased by 10 per cent since 1994 and non-violent offenses, such as burglary and car theft, have continued a 20-year decline. Some experts say that crime is going down because more and more offenders are now locked up and off the streets, but others contend that the crime drop is due to changing demographic patterns, shifts in the drug trade, and other factors.

To steer away from that debate, some organizations are trying to focus more on ways to build coalitions to prevent crime and less on the ways offenders are punished.

The Youth Law Center, a Washington charity that seeks new ways to deal with youthful offenders, is looking for foundation grants to help pay for a new three-year project to reduce the number of minority youths behind bars. The project, which has a $3.3-million price tag, will try to encourage local law-enforcement groups, health-care professionals, and national organizations for minorities like the N.A.A.C.P. to jointly pro mote efforts to reduce criminal behavior and incarceration rates of young minority-group members.

“We need to bring all of these groups together to work in the same direction,” says Mark Soler, head of the Youth Law Center. “That has not been done before.”

In another ambitious crime-fighting program, the California Wellness Foundation is halfway through a $65-million, decade-long effort to prevent kids from committing violent crimes that land them in the corrections system.

A central strategy of the foundation’s effort is an $11-million publicity campaign run largely by Martin & Glantz, a San Francisco communications-consulting company. It seeks to inform people about various policy options to prevent violence and to create a broad-based group of community leaders who will press legislators to enact new measures to restrict kids’ access to guns.

The first phase of the publicity campaign sought to show California residents that the leading cause of death for people aged 24 and younger is gunshot and to convince them that young people are victims of crime, not just perpetrators. To get that message across, the campaign has used paid advertising and other materials, some of which were screened by kids.”Do we have to draw a picture for you?” said one poster, a photograph of a crayon box filled with bullets. ”Youth want you to know: Handguns are the number one killer of California kids.”

Campaign leaders also conducted public-opinion polls showing that once voters and gun owners became aware of such statistics and other facts about the state’s existing handgun policies, they were more likely to say they would support efforts to control access to guns. Those findings were sent to community leaders, civic organizations, and other groups who might influence legislators.

Campaign leaders also arranged a statewide videoconference that drew more than 1,500 local city-council members, hospital and public-health officials, executives from non-profit youth groups, police officers, journalists, and other civic leaders. They all received a portfolio containing fact sheets, press clippings, public-opinion surveys, and analyses of policies that could prevent youth violence.

Since the campaign began, the number of California cities and counties that restrict the manufacture and sale of handguns has jumped from 45 to 144. And, last year the state’s Legislature voted to prohibit “Saturday night specials,” low-cost handguns that critics say are particularly deadly because they lack safety features found in more expensive firearms.

The campaign did not fully succeed in meeting its goal. The decision by Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, to veto the legislation — in part due to strong opposition from the National Rifle Association and other groups — is a sign of the tenuousness of many of the new coalitions to fight crime.

Even so, Gina Glantz, president of the company that led the campaign, describes it as “a significant win” to have gotten the bill through the Legislature. “You do not make a significant policy change overnight,” she says, “and we now have a new broad array of people from across the state, both liberals and conservatives, who are committed to controlling handgun access.”

That would never have happened, she says, if the campaign had not gone several steps beyond traditional publicity efforts.

“You can’t just do a public-service ad with an 800 phone number and send a media kit to people who call in,” Ms. Glantz says. “That might have worked in Walter Cronkite’s time, when there were only three television networks, but those days are over.”

On issues like crime and violence, she adds, “you have to do more to bring people together.”