Scattershot Youth Violence War Still Gropes for Answers

President Clinton’s remedies for youth violence, like his solutions to other problems, have created seemingly conflicting policies that try to appeal to everyone on the political spectrum but end up pleasing few.

During his term in the White House, the president and his Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention pushed programs that stressed prevention over punishment and incarceration. But the Clinton administration also fashioned policies that make it easier for prosecutors to try more juveniles in adult courts.

"I really feel that the federal government, with some modest exceptions, has taken a pass on juvenile justice, and has actually politicized it," says Paul DeMuro, a juvenile justice consultant and federal court monitor.

“They have demonized delinquents, particularly minority delinquents," DeMuro adds. "My response is, to echo the phrase from the McCarthy hearings: Have you no decency?"

Grading the President

Critics and supporters of the president’s youth violence prevention efforts give him high marks for identifying and pushing effective prevention programs in his 1994 crime bill. A Republican-led Congress has crippled those programs by failing to put up an estimated 95 percent of the dollars requested by the White House.

Juvenile justice experts and practitioners also praise Clinton for his willingness to link youth crime to teens’ easy access to handguns, a subject that was taboo under Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush.

The administration’s successes in the juvenile justice arena include OJJDP’s much-acclaimed Comprehensive Strategy for combating youth crime, which identified effective prevention programs across the country, and a 1995 study of the legal representation provided juvenile offenders. That study, the first-ever nationwide analysis of the juvenile legal defense system, found that most juvenile justice attorneys were too overloaded with cases to effectively represent their clients in court.

Kentucky followed up the OJJDP study with its own evaluation of its juvenile justice system, and found many of the same problems. A similar study is expected to get underway in Ohio this year.

“I think OJJDP has done its best work in getting information out on good programs,” observes Mark Soler of the Washington-based Youth Law Center. “It has done a far better job than any other administration of putting information together, getting reports out, and making the information available all over the country.”

But many in the juvenile justice field, including Soler, give President Clinton a failing grade for advocating policies that encourage federal and state prosecutors to try juveniles as young as 13 years old in adult courts. The president unveiled this policy during last year’s election, and reintroduced it in February as part of his proposal to crack down on gangs and youth violence.

Overall, the president gets low marks, or an incomplete, for his juvenile justice policies.

“For the past three years, the whole juvenile justice policy of this administration has been talking about prevention and trying kids as adults,” notes Donna Hamparian, a consultant to OJJDP and an evaluator of boot camps. “My argument is, we really need to have something in between those two things. Like community-based facilities for offenders. Like early intervention.”

“We don’t use restitution and community service enough,” Hamparian notes. “It works, particularly if the restitution is agreed to by the victim and the offender.”

Reassessing the 1994 Crime Bill

Some critics question whether the administration’s 1994 crime bill, the high mark of its effort to push prevention over punishment for youth offenders, was little more than breast-beating. Eric Sterling of the Washington-based Criminal Justice Policy Foundation points out that the administration’s spending plans for crime prevention programs, in retrospect, appear highly unrealistic.

For instance, spending on family and school intervention programs to combat youth crime would have increased from $37 million in Fiscal Year 1995 to more than $201 million by FY 2000. “This would add up to real money, but I think it was all posturing,” Sterling, a former House Judiciary Committee staffer, now concludes.

He doesn’t believe those dollars would have been approved by Congress even if Republicans hadn’t seized control in the 1994 elections. The GOP takeover of the House and Senate led to congressional action in 1995 emasculating much of the administration’s 1994 crime bill, particularly the prevention programs.

“There’s criticism to be handed out all around,” concedes Peter Edelman, the former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services official who often acted as the administration’s point man on youth violence prevention programs.

“The basic problem was that the Republicans took over the Congress and were not the least bit interested in those prevention programs, with the exception of violence against women,” says Edelman, now at Georgetown University’s Law Center.

“Whatever impact that was constructive that he [Clinton] was going to have was cut off by the loss of Congress,” Edelman contends. “So I don’t think there was a very great impact [on youth violence].”

Although OJJDP has emphasized evaluation of prevention programs to determine what works before investing dollars, the White House doesn’t appear to be paying attention. The crime prevention plans offered this year by the administration, as well as bills put forth separately by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, continue the growth in spending on boot camps and programs such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education [D.A.R.E].

A nationwide study by University of Maryland criminologists, billed as the most comprehensive study ever conducted of crime prevention programs, concluded that boot camps and drug education classes have had little impact on crime. The study was commissioned by Congress last year, and released in April.

Previous studies of DARE and boot camps have reached similar conclusions.

New Hampshire officials this spring decide to shut down the expensive Laconia boot camp after concluding that the recidivism rate among boot camp participants roughly equaled that among youth in the general prison population. New Hampshire was one of the first states to experiment with boot camps. Boot camps in other states, including Maryland and Arizona, have closed during the past two years.

Trying Kids as AdultsAs for its much-criticized advocacy of transferring violent youth to adult courts for trial, the White House can point to a recent development that appears to certify its approach, and belies claims made by critics.

Following the Clinton administration’s lead, Virginia last year gave state prosecutors the power to try many more juveniles as adults. But during the 10-month period after the law went into effect last July, the number of juveniles tried in state circuit courts had increased only slightly.

“I don’t think there has been a change in our practices as a whole,” says Burns. “I don’t see any danger in our state because we still have a lot of hoops to jump through, even with the new mandatory transfer for murder, rape and robbery.”

“I think we kind of have it under control, knock on wood.”

The Virginia experience may do little to calm concerns among juvenile justice practitioners that waiving youth offenders into adult court will harm juveniles, increase recidivism rates and eventually lead to the collapse of the nation’s more rehabilitative juvenile justice programs. Opponents of juvenile transfers dismiss Virginia’s early results as an isolated example.

For evidence to bolster their concerns, they point to Florida’s 15-year experience with juvenile waivers, which hasn’t reduced youth crime. The recidivism rate among juveniles transferred to adult courts in that state has increased by as much as 30 percent among some offenders, according to recent studies. Many of these transfers occurred in Dade County when now-Attorney General Jane Reno was chief prosecutor and now-OJJ Administrator Shay Bilchick managed juvenile cases.

Mark Soler of the Youth Law Center says the same results can be found among 16- and 17-year-olds tried in New York’s adult courts.

“That’s a very sobering finding for an agency [OJJDP] that’s promoting sending more kids into the adult system,” Soler warns. “We’re sowing the seeds for more problems down the line.”

Evaluating Prevention Programs

Although the Republican-led Congress scuttled many of the administration’s youth violence prevention projects, federal and state governments, and private foundations, are still pouring tens of millions of dollars into community anti-violence programs around the country. Much of this money is flowing to programs with no track record, and no evaluation proving that they actually reduce violence.

For the past four years, Del Elliott’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado has been struggling to find just 10 programs nationwide that can substantiate claims of reducing violence, delinquency or drug use.

“We have been funded to develop 10 blueprint programs, and we’ve only identified seven,” Elliott confirmed in a recent interview. “We’re still looking for the other three.”

The center’s search is being conducted under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation in New York. Elliott says the foundation intends to reproduce these programs in communities around the country.

His selection criteria are pretty tough. Programs must have operated successfully at multiple sites, and evaluations must show effective impact, and long-lasting behavioral changes in youth.

“We wanted to cover the whole spectrum, from early childhood to interventions for kids making the transition into adolescence to late adolescence.” Elliott offers. “But the fact is there are few programs out there that come close to meeting our three criteria that we didn’t have that choice.”

Stepped-up funding of anti-violence programs has followed President Clinton’s campaign to control handguns and automatic weapons and sponsors are insisting that evaluations be part of the program’s designs.

In January, the National Science Foundation awarded $12.1 million to a dozen universities joined under the umbrella of the National Consortium on Violence Research and headed by Carnegie Mellon criminologist Alfred Blumstein. The study, reportedly off to a very rocky start, is expected to take five years – and seek answers on all types of violence, including youth violence.

The Justice Department, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and a group of foundations are sponsoring the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention. Started in 1994, the Washington, D.C., agency headed by former HHS staffer Linda Bowen has just awarded grants to Minneapolis and 10 other cities to generate innovative community responses to violence. An evaluation has been built in to the $8 million program.

Other foundation initiatives include California Wellness, the main financial backer of a $35 million, five-year series of 16 collaborations around California which involve several foundations in projects to develop leadership, policies and community action to combat violence. California Wellness also supports individual programs that try to combat violence – especially homicide – in young people under age 24 by targeting such root causes as racism, oppression, alcohol and drugs.

Recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation posted a $5-million “incentive fund” to be used in the 27 communities with Knight-Ridder newspapers to help “reduce or prevent youth violence.” University of Illinois-Chicago psychologist Nancy Guerra is providing technical assistance.

Evaluating the Evaluators

Since 1992, Carnegie Corporation of New York has mounted a three-pronged $1 million annual anti-violence campaign featuring Del Elliott’s search for replicable prevention programs ($300,000), Marci Kelly’s scrutiny of television and Hollywood through her Studio City-based Media Scope ($350,000) and creation of the National Network of Violence Prevention Practitioners by the Educational Development Center in Boston ($250,000).

The network headed for the past two years by Gwendolyn Dilworth, recently has expanded from 22 charter members to about 160 members. “Our vision is to forge a national movement to prevent youth violence,” Dilworth told YOUTH TODAY. The network was set up to distribute research findings and originally was supposed to be cooperating closely with Del Elliott’s Violence Center to help members evaluate their programs.

“But we’ve not heard from any of those programs,” says Elliott. “I think that whole evaluation piece has fallen through the cracks because of budgetary constraints.” In fact, reports Elliott, he’s had almost no contact with EDC in two years.

Contacted by telephone, several of the network’s members (the membership list was obtained from another source) said they found the network’s newsletter and other materials helpful. Many members had only recently signed on, however, including 26 involved with the state of Arkansas’ $2 million Common Ground initiative of local community programs designed to prevent the onset of violence by young people. The network has an Internet web site but only members can access its information services.

Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health and the violence prevention movement’s current messiah, has authored a violence prevention curriculum that is marketed by the Educational Development Center.

Michael MacDonald of the Hands Without Guns anti-violence program for Boston youths, a new network member, credits the preachings of Prothrow-Stith, starting in the 1980s, with creating a “climate of violence prevention” that has helped eliminate youth homicides in the city over the past many months. In her speeches Prothrow-Stith asks the audience to help “break the cycle of meanness” toward young people and help them rather than ignore their needs.

“Activists bought into what she was saying, that violence could be prevented like a public health problem, and so did the police,” MacDonald said. “But it was also true that the activists bought into the fact that there are a small number of people in some neighborhoods who are holding them hostage and have to be removed by the police.”

This kind of leadership – a meeting of minds and purpose – is needed nationally to bring coherence to the “violence prevention cottage industry,” says National Council on Crime and Delinquency President Barry Krisberg.

“One of the questions that should be asked of these programs is to what extent they are targeting their resources at the most at-risk kids?” Krisberg says.

A while ago, at the behest of a foundation, Krisberg said he attempted to pull together a powwow of prominent movers and shakers – funders, researchers and information disseminators – in the violence prevention field. But he failed to bring off a meeting.

“I couldn’t get people to spend a couple of days comparing notes. People would ask: ‘will this lead to major new sources of funding?’

“For whatever reasons, entrepreneurial, turf whatever, there’s an unwillingness on the part of a fairly substantial number of people – universities, foundations, nonprofits etc. – who are not coming together, sharing notes and building coherence around this field.”

Resources

Barry Krisberg, President
National Council on Crime and Delinquency
658 Market St., Suite 620
San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 896-6223
Fax: (415) 896-6223

Delbert S. Elliott, Director
Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence
910 28th St., Campus Box 442
Boulder, CO 80309-0442
(303) 492-1032
Fax: (303) 443-3297

Gwendolyn Dilworth
National Network of Violence Prevention Practitioners
Education Development Center
55 Chapel St.
Newton, MA 02158-1060
(617) 969-7100
Fax: (617) 527-4096

Linda Bowen, Executive Director
National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention
815 15th St., NW, Ste. 801
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 393-7731
Fax: (202) 393-4148

Marci Kelly, President
Media Scope
12711 Ventura Blvd., Ste. 248
Studio City, CA 91604
(818) 508-2080
Fax: (818) 508-2088

Publication

The Prevention of Youth Violence: A Framework for Community Action
CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control
4770 Buford Highway NE
Atlanta, GA 30341-3724
(770) 488-4224
Fax: (770) 488-4349

Cummins, Ken. "Scattershot Youth Violence War Still Gropes for Answers." Youth Today, May/June 1997, p. 1.

©2000 Youth Today. Reprinted with permission from Youth Today. All rights reserved.