Attacking Juvenile Crime

According to the Council on Crime in America, crimes committed by boys aged 14 to 17 will increase by 23 percent between 1995 and 2000. If recent trends continue, much of these crimes will be violent. Congressman Bill McCollum of Florida has introduced a bill in Congress to address the problem of juvenile crime. In a recent Heritage paper, James Wootton and Robert O. Heck, however, note that juvenile crime is primarily a state and local responsibility, and suggest three policies to help address the looming crisis. They urge states to try all juveniles who commit heinous crimes as adults and to enact truth-in-sentencing laws to ensure that violent offenders serve at least 85 percent of their sentences.

In addition, the authors propose that states and localities integrate innovative community police work with the efforts of community leaders and other agencies in the criminal-justice system. And they applaud efforts to target and track serious habitual offenders, including juveniles, through SHOCAP, or Serious Habitual Offenders Comprehensive Action Program. SHOCAP combines sophisticated data collection and crime analysis with community police work to identify and track teenage criminals who are habitually violent. The key component is cooperation, among both all local agencies that deal with juveniles offenders-probation and parole offices, juvenile court, social services, schools, prosecutors, and public housing-and also among state and local agencies that collect and analyze data on arrests and incarceration.

According to journalist Heather Mac Donald, when they were first founded, the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations provided a "luminous example" of how private philanthropy can improve the lives of millions. But in the 1960s and 1970s, these foundations -- along with many smaller groups that modeled themselves on the three leviathans -- became radicalized, so that they now constitute "a battering ram targeted at American society."

The results have been devastating. "Progressive" foundations are fighting welfare reform by funding Washington-based think tanks like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, whose director won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in 1996. They have helped saddle American institutions with a pervasive racial quota system. In the name of multiculturalism, they have striven to undermine the very idea of a common American culture. They have promoted the rise of a host of "victim" groups who use the courts as a way of short-circuiting the democratic process. And foundation-supported "community activists," arguing that "social change" requires "encouraging local adults to engage youth in frank and open discussions regarding sexuality," have tried to undermine traditional values in communities across the country.

Under former White House national security advisor McGeorge Bundy, the Ford Foundation played an especially pernicious role, funding such endeavors as the 1968 school decentralization experiment in the Ocean-Hill Brownsville section of Brooklyn that fractured the black-Jewish civil rights coalition and soured race relations in New York for years afterward. Ford's radical, anti-capitalist orientation led Henry Ford II to resign from its Board of Directors in 1977.

But smaller foundations have also caused havoc. The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, for example, funded one of the lawsuits that led to the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, a major cause of homelessness in America today. Currently, it is generously supporting New York's Legal Aid Society's Homeless Family Rights Project, which has been suing the city for over a decade to require immediate housing for families claiming to be homeless.

Simultaneously, however, it is promoting a tight housing market by bankrolling rent-control advocacy groups like the New York State Tenant and Neighborhood Information Services, thanks to which New York is the only city in America to have maintained rent control continuously since the end of World War II.

Mac Donald believes that the major foundations need to rethink their mission. "The mega-foundations should repress their yearning for activism once and for all. The glories of early 20th-century philanthropy were produced by working within accepted notions of social improvement, not against them." Foundations will cease to do harm only when they sever their ties to the counterculture of the 1960s.

* "The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse" by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, Autumn 1996.

In 1982, criminologist George L. Kelling and political scientist James Q. Wilson co-authored the now-famous "Broken Windows" article in the Atlantic Monthly. They argued that crime and public disorder were closely connected. "If a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired," they wrote, "all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. . . . One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares," and once that signal is widely broadcast, law-abiding citizens will avoid areas with broken windows, criminals will move in, and a heretofore orderly neighborhood will quickly deteriorate into a crime-ridden slum.

In this book, Kelling and his co-author, social anthropologist Catherine M. Coles, have made the idea of public order maintenance -- "fixing broken windows" -- the cornerstone of a new, community-based approach to law enforcement. Taking issue with the conventional crime-fighting approach that seeks to apprehend predators after they have committed their crimes, Kelling and Coles advocate a preventive strategy of combating public disorder such as "aggressive panhandling, street prostitution, drunkenness and public drinking, menacing behavior, harassment, obstruction of streets and public spaces, vandalism and graffiti, public urination and defecation, unlicensed vending and peddling, unsolicited window washing of cars ('squeegeeing'), and other such acts."

