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NewsJust getting tough: We can't stop street gangs without aiding preventionNovember 15, 2007Philadelphia Inquirer Following the lead of the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives is expected to pass new tough anti-gang legislation in upcoming weeks that will expand the definition of the term street gangs and increase criminal penalties for gang activities, including permitting federal judges to sentence 13-year-olds to life in prison without parole. Except for gang members themselves, I don't know of anyone who doesn't favor the elimination of criminal street gangs. The problem is, we are making some of the same wrongheaded decisions about gangs that we've been making during the so-called war on drugs over the last three decades. We've been pretending it's enough to pass get-tough legislation, while underfunding prevention and treatment programs. The result: swollen prisons and wasted generations. A version of the Gang Prevention, Intervention and Suppression Act of 2007 pending in the House (H.R. 3547) has already passed the Senate by voice vote and is expected to be approved by the Senate with the support of key Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif). President Bush is expected to sign the bill into law. We are not likely to see a decrease in juvenile crime as a result of this bill's passage. And Latinos, African Americans and Asians are likely to become even more disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. Much of the outcry against gangs is media-driven and goes against the evidence. A report issued in July by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based public-policy group that studies criminal-justice issues, lets us know just how uninformed we are about gangs. Titled "Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies," the report notes: "Youth crime remains near the lowest levels seen in the past three decades. Yet public concern, fueled by increased media coverage, has skyrocketed since 2000. "There are fewer gang members in the U.S. today than there were a decade ago. The most recent comprehensