[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ADDRESSING GANGS:
WHAT'S EFFECTIVE? WHAT'S NOT?
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIME, TERRORISM,
AND HOMELAND SECURITY
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JUNE 10, 2008
__________
Serial No. 110-151
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
Available via the World Wide Web: http://judiciary.house.gov
----------
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
42-827 PDF WASHINGTON : 2009
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800;
DC area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2104 Mail: Stop IDCC,
Washington, DC 20402-0001
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
JOHN CONYERS, Jr., Michigan, Chairman
HOWARD L. BERMAN, California LAMAR SMITH, Texas
RICK BOUCHER, Virginia F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, Jr.,
JERROLD NADLER, New York Wisconsin
ROBERT C. ``BOBBY'' SCOTT, Virginia HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina
MELVIN L. WATT, North Carolina ELTON GALLEGLY, California
ZOE LOFGREN, California BOB GOODLATTE, Virginia
SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
MAXINE WATERS, California DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts CHRIS CANNON, Utah
ROBERT WEXLER, Florida RIC KELLER, Florida
LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California DARRELL ISSA, California
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee MIKE PENCE, Indiana
HANK JOHNSON, Georgia J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia
BETTY SUTTON, Ohio STEVE KING, Iowa
LUIS V. GUTIERREZ, Illinois TOM FEENEY, Florida
BRAD SHERMAN, California TRENT FRANKS, Arizona
TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin LOUIE GOHMERT, Texas
ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York JIM JORDAN, Ohio
ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
ARTUR DAVIS, Alabama
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Florida
KEITH ELLISON, Minnesota
Perry Apelbaum, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Sean McLaughlin, Minority Chief of Staff and General Counsel
------
Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security
ROBERT C. ``BOBBY'' SCOTT, Virginia, Chairman
MAXINE WATERS, California LOUIE GOHMERT, Texas
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia
JERROLD NADLER, New York F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, Jr.,
HANK JOHNSON, Georgia Wisconsin
ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina
SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
ARTUR DAVIS, Alabama DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California
TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin
BETTY SUTTON, Ohio
Bobby Vassar, Chief Counsel
Caroline Lynch, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
JUNE 10, 2008
Page
OPENING STATEMENTS
The Honorable Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott, a Representative in
Congress from the State of Virginia, and Chairman, Subcommittee
on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security..................... 1
The Honorable Louie Gohmert, a Representative in Congress from
the State of Texas, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Crime,
Terrorism, and Homeland Security............................... 3
The Honorable John Conyers, Jr., a Representative in Congress
from the State of Michigan, and Chairman, Committee on the
Judiciary...................................................... 4
The Honorable Lamar Smith, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Texas, and Ranking Member, Committee on the Judiciary. 5
WITNESSES
Mr. Charles Ogletree, Jr., Professor and Director of the Charles
Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, Cambridge, MA
Oral Testimony................................................. 8
Prepared Statement............................................. 35
Mr. Frank Straub, Commissioner, White Plains Department of Public
Safety, White Plains, NY
Oral Testimony................................................. 46
Prepared Statement............................................. 48
Major John Buckovich, Richmond Police Department, Richmond, VA
Oral Testimony................................................. 64
Prepared Statement............................................. 66
Mr. Ely Flores, Leadership Facilitator and Teaching Assistant,
Los Angeles, CA
Oral Testimony................................................. 77
Prepared Statement............................................. 79
Mr. Kevin O'Connor, Associate Attorney General, U.S. Department
of Justice, Washington, DC
Oral Testimony................................................. 83
Prepared Statement............................................. 85
Mr. Robert D. Macy, Executive Director of the Boston Children's
Foundation, Beverly Farms, MA
Oral Testimony................................................. 111
Prepared Statement............................................. 113
APPENDIX
Material Submitted for the Hearing Record........................ 153
ADDRESSING GANGS:
WHAT'S EFFECTIVE? WHAT'S NOT?
----------
TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2008
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism,
and Homeland Security
Committee on the Judiciary,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 1:40 p.m., in
room 2237, Rayburn House Office Building, the Honorable Robert
C. ``Bobby'' Scott (Chairman of the Subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Conyers, Scott, Nadler, Jackson
Lee, Waters, Baldwin, Smith, Gohmert, Coble, Chabot, and
Forbes.
Staff present: Bobby Vassar, Majority Chief Counsel; Rachel
King, Majority Counsel; Mario Dispenza, Majority Fellow, ATF
Detailee; Karen Wilkinson, Majority Fellow, Federal Public
Defender Office Detailee; Veronica Eligan, Majority
Professional Staff Member; Caroline Lynch, Minority Counsel;
and Kelsey Whitlock, Minority Staff Assistant.
Mr. Scott. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. The Committee
will now come to order.
I am pleased to welcome you today to this hearing before
the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security to
discuss what is effective in preventing gang crime and what is
not.
This hearing is the latest of several Subcommittee hearings
we have held to take testimony and counsel from experts in the
field of justice over this session of Congress for the purpose
of developing effective crime legislation.
Today, among our witnesses, we are joined by Professor
Charles Ogletree, the director of the Charles Hamilton Houston
Institute for Race and Justice in Harvard Law School. The
institute recently completed a study and released a policy
brief in March in 2008 entitled ``No More Children Left Behind
Bars: A Briefing on Youth Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime
Prevention.'' The focus of today's hearing will be to discuss
this study's findings which give the most up-to-date
information about evidence-based foundations for sound crime
policy.
Now working on crimes issues over the years, I have learned
that when it comes to crime policy, you have a choice: You can
reduce crime or you can play politics. The politics of crime
calls for the so-called tough-on-crime approach, such as more
death penalties, more life without parole, mandatory minimum
sentences, treating more juveniles as adults or as gang
members.
However, we can now show by research and evidence that
while these approaches score well in political polls, they have
little to do with preventing crime. Under the get-tough
approach, no matter how tough we were last year, we have to get
tougher this year. We have been getting tougher for about 25
years now, and since 1980, we have gone from about 200,000
persons incarcerated in the United States to over two million.
This incarceration binge is not free. The annual prison
costs have gone from $9 billion in 1982 to over $65 billion a
year now. Los Angeles County spends about $2 billion a year in
State, Federal, and local funding to lock people up. In several
cities in my district, we spend between $250 to $500 per
citizen. About $750 to $1,500 per child or, if you target for
at-risk dangerous children, about $1,500 to $3,000 or more per
child per year locking people up.
The chart on the left shows where we are in international
incarceration rates. The United States now is the world's
leading incarcerator by far. The incarceration rate is seven
times the international average. The world average of
incarceration is about 100 persons per 100,000. The average
rate in the United States is over 700 per 100,000, and in some
States, the rate goes over 4,000 per 100,000.
Russia is the next closest with the rate of incarceration
of about 560. Every other nation is below that, such as India.
In the world's largest democracy, 36 people locked up today for
100,000 population; China, the world's largest population, 118
per 100,000; the United States, over 700 and, in some areas,
over 4,000.
The United States has the world's most severe punishments
for crime, especially for juveniles. Of over more than 2,200
juveniles sentenced to life without parole all over the world,
all but about a dozen are in the United States. Some who were
given their sentence as first-time offenders under
circumstances such as being a passenger in a car from which a
drive-by shooting occurred. Examples like this prove that we
are already tough on crime.
All States have provisions that allow, if not require,
juveniles to be treated as adults for trial, sentencing, and
incarceration for serious offenses. Most juveniles treated as
adults are convicted actually for non-violent offenses.
And, again, we are very tough on crime, especially juvenile
crime, and this chart shows it on a graph, that we are off the
charts in terms of incarceration.
And yet crime persists, and it is growing, by some
accounts, even as we continue to cling to our get-tough
approach. Still, under some proposals before this Congress,
such as those who are addressing gangs, we would further expand
the get-tough approach by punishing conspiracies and attempts
the same as completion of the crime. This would result in a lot
more fringe involved individuals being sentenced to harsh
punishments, such as life without parole.
And the impact of the focus on touch enforcement approaches
falls disproportionately on minorities, particularly Black and
Hispanic children. Many studies have established that when
compared to similarly situated White children, minority
children are treated more harshly at every stage of the
juvenile and criminal justice system.
I am concerned that policies, such as expanding the
definition of ``gang'' and expanding big gang databases, would
only exacerbate this problem, with no impact on reducing crime.
Without appropriate intervention, these children will be on
what the Children's Defense Funds has described as a cradle-to-
prison pipeline where many minority children are born on a
trajectory to prison. When we realize that it is possible to
get them on a cradle-to-college pipeline, it is tragic and much
more costly to society in the long run, if we do not do so.
Research and analysis as well as common sense tell us that
no matter how tough the law on the people you prosecute today,
unless you are addressing the underlying reasons for crime,
nothing will change. The next crime wave will simply replace
the ones you have taken out, and the crime continues. So the
get-tough approach has little impact on crime.
Further, all credible research and evidence shows that a
continuum of services for youth identified as being at risk of
involvement in delinquent behavior and those already involved
will save much more money than they cost compared to the
aborted law enforcement and other expenditures, and these
programs are most effective when they are provided in the
context of a coordinated, collaborative strategy involving law
enforcement, educational, social service, mental health, non-
profit, faith-based, and business sectors working with
identified children at risk of involvement in the criminal
justice system.
In the face of all of this evidence, it is curious that we
have continued to rely on the so-called get-tough approach. It
is my fervent hope that with the testimony and evidence that
the Subcommittee will hear today that we will change this focus
of crime legislation from sound bite policies to effective
legislation. I look forward to working with my colleagues as we
adopt these proven concepts.
It is now my pleasure to recognize the esteemed Ranking
Member of the Subcommittee, the gentleman from Texas, Judge
Gohmert.
Mr. Gohmert. Thank you, Chairman Scott.
And thank you for holding this important hearing today on
strategies for combating gang violence.
My colleague from Virginia and I share deep concern for the
impact of violent gangs on our communities and our youth.
Although we may have different approaches for addressing this
issue, our goal is the same.
Today, there are nearly one million gang members in
America--one million. It may be hard for some to appreciate the
magnitude of this, but when you consider that the total number
of Navy and Army active duty personnel is 856,000, then it
becomes a startling figure.
Sadly, the problem of gang violence in America is not a new
one. For decades, gangs of all shapes and sizes have exacted
control of our neighborhoods, brought narcotics and guns to our
street corners, and instilled fear in our families.
Street gangs, prison gangs, biker gangs, even border gangs,
each with different styles and organizations, present a
daunting challenge for law enforcement. Once thought to be only
a problem in our Nation's largest cities, gangs have now
invaded smaller cities and suburban areas, cities like
Richmond, Orlando, Tulsa, and even my home in Tyler, Texas,
where nearly 20 years ago a gang task force was implemented
with sophisticated anti-gang initiatives that had been
traditionally utilized in Los Angeles, New York or Chicago.
Equally troubling is that today's gang members are younger
and younger. Youth gang members commit a high percentage of
gang murders, robberies, and assaults. According to statistics,
nearly one in five gang murders are committed by offenders
under the age of 18. Preventing America's children from joining
a gang is perhaps the greatest hurdle to stopping the growth of
gangs.
In my home state of Texas, rival Mexican drug gangs are at
war with each other across the U.S.-Mexico border. The Gulf
cartel and the Sinaloa cartel have turned Laredo, TX, and
Mexico's neighboring city, Nuevo Laredo, into the most
significant launching point for illegal drugs entering the
United States. It has become basically a war zone.
To protect and expand their criminal operations, these
cartels maintain highly developed intelligence networks on both
sides of the border and employ private armies to carry out
enforcement measures. The Gulf cartel employs a group of former
elite military soldiers known as Los Zetas. Los Zetas have been
instrumental in the Gulf cartel's domination of the drug trade
in Nuevo Laredo. In addition to defending the Gulf cartel's
terrain in northern Mexico, the Zetas are also believed to
control trafficking routes along the eastern half of the U.S.-
Mexico border.
In cities across the country, prevention, education, and
rehabilitation efforts are being combined with law enforcement
strategies to provide a comprehensive approach to dismantling
gangs, prosecuting gang violence, and deterring gang
affiliation, particularly among young people, but violent
international gangs, such as MS-13, or border gangs, such as
Los Zetas, pose a dangerous threat that requires a
sophisticated coordinated law enforcement response.
But one tactic must be mandatory, and that is for greater
border security at a time when the estimates we have heard
indicate that there may be 70 to 75 percent of gang members
illegally here in this country, and the estimate we have seen
and in testimony today, I think, has illustrated that probably
90 percent of the MS-13ers are illegally here.
Gangs have evolved from what they were just a few decades
ago. The answer to the question, ``What is effective to combat
gangs?'' must evolve as well. One size no longer fits all.
I welcome our witnesses. Thank you for joining us today.
And I yield back.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
And we are pleased to be joined by the Chairman of the full
Committee, the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Conyers.
Mr. Conyers. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This is important because we have been dealing with gangs
for decades, if not generations, and there have been unusual
attempts at it. I am glad there is one of our witnesses with a
sociological and hopefully a psychological approach that I will
be very interested in. And, of course, we have our dear friend
from Harvard Law School, Charles Ogletree, who has joined us on
many occasions in the Judiciary Committee.
But I was struck by your observation that unless you deal
with the underlying causes of crime, we are not going to get
very far down the line, and, of course, it requires what is
necessary in all Federal legislative undertakings. You have to
depoliticize the subject matter. You try to deal with health
care, and if you do not depoliticize it, you just get different
groups with their own points of self-interest arguing or
sharing views with one another, and we will not get anywhere.
Gangs, of course, frequently have a racial connotation, and
that is due to, in my view, the fact that it is much easier for
young people of color to get into an unhealthy relationship
with law enforcement than anybody else, namely because we are
still clearing the race situation out of law enforcement and
out of criminal justice and out of the courts and out of the
prisons.
So it does not take a lot of research to realize that with
some of these notions of how to deal with gangs some wanted
increased prosecution. We have some bills, I think, still
laying around. Fortunately, they are in your Committee, so we
sleep pretty comfortably at night.
But these bills say, ``Let's crack down on crime.''
Everybody says, ``Right on. Well, let's get the gangs first.''
And then you get a few young men of color on the corner, and
they say, ``Well, any association like that, that constitutes a
gang, and let's break them up right away.''
And so this kind of simplistic implication of lack of
education, living in a poor economic community, and then having
a broken-down education system on top of all of that, and then
throw in the vast unemployment characteristic--and I used to
laugh about the unemployment statistics. When they are telling
you about 6 percent and 7 percent--oh, and in some places, it
is up to 10--look, there are places inside the inner cities of
America where there is 50 percent unemployment, 60 percent
unemployment. There are more people out of work than are
working.
