Declaring peace on crime - smarter ways to reduce crime and misery

In the last issue of The Humanist, I argued that our current crime, control policies have proven to be an abysmal failure.

Unfortunately, however, critics of mainstream crime policy have not provided a comprehensive vision of an alternative strategy, thus ceding the crime "issue" to the society's most conservative forces. Instead of the old get-tough policies, we need a new get-smart strategy. We need to reject the outdated cliches of crime control, including the notion that draconian punishments, increased incarceration, and official violence are the only ways to get "serious" about crime. People want peaceful communities. Only justice can produce that peace; but only peaceful, nonviolent means can produce justice--including criminal justice.

A peace movement against crime would not perpetuate conventional "law-and-order" strategies. It would not promote the self-serving perspectives of the criminal-justice industry, nor would it embrace official responses designed to coopt victim movements and citizen action. Most importantly, it would not analyze the "crime problem" piecemeal, apart from con, temporary social conditions. These are among the reasons why mainstream crime policy repeatedly fails.

A strategy of active nonviolence may well be the only realistic way of reducing crime and victimization. Instead of waging endless (and losing) "wars" against crime, perhaps it is time we gave peace a chance. Such a strategy would include:

A Human Rights Strategy

Crime victims and communities in general now pursue a piece, meal rights competition against offenders--a zero-sum game in which one group's well-being relies on the other's misery. In, stead, we should embrace a human-rights strategy which recognizes crime's cultural sources (often ignored or even exploited by the elites we now rely upon as our protectors). A human, rights analysis recognizes the connection between social victimization and criminal victimization, as suggested, for example, in the recent United Nations Declaration on the Victims of Crime and Abuses of Power. It stresses the importance of substantive and procedural rights for victims, offenders, and other citizens alike.

Equal Laws for All

There are limits to the changes the legal system can produce. The law cannot stop crime; in particular, imposing draconian punishments will not prevent victimization, as our already stringent penalties make clear. Nevertheless, we can make some important adjustments in the law in order to productively refocus law-enforcement energies and eliminate discriminatory double standards. Criminal law must be reconstructed according to the real harm crime causes others.

* Decriminalization. We should decriminalize drug use and possession, end our counterproductive drug wars, and divert law enforcement to more serious harms, thereby eliminating the extensive crime and violence which drug criminalization generates. Drug abuse should be addressed through treatment, education, and social revitalization. Likewise, gambling, prostitution, sodomy, and other victimless "crimes" should also be decriminalized.

* Depenalization. Criminal penalties should be reevaluated and reduced. Imprisonment does not achieve its penological objectives; instead, it generates more crime. Incarceration should be mandated only as a last resort, and more effective alternatives to prison should instead be incorporated into the criminal law.

* Criminalization. Punishment should address the harm caused by the offender and not his or her social or economic status. Corporate and official wrongdoing--Wall Street stock fraud, the savings-and-loan debacle, Iraqgate, and the Housing and Urban Development scandal, to name but a few examples--produce far more damage, loss, and injury than common crimes. These harms should be incorporated into the criminal law and sanctioned proportional to their impact. Penal in, equalities between street crime and white-collar corporate or official offenses should be eliminated.

* Gun control. The insane proliferation of firearms in the United States promotes crime, violence, and accidental shootings. Comprehensive and stringent gun-control laws should be adopted nationally and in each of the states to prevent new sales and to begin eliminating the millions of guns already in distribution. It should be obvious by now that arms control is as important to domestic peace as it is to world peace.

Crime Control Instead of Social Control

Law-enforcement agencies continue to devote overwhelming resources to largely fruitless anti-crime crusades which increase rather than decrease victimization. "Victimless crime" enforcement dominates police work, and enforcement double standards ensure that our efforts at "crime control" are in reality aimed at social control in poor and minority communities.

The criminal process must be reoriented. We must assess the limits of what enforcement can actually achieve and refocus it--equitably--on the most serious victimization. By reordering police priorities, we can help relieve the burden on overloaded courtrooms and overworked law-enforcement agencies.

An effort to pursue genuine crime control would include:

* A cultural strategy. Crime doesn't happen because people are inherently evil, enforcement is lax, or victims are careless. Instead, crime's roots can be found in social, cultural, and economic injustice; only serious social change will stop it. Thus, law enforcement cannot be expected to prevent crime; we must abandon such unrealistic expectations about police work. To the limited extent it can, the criminal process should address the causes of crime, not merely unleash state power against its symptoms.

* A new criminal-justice model. We should pursue a more feminist model of criminal justice, focusing less on how to extirpate crime and more on how to achieve greater social harmony. This is not, as some might protest, a utopian goal; it can be achieved through hard-headed strategies. For example, we should move from a rights-control model of justice based upon hierarchy, conflict, power, and dehumanization to a care-response model based upon equality, conflict resolution, mutuality, and empathy. Rather than asking, "How effective are our programs in controlling criminals?" we should be asking, "What is lacking in the lives of our neighbors that makes crime an alternative?"

* Problem-oriented policing. Crime results from social disorder, but aggressive order-maintenance by police makes things worse. As unpopular as it may be in some quarters to point this out, criminals are victims too--the products of failed public policies. Our response should be to heal, not to inflict retribution or impose order through force. We must reconstitute police work as community service rather than as community control. The police merely react to crime; instead, they should help communities organize themselves to prevent crime by developing social programs and services (rather than mere protective gadgets and strategies).

To this end, law-enforcement funding should be redistributed to neighborhood programs for helping youth, families, and the disadvantaged. Law-enforcement officers must practice minimal policing and be entirely accountable to communities beyond mere civilian review) rather than to political or bureaucratic hierarchies. Police should practice minimal intervention and pursue serious investigation and detection--especially in such neglected areas as domestic violence--not surveillance and control. State power should be reduced, not enhanced; and police forces should be demilitarized if not eventually disarmed. Finally, bans on police violence must be strictly enforced.

* Equal rights. Law enforcers don't deserve the blame they often feel they get for not stopping crime. To avoid this blame and increase their effectiveness (however illusory), law-enforcement agencies routinely cut comers. Although they are responsible for enforcing the law, in practice they often break it (committing their own crimes) or bend it (violating other people's rights), thereby undermining both their own and others' respect for the law. By viewing crime as a social problem, however, we can help lift the responsibility for crime off law enforcement's shoulders. Under this model, police could begin seeing rights (for offenders, victims, and other citizens alike) not as impediments to their operations but as effective vehicles for reducing crime by helping to eliminate the human-rights in, justices which cause most crime.

Beyond rights protections, law enforcers throughout the system must apply their power equitably to overcome a legacy of discrimination against women, minorities, and the disadvantaged. Helped by more equitable criminal laws and freed from the old double standards, officials should be held responsible for equal enforcement of the law throughout the whole of the criminal-justice process: arrest, charging, counseling, prosecution, conviction, sentencing, and punishment.

Less Punishment

Conventional crime policy promotes harsh criminal penalties which are ineffective, repressive, even counterproductive. (We have both the world's highest incarceration rate and one of the world's highest crime rates.) Harsh penalties achieve no legitimate correctional goal: they don't deter, reform, treat, or rehabilitate. Most prisoners are not a threat to society, but they do become increasingly dangerous the longer they are imprisoned. Likewise, building more prisons doesn't prevent crime one iota; rather, prisons will only be used as warehouses for more and more outcasts of American culture.

A productive correctional strategy requires:

* Equity. We need to eliminate through decriminalization the many vice crimes whose perpetrators now clog our nation's prisons; these "crimes" should be handled through treatment and education. For the remaining serious common crimes, penalties should be reduced: shorter punishment, more surely and equally administered, will be far more effective than draconian punishments unequally administered. As a matter of equity, white-collar corporate and official crimes should not be excused but, rather, should be punished like common crimes--proportional to the harm done.

* Decarceration. While establishing more equitable criminal penalties (and also a more compassionate and responsive society), we should significantly reduce the use of prisons as punishment, thus reducing the crime generated by the institutions' own violence. We should close prisons and slash prison populations--most of whose members, even hardened wardens admit, are no violent threat to society. While aiming for the elimination of most prisons, reduced imprisonment should be accompanied by an upsurge in correctional alternatives--such as restitution, mediation, training, reconciliation, work release, conflict resolution, community service, and psychological and other counseling. Supervised parole and probation should be restored as workable options.

* Rehabilitation. For our current punitive model, we should substitute a treatment or social-action model of corrections that links individual change to social change; individual rehabilitation is achieved not simply by adapting to prevailing social norms but, rather, by working to change the unjust social conditions of that society. We should also restore the role of victim-offender interactions in resolving criminal conflicts.

* Prisoners' rights. For those still in prison, the experience must be made productive; otherwise, more crime will inevitably result. This can be achieved not merely by the right treatment and programs but also by taking seriously prisoners' rights, especially as they affect prison conditions and discipline. All prisons should be required to exceed the United Nations' minimum standards. There must also be minimum educational standards for prison guards. Prisoners must be given widespread privileges within the prison to help them develop responsible life-styles: in particular, their citizenship rights should be preserved as much as possible, as well as their connection to whatever community ties they may once have had. Finally, the death penalty --a fundamental human-rights violation--should be universally abolished.

A New Emphasis on Communities

Conventional crime policy emphasizes evil individuals as the source of crime and rallies communities against the criminals in their midst. Government-sponsored community programs stress police strategies, target-hardening hardware, neighbor, hood vigilance, and official control. Yet, Neighborhood Watches and other government-inspired strategies have little effect on crime, since they largely ignore crime s deeper sources in American communities. And as these strategies fail, vigilantism increases.

Rather than restrictive social control, we need more demoratic public control--community revitalization and social change actually directed by the community's residents, not coopted by officials. We need community crime-control programs to be focused not on creating armed fortresses but, rather, on analyzing the fundamental sources of violence and crime in our neighborhoods--in short, a nonviolent enforcement effort focused on community problem-solving.

A truly independent community crime-prevention program would include:

* Community assessment. By focusing on community conditions as the source of crime and by pursuing strategies to address these conditions, residents would be able to take back their communities from counterproductive political and economic institutions. To do this, we should assess what conditions in the community--for example, unemployment, drug abuse, poor education, lack of opportunity, racial tensions, declining local resources, lack of adequate political representation or power--are actually producing violent or criminal behavior.

* Community strategies. Based on our community diagnosis, we need cooperative planning to recapture local control over political and economic decisions. This would allow the planning of both short-term and long-term strategies to deal with current crime and also strategies to prevent future crime. Communities must organize to demand the resources necessary to address the root causes of crime and other problems.

Community organizations have shown themselves to be more effective than law enforcement in promoting the kind of order that reduces crime. Thus, we should rely more on our own groups, such as community protection councils, and less on formal governmental bureaucracies. Rather than responding to police directives with blind obedience, communities must tell law enforcers what they need based on their own evaluation of the community's problems. Officially imposed stereo-types about what constitutes effective crime control need to be challenged and abandoned.

* Community culture. Taking control of the crime problem can perhaps help communities rediscover or rejuvenate themselves. Since community justice requires a broad assessment of neighborhood conditions rather than artificially isolating the crime problem, communities could use the opportunity to help clarify and define what they stand for, what values they represent. This can produce healthier, less atomized, more cooperative communities, which in itself is conducive to reducing crime, violence, and conflict. Organized, cooperative, and politically active communities are less crime-ridden than other communities.

* Community politics. To get some adequate response to its own assessment of its needs, each community must develop an effective politics. In other words, communities must learn how to get and exercise power; with that power, they should establish local justice institutions which respond more directly to the community's needs than distant or outside bureaucracies will. These include programs for police review, mediation and dispute resolution, community policing and corrections, rape crisis and domestic violence counseling, and community drug programs. A revitalized citizen politics is needed to convince people that we can reduce crime, we can solve our community's problems, and we can have some control over our own lives.

Social and Economic Justice

Mainstream crime, control policy reflects and reinforces contemporary American culture. It ignores the social injustices under, lying most crime and blocks the social change most needed to eliminate those injustices. A culture that celebrates violence at the same time that it generates widespread powerlessness and despair can only produce a cycle of violence which is then further perpetuated by violent official responses. If we don't begin moving toward a new Culture, crime and violence will continue unabated.

We can achieve a less violent culture only by addressing the roots of American crime, which are deeply embedded in our political and economic institutions. Quite simply, those institutions create adverse social conditions which violate people's human rights; they foster the conditions which breed most crime. Taking human rights seriously requires not only a more just legal system and a less criminal government but basic changes in the American system. Like the former Soviet Union, the United States also needs a kind of glasnost and perestroika.

Achieving the social justice necessary for reducing crime re, quires:

* Economic democracy. We need structural changes which would democratize both the process and the outcomes of the American economic system. Serious policy reforms are required to overcome such problems as poverty, inequality, unemployment, racism and sexism, broken families, and community disintegration--the real roots of crime in America.

Economic democracy would require, for starters, a comprehensive social insurance scheme (similar to European models) for all Americans and should include approaches such as workplace democracy, public ownership, industrial cooperatives, family care, full employment and job training, universal shelter and nutrition, equal educational opportunity, minimum guaranteed standards of living, public control of investment, national health care, demilitarization, and real anti-trust enforcement. Corporate harms should be criminalized like common crimes, and corporate power severely curtailed.

We must pay particular attention to young people, investing in preventive programs for drugs and delinquency and rehabilitation schemes which are supported well enough to give juveniles a fighting chance. We need a progressive family policy, including birth control and family planning, day care, and educational reform. We should develop public-sector employment programs and local economic development schemes--not misguided, private-sector "urban enterprise zones" All of this would take place in the larger context of replacing our permanent war economy with a permanent peace economy.

* Political democracy. We need political democracy both in outcomes and in decision-making power. It requires real--not merely formal--participation, choice, and equality of opportunity, as well as decentralization and community control. Obstacles to real political democracy undermine people's power, human rights, and ability to control their own lives in a meaningful way, which in turn produces alienation, powerlessness, and ultimately more crime (committed by people both outside and inside the government). Political empowerment will make crime a less attractive (even a less necessary) alternative and will give people the tools they need to actually control crime within their own communities.

* Cultural democracy. To achieve and sustain political and economic democracy, we need a more democratic culture. We must promote alternative social values in our education, media, and other means of socialization. These values should reflect the aforementioned structural changes; they include non, violence, sharing, public service, cooperation and community, racial and sexual equality, and human dignity and human rights.

Better Thinking on Crime

The prevailing thinking on crime in America assumes that crime is inevitable, that it is committed by irretrievably evil people, and that nothing much can be done short of get, tough measures to hold the line against the society's worst violence. As I've suggested herein, this is an expedient and needlessly pessimistic view, ripe for exploitation by the society's most reactionary forces. We need better thinking on crime than this.

Unfortunately, this view pervades American society; is strongly connected to our general world-view of a planet filled with people who are out to get us or take advantage of us and who understand only toughness and force. This assumption runs deep in the US. media, in government agencies (certainly in the criminal-justice process), in our educational system, and even in the ranks of academic professionals in criminology and victimology. These self-defeating views, which prevent a serious approach to eliminating crime and victimization, are motivated both by politics and philosophy. Both must change. We need a progressive politics which appeals to the best in people--building on what we all have in common and reminding us of our responsibilities toward one another--as well as a progressive philosophy that encourages the bright side of human nature.

The recent Seville Statement on Violence, signed by many of the world's leading researchers, concluded that human beings are not inherently violent; violence results from social conditions. Thus, we need a more radical criminology which distinguishes itself from official perspectives and which calls for the kind of fundamental changes in American culture needed to seriously reduce crime and victimization. We should develop a notion of "criminology as peacemaking"--a perspective that should be more widely embraced not only by academics but by criminal-justice and victim-service practitioners.

The media must finally discard its old, stereotyped, and superficial thinking on crime if the public is ever expected to understand what really causes crime and what can be done about it. Crime has long been an issue exploited by the political right. Political progressives must begin taking the issue back, providing new hope and--most importantly--new solutions that don't recycle the failed policies of either liberals or conservatives. To do this publicly, we must challenge the media generally and their crime coverage in particular; media activists have already begun this fundamental task. Finally, not only must we educate people differently about the causes of crime and violence, we must also educate to develop other societal values than competition, aggressiveness, material accumulation, hostile individualism, and mindless consumption--values not unrelated to the causes of crime and violence in American society.

Taking crime seriously is a tall order, but short of addressing the social and economic causes of crime, we will all gain little from the piecemeal reforms that have been adopted thus far. While the strategy proposed herein faces serious (and obvious) political obstacles, it is unlikely to fail as miserably as official programs have so far; indeed, it is a strategy that could not only succeed against crime but could also help to undo various other kinds of victimization occurring in American society. Such a strategy may also finally shake us from the debilitating assumption that we can do nothing other than what we've always done.

Do we want, ultimately, to control crime? Then let us all join in the effort to make this a more equitable, just, progressive, compassionate, and democratic society. It is as simple--and as difficult--as that.

Robert Elias is chair of legal studies at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of The Politics of Victimization (Oxford University Press, 1986) and Victims Still: The Political Manipulation of Crime Victims (Sage Publications, 1993), and coeditor of Rethinking Peace (Lynne Rienner, 1994).

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