The "crime-prevention" approach to law enforcement was first adopted on a major scale by William Bratton in 1990, when he was appointed to head the New York Transit Police Department and charged with "taking back the subway for the people of New York." Under Bratton, police were encouraged to uphold public order in the subway system first by warning passengers who refused to obey subway rules, then by arresting them if they continued to misbehave. Police soon discovered that many offenders charged with relatively minor public order violations -- farebeating, for example -- were wanted on serious felony charges, as well. Consequently, the Transit Police's vigorous campaign on behalf of public order caused a major decline in more serious subway crimes.

In 1994, after becoming New York City's police commissioner under Mayor Giuliani, Bratton applied the approach he had pioneered in the subways to the city's streets. Again, the results were dramatic: "A person arrested for urinating in a park, when questioned about other problems, gave police information that resulted in the confiscation of a small cache of weapons; a motorcyclist cited for not wearing a helmet, on closer inspection, was carrying a 9-mm. handgun, had another in his side bag, and had several high-powered weapons in his apartment; a vendor selling hot merchandise, after being questioned, led police to a fence specializing in stolen weapons. These stories made concrete the importance of dealing with minor problems in order to forestall major problems."

Other cities have begun to emulate New York's successful strategy: In Baltimore, local businesses, police, and security firms have collaborated on so-called Business Improvement Districts dedicated to preventing crime through the restoration of public order; in San Francisco, former mayor Frank Jordan initiated an aggressive Operation Matrix that addressed disorder in various neighborhoods; and in Seattle, city officials are awaiting a decision from the Ninth Circuit Court on the legality of their ordinances prohibiting disorderly behavior on sidewalks.

Kelling and Coles are sensitive to the concerns of civil libertarians, who fear that an order-maintenance strategy will deprive the poor and the homeless of their rights. To avoid such an outcome, they believe that the community and the police must enter into a partnership, "fully inclusive of all racial, ethnic, religious and economic groups," to determine standards of public behavior that are acceptable to everyone. By entering into such a pact, they contend, community members will "publicly indicate that they are conferring authority on officials to act on their behalf" to uphold agreed upon standards. Armed with this authority, police will be empowered to restore public order, thereby "fixing broken windows" and preventing urban neighborhoods from becoming crime-ridden slums.

* Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities by George L. Kelling and Catherine M. Coles (Free Press).

No Place Like Home

The reason public housing has become a "a world ravaged by fear, mistrust and hopelessness" is that all sense of belonging to a community has broken down and social life has returned to a Hobbesian state of nature. This is the conclusion of writers Flagg Taylor and Robert B. Hawkins Jr. in Owning the Dream: Triumph and Hope in the Projects. Compounding the problem, traditional social-service programs have not encouraged public-housing residents to cooperate in rebuilding a viable community. On the contrary, government-run programs have generated a widespread sense of helplessness by creating a dependent class of clients, "who can only consume the services they are given as professionals continually redefine their 'needs.'"

Fortunately, the growing movement toward tenant management of public housing offers an effective alternative to the failed bureaucratic approach. The first resident management association -- Bromley-Heath Tenant Management Corporation in Boston -- was formally incorporated in 1971. Initially, it focused on such relatively simple tasks as "coming together to talk about common goals." Gradually, "trust among residents increased and they began making commitments to one another." Eventually, the Tenant Management Corporation was able to break down the sense of isolation and distrust that prevented Bromley-Heath residents from uniting to defeat the drugdealers and violent criminals who preyed on their community. By hiring and supervising its own security patrol -- many of whose members were development residents -- the corporation "enabled the community to monitor the behavior of its residents and to uphold certain standards of behavior so all residents could enjoy living in a safe neighborhood."

The success of the Bromley Heath experiment in community-building through tenant management encouraged similar efforts in other cities. Eventually, with the help of Robert L. Woodson Sr. of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise and HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, federal money flowed to tenant management groups around the country and programs like HOPE (Home Ownership and Opportunities for People Everywhere) offered incentives for privatizing public housing. As a result, in many tenant-managed projects today, the rates of crime and teenage pregnancy have fallen while employment has risen.

The key to a successful tenant management corporation is a renewed sense of community. Such community-feeling can be fostered, Taylor and Hawkins argue, only if local public housing authorities recognize the right of residents to self-government, and not insist that they remain clients of the established social-service system. Another condition for successful community formation is that the tenant managers have the power to establish standards of behavior, and to screen prospective tenants according to those standards. Democratically elected tenant managers must also have the right to monitor behavior, and impose penalties -- including expulsion from the development -- on those who refuse to abide by the rules.