And then if you were too academic about this, Chairman
Scott, you would start saying, ``Well, let's look at the
technical reasons.'' Look, if you do not have a job, you come
from a broken family, the education system is not working, the
police have frequently associated more as your enemy than as
your friend, and then you say, ``Well, I wonder why they joined
a gang''--and so we are here to begin the exploration, the
continued examination, of a very important subject.
And what this Committee has done--I can say as the longest-
serving Member on it--in the 110th Congress breaks new ground,
and so we continue this exploration of how we get to the truth
in this matter, and that is why I am proud to be with the
Committee today.
Mr. Scott. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
The Ranking Member is with us today, the gentleman from
Texas, Mr. Smith.
Mr. Smith. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
As our children begin their summer vacations, their safety
is now more than ever on the minds of parents across the
country, and these concerns are no longer reserved for families
in large cities. With the spread of violent crime to
traditionally suburban areas and smaller cities, parents in all
parts of the United States fear violence in their
neighborhoods.
Gangs are responsible for a large number of violent crimes
committed each year, including homicides. Experts estimate that
there are more than one million gang members nationwide. In San
Antonio, Texas, my home town, there are over 4,500 gang
members, and those are only the ones who have been identified
and documented by local law enforcement officials.
As part of our efforts to prevent violent crime and curb
the expansion of gangs in our communities, we need to address
the flow of illegal immigration. That is because some of the
most dangerous gangs in America today are comprised primarily
of illegal immigrants.
For example, MS-13 is one of the largest and most violent
gangs in the country, active in at least 38 States and boasting
approximately 30,000 to 50,000 members worldwide. According to
the Center for Immigration Studies, 90 percent of MS-13 members
in the U.S. are illegal immigrants. In California, 80 percent
of the gang's members are illegal immigrants from Mexico and
Central America. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding
warrants for homicides are for illegal immigrants.
Last week, U.S. Marshals arrested three men in the May 31
death of Omar Florencio-Vazquez of Manassas, VA. One of the
three members apprehended, Sebastian Cortez Hernandez, had been
deported in 2003 after being arrested on gang charges.
It is clear that many gangs in the United States are
heavily dependent on the recruitment of illegal immigrants. The
only way to put gangs out of business is to secure our borders
and to facilitate deportations. Such approaches may not solve
all of our gang problems, but they will go a long way toward
solving many of them.
We must also look to strengthen our own laws against gang
members and to beef up sentences both to deter and to
incapacitate gang members. There is also a special Federal role
in promoting cooperation and coordination among various
jurisdictions, especially through task forces and targeted
grants, because many gangs do not respect communities' borders.
Mr. Chairman, I thank you for holding this hearing.
And I want to thank the witnesses for their expert
testimony coming up shortly.
Now I yield back.
Mr. Scott. Thank you. Thank you.
We have a distinguished panel of witnesses with us today to
discuss these important issues.
Our first witness will be Professor Charles Ogletree, the
Harvard Law School professor of law, founder and executive
director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and
Justice. He is a prominent legal theorist who has made an
international reputation by taking a hard look at complex
issues of law and working to secure rights guaranteed by the
Constitution for everyone equally under the law. He has a
bachelor's degree and master's degree in political science from
Stanford and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Dr. Frank Straub is a commissioner for public safety for
the City of White Plains, New York. He has over 24 years of
experience in law enforcement at the Federal, State, and local
levels. He is nationally recognized as an innovator, having
introduced COMSTAT, a concept to improve performance and
implement innovative community policing strategies. He holds a
bachelor's degree in psychology, a master's degree in forensics
psychology, and a Ph.D. in criminal justice.
Our next witness is Major John Buckovich of Richmond,
Virginia, Police Department, who brings a wealth of diverse
investigative, tactical, and organizational experience. He has
received several medals of honor during his service, including
the Medal of Valor, the Police Medal, the SWAT Medal, the
Meritorious Police Duty Award, the Unit Citation, and the
Excellent Police Duty Award. He has a bachelor's degree in
applied science from the University of Richmond and is a
graduate of the FBI Academy.
The next witness will be Ely Flores, a former gang member
who has become a talented organizer, facilitator, and public
speaker. He has worked with many community-based organizations
in the Los Angeles area, working on community organizing,
social awareness workshops, facilitation workshops, asset-based
community development, adultism, leadership development, and
California legal education. He is working on two educational
pursuits at this time. He is working on an associate's degree
in liberal arts from Trade-Technical College in Los Angeles and
is working toward certification in youth development training
by YouthBuild USA.
Our next witness will be Kevin J. O'Connor, associate
attorney general of the United States. He has a wealth of legal
experience, including partnership with the law firm of Day,
Berry & Howard, and served as corporate counsel for the town of
West Hartford, Connecticut, and as a staff attorney for the
United States Exchange Commission. He has a bachelor's degree
from the University of Notre Dame and a J.D. from the
University of Connecticut School of Law.
And our final witness will be Dr. Robert Macy, director of
community services for the trauma center in Boston,
Massachusetts. He has 20 years of experience doing clinical
interventions and academic research in the field of behavioral
health crisis intervention and traumatic incidents management,
which he has presented at numerous regional, national, and
international conferences. He has a bachelor's degree from
Lewis & Clark College, a master's degree in psychology from
Lesley University, and an advanced graduate degree in cognitive
neuroscience from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology
again from Harvard.
Each of our witnesses' written testimony will be made part
of the record in its entirety, and I would ask the witnesses to
summarize your testimony in 5 minutes or less. To help you stay
within that time, there is a timing device at the table which
will start with green, go to yellow when you have about a
minute left, and finally red when your 5 minutes are up.
And we begin with Professor Ogletree.
TESTIMONY OF CHARLES OGLETREE, JR., PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR OF
THE CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON INSTITUTE FOR RACE AND JUSTICE,
CAMBRIDGE, MA
Mr. Ogletree. Thank you, Congressman Bobby Scott. I am very
pleased to be here to testify today.
This is the first time I have been as far away from the
clock in testifying, and so I cannot see how much time I have
left, but I am sure you will remind me.
I am very happy to be here today, and I wanted to have not
only my testimony submitted to the record, but also a report
that we did called ``No More Children Left Behind Bars: A
Briefing on Youth Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention''
that we prepared this past March, having had the chance to
examine several bills that were both in the Senate and the
House.
My colleagues, Dr. Susan Eaton, David Harris, and Johanna
Wald----
Mr. Scott. Without objection, the report will be made part
of the record.
[The information referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Ogletree. Thank you.
Dr. Susan Eaton, David Harris, Johanna Wald, and Daniel
Losen have been working extremely hard on this topic.
And I hope there will be at least two important conclusions
today.
First of all, there is no one on this panel or in this room
who supports the idea of gang violence. We all think it is a
problem and it should be addressed. It is not to suggest there
is not a serious problem, but the problem is how we have
addressed it thus far. The money that we have spent on gangs at
the expense of prevention is just astonishing.
We have focused on targeted groups, many of them male, many
of them Black and Brown, and if you look in this audience
today, you see a lot of young men who have overcome those
challenges and tell us if we invest in our communities, it
makes a huge difference in those who will be able to make a
difference.
And if we want to solve the problem of violent crime, it is
imperative that we focus on the gang members and not every
single person of color who happens to fit the age, the dress,
the race, and the residential profile. It is too inclusive, and
it undermines the idea of having a focused and seriously
addressed criminal justice system.
I also want to acknowledge the work of Dr. Robert Macy who
you will be hearing from momentarily who is providing expert
testimony today, and he supports the most counterproductive
direction that we can move in. It tells you it is to expand the
net of offenses for which youths can be prosecuted and
incarcerated. If we do, he will tell you, we will snare into
that net those children and teenagers who are neither dangerous
nor violent, but very much in need of adult guidance and
direction and opportunities to develop healthy pursuits,
talents, and skills.
Moreover, a strategy that will almost certainly target
children of color who live in the communities that are already
overwhelmed undermines the very purpose of crime prevention. We
can prevent these crimes by addressing more systematically,
more systemically, and more effectively and more costly the
idea from birth to teenage years giving those children a
healthy environment, an opportunity to go to school, family
resources in a community that has programs that addresses them.
In our report, we outline some of the best practices in the
country that have been very effective over the past few years,
and they are there for the Committee to consider.
And one of the problems that you cannot ignore, this idea
of sweeping in gangs has led to an onslaught of sweeping in
Black and Brown males, particularly in places like California
and in places like the City of Detroit and Chicago and
Philadelphia and Washington, DC. You can almost take any map
and see where there is a large conglomerate of African-American
men or Latino men and see an overrepresentation of criminal
justice system.
It is a problem that has been plagued by the absence of
meaningful educational programs, by a net that is too large,
and by the absence of any meaningful efforts to address it
systemically.
Finally, I would say that our institute is very interested
and willing and able to assist this Committee in not only
looking at the data that is available, but also coming up with
recommendations that will address the concerns of those who
want to fight crime and fight the criminals and not just fight
those who are innocent bystanders and who are the byproduct of
a system whose net is much too large, whose focus is much too
general, and whose target is largely men of color who are
African-American and Latino.
We can address those issues much more systemically, and I
hope we have a chance to do that during the course of this
hearing and beyond.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Ogletree follows:]
Prepared Statement of Charles Ogletree, Jr.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
Now Dr. Straub?
TESTIMONY OF FRANK STRAUB, COMMISSIONER, WHITE PLAINS
DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY, WHITE PLAINS, NY
Mr. Straub. Thank you, Chairman Scott and Members of the
Subcommittee, for the opportunity to testify about White Plains
police strategies that have reduced violent crime and gang
activity, improved communication with our young people, and
built trust in our neighborhoods.
In 2006, a series of violent events--a fatal stabbing in
March, a fatal shooting in May, two more stabbings in
September, and a shootout in the city's largest public housing
complex--brought the realities of gang violence to White
Plains.
In response, the police department increased uniform
patrols and stepped up enforcement in crime hot spots.
Detectives identified gang leaders, arrested them and their
crews. The community policing division conducted home visits,
interrupting potential violence, and preventing retaliation.
Police and Youth Bureau representatives met with the
African-American community and ministers in that community who
demanded that the police end the violence. At the same time,
they described incidents that had generated animosity and
distrust between the community and the police.
There is no single response to youth violence and gang
activity. Enforcement alone is insufficient. Long-term
solutions require comprehensive, collaborative models that
offer real alternatives, individualized services, support, and
mentoring.
We partnered with the North American Family Institute to
develop and implement a program to reduce youth-involved
violence and improve community police relations.
The youth-police initiative brings at-risk youth and patrol
officers together to discuss race, respect, street violence,
and gang activity. In role playing, they learn how their
actions and language can escalate street encounters, and by the
end of the 2 weeks, the youth and police officers come to
realize that maybe they are not that different.
Team-building exercises held outdoors in the heart of our
public housing complexes generate community interest and
support. For many residents, this may be the first time they
have seen police officers positively engaging with youth in
their neighborhood.
Step Up, another critical component of our gang reduction
strategy, is based on DOJ's Comprehensive Gang Model program.
At-risk youth enter Step Up through police referrals, youth
bureau outreach, and most recently, young men and women in the
program have recruited their peers. Once engaged, the youth
receive individualized case management to address truancy,
school performance, job skills, teen parenting, substance
abuse, and other issues. Among the 87 young men and women who
have participated in Step Up to date, individual risk levels
and negative police contacts have been reduced by the twelfth
month.
The White Plains Police Department's prisoner re-entry
program, the first in Westchester County, represents a further
effort to prevent violence. A multiagency team led by the
police department meets with county jail inmates 1 month prior
to their release. Social service providers, religious groups,
and community organizations offer employment, housing,
education, mental health, and other services. The police
reinforce the message that criminal activity will not be
tolerated and discuss repercussions of re-offending. In 2007,
the re-entry team met with 84 inmates. Only seven have been re-
arrested.
The White Plains Police Department under my leadership is
committed to fighting crime on all fronts. Traditional police
strategies target high-rate offenders, illegal activities, and
crime hot spots. The community policing division partners with
the city's youth bureau and community organizations to develop
and implement programs that target the factors that drive
violence and gang activity.
As a result, serious crime has declined by 40 percent to
the lowest level in 42 years. There has not been a homicide
since the fatal shooting in May 2006.
The White Plains Police paradigm confirms that the police,
through their actions, enforcement, and community building, can
shape and define the factors that impact crime.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify and for your
leadership regarding the youth crime aspect.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Straub follows:]
Prepared Statement of Frank Straub
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
Major Buckovich?
TESTIMONY OF MAJOR JOHN BUCKOVICH,
RICHMOND POLICE DEPARTMENT, RICHMOND, VA
Mr. Buckovich. Chairman Scott and Members of the Committee,
in response to the rise of violence and gang activity, the
Richmond Police Department has----
Mr. Scott. Could you pull the mic a little bit closer?
Mr. Buckovich. Is that better?
Mr. Scott. Yes, I think so.
Mr. Buckovich. The Richmond Police Department has sought to
develop a focused and comprehensive violent crime and gang
strategy which addresses the systemic enablers of the crime and
that will create lasting partnerships with the community and
our local and Federal law enforcement partners. The key to this
focused strategy is accountability on all levels of our
organization as well as from community members and our law
enforcement partners.
Two important factors in our violent crime and gang
strategy which have produced significant results are our Gang
Reduction Intervention Program, GRIP, and the Cooperative
Violence Reduction Program, known as CVRP.
In 2004, the City of Richmond was awarded a Federal grant
to combat gang violence and the influence of gangs on youth and
our community. GRIP is funded through a grant from the U.S.
Department of Justice.
GRIP has four categories, one being prevention, primary and
secondary. Prevention includes a wide variety of activities
that focus on the entire population in high-crime, high-risk
communities, and the primary prevention strategy for GRIP
centers around providing a single one-stop service and resource
center that facilitates effective distribution of services.
Another part of GRIP is intervention. GRIP incorporates
aggressive outreach and recruitment efforts that are needed to
ensure that these high-risk individuals and their families
receive needed services.
Another part of our GRIP strategy is directed at
suppression and re-entry. Where prevention and intervention
fail, gang leaders are identified and targeted for aggressive
suppression efforts. Re-entry targets serious and gang-involved
offenders who face multiple challenges to re-entering their
community.
Examples of some of the partnerships and programs under our
GRIP initiative include a one-stop resource center, after-
school programs, truancy and dropout prevention, gang awareness
training for both our officers and the community, and directed
police patrol in the targeted neighborhoods.
The centerpiece of GRIP has been its partnership with so
many outstanding organizations, departments, and citizens.
Crime reduction in the targeted communities in 2007 showed
a reduction of 25 percent of robbery of businesses, 20 percent
reduction of robbery of individuals, and a 12 percent reduction
in aggravated assaults.
In 2008, we continued on the reductions over the 2007
reductions. Robbery of businesses have been reduced by 71
percent; robbery of individuals, by 36 percent; and aggravated
assaults, by 31 percent.
To increase communication and coordination of efforts
between the Richmond Police Department and our Federal
partners, the Cooperative Violence Reduction Program was formed
in May of 2005. Member organizations of CVRP include the
Richmond Police Department, Richmond Commonwealth's Attorney's
Office, Attorney General of Virginia, United States Attorney--
Eastern District of Virginia, the Virginia State Police, ATF,
FBI, DEA, and the Virginia Department of Corrections' Probation
and Parole.
The CVRP utilizes an intelligence-driven approach to
identify the most violent neighborhoods and offenders in the
City of Richmond and then deploy the combined resources of the
CVRP partners to interdict, suppress, and prevent violent
crime. The CVRP is a multipronged approach to reducing the
historically high rate of violent crime in the City of
Richmond.
The five prongs that are associated with our CVRP approach
are: homicide and violent crime prevention, this is designed to
gather intelligence, identify neighborhoods and target habitual
offenders using the collective resources of member agencies;
homicide and violent crime deterrence, which is based on the
Boston approach of pulling levers; homicide and violent crime
intervention, which in GRIP is our centerpiece for this portion
of the CRVP; and homicide and violent crime investigation, this
prong includes maintaining a fully staffed, centralized,
homicide and gang unit within the RPD consisting primarily of
the most experienced detectives; and, finally, homicide and
violent crime prosecution, our sector prosecutors, this fifth
and final prong emphasizes the role the prosecutors play
through their partnership with not only police, but with also
the community. Community prosecution is achieved in Richmond by
integrating designated prosecutors into each of our 12 police
sectors.
The collaborative efforts of GRIP and CRVP, along with a
focused sector approach to policing, which not only addresses
violent crime and gangs, but the systemic enablers of crime,
have produced significant results in decreases in violent crime
in the City of Richmond. In 2006, violent crime was reduced by
14 percent; in 2007, violent crime in the City of Richmond was
reduced by 10 percent; and year to date, we are at a 24 percent
reduction in violent crime.
Homicide decreased from 86 in 2005 to 55 homicides in 2007,
which was the lowest rate of homicide since 1981. Currently, we
are on track to meet or go below the 2007 numbers.
The Richmond Police Department continues to review and
evaluate its methodology and tactics, endeavoring to remain
flexible and responsive to changing crime trends and patterns.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Buckovich follows:]
Prepared Statement of John Buckovich
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
Mr. Flores?
TESTIMONY OF ELY FLORES, LEADERSHIP FACILITATOR AND TEACHING
ASSISTANT, LOS ANGELES, CA
Mr. Flores. Hello. My name is Ely Flores, and I am from Los
Angeles, California.
As a child, I was abandoned by my father, and I grew up in
both the City of South Hollywood and South Central Los Angeles,
an under-resourced, oppressed community where more youth are
sent to prisons rather than rehabilitations--or to college, for
that matter.
Our mothers were so overwhelmed they could do little to
prevent us young men from searching for other means of sense of
belonging in the streets. That led us to straight to prison and
some of us even jail--or even death.
Violence was my learned resolution for all the challenges I
faced. Like many young people who grew up in poor communities
and disenfranchised communities with few opportunities, I lived
by the law of dog eat dog and the survival of the fittest.
I raised my fists in violence over nothing. Maybe someone
made fun of my shoes or clothes. Perhaps someone talked
negatively about my mom or my sister or my brother. Perhaps
someone challenged my so-called manhood. A fight was always the
conclusion. Where I am from, being scarred and bruised was like
wearing military stripes on the battlefield or won on a
battlefield. Whenever the pain was too much to bear, many of us
chose to take a dose of marijuana or whatever drug relieved
that pain. The older gangsters found it fun to pit kids against
each other, instigating little disagreements that escalated to
a fight. Violence was commonplace. It was entertainment and, to
us kids, it seemed normal.
Violence plus the lack of resources and a dearth of
opportunity made it easy for me and other kids to pursue
fantasy lives, to emulate gangster lifestyles and drug dealing.
My brother and I slipped into that. I have been in situations
where I was forced to fight individuals for claiming or stating
their membership to another gang that we did not get along
with. My anger and violence led me to use weapons to hurt
people. I conditioned myself to not care whether or not my
victim ended up in a hospital--or, for that matter, ended up
dead. The same rules my homies and I lived by also ruled the
people that I thought of as my enemies.
One of the experiences that changed my life was when one of
my homies was shot dead at the age of 14. He used to be a
skateboarder. He always promised that he would never join a
gang. But one day the peer pressure and lack of other options
got the best of him. He joined the local gang, and a month
later, he was shot and killed right outside of my grandmother's
house. That cycle continued with years of retaliation.
As I began to develop my consciousness about social issues,
I asked myself, ``Why are there so many poor people in prisons
and especially Black and Brown people in prisons? And why do
they keep going back? Is it the people's fault, is it the
communities' fault, or is it the parents' fault?'' Then I
realized that I was trying to come up with an answer from an
oppressed and deficit perspective.
Of course, there has to be some accountability for the
people, but there also has to be accountability for the
institutions that contribute to the problem and do not help to
solve the problem. It affects not just young people caught up
in a cycle of violence and deprivation, but the entire society
in which we live in. South Central Los Angeles is already a
poor community, but continuously prisons and police continue to
criminalize the many communities of color.
I found an organization called LA CAUSA YouthBuild, which
is an affiliate of YouthBuild USA, a grantee of the U.S.
Department of Labor's YouthBuild Program, and introduced to me
a positive program, a program of consolation, self-
accountability, and leadership.
Because of this key I was given, because of this
opportunity I was given, I became an activist. Because of this
key, I have developed a passion for community work and helping
numerous people in diverse and challenging communities.
This opportunity was rarely given to people, but it was
given to me. Because of this opportunity, I have been able to
not only get recognized by a Member of Congress, to not only be
recognized by the City of Los Angeles, but it also has given me
a chance to even travel to places like Israel to try to work
with Palestinian and Israeli youth. I just try to bring peace
among them.
So I want you to imagine that, like an ex-gang member who
lived by violence, who acted in violence against other people,
and I could sit here and tell you that I am actually now an
activist or an advocate for peace, not only here in Los
Angeles, but in Israel.
So, when you think about developing some sort of programs
or allocating money, think about my story, right. Think about
that, a gang member that is sitting here right in front of you
that could have been incarcerated, could have been dead, and
because of resources and opportunities that were given to our
community, I can sit here and tell you that a gang member can
become a productive member of society and a gang member can
become an advocate for peace and an advocate for justice.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Flores follows:]
Prepared Statement of Ely Flores
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
Mr. O'Connor?
TESTIMONY OF KEVIN O'CONNOR, ASSOCIATE ATTORNEY GENERAL, U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. O'Connor. Thank you, Chairman Scott, Ranking Member
Gohmert, and Members of the Subcommittee. I am pleased to be
here with you today to discuss the Department of Justice's
strategy to address the problems of gangs and gang violence.
I would like to begin by noting that the data released just
yesterday from the FBI indicates the country experienced a
decrease in the number of violent crimes for 2007 compared to
2006. Much of the credit for this decrease, of course, goes to
our local and State partners, many of whom are represented here
today, as well as to local and community leaders, faith-based
leaders and their communities, who are working tirelessly to
address the problem of violent crimes and gangs in their
communities. I applaud their efforts, the department supports
their efforts, and we in the department will continue to be
vigilant and support their efforts to fight violent crime.
Notwithstanding the recent good news, the department will
not take its foot off the gas pedal, if you will. We will
continue, as we must, to be proactive in combating gangs, and
we remain fully committed to implementing strategies to fight
violent crime, focusing not just on traditional law
enforcement, but, as many here today have noted, also working
with our community partners to provide opportunities for at-
risk youth and returning offenders to learn the skills and
attitudes that they need to become productive members of
society.
The department's comprehensive approach to gang and gang
violence centers briefly on three key areas: enforcement,
prevention, and prisoner re-entry.
One example of this approach is the department's
comprehensive anti-gang initiative. This initiative targets
communities plagued by gang violence through the prosecution of
the most significant gang members, intense prevention efforts
employing local strategies to reduce gang membership and
violence, and re-entry strategies that create mentor-based
assistance programs for prisoners re-entering those communities
upon completion of their sentences.
Currently, the initiative operates in 10 jurisdictions
across the country with each jurisdiction receiving a total of
$2.5 million in targeted grant funding. This amounts to $1
million for enforcement, $1 million for prevention, and half a
million dollars for re-entry programs. As you can see, well
more than one-half of the funding in each of these sites is
dedicated to prevention and re-entry.
Another good example of this comprehensive approach to gang
violence is Project Safe Neighborhoods, a national program
which targets the most serious violent criminals with
aggressive enforcement of our Federal and State firearms laws.
Under Project Safe Neighborhoods, the Federal Government
through this Congress has committed more than $2 billion to
fund more than 200 Federal and 550 State and local prosecutors
to prosecute gun crime.
I should add the money has also been used to support
training for more than 30,000 law enforcement officers,
prosecutors, and community members across the Nation to develop
effective prevention and deterrence efforts to reduce gang and
gun violence.
Our efforts, as you can see, are not limited to prosecution
of gang members. At the direction of the attorney general,
every United States attorney, including myself when I had the
pleasure of serving in Connecticut, convened a gang prevention
summit in their district that collectively brought together
over 10,000 law enforcement and community leaders to discuss
best practices, identify gaps in services, and create a
prevention plan in their particular districts to target at-risk
youths within our communities.
The department has long supported other gang prevention
activities, such as the Gang Resistance Education and Training
Program, GRIP, as my colleague Major Buckovich referred to, as
well as many other gang prevention strategies.
The third component of the department's gang strategy is
funding and support for prisoner re-entry programs. These
programs provide services and supervision for gang members, in
particular upon their release from prison. The goal of this
initiative is to connect community organizations with law
enforcement to provide much needed services tailored
specifically for prisoners re-entering their communities.
In order to reduce violent crime, the Federal Government
must work cooperatively and collaboratively with our partners
in State, local, and international law enforcement. We must
also, as it is very clear by today's hearing, focus not just on
dealing with today's criminals, but on preventing our children
from turning into tomorrow's criminals.
Thank you, again, for your attention to this issue, and I
look forward to taking your questions at a later time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. O'Connor follows:]
Prepared Statement of Kevin O'Connor
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
And Dr. Macy?
TESTIMONY OF ROBERT D. MACY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE BOSTON
CHILDREN'S FOUNDATION, BEVERLY FARMS, MA
Mr. Macy. Thank you.
I want to extend my gratitude to the Chairmen and to the
Members of the Committee and to my esteemed colleagues. It is
an honor to be here.
I thought, given Chairman Conyers' comment around
sociological perspective, I would take that up as a potential
lens to maybe stimulate some further conversation as we go
along today.
I see two major domains involved in what I would consider
to be one of the top two or three public health crises in our
young 230-year-old Nation, and that is this issue that you are
committed to looking at today and hopefully beyond.
The two primary domains are public safety, which I think
has been established through our other witnesses to be of prime
importance and cannot be ignored, and the second domain is what
I could call social capital. I learned this term from the World
Bank. It refers to our children, to our future leaders, and not
only our future leaders, but to the people that actually run
the country at the basic human, community, religious, cleanup
level.
Within these two domains, we have to consider at least five
huge challenges which are complexly layered, as was pointed out
by the two members from Texas with respect to immigration, and
what I would consider to be racketeering, organized crime
groups--MS-13, which is actually a non-profit organization,
established private 501(c)3s in 38 States--and, of course, the
border gangs. We really cannot compare those to what are called
sneaker pimp gangs and younger youth gangs around America.
But we have this issue of protecting public safety which
primarily is at this point using arrest and incarceration, and
there are some key issues here, as I just pointed out, with
respect to illegal immigrants, and ICE is doing quite a good
job and, I think, needs to certainly be applauded for what it
can do and may be able to be brought in to look at some of the
violent gang activities with respect to illegal immigrants.
The second are the costs of arrest and incarceration versus
costs for alternative measures to decrease violence among
youth. And I just want to point out that I am not as familiar
with some of the criminology data that some of my esteemed
colleagues are, but I think if we were to use and look at age
breaks and the decrease in violent crime, you might not
necessarily see the same decrease in the 15-to-23-year-old age
range, and that is part of the issue.
Mr. Scott. Say that again. Sorry.
Mr. Macy. I would just say that as a Committee and as
associates of your Committee, you probably look at the age
break of 15-to-23-year-olds, when we talk about the overall
reduction in criminal acts for aggravated assaults for youth
the year 2007, because I am having an educated guess that it
may actually have increased.
Our third issue is what is known as the DMC which Professor
Ogletree's written testimony provided. That is the
Disproportionate Minority Contact which Congress is well aware
of, in view of the 2007 Federal Advisory Committee on Juvenile
Justice, and it has been pointed out here on these charts and I
think it has been brought up in several of your comments during
the introduction.
The fourth issue is elements of the youth offender, him or
herself, and several people have mentioned this. We have to
look at not just the crime, but the criminal. And I would refer
to a gentleman named Arredondo who wrote a seminal article in
juvenile justice on looking at offender-based sanctioning
versus offense-based sanctioning. I think that is going to be
critical as we move forward.
And fifth is the relationship between trauma and violence,
which is what I would like to spend the rest of my time on,
which looks like it is not very much, and that is that we have
$90 billion a year spent on child maltreatment. This is
determined by the U.S. Surgeon General's 2005 report. So one of
the questions I pose to all of us: Is increased sanctioning,
severe sanctioning, actually feeding into child maltreatment?
It appears from the overwhelming research, high-fidelity
research, among many different investigative domains that
children grown in impoverishment without resources first
experience trauma, and in order to survive, they use
maladaptive coping strategies, that is, they try to protect
themselves. You can do this with your own son or daughter.
Irrespective of the color of their skin, they want to get to
school and they want to pass the test and they want to belong
and they want to become.
But, in order to get to school, they are called a wannabe
gang member. They are not involved in gangs yet, but they get a
gun or they get a knife. They do not really know how to hide
it. They get tagged. They end up with a felony. They end up not
being able to vote, and they end up being incarcerated at quite
a great cost.
So, in summary, I think public safety and social capital
are of equal value, and we have to hold them as of equal value,
both for public safety and the development of our social
capital, the protection of our children.
And I would like to end with a quote by Black abolitionist
and escaped slave Frederick Douglass who said, ``It is easier
to build strong children than to repair broken men.''
I think we have several approaches that are evidence-based,
some of them registered in the National Registry of Evidence-
Based Practices that would speak to the issue of using
treatments that are biopsychosocially driven rather than
treatments of incarceration.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Macy follows:]
Prepared Statement of Robert D. Macy
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
And I want to thank all of our witnesses for this great
testimony.
We will ask questions using the same 5-minute rule. I will
recognize myself for 5 minutes.
I notice in all of the testimony that we did not hear any
need for new statutes, any gang-related statutes. It would seem
to me, Major Buckovich, if you catch somebody in a drive-by
shooting, the penalty for that will be life. If you dress it up
and call it a gang-related drive-by shooting, does that help
you?
Mr. Buckovich. Thank you.
My response to that would be the Richmond Police
Department, whether it is a gang-related or non-gang-related
shooting, investigates with the same amount of energy and
aggressive investigative techniques as we would any type of
shooting.
However, I believe that enhancements to certain----
Mr. Scott. But would you get more time if it is dressed up
as a gang-related drive-by shooting as a regular drive-by
shooting?
Mr. Buckovich. If someone was killed or injured?
Mr. Scott. It is the same life.
Mr. Buckovich. Yes.
Mr. Scott. Okay. And if we are going to do something about
gangs, dressing up the criminal code does not appear to be what
we need to do to reduce gang membership because by the time you
get to the point of sentencing, they have already joined the
gang, committed the crimes, got court, got convicted, and now
you are arguing about how much time they are going to get when
the criminal code--according to this chart, you are doing
pretty good. The police are doing a pretty good job, and we
have locked up more people on earth than anywhere.
Those brown charts show what we are doing in the minority
community compared to the rest of the world. It just does not
seem that changing the criminal code would be a necessary
element. Maybe more enforcement of the present criminal code,
but the criminal code itself has produced this chart where the
United States, and particularly the minority community--the
first brown chart is the average African-American incarceration
rate. The second brown chart is the top 10 States. Many States
are around 4,000 per 100,000 locked up today when most of the
world is around 100. So it seems as though the criminal code
seems to be working pretty good.
Dr. Macy, your testimony talks about the effect of getting
real tough on gangs as being possibly counterproductive. What
do you mean in terms of helping with gang membership, getting
kids out of gangs? What did you mean by that?
Mr. Macy. Thank you.
I think the more generalized issue, which is critical for
all of us, is young children face a pretty significant decision
early on because, as you all know with your own children or
grandchildren, their primary question is: Who do I belong to?
Who belongs to me? How do I become?
And so children actually seek permission for many things,
including to kill, and this certainly has been demonstrated in
David Grossman's work, ``On Killing.'' In fact, children face a
difficult decision when they offer their permission to someone
to tell them what to do.
So, right now in this country, many of the disadvantaged
children, which we call at risk, are faced with a decision like
Ely was, which is: Do I give my allegiance, do I actually give
my permission to have someone tell me what to do to a gang or
leadership authority structure organized around violence, or do
I give it to a gang or leadership authority organized around
justice, peace, democracy?
And so if we sanction children too young and too hard, what
usually happens, in my personal field experience and in the
research, is that they end up giving their affiliation, their
permission to an authority structure that is organized around
violence.
The second issue is that if you take a kid and you bring
them into jail, irrespective of all the sort of old-timer
stories about how kids learn more crime in jail, there is a
more significant issue. As we increase arrests and use felony
charges to keep kids in jail, in order for them to stay alive
in jail, especially the younger ones, they have to swear their
allegiance to a gang for protection, and then they owe that
gang when they get out. So we are actually increasing gang
membership by this methodology, I believe.
Mr. Scott. And, Professor Ogletree, what does a get-tough
approach do to gang cohesiveness?
Mr. Ogletree. Well, it makes it even stronger, and that is
what surprised me a little bit by Mr. O'Connor's comment that
the Department of Justice better not take its foot off the gas
pedal. It seems to me at some point you take your foot off the
gas pedal to see what you are doing and whether you are making
any progress and, in fact, some of these get-tough-on-crime
policies, as we indicate in our report, only lead to the
contrary result.
I am not sure you can say you have succeeded because you
have more people in prison, but you have not solved the problem
of young people being able to be productive members of our
community, and I think that what we need to do is to do what
has been successful.
All these departments--White Plains--these are East and
Northeast, and Richmond's southern--people take the time to
figure out how to work with communities, how to work with the
clergy, how to work with the young people are creating
remarkable changes. Both what Ely said about his own experience
and what you heard is that if you give a child a chance, it
makes a difference, and if you do not, you are going to find
more people incarcerated, but you are not going to find the
problem of violence reduced or seriously addressed.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
Mr. Gohmert?
Mr. Gohmert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We are all concerned about the same problem. Everybody has
come at it from a different position.
Mr. Flores, we appreciate what you have been able to do
with helping and caring for people.
We have a number of questions to ask, but, folks, I am not
going to ask questions because I did not hear anybody get to
the heart of what I heard over a decade of sitting on the bench
over thousands of criminal cases. I started taking my own
little survey for 3 months, for a quarter. I randomly picked 5
years of age. Way over 80 percent, nearly 85 percent, of the
people that came before me for sentencing on felony cases had
had no relationship with a father since at least age 5.
Mr. Flores, your testimony started off, and you prepared
your testimony, I take it. You chose to start off by saying,
``I was abandoned by my father.''
Dr. Macy, you pointed out people are looking to belong.
In our society, there ought to be societal pressure to be a
father, and I know that some of the greatest contributions in
this country have come from people from single parents and will
continue to come from people from single-parent homes, some of
the major problems have come from people with two parents, but
we are----
You know, I saw in this testimony here, Dr. Straub, the
statement ``Incarceration breaks up families and disrupts
social networks,'' and I am thinking breaking up families? It
is about incarceration.
I was sentencing a young man who was a gang member, and he
just poured out his heart. And he had been stoic. You could not
tell hardly when he was lying because he was so cold and cool.
But, clearly, the evidence showed beyond a reasonable doubt he
was involved in a murder, and he talked about he had no father.
His mother was never around. He wanted to belong to something.
His gang was his family. He felt safe with his gang. That was
his family.
Now it concerns me that with all your expertise and with
all the brilliance and the high IQs sitting here in front of me
that we are not talking about that, that the societal pressure
ought to be there to be a good father, do your best to succeed.
You know there ought to be pressure to do well in school.
You know, for far too long, in my criminal court, over and
over, people came before me and they said the pressure from
those they hung around with was, ``Do not succeed. Do not sell
out.'' The pressure ought to be there to succeed in school, to
do well, and I am just afraid we are not talking about an
elephant in the room, the societal breakdown of the family.
In 1973, I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, and
I was taken to numerous daycare centers as a point of pride
because they pulled the kids--there were eight Americans there
that year. We were told, ``The Government knows best. We have
these Government programs for raising the kids. The parents
cannot always be trusted. So, as soon as they are old enough to
walk--and in some cases before that--we get them in here in our
daycare centers so we can start working on them.'' Highest
alcoholism rates anywhere in the world is what I understood.
The Government was not the answer.
So I welcome input. My time is about up. And 5-minute
little blurbs does not really do it for any of you with your
vast amount of research. I would welcome input from any of you
in writing after the hearing, but I am afraid we are not
addressing an important societal problem here, and that is the
breakup of the family and kids just wanting to belong.
I yield back.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
The gentleman from Michigan?
Mr. Conyers. Judge Gohmert touched on something that Maxine
Waters and I were commenting on, is that--and you have done
this yourself, Chairman Scott--and we need a different setting.
This is too formalized and ritualistic. You have had forums on
crime where we sat in a different relationship--this is a
bureaucratic legislative hearing about something that touches
the nerve endings of us all--where we sit around and everybody
could chime in and interrupt and agree or disagree, and I know
that Professor Ogletree has been in these kinds of sessions
that we have had not only in the Congress but around the
country and at Harvard as well, come to think about it.
But let me tell you what I am thinking about. A lot of this
has to do with belief systems, and they start out early.
Sometimes we do not make much progress as quickly as we want
to, but I have begun to think that in this country, at this
point in time, we are beginning to get more honest and
realistic about the nature of race relations and the cultural
considerations that are all a part of it.
I think of Martin Luther King--and now after more than a
dozen years it took to get the King holiday bill--where a
person got up and said, ``Non-violent protests can win the
day.'' Now that is still coming out of a culture, a background,
Ogletree, that is crazy. We spend more money on not only
weapons of destruction. I think it was $1.3 trillion worldwide.
And we have huge research activities going on, more in this
country than any other, where we are developing new weapons. We
are now out in space.
So, when you come back then and say, ``Well, you know, King
was one of the great leaders of all time. You do not
understand, Congressman, his non-violence theory,'' and I say,
``Hey, wait a minute.'' We have a culture of violence that has
been from the beginning of time. That is the way things always
were.
It was not until Roosevelt and Churchill came along at the
end of World War II that we said, ``There ought to be treaties
against torture, and there ought to be treaties''--then we came
to nuclear non-proliferation treaties. Then we came to war
crimes tribunals.
Now that sounds maybe far away from the subject of gangs,
but, you know, when you are looking at our video, television,
and our cultural recreational things, you get into some serious
problems where kids have seen 1,500 murders on television
before they are 12 years old. Then you say, ``Well, why did you
join a gang, Tommy?'' and he looks at you like you must be on
another planet. What do you think most of our recreation is
about? Crime. Law and order.
And I would just like to get a reaction from Professors
Ogletree and Macy on this, if my time permits.
Mr. Ogletree. Congressman Conyers, I mean, you hit the nail
on the head, and I am very impressed with the analysis of
connecting all these things together. It is exactly right.
We have a culture of violence. It is embedded in our
culture, and at the same time, we do not even recognize the
fact that as a democratic progressive Nation, if you look at
this chart, I mean, we are off the charts in terms of promoting
violence. It is part of our culture, and it goes to the
question raised by Congressman Gohmert as a judge, and I can
see the challenge as well.
I think Dr. Macy hit the nail on the head as well when he
talked about social capital. If you care about children, you
care about families, and if you and I sat down in a room with a
door locked for half a day, we could solve it. For example, I
would tell you that there are a lot of fathers already there.
Mr. Gohmert. You would need someone a lot smarter than me.
Mr. Ogletree. Oh, no, you are exactly what is needed. It is
not a question about intelligence. It is about a sense of moral
courage.
And those fathers who are not there, some of them are not
there because they are dead. Some are not there because they
are incarcerated before. They cannot get a job. They cannot
help the family. They cannot go back to school. They cannot get
a driver's license. So that is social capital as well, not just
the children, the family.
I agree with you about the importance of two parents, but
it is not that they do not want to be there. We have created an
infrastructure that prohibits them from being a part of a
family, and if we really solve the gang problem, the violence
problem, we have to say that man who has been in prison, has
been released can paint a fence, can cut some grass, can be a
taxpaying, wage-earning citizen, and not a recidivist.
That means we are looking at a holistic problem. If we take
that up--and then we will address Congressman Conyers' problem
because--if we look at it holistically, at social capital, not
just a child, but also the adults, we could begin to address
this. But we have not even scratched the surface of it. We look
at the symptoms and not the problem.
Mr. Macy. I agree with the professor, Mr. Conyers. I think
you are on track, and I think connecting the dots are
important. I did that in my written testimony in terms of the
global violence with respect to what is called identity
conflict, which is age old, but has really arisen to astronomic
proportions in the last 15 years.
I think I might as well say what I think the white elephant
in the room is, and I say it with the greatest respect for all
of us who are struggling really with very difficult, complex
challenges. It is very hard to legislate good parenting. I
think there should be a taboo against poor parenting because,
you know, it is very, very difficult.
The professor speaks to some proportion. I would give an
educated guess it is more than 50 percent of fathers that want
to be fathers, especially after the age of 25--the
developmental psychopathology literature points that out--are
in jail. So it is hard for them to father.
But the white elephant I was referring to is slavery, and I
have part of this proven. I do not have the whole thing proven,
but I tried in my verbal testimony to link trauma as the root
cause of violence as opposed to saying violence causes trauma.
Psychological trauma appears to be one of the root causes of
violence, violence as a way to protect one's self in an unsafe
world.
The unsafe world was created by trauma which is really a
psychological shattering of the whole human being. And how did
that come about? If we look at the history certainly of our
country and then you look at these graphs here, we do have an
issue, which I think we cannot avoid, which is slavery, and the
enslavement of these young men is in a sense a recapitulation
of that.
And then what I have been looking at in working with the
gangs is that a gang is just another form of imprisonment. It
is no better being in a gang than being in a prison. It is
just--now you can call it a secondary form of enslavement where
young men do unto others what was done unto them only better.
They ask for allegiance to violence and to destruction, and
it is really the destruction of the fatherhood in the family
because most of these gangs are males instead of seeking out an
authority that allows them to pursue justice and peace.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
The gentleman from Virginia?
Mr. Forbes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank all of you for being here and echo what
everybody has said in that I think each of you have an enormous
amount of wisdom and expertise in this area, but I do not
think, and I have never thought that the forums that we utilize
are the correct ones. This is not the first time we have raised
this.
I mean, just look at the logistics of what I have here. I
have six wonderful witnesses that I would love to delve into
what you say and pick out the good parts because this whole
thing is a matrix. It is not just, you know, that Mr. Ogletree
is right, Mr. Flores is wrong. It is a matrix that we need to
pull together, but I have six of you. I have 5 minutes. That
gives me 50 seconds each. It would be insulting to you for me
to even try to begin to do that.
But let me just tell you that I am at least glad that we
recognize that we have a gang problem because a few years ago
when I brought legislation here--it was not perfect--
legislation to try to even talk about the gang problem, some of
my good friends over here said, ``We do not have a problem.
Where is the problem?''
And I will tell you we would go to school districts, and I
would talk to school superintendents, and I would say, ``You
have a gang problem.'' They said, ``We do not have a gang
problem.'' The next day, I would have the assistant or deputy
superintendent coming in my office, ``We have a big gang
problem, but we cannot talk about it because we will offend
somebody or perhaps it will hurt our real estate values,'' or
whatever.
I am just excited that we at least can come together and
talk about the fact that we have a gang problem.
The second thing is my good friend and Chairman of this
Committee asked this question: Do you want to reduce crime, or
do we want to play politics? There is not--I do not think. I
have not seen the person. I do not think there is a person in
this room that does not want to reduce crime.
If there are, I have not met them. I do not know who you
are. But I do not think there is a person in here, I do not
think there is a person on the other side of that aisle that
does not want to reduce crime. I know that I have no person on
this side of the aisle.
But what we do is if somebody disagrees with our approach,
we label whatever they want to do as playing politics, instead
of recognizing that we have to create this matrix to be able to
come together and create a solution.
The other thing that we have talked about is the fact that
incarceration is not free. No one in this room is foolish
enough to think that the cost of incarceration is not through
the roof, but the other thing we at least need to put on the
table is the fact that letting gang networks run free is not
free either because we have had overwhelming testimony before
this Committee of people whose lives have been transformed in a
negative way because of gang networks that came in.
We had one lady that I think all of us have seared into our
mind. She lived in Philadelphia. She was an African-American
woman who had, I believe, five children, but I might be wrong
on there, lived in Philadelphia, left Philadelphia because she
was afraid of the gangs that were there, went to Maryland to
escape the gangs in Philadelphia, put her children in private
school to try to avoid it. Her and her husband worked two jobs.
He was a minister, part-time, took another job.
A gang member, 17 years old, comes up to him one night,
puts a gun to his head, and kills him, never met him before,
but killed him for one reason. That was his initiation into a
gang. And when you looked at her, she realized that letting
that gang member run free to kill her husband was not free to
her and her children either.
We need to recognize that these gang members, some of them,
are going out and they are cutting people's larynxes out in
northern Virginia, they are cutting their arms off, they are
murdering witnesses, they are doing extortion, they are
recruiting innocent children, and I will tell you I remember
the head of one of the gang units in Maryland, Mr. Forest, he
said exactly what you did. He was a former MS-13 member who had
transformed. Now he is out trying to stop gangs.
He told me in a summit that we had in Arkansas, he said,
``Do you know the group that fights against me the most when I
am trying to get kids out of gang?'' He said, ``You will never
guess.'' And I said, ``Who is it?'' He said, ``The mothers. The
mothers who are trying to keep their children in gangs because
they want the money flow coming in.'' And he had transformed
his life.
Now the other thing that I think is we play politics when
we start putting things in categories and say, ``This is a get-
tough approach,'' where I guess the alternative is a get-soft
approach. I mean, the reality is we have to pick and pull the
tools that we need to deal with some of these problems. It is
easy to reach in our quiver of arrows and pull out the common
ones and say, ``Oh, look, it is unemployment. It is
dysfunctional families. It is small groups of innocent kids
from street corners.'' We are all against those.
But here is the other thing that we need to recognize. In
the 1960's when we went after organized crime, we could have
done the same thing by just saying, ``People just want
prostitution. People want gambling. People want drugs.''
Fortunately, we did not do that. We went after the networks and
pulled those networks down very successfully.
So what I am just suggesting to you--and I know my time is
out. That shows how little we have. But I just want to tell you
this. We need a combined approach that begins by tearing down
these networks because these networks are out here recruiting,
and I do not care what you do, those networks of people are
going to continue to recruit, continue to do some of the things
that we see.
We also need to understand that it is no less fatal to have
a murder by a 17-year-old than to have a murder by an 18-year-
old.
And the other thing that we need to realize is that when
you have at least sometimes in some of our most violent gangs
80 percent of the members coming in here illegally, then some
of the prevention programs that we know work and we want to use
are not going to work for that particular gang.
The final thing is--of course, I could not agree with you
more--I think gang members can be transformed and changed, but
some of the most effective agents of change are some of our
faith-based organizations that are going out and changing
people, and yet we strap their hands every time we get a chance
instead of letting them do that change.
And the final thing I think we need to do is recognize that
we need a combined program that brings the best of all these
tools together so that we can pull down the networks and then
so that we can deal with some of the other problems that cause
people to join gangs, be it unemployment, dysfunctional
families, lack of self-esteem, racial tensions, whatever they
are.
Unless we get that comprehensive approach, I do not think
we are going to be able to make a big dent in this problem.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you for your patience.
Mr. Conyers. Mr. Chairman? Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Scott. The gentleman from Michigan?
Mr. Conyers. Might I beg your indulgence to allow the six
witnesses to just briefly reflect off of Randy Forbes, the
former Ranking Member of the Crime Committee?
Mr. Scott. Well, it is Ms. Waters' turn if she will defer.
Okay.
Mr. Straub. Congressman Forbes, I agree wholeheartedly with
your comments that we need to bring multiple approaches to the
problem of at-risk youth or gang-involved youth. There clearly
is not one solution, and there clearly are people who are
serious criminals who need to be incarcerated, and I think all
of us would readily admit that.
In speaking to Congressman Gohmert's comment about the
incarceration and fatherhood--I am fortunate to have two
children of my own and clearly believe that fatherhood is
critical--I would echo Professor Ogletree's comments about the
effects of incarceration in breaking up families and putting
fathers in jail. Some deserve it. There is no doubt about it.
The problem becomes this constant churning of communities
where the community never settles down. So there really is no
stability in the community, and I think we have to explore ways
to reduce the ``churning.''
Clearly, we want to encourage people and we want to
encourage fathers to be with their family and to be good
families, and I think the program that we talked about
specifically in White Plains is very much about that,
addressing family values, keeping families intact, building
positive skills so that people can become strong members of the
community and we can, in fact, build the social capital and the
community capital that my other colleagues here referred to.
Mr. Buckovich. Congressman Forbes, I also agree with you.
For so many years in policing, we judged our effectiveness
by the amount of arrests we made, fill this table up with guns
and stand behind it and say, ``Look what we have done,'' but
ignoring if it had impact on violent crime. I think we are
starting to see that we do have to address prevention, we do
have to address intervention, we certainly have to have
suppression efforts, but without prevention, without
intervention, without addressing the systemic enablers of
crime, that we are not going to be successful in the long term.
And we have to engage the community. I know in Richmond
that engagement means more than just going to community
meetings and telling them, ``This is what crime is like in your
neighborhood.'' It means going to community meetings and
saying, ``This is what we need from you. This is what we need
you to do to help us and to help your community,'' and I think
that that is the direction we have to go in.
Mr. Flores. I think that you have a point where you are
talking about a lot of religious groups are doing a lot of good
work, but then I would raise the question that what happens to
those gang members who do not believe in religion and who do
not want any affiliation? I am not saying that they are
approaching it----
Mr. Forbes. I am not saying that needs to be exclusive. I
am just saying that is one tool that is very effective, and we
want to use all the tools we can. I mean, my point was not that
one size fits all. It is simply that we ought to let them if
they are showing that effectiveness have that great affect that
they are doing in lots of----
Mr. Flores. Yes. And I guess my second thing to that was
just to--like you were saying is using more than just one
approach, like it should be more than one. I mean, to
incarcerate young people, there are a lot of approaches that
you take to do that, too, right? There are different approaches
that you can use to incarcerate someone. So I think that should
be the same way, is in order to rehabilitate someone or get
someone out of that gang culture.
And exactly what Professor Ogletree was talking about, he
said the social capital of it. There are a lot of people that
want to be parents. I became a parent at the age of 17, and if
I did not search or I did not find that social capital, I might
have not been there either. You know, I might have been
incarcerated, dead, or whatever not.
So I think also the social capital issue is huge, and there
is breaking up families and that, and this is going on, right?
So I think this issue needs to be handled from all sorts of
directions, not just one, just saying just, you know,
religious-based or whatever not, but it needs to be from all
sorts of directions.
If you have also been incarcerated, you will find out that
gang members might be part of this lifestyle, but even in the
gang lifestyle, there is diversity within there as well. So
there needs to be different angles.
Mr. O'Connor. I will try to avoid being repetitive, and I
would just say, Judge Gohmert, your perspective as a judge is
one I think every prosecutor deals with. You know, prosecutors
feel generally content, particularly when the victim of violent
crime sees their perpetrator go to jail. It is justice. It
restores confidence in the system. But I do not know of a
prosecutor who does not stop and say, ``Boy, this kid threw his
life away and is going to jail for the rest of his life.'' They
had that MS-13 member in Maryland yesterday with a life
sentence.
That is why I do not know a prosecutor who does not go back
to the local police chief or to the community groups and say,
``What are we going to do to stop this?'' It is not just
throwing people in jail. I mean, we have an obligation to
enforce the law. If people commit violent crimes, we are going
to prosecute them. That is what the public expects. But we
prefer not to be prosecuting these cases. We would prefer if
kids--and they are predominantly kids--made better choices.
We also recognize that as prosecutors we are not social
workers. We do not have the Ph.D.s, we are lawyers, and so we
rely heavily on community groups, faith-based or otherwise, to
tell us what can we do to stop people from coming in because,
by the time a file lands in my office, it is too late. Somebody
is already been victimized, and somebody is going to be held
accountable.
The real goal is to keep people from entering the criminal
justice system in the first place, and that is why I think
prevention and enforcement are not mutually exclusive. I would
say they are strongly complementary of one another. You send a
message through enforcement that there are consequences for
wrong choices. Through prevention, you say to people, ``And you
have better alternatives.''
Thank you.
Mr. Macy. I think that Committee Member Forbes did an
incredible job trying to summarize what you call the matrix,
and, you know, trauma which breeds violence has multiple
determinants, so we need a multiply determined approach to
decrease the violence.
And I would argue from the social work combined criminology
side before it gets to Mr. O'Connor's desk that we look at the
public mental health model where we are using identification
assessment and early intervention starting--someone brought it
up earlier--really in preschool, daycare, to look at children
who are already at risk for mental distress which leads to
mental disorders, and the studies are overwhelming at this
point.
If you look at the United States Secret Service report on
school shootings in the last 25 years, 47 shootings, it was all
youth-on-youth violence, and they tried to, as the U.S. Secret
Service is expert at doing, develop a portrait or, if you will,
a profile of the next school shooter, and they could not do it
because there is no next school shooter profile because there
are so many differences.
They found two stunning similarities among 75 percent of
all the shooters, no matter their color, their advantage, their
disciplinary action record, or their academic achievement. One
was 75 percent of all shooters prior to the shooting had
evidence of suicidality, and, two, that for almost 90 percent
of these shooters, no adults in the school system that actually
knew who the kid was, knew anything about the kid. So you have
factors of mental illness and isolation.
This carries over into kids who get conscripted into gangs
as early as fifth and sixth grade to do the initiation, which
is absolutely grotesque behaviors, which are high-level
military combat techniques, which these gangs know about, to
condition them to kill because there is a universal human
phobia to kill so you have to condition that out of a human.
They start very young with kids who are not just at risk
because of their disadvantaged neighborhood or their being born
into slavery, because they have a burgeoning mental illness, so
I think adding to the matrix, in concert with criminology, a
public health/mental health model is going to be crucial to
consider.
Mr. Ogletree. And I will be very brief.
Congressman Forbes, you made some great points. Let me just
take two of the points you made and try to expand on them and
tell you where I think there is a problem with the
overgeneralization.
You talked about organized crime, which is a good example,
and I think the strategy in the 1960's and beyond the 1970's to
come up with the approach to fight organized crime was an
important one. It was not a law enforcement effort that labeled
every single adult who happened to live in an Italian community
or who happened to be poor as a member of organized crime. It
was surgical, finding the people responsible, punishing them
very severely----
Mr. Forbes. Especially going after the networks. Especially
going after the networks.
Mr. Ogletree [continuing]. And leaving the community
intact. That is very important. So I think that example is a
good one. They did not just target anyone who was in the
neighborhood or anyone who ate at a restaurant. That is an
example.
The mother who depends on the economics, that is the broken
family, what we talk about in our report here. The broken
family is part of the problem.
Another one that really is important, particularly for a
place like Virginia, is the school system. The people who are
in gangs are not in school, they are not at home, they are not
under supervision, and it tells us those people who are
finishing high school and going to college and who have a job
are not in gangs.
And so we know the solution. We have to figure out how to
balance dealing with the violence of the crime of gang members,
but also try to be preventive. It is not either-or. I am not
saying it is public safety or social capital, it is both, and
the idea is the proper balance. But my sense is that it would
be much better if that 14-year-old was not out of school, was
not suspended or expelled, was not in a single family with no
supervision, was not unemployable because he was arrested as a
juvenile.
All of those things are preventable, and I just think that
we really are not that far off in terms of our point of view,
and my sense is that where you see a thousand gang members, I
see a hundred, and I would rather we focus our resources on
that 10 percent to address it substantively than to put in that
group a lot of people who can be saved, who would be more
productive as citizens.
No matter what we do, we cannot kill them all, they are all
coming back. Whether they are 20 or 30 or 40, they are coming
back, and so if we can prevent it on the front end, which I
think you would not oppose, I think that is a solution that
helps all the citizens of Virginia to be safe, more people
finishing high school, more people employed and employable, and
a much better community.
Mr. Scott. Thank you. I thank all of our witnesses.
The gentlelady from California?
Ms. Waters. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I wanted to be at this hearing today, not so much that I
wanted to learn more about gangs, but I wanted to be here
because I am trying to help you and this Committee educate the
Members of Congress about how to approach dealing with these
gang problems, and we have to get rid of the notion that you
lock them up and you throw the key away, you get tougher, you
give longer sentences, you create more laws, sending a signal
to the public that you are tough on crime.
I really want us to do everything that we can--and I know
this is what you are attempting to do--to try and formulate
some good, sound, sensible public policy that is going to deal
with these problems in a real way. We know that locking them up
and throwing the key away has not solved anything, and so I am
hopeful that through these hearings, we can get to basically
what is the last paragraph of Mr. Ogletree's testimony that
talks about trying to invest in human potential and to deal
with developing the talents and possibilities of young people.
Let me just say for the sake of this Committee that each of
you brings some interesting perspective on dealing with this
issue, but there is one thing that you kind of fall into
because I think it sounds good about the role that the faith-
based community is playing in helping to deal with gangs and
helping to solve problems.
I want to assure you that there are well-intended ministers
and preachers who would like very much to solve this problem,
but they do not have the resources to do it, and while they may
have a march in the community to talk about taking back the
community, they may even dedicate a Sunday to preaching about
it, the gangsters are not in church, they are not in prayer
meeting on Wednesday night, and the ministers are truly not in
the public housing projects where the gangsters are.
So I want us not to think that somehow that we can rely on
the faith-based community or the community to solve these
problems. The communities are begging for help. They are
begging for the system to do something substantive.
I listened to the Justice Department, and, you know, I was
hoping this would not be the kind of hearing where you would
feel the need to have to talk about how good you are and how
much good you are doing and how you are dealing with the
problem because really you are not. The Justice Department, in
my estimation, is not doing a lot with prevention.
As a matter of fact, I am not so sure that the Justice
Department is cooperating well enough with the local law
enforcement authorities to do what it could be doing in dealing
with getting some of the shot callers and the shooters off the
streets so that we can deal with the others who have been
described here in many different ways who have a lot of
potential.
I have worked with gangs--the Crips, the Bloods, the Eight
Trays, the Grey Streeters--in South Central Los Angeles since
the 1980's. I know and understand the community of gangs, and I
know and understand, as many have alluded to here today, that
many of these are the children of families that are in deep
trouble. I had public housing projects, and many of those
parents were dead, in jail, addicted, out on crack cocaine,
living with grandmothers, living nowhere because the laws are
terrible as it relates to poor children.
Number one, in order to be on that lease after a certain
age in public housing projects, it costs more money. So they
were not on the list. They did not live anywhere. They lived in
some of the vacant units with other gang members, and they had
decided that truly was their family and that nobody really
cared about them.
Then I started a program in all five of these public
housing projects in South Central Los Angeles with Wagner
Pfizer monies. I walked the public housing projects, and we
recruited people to come to our training programs because we
decided, we understood that in the public housing projects, for
some reasons, they were treated differently than other parts of
the city. The job training programs, private industry council
programs did not get inside those public housing projects. So
there was no job training going on.
We started to organize. We took over the gymnasiums. On the
first day in Jordan Downs Housing Projects, I will never
forget, we had a line around the corner, over 200 young people,
who had responded to these flyers and to the talking and the
walking that we had done about trying to change their lives.
We discovered a lot about them. All of them had
experimented or were dealing with crack or marijuana or some
form of narcotics. Surprisingly, many of them had graduated at
that time from high school because they had not gotten down to
the age that they are now, the 14-and 15-year-olds.
Many of them had not learned how to negotiate the
employment system, had never been to personnel offices, none of
that stuff. So we dealt with the old basic stuff of how you
fill out applications, how you dress, what employers were
expecting.
But this is another thing that we did. You cannot do job
training without stipends and money for people to survive on
while they are in training. The system does not want to put the
money into training these young people. If you are going to
train poor children, young men who have no money, you have to
have food, and you have to have stipends for them to have some
decent clothing, some haircuts, other kinds of things. We put
the stipends into the program. We trained a lot of young
people.
We discovered that the Howe Public Housing Project would
get contractors from outside of the community. They would come
in to lay cable and do other kinds of things, and the people
who lived there did not have a shot or a chance of those jobs,
and nobody connected them with the jobs. We finally said to the
public housing authority, ``You will bring no other people in
from out of the community and from other cities to do these
jobs without at least finding out what you have here and giving
young people a chance to do the jobs.''
We hooked up with AT&T when they first laid their cable. We
got gang bangers hired on those jobs. I have never seen a
happier group of young people. They put their bandanas on their
head, they got down in those trenches, they dug those ditches,
they laid that cable, they made money, and some of them moved
out of public housing.
We went on to develop a fiber optics program at the Maxine
Waters Employment Training Center that paid a lot of money, and
those young people bought houses. A lot of them moved out. I
have seen a lot of deaths. I have been to funerals. But in all
that we did in this training, we went to the jails at night. We
ran out to Martin Luther King Hospital when shootings took
place to see what was going on and to respond to families.
In addition to the training that we were doing about how to
dress, how to fill out applications, what was expected of you,
we had to do tattoo removal. We had to deal with the judges and
the courts in order to remove the warrants and give people a
chance to work them off because we discovered if you come in
for this job training and you have warrants out there or you
have not paid your traffic tickets, you cannot get to anybody's
job. Part of that stuff has to be worked with.
So I am thankful for the faith-based organizations and
others, but it takes money. It takes real job training.
Gangsters want jobs, and this business about they are making so
much money dealing with drugs is a myth. There are only a few
people who make a lot of money. Most of these young people who
ended up with crack cocaine that they ended up getting
mandatory minimum sentencing on, which is absolutely nuts and
crazy, were not making a lot of money. They were out there
surviving.
So we have to change our thinking. Yes, there are some
very, very bad folks out there who need to be locked up, but
most of them are not. Given an opportunity, given a chance--we
have in some of those high schools--60 percent of the students
at Locke High are in foster homes, and so the system has to be
dealt with. We have to provide the resources. We have to
provide the support. We have to stop thinking we can lock
everybody up.
So I am here today to say the next hearing, Mr. Chairman, I
hope that we will bring in a whole room full of ex-gangsters
and gangsters and put a face on them. Let's talk to them. Let's
find out who their mamas and daddies are or were. Let's find
out not only have been abandoned, how many have been abused
sexually, physically, how many have slept out without a place
to live and no food. They are angry at the system, and there is
nothing worse than running into a poor, young, particularly
Black males, who have seen their mothers abused, who have been
abused, and you think if you put a gun in their hands, they are
not going to shoot somebody. They will.
But we can prevent that if we are serious about investing
in human potential. I like the way you describe it because we
do not have the fancy sociological names for what is wrong with
the kids, but you described it. I understood exactly what you
were saying, and we need to take that kind of information and
make it more available to people in ways that they understand.
Justice Department, how much money did you have in
prevention?
Mr. O'Connor. I would not be able to give you an exact
figure.
Ms. Waters. But it was not a lot, was it?
Mr. O'Connor. Well, I know that we just sent $1 million-
plus to L.A. in particular in the anti-gang----
Ms. Waters. One million dollars in L.A. is like a drop in
the bucket.
Mr. O'Connor. I agree, Madam. I would say nationally it is
well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ms. Waters. Well, let me tell you--he is trying to shut me
up--it is not enough. So what we need for you to do is we need
a Justice Department who will come in here and ask the
President--I do not care who it is--to place in their budget
some real money and some real resources to deal with
prevention. Until the day that I see you come in saying this is
how you can help us, then I do not know that you really do
understand what the needs are.
So let me thank all of you for being here.
Mr. Ogletree, I think again everybody should read the
Charles Hamilton Houston report that you just gave us and dwell
on that last paragraph because I think it is so informative and
it directs us.
And I thank you for your generosity. I just had to say that
because I know this business. I have worked with it long
enough. I understand it. Jobs, job training, and some
investment will do the job.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
The gentlelady's time has expired.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Scott. The gentleman from North Carolina?
Mr. Coble. I am belayed, Mr. Chairman. I do not have any
questions.
Mr. Scott. Well, thank you.
The gentlelady from Texas?
Ms. Jackson Lee. Thank you.
I would like to associate myself with the Chairman of the
full Committee's comments. This does, if you will, warrant a
roundtable discussion, Mr. Flores, with many of those that you
have spoken of.
Mr. Scott. Will the gentlelady suspend?
The Ranking Member and I have agreed to do a roundtable
discussion. So, in response--actually, before the comment was
made, we had been talking about that already--I think that will
happen.
I apologize to the gentlelady.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Let me start again, and I know the
Chairman will yield me the extra time to compliment him----
[Laughter.]
Ms. Jackson Lee [continuing]. And the Ranking Member for
this format that would allow us to have a roundtable, and I
would assume, Mr. Chairman, that we could engage some of the
individuals that Mr. Flores may have commented on because all
of us living in the real world, Professor Ogletree, have had
our share, and although the time may not have been as extended,
I am reminded of the intensity of gang warfare when the so-
called 1994 crime bill came out, and that was supposed to be
relief, R-E-L-I-E-F, and I think we found out that it was not.
I was then a Houston City councilmember that engaged with
the gangs in our community in discussions, in calls, gang
meetings, if you will. Guys come in and let's face to face. I
remember there was a great deal of humor about the midnight
basketball. In fact, I think it extinguished itself as a joke.
Frankly, there was value to that. Those folks were off the
street talking to each other, seeing role models.
So I want to just pursue this line of questioning and will
try to have all this merged in to my thoughts.
This is a brilliant piece, Professor Ogletree. It is
something that I will pull out of this big notebook and really
try to frame the framework. Let me give some suggestions, if
you would comment on them.
When we begin in this new Administration that will have a
new President--I would perceive that the President would be a
graduate of the Harvard Law School. That means he is by the
very nature bright, among others--but as we look toward the
economic piece, we will be doing a rebuilding of the Nation's
infrastructure. We will be doing large transit projects. Why
can't we be creative and actually write into the legislation
that the workforce should come from, a certain percentage
thereof, individuals of this definition? Write it into the law.
The second suggestion is no one even knows that we have
provisions in the law, Mr. O'Connor, that talk about reporting
stolen or lost guns. Do you know that there are State
legislators who are asking me, ``Is there such a bill?''
because no one is enforcing whether or not local jurisdictions
are, in fact, reporting lost or stolen guns, which fuels the
fires of gangs. That is how they get most of their weapons.
That is how they market them down to the border. They are
stolen or lost, and there is no enforcement.
That does not get necessarily to the question of whether or
not we are unfairly incarcerating teenagers. That really is
outside of that and would be a helpful piece of that if we
looked at it in the right way. So let me pose these questions
to you.
First of all, I want to recite in Mr. O'Connor's testimony.
And I understand that you are working with the tools that you
have, but here is what the Justice Department is doing: FBI-led
Safe Streets Violent Crime Task Force, Violent Gang Task Force,
the combination of the Violent Crime Impact Teams. We have
something called RAGE. Can you imagine? RAGE. This is a force
established by the ATF and Prince George's County Policy and
the FBI. The police forces' RAGE. This is something that comes
down upon our children.
And so I would like, Mr. O'Connor, if you would read this,
my question to you would be if we found other solutions, would
the Justice Department then have the data to up its monies on
prevention? I think what you want is to see the crime stop.
I think that the Justice Department is the place of last
resort that people cry to and look to and say, ``Why isn't the
Government doing anything?'' and so you form all these task
forces that, frankly, do not work because, if they did, from
1994 to 2008 when they passed that 1994 bill, we would see a
magnificent change, would we not? We would see numbers that
Professor Ogletree did not see.
So quickly, Professor Ogletree, you mentioned two points.
``Public onion data strongly suggests that people living in the
United States are far more likely to support education
prevention strategies for youth rather than prosecution,''
number one, and then the suppression, ``suppression policies
and expansive law enforcement power have not proven
effective,'' and then you proceed on (E) that talks about how
it comes down on the people of color.
Would you just comment?
And I will go to you, Mr. O'Connor, as the person that
people look to say, ``Why aren't you doing more?'' to tell me
whether or not you would, one, read this extensively and, two,
be able to get rid of all these RAGE task forces if we found
data to support the premise of this.
Professor Ogletree?
Mr. Ogletree. Thank you, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee.
I am very happy to respond.
I want to say a word first about the FBI and the Department
of Justice, and I think you and Congresswoman Maxine Waters hit
on an important point, and I think it is fair for the
Department of Justice to say--they may say--``That is not our
business.''
If your business is only to be involved in fighting crime,
we should know that because Congress keeps offering them
opportunities to come to get money, and they keep saying, ``We
have enough for what we are doing.'' I think it is important to
get an answer, and maybe the answer is, ``That is not our
business. We do not do that prevention stuff. We are fighting
crime.'' It would help us to know.
In terms of what we are doing, what the reports say, let me
respond to the first thing. One of the important examples of
social capital is that we have to figure out how to find a way
to employ, not over other employable people, but to employ the
hundreds of thousands of men who have served their time and who
are coming out of prison and who need a chance to work
somewhere.
Let me give you an example. When we talk about crime, if
you look at Houston, New Orleans, Oakland, and Newark, what is
interesting about those four places, are ports, ports that
employ thousands of people, and that the terrorism law now
prohibits even the consideration of anyone. The question is
whether or not Congress will, if you really want a solution,
look at whether or not somebody can paint a fence or cut some
grass or do something that does not undermine national
security, whatever it might be, because that is a place that we
are not going to reduce employment, we are going to increase
employment, and what a better way to start training people.
The Second Chance Act that--not the one that was passed,
but the one that you may recall a decade ago--Mayer Ed Koch and
Reverend Al Sharpton and I came and talked about that 10 years
ago. What you passed was not what we proposed. It was looking
at prior offenders, making them go through drug treatment,
making them prove that they are eligible for employment, and
then they would not be rejected That is exactly right, and that
is the second point.
The final point is that the public really wants to be safe.
Ms. Jackson Lee. I am sorry. Would you agree then that in
major infrastructure and in funding legislation dealing with
job creation, we should consider a piece that directly--you
know, we have goals for minority businesses and make sure there
is no discrimination because these are Federal funds--goes
ahead and targets that segment of the population?
Mr. Ogletree. Indeed. In fact, as you know, we have goals
in our funding for Iraq to make sure that that money goes to
Iraqi citizens. There is an affirmative step there. And it
seems to me here is the example where we can do something that
is forward looking by saying, rather than knowing that the
opportunity costs of having you back in prison, we are going to
continue to work not paying much, but paying enough to make it
productive as one of those goals, and the public will be happy
to know that their tax dollars are not going to incarcerate
somebody. They are going to make them employable, law-abiding,
productive citizens.
I think that is a very good idea, and I think it is the
kind of thing that as Congress, not being soft on crime, being
tough on crime, punish souls and send them to jail, but when
people get out, make sure they can be productive parts of the
community, and I think that is a very important forward-looking
idea, and that is what we talk about in the report.
And it is not one or the other. We are saying it is both.
You have to be tough on crime, focus on the worst criminals,
but also find a way to be preventive so that you do not
increase that list and be proud of the fact that we have not
one million in the 20th century, but two million people in
jail. That is not progress. That is a sign of a failed system,
and I think we need to recognize it and figure out how to fix
that failure.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Mr. O'Connor, reading this and, also, if
we found that the data in here would support another way to
handle this increasing crisis in juvenile crime or gangs, the
Justice Department has a preventative element to it, would you
work with the Congress? Would you believe the Justice
Department--because, obviously, you are here at this timeframe.
We do not know what your future is--would be able to work with
us on this matter?
Mr. O'Connor. The department would be certainly willing to
work on any prevention-related programs. I mean, I think, if I
may, with the Chairman's deference answer one thing, I do not
know where these task forces get their names, I certainly do
not come up with them, but that is not about prevention,
unfortunately. That is after a police chief----
Ms. Jackson Lee. You are right.
Mr. O'Connor [continuing]. Or a mayor has come to us and
said, ``There have been 15 homicides. Help. Help us find out
who did this and get them off the streets.''
I looked around my office in Connecticut when I got one of
those calls. I do not have one social worker in the U.S.
attorney's office in Connecticut. I do have 75 prosecutors and
teams of FBI agents, and I think it is just important to
understand that when it comes to prevention, the department's
role is funding prevention efforts by others, not preventing it
itself. We do not have social workers we send into communities.
We look for people who are on the ground and do that.
So I cannot commit to saying we will not have task forces.
The public expects that, the mayors, the governors, the
congressmen, anyone who is concerned, community groups. We have
to do that, and I think that challenge for us is to be able to
do both, to continue to fund the many prevention programs, some
of which were talked about here, but at the same time be able
to adequately respond to crimes after they occur.
Ms. Jackson Lee. But I think what you are saying--and I
will conclude on this--is----
Mr. Scott. If the gentlelady will suspend, we have a markup
that has been scheduled, and we want to do that, and then we
will come back to finish up the questions.
Ms. Jackson Lee. I will conclude my sentence, and then I
will yield back.
Mr. Scott. Go ahead.
Ms. Jackson Lee. And thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your
indulgence.
Let me just conclude by saying how I interpret what you
have just said, is, one, you will read this document, but there
is a prevention component in the Justice Department, and so
Congress can give the Justice Department more money, and you
would be collaborative.
I think the final word is if the crime of 15 homicides did
not occur in that jurisdiction that you are speaking of, they
would be just as accepting of the prevention dollars to not
have those already homicides, and that is what we want to do,
get in front of it to help these gang members get out of what
they are doing and to solve these problems ahead of time.
I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
And we are going to suspend the questions for just a
minute. We had some previously scheduled business.
[MARKUP]
Mr. Scott. With that, the markup is concluded, and we will
resume the questioning of the witnesses.
Does the gentleman from Ohio have questions?
The gentleman from New York?
The gentlelady from Wisconsin?
Just for a very brief second round, I would like to ask Mr.
O'Connor a question. We have heard several references to the
Second Chance, to how to deal with returning people who have
served their time. We passed the Second Chance Act. Obviously,
the way the Federal Government works, you cannot possibly have
gotten any rules and regulations to implement the bill yet.
Could you tell us the status of the implementation of the
Second Chance Act?
Mr. O'Connor. Mr. Chairman, I do not know, but I certainly
can get back to you.
Mr. Scott. If you could provide that for the record----
Mr. O'Connor. I will.
Mr. Scott [continuing]. We would appreciate it.
And you mentioned that all the U.S. attorneys had gang
prevention summits. Do you have the information gleaned from
those summits?
Mr. O'Connor. I do not know if there was any sort of formal
effort to coordinate whatever information was gleaned. I can
certainly check back with the Executive Office of U.S.
Attorneys and get back to you. I suspect that every district at
least reported back in writing as to what they did, who
participated, but beyond that, I just do not know. But we can
find that out for you.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
And for Dr. Straub and Major Buckovich, the Youth PROMISE
Act contains a provision we call the YOPs, youth-oriented
policing. Are there strategies the police departments can use
to more effectively deal with juvenile crime?
Mr. Straub. Mr. Chairman, the youth police initiative that
I spoke about in White Plains deals just with that issue, and I
applaud your work on the Youth PROMISE Act. Clearly--and a
number of people have spoken about it--one of the biggest
issues is building relationships with at-risk youth between the
police and those youth. If there is not an opportunity for them
to discuss very difficult important issues--race, violence,
respect--those conversations never happen. We never have the
chance for de-escalation. We never have the opportunity for
either side--and I hate to say either side--to come to an
understanding of each other.
So I think the youth police initiative, which has been
very, very effective in White Plains and now is being
replicated in a number of cities, provides that opportunity to
bring at-risk young men and women together with police officers
to have those very serious discussions that typically as a
society we do not want to have. We do not want to talk about
race, we do not want to talk about respect, we do not want to
talk about violence, and unless we bring the parties together
and have those conversations, in my opinion, we are not going
anywhere.
Mr. Bukovich. And I agree. I think we have a window of
opportunity with youth between about ages 17 and 14 or 14\1/2\
to really make an impact. I think it is between those ages
where they start to, especially youth in high-risk communities
or who are at high risk, have interactions with the police,
sometimes negative, and I think that we need strategies, when
we are presented with those opportunities, to try to impact
them in a positive way.
I know that certainly in Richmond we are constantly looking
for ways to provide positive role models for the youth, whether
it is through sports, such as our police athletic league, or
through some of our truancy prevention programs, to really put
police in contact with these at-risk youth.
Ms. Waters. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. Scott. I yield.
Ms. Waters. Mr. Chairman, the perception of the police
officer is developed on the street, and it is not that you get
a group of kids together and begin to talk with them. It is how
you treat them on the street.
When you have 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds who are getting
into trouble for the first time and they are made to lie on the
sidewalk, they are handcuffed, they are thrown up against the
car, they internalize what they are being told by others, that
the police hate them, they are racist, they do not like them,
on and on and on.
There was an incident in one of my communities where some
13-year-olds were literally breaking into a vacant house on the
block. I knew the police, the sheriffs. They were called. I met
them over there. They picked up the young people. I asked the
sheriffs to please let's get their addresses, let's go to their
homes.
I went with them to their homes. The parents were shocked.
They did not have any idea that this is what these kids had
been doing, but I have since been in touch with them over the
years. All of these young people are doing fine.
Mr. Scott. Would the gentlelady suspend? My time has
expired. On this round, we are going to keep very close to the
actual time. My time has expired.
It is the gentlelady from California's time. You are
recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. Waters. Thank you. And I will yield back my time to
you, Mr. Chairman.
But let me just say what those parents have told us is that
having been apprehended and brought home probably did more in
teaching them the lesson of not breaking into a house, not
going on the other property. It left a great impression about
the police who came to their homes, brought them home, instead
of taking them to jail.
So I just wanted to say that because I respect the idea
that you are trying to build relationships and you talk about
getting kids together and talking to them, but it really does
not happen that way. It happens based on how they are treated
with their early contacts with the police.
The statistics are such that by the time an African-
American male is 17 years old, he has been in touch with the
police at least--I think it is, Mr. Ogletree, at least two or
three times--and those experiences are what really helps them
to understand or think they understand who the police are and
what they are all about.
So, if I can suggest when you talk about policing and
youth--first of all, I like intervention programs and
prevention programs, which the Justice Department used to have.
I do not know if they have them anymore--when kids get in
trouble for the first time, they are not taken to jail. There
are alternative ways to deal with them in the community.
That does more in developing relationships than going to
even a church where they have gathered a group of kids to talk
to because usually those are not the kids that need the talking
to.
I yield to the Chairman.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
I did have another question that I wanted to get in, and
that is that the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act
requires us to focus on disproportionate minority confinement.
The chart over here shows the present gang-related
statutes. The red bars are the percentage in the various
statutes that are minorities where it shows, obviously, that a
disproportionate number of minorities are prosecuted under
those gang statutes.
My question is what passage of some of the alternative get-
tough bill would do to minority confinement first, then the
definition of gang, and also the conduct of a trial that allows
a prosecutor to bring in all kinds of community crime and
mayhem. The suppression bill says part of the definition of a
gang member involves people who have committed, not convicted
of, committed crimes which allows you essentially to try that
case along with everything else in the trial in chief, what
that might do to disproportionate minority confinement.
Mr. Ogletree?
Mr. Ogletree. The one obvious thing it will do, Congressman
Scott, looking at that chart is that it will go off the chart.
I mean, the numbers will be so catastrophic that you will not
even be able to confine the rate of disparity based on race in
terms of how youth are being treated in our system.
The disparities are national, but, ironically, they are not
geographic. When I say that, it is not a southern problem. You
will find it in the Northeast. You will find it in the Midwest.
You will find it in North and South. Even when there are small
concentrations of minority communities, the overrepresentation
of children of color in this system is growing exponentially.
We have identified some of the problems. Some of the
problems are that these kids are being suspended and expelled
from schools. That is that the educational system has become
part of the criminal justice system. There are police on the
property. There is a whole security apparatus. A police officer
has usually unfettered discretion to decide who stays in
school, who is suspended, who is expelled, and when they are
out of school, they are out of school not just for the day, but
until their case is resolved, which means they miss 6 months in
school, and then they cannot repeat that grade.
So this is a problem where we know there is a solution, and
the juvenile court judges are calling us asking for help,
superintendents are calling us, teachers are calling us. They
all are saying there is a problem with these statutes that
require judges to have no role, and the only role is the police
officer on the school grounds, and it creates this kind of
disparity, and it only makes the overrepresentation of children
of color even greater in our system.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
The gentlelady from Texas?
Ms. Jackson Lee. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And let me continue the line of questioning and thought
processes that we have had.
And, Professor Ogletree, what I would offer is to use
Harris County as a laboratory, and the reason I say that is
because using State laws, our juvenile court system has
discretion, and what we have found unscientifically is that
more youngsters of the majority population--of course, that is,
you know, somewhat of a metaphor now because who knows who the
majority is--who are Anglos are sent home or parents are called
versus Hispanic and African-American youth.
Might I also suggest that in this economic market, this
crisis where adults are competing for the typical youth
positions, summer jobs at our franchises where you could always
count on getting your summer job, and the loss, for example, in
our community of a major entertainment center, like a Coney
Island, which has been lost or whatever in New York, which used
to be a central spot for hiring of our youth, is gone.
So the scheme of things has turned upside down and,
therefore, where do they go and what do they do? So a child
that gets out of school who has no history of criminal
activities, the long, hot summer, drives them, unfortunately,
into a circumstance that may alter their life.
And let me add one other point. I remember having Senator
Paul Wellstone during his life visit--I will use Harris
County--in our juvenile detention facility where he found, just
by conversation as we were walking through, numbers of young
people who had mental health needs that are now being detained
in these facilities, and the mixture of volatility and criminal
activity and someone who needs some other kind of help only
sends that youngster out on the street again, not finding the
services that they need.
So I would want to ask you to comment on this whole
question of a comprehensive approach to services. I think we
spoke earlier about jobs, but the fact that we have turned this
society upside down. There is not a nurturing and caring
society. We are so frightened by this potential of gang
warfare--and, certainly, gangs have guns, and I know police
persons are frightened of their lives as they project the image
of gangs--and so suppression and using these heavy laws do not
leave any pathway, if you will, for some of the thoughts that
you made, if you would comment on that.
And, Mr. Flores, if you would comment, what would happen if
we turned the corner and had a massive structure of mental
health services, employment--I think Professor Ogletree
mentioned ridding ourselves of stigma, but if they are as young
as 13 or 14, we might not be stigmatized totally yet--but
anyhow moving them in that direction. I am not sure if you are
familiar with MS-13, but I think I would like to make sure that
we distinguish ourselves for some of the sort of hardened track
that people tend to go on after they graduate from these baby
crimes.
Professor Ogletree?
Mr. Ogletree. Thank you.
Let me just say one thing taking a step back. The research
that we do suggests something very different than what I have
heard today. That is if we are looking at people who are 14 to
17, that is too late. We have to look at them at 9 years old to
13 when we still have a chance to keep them in school, keep
them from dropping out, have a network there. So I think we
have to, unfortunately, step back in a real sense and make a
difference.
And then some of the data--the mental health is just
pervasive. We looked at a number of States, and many of the
Black and Brown boys in particular in the juvenile justice
system, almost two-thirds, have some mental health crisis that
has been undiagnosed--too quiet, too active, those with ADHD
and a whole series of other medical mental health issues that
are being ignored, and, in fact, they have become aggravating
rather than mitigating circumstances because, instead of trying
to treat those, they become reason to detain, et cetera, as
opposed to trying to find the right facility. So that is a very
important issue to study.
Having said all that, there is some good news. My wife, Pam
Ogletree, is the president and CEO of something called
Children's Services of Roxbury. It is very like many other
programs dealing with child welfare, but on their own, the
young people started a group called YPP, youth-to-police
partnership, and these are the young people who have been
harassed by police, who could not get along with police, and
they have decided to tell them why I run when you come after
me, why I do not want to talk to you on the streets, and it is
really a remarkable thing because they are out in the streets
talking to other youth, ``Do not be afraid. Come to us because
we need to work with ways the police can be much more
effective.''
Harris County is a very good example as well. There is good
anecdotal data, but there is a big enough set of data. If we
could have access to that to talk about both, how the young
people are in the system earlier and how to increase the ideas
of discretion, and it really seemed that everything we are
talking about today is tied to the educational system.
If we want to fix the issue of gangs, fix the issue of
criminal justice, juvenile justice, we must first start with
saying the school system is a haven of peace, educational
opportunity, and of opportunity to move forward. If we do not
do that, no matter what we do, we are going to find ourselves
talking about another violent shooting. We are going to have
that happen because we have not addressed the fundamental
problem of making the educational system safe for our children
and making them feel that they are protected.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Mr. Flores, can you just quickly answer? I
will just put it this way. Intervention--would that be a
positive step on some of these gangs for youngsters who are as
young as 9 years old and jobs for that age group that may be 14
to 17?
Mr. Flores. Well, first, for your first question about
affiliation with MS, I do have a long history with----
Ms. Jackson Lee. I did not ask you about your affiliation.
Mr. Flores. No, not my affiliation, rather my----
Ms. Jackson Lee. Your knowledge.
Mr. Flores. The knowledge of them and, actually, and, you
know, my family varies with people from different gangs, so I
am not going to say who is from where, right.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Absolutely.
Mr. Flores. But I think I am very knowledgeable of what
they do and who they are.
I think that intervention at the early age is very
important, but I think what also is important is that even at
an early age, as an 8-year-old, 9-year-old, you already have a
sort of vision of like a cop or of a police officer or anything
like that. So even at an early age, you might be refrained from
going into these programs that are run maybe by a police
station or are run maybe by, you know, the Department of
Justice or whatever it is that they are run by.
So I think also the importance is for these departments to
look for people who look like them, right, and I think that is
a key that is a success to organizations in which I work with
in Los Angeles, is looking for people that also look like them
so those barriers can be broken down already, of course,
because there are a lot of kids already afraid.
I have a 3-year-old son that already knows to be scared of
a cop. I do not know where he got it from. I know I am not
teaching him that, but, you know, me not being with his mother
and he is into the police, I do not know what he is learning
over there, right, in terms of knowledge of police or whatever
not.
So I think in order to break these barriers down, we have
to use different methods, searching for people that look like
them, and that is one of the keys that happened the
transformation that I had, as well as transformation of other
gang members that I know, is that there were people that looked
exactly like them, but they were giving them different
information, rather than the information that is being kicked
or being brought in by, you know, gang organizations or
whatever you want to call them.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
The gentlelady's time has expired.
The gentleman from Georgia?
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Members of the panel, last week, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics released data on the unemployment situation in May,
and to make a long story short, a net loss of 49,000 jobs for
the month of May, 324,000 jobs lost so far this year. So
unemployment has risen at the highest rate the last 20 years.
Housing foreclosures are rampant, and people are losing their
homes. The economic situation is tight.
How does the uncertainty of our economic posture--and it is
really getting bleaker every day, gas prices going up every
day, record highs--what impact does this economic condition,
which is deteriorating, have on the prospects for gang
development, starting with you, Professor Ogletree?
And I would say of there could be a connection between the
economic conditions and the rise of gang affiliation, does it
make sense to continue to lock people up, or should we do more
in terms of social services?
Mr. Ogletree. Well, Congressman Johnson, you are absolutely
right, and you and I both as lawyers and particularly working
in this system have seen the impact of the lack of education,
lack of employment, and it is even tougher with people who have
gone through the system, which means they have a record, they
cannot get a job, they are not eligible. That becomes a huge
problem.
The other point that has impact not just to young people,
but these loss of jobs of their parents. Jobs are being moved
away. It is a huge problem that is being exacerbated by the
current economic environment and foreclosure of homes. All
that.
And the interesting thing is that it is not just a race
issue. This is striking poor White families, the urban
families, whether they are Black or White or Brown, and I think
it is a problem that I hope that not only this Congress, but
the next Administration will focus on. It is one of the pink
elephants in the room that here we are, we are called jobs,
that means we have people on the street.
Washington, D.C., tonight, it is probably 90 degrees
outside or hotter. It will be 85 tonight at 11:00, and there
are a lot of young people that are going to be walking the
streets, not because they are looking for trouble. There is no
air conditioning in the house, there is nothing else to do, and
they become targets, and we are witnessing right now the very
problem that we are talking about here in our Nation's capital.
And if we do not see that these kids who cannot get a job,
who do not have a home with air conditioning, who are not in
school, then we are the problem, and labeling them all as gang
leaders is not going to answer it, and I think your idea of
looking at these unemployment statistics, looking at this
subprime lending and foreclosures tells us it is not a Black
problem or a Brown problem, it is an American problem.
I hope even though we are talking about gangs, if we want
to solve the problem, we need solutions that address the whole
family and the whole community. That is what we have not done
in a comprehensive and meaningful way.
Mr. Straub. I think the other thing that we are going to
see is a tremendous amount of frustration which is going to
further exacerbate the existing problems.
One of the issues that we really have not talked about at
all is the whole issue of domestic violence, and I think as we
see people become unemployed, as we see people lose their
homes, as we see tremendous frustration levels build, there is
going to be a propensity to increased--and we have seen it
already in White Plains--incidents of domestic violence, and
that is a whole series of issues.
It is not just the partners that are involved, but it is
the children who witness violence in their home, and what does
that say to them as they go forth in their development, having
witnessed mother, father or other partner type relationships
where there is violence, and I that is something that we are
not talking about. We are talking about kids on the street or
we are talking about these issues, but domestic violence, I
think, is just something that clearly is going to be very much
aggravated by the dire economic situation that we are looking
at.
Mr. Bukovich. I think another important factor is
communications between confinement facilities and re-entry
teams. As these gang members come back to their neighborhoods
where the job opportunities are even less than when they were
confined that there has to be information sharing between the
confinement facilities and the intervention and re-entry teams
that are trying to get these gang members that have a host of
issues back into their neighborhoods.
And also the programs have to address the parents. You
cannot just focus on the youth, but the programs have to
address the parents, parenting issues, and economic issues that
the parents are facing when the child comes back into their
home.
Mr. Flores. I think that the unemployment issue is huge and
is creating larger gangs, if you want to call it, because I
think that a lot of these gang members are young members. Their
parents are being laid off, right, and I think that that also
pushes more young people, even people in high schools, to look
for jobs, and I think that it is important for someone in high
school to not be thinking about a job, right, to more be
thinking about his or her education rather than thinking about
a job, and unemployment is a huge issue that is affecting the
large number of the gang growth and things like that.
And I think one of the things that Maxine Waters talked
about was stipends. I work in an organization that we stipend
our young people for coming to school, and I think if we had
more programs like that, it would alleviate some of that, some
of the reasons why unemployment is affecting this issue.
Mr. O'Connor. I mean, I think it is undisputed that there
is an economic link to crime rates. Just for the sake of time,
I do not have much more to add than that, but, certainly, that
is a factor in anyone's mind, that as the economic forecast
appears, one has to be sensitive to the link there.
I am not a social scientist, and I could not be precise,
but it goes without saying that that would certainly heighten
any concerns, any prosecutor's concerns. It is going to create
an environment where people tend to be more angry. Anger tends
to spout more violence.
Mr. Macy. I think it is a wonderful connection you are
making because I think it is no accident that the Subcommittee
is titled Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, and I am not
an alarmist nor am I a conspiracy theorist, but having worked
in the Middle East over the last 7 years and asked to come and
look at the destruction, the psychosocial degradation after the
second Lebanese war, if you are familiar with the role that
Hezbollah played in that war, and we saw from the media
standpoint how onerous and terrible it was that the citizens of
Lebanon harbored the Hezbollah militants.
But, in fact, were you to take a closer look, Hezbollah,
which is organized around violent gang principles, is, in fact,
the social service structure for the Country of Lebanon. So
they get Lebanese children to school. They get the Lebanese
families essentially health insurance. They are the ones that
actually back the poorest of the citizens.
It is no mistake, in my consultancy work with the
Department of Homeland Security in New Jersey, they are looking
at similar recruitment tactics, and I think it plays out
probably more than just in New Jersey where these, as Committee
Member Forbes terms them, networks of gangs are looking to take
care of younger folks because, at this point, there is a gap
between how our Government and our State and municipalities are
unable to take care of them. They slip right into that gap very
quickly and offer a false sense of security and safety.
And so I think we have a bigger issue on our hand than just
increased violence. I think we have a security issue in the
long run, and I think that we are not going to arrest our way
out of this. We are going to have to put significant funding on
the table for psychosocial servicing that is broadband and
includes biopsychosocial approaches and includes mental health
services, along with looking at justice for the
disproportionate minorities who are incarcerated.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
Has the gentleman finished his questions?
Thank you.
I want to thank all of our witnesses for their testimony
today. We have heard about the importance of long-term
solutions. We heard about domestic violence.
One of the things that we have had from other hearings is
the success of nurse-family partnerships who deal with
newborns, family with newborns, and it is my understanding that
by the nurses coming and visiting, working with the family
through the last few months of pregnancy, first year of life,
that 18 years later, children in that program are significantly
less likely to get in trouble.
I think it says domestic violence could be reduced, child
abuse certainly would be reduced, and we know there is a strong
correlation between child abuse and future violence. So we know
we have to take a long-term approach, and we heard through the
entire hearing that the criminal code has enough in it to deal
with the serious crimes.
We heard an example of a gang member cut somebody's arm
off. Well, I think every State has a criminal code sufficient
to deal severely with someone who chops somebody's arm off, but
we have heard not only how effective prevention strategies can
be, but that the suppression strategy is not only ineffective
in reducing future crimes, it is made situations
counterproductive, that it actually may lead to more gangs.
And we lock up already more people proportionally than
anywhere else on earth. This chart shows the United States
number one in the world, and the minority community getting
locked up at rates that would justify an international human
rights investigation that you would target a community with
rates such as the one shown on that chart--2,200 per 100,000 in
the minority community; the far right Brown line, almost 4,000;
the top 10 States in minority confinement, 4,000 per 100,000--
when most countries lock up between 50 and 200 per 100,000.
So, obviously, the criminal justice system is doing all it
can do, but what the chart also reminds us of is that the
Children's Defense Fund calls the present system the cradle-to-
prison pipeline. We know, as Professor Ogletree has said, if we
get people in the cradle-to-college pipeline, those children
will not be getting in trouble.
So we want to thank all of our witnesses for your
testimony.
Members may have additional written questions for our
witnesses, which will forward to you and ask that you answer as
promptly as you can so the answers may be part of the record.
Without objection, the hearing record will remain open for
1 week for the submission of additional materials.
Without objection, the Committee now stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:12 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
----------
Material Submitted for the Hearing Record
Prepared Statement of the Honorable John Conyers, Jr., a Representative
in Congress from the State of Michigan, and Chairman, Committee on the
Judiciary
Today, the Subcommittee is holding the third hearing this Congress
on what approaches work to stop gang crime.
Some think that the most effective approach is to enact more laws
that would result in more people being locked up. Others support
programs that help prevent young people from getting involved with
gangs in the first place.
I hope that today's witnesses will address both approaches and help
guide us in determining what will best stem the tide of gangs. To that
end, I have three suggestions.
First, I believe it is particularly important that we address the
fundamental reason why young people are drawn to gangs. We need to
understand why our youth often feel more of an allegiance to their gang
than they do to their own families.
Second, we must not ignore how communities are impacted by gang
crime. Whether you live in urban or rural America, you have the right
to feel safe from violence in your home.
However, feeling safe in your home should not mean locking up every
young person and throwing away the key. We need to find a balance that
aims for the best result for our young people as well as for the
communities where they live.
As Professor Olgetree's recent study points out, we spend anywhere
from $35,000 to $70,000 a year to incarcerate a juvenile in this
country. A recent Pew Foundation study points out that 1 in every 100
Americans are now behind bars, with 1 in every 9 young black males
behind bars.
Regardless of whether your motivation is to save money or to save
lives, we should reflect upon whether our resources are being used
wisely by sending so many people to prison.
And, third, while it is critical to address gang crime, we must do
so in a way that will not sacrifice basic principles of fairness and
justice. We must deal with gangs in a way that does not lead to racial
or age-related profiling, with disproportionate numbers of young
Americans being unnecessarily funneled through the criminal justice
system based on their race or ethnicity, or on their youth.
More broadly, we should not be so quick to throw away our young
people. The Supreme Court has acknowledged that there are fundamental
differences between adults and adolescents that impact the way a young
person thinks and reasons. We should also acknowledge these differences
as we consider how to deal with gangs.
With that said, I'd like to thank each of the witnesses for
agreeing to appear before us today. I look forward to hearing your
testimony and working with you to develop positive solutions to our
gang problems.
Prepared Statement of the Honorable Sheila Jackson Lee, a
Representative in Congress from the State of Texas, and Member,
Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security
Thank you, Chairman Scott for convening today's very important
hearing addressing gangs. Specifically, this hearing will focus on
determining an appropriate response to gang crime in the United States.
Witnesses will discuss alternative approaches to stemming violence, the
effectiveness of various approaches and the appropriateness of federal
law enforcement in criminal activity traditionally addressed by the
states. Although there are several gang bills currently before
Congress, those are not the primary focus of today's hearing.
Today's hearing will focus primarily on the Charles Hamilton
Houston Institute for Race and Justice (Harvard Law School) report, No
More Children Left Behind, which assesses the most comprehensive and up
to date studies on the issue of evidenced-based crime reduction
strategies, and applies the information to the major legislative
efforts pending in the Congress to address the issue. Witnesses will
also address law enforcement approaches to addressing crime, and their
effectiveness.
There will be a single panel of witnesses. Professor Charles
Ogletree, Jr, Professor and Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston
Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School will present
findings from their report released in March 2008, entitled, No More
Children Left Behind Bars. This survey report reviewed current research
about child development and educational interventions in an effort to
curb youth violence and gang affiliation.
Ely Flores, a former gang member turned community activist, will
testify about his work at LA CAUSA YouthBuild (Los Angeles Communities
Advocating for Unity Social Justice and Action). Mr. Flores urges
members of Congress not to give up on gang members, but instead to look
for ways to incorporate them into functioning within the legal social
structure.
Dr. Robert D. Macy, Ph.D., founded the Boston Children s
Foundation, a public charity, to address the ongoing gang violence and
suicides in the 56,000 children enrolled in Boston Public Schools, will
testify about anxiety disorders and traumatic stress disorders, the
basis for much of the maladaptive gang behavior, which are highly
amenable to treatment.
Dr. Frank Straub, Ph.D., Commissioner of Public Safety for the City
of White Plains, NY, watched as his city became gentrified, and how
that affected crime and gang activity. Ultimately the police department
and the city s youth bureau partnered with the North American Family
Institute (NAFI), a Massachusetts-based social service organization, to
develop and implement a successful program to reduce violence and
improve community relations.
Major John Buckovich, Richmond Police Department, will testify
about the GRIP program (Gang Reduction and Intervention Program). The
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) allocated
2.5 million dollars to four pilot cities Richmond, Virginia; Los
Angeles, California; Milwaukee, WI; and North Miami Beach, FL. The
police department works in conjunction with multiple private and public
organizations to focus on: primary and secondary prevention,
intervention and lastly, direct gang suppression. Richmond has seen as
decrease in the amount of violent crime by 24% since 2006, and
homicides have decreased from 86 in 2005 to 55 in 2007.
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program indicates that violent
crime specifically robberies, homicides, and aggravated assaults has
increased 1.9% over 2006; whereas some types of crime rapes, burglaries
and auto thefts have continued to fall. The overall crime rate violent
crime and non-violent crime considered together is the lowest it has
been in 30 years. The top five cities suffering from crime increases
are St. Louis, MO, Detroit, MI, Flint, MI, Compton, CA, and Camden, NJ.
Some crime experts suggest that the increase in violent crime is
linked to an increase in juvenile crime, specifically gang crime. In
Oakland, police officials attribute recent rises to an uptick in Latino
gang violence, more turf wars between drug gangs and an increase in
violence among juveniles who escalate minor disputes to homicide.
However, other experts disagree that gang activity is on the rise.
According to a recently-released report from the Justice Policy
Institute (JPI):
There are fewer gang members in the United States today than
there were a decade ago, and there is no evidence that gang
activity is growing . . . the most recent comprehensive law
enforcement estimate indicates that youth gang membership fell
from 850,000 in 1996 to 760,000 in 2004 and that the proportion
of jurisdictions reporting gang problems has dropped
substantially.
Researchers Kevin Pranis and Judith Greene, authors of the JPI
report, conducted a literature survey of all gang research. They found,
that there is no consistent relationship between law enforcement
measures of gang activity and crime trends. For example, an analysis of
gang membership and crime data from North Carolina found that most
jurisdictions reporting growth in gang membership also reported falling
crime rates. Dallas neighborhoods targeted for gang suppression
activities reported both a drop in gang crime and an increase in
violent crime.
Some believe that demography has played a role in the crime
increase. Some cities with rising juvenile populations are experiencing
a rise in juvenile crime. In other cities, criminals are being released
from prison after serving lengthy sentences imposed in the 80's and
90's. Often these newly released people never received treatment while
incarcerated and there are few, if any, services available to them on
the outside.
Another explanation for the violent crime increase is diminished
federal funding of local police forces. For example, under President
Clinton the COPS program reached a high of $2.5 billion; in comparison
to 2006 federal funding which was $894 million. The change in funding
priorities is attributed to increased funding for terrorism instead of
bread-and-butter crime fighting, according to Los Angeles Police Chief
Bill Bratton, past president of the Police Executive Research Forum.
Again, I welcome today's witnesses. I yield the remainder of my
time.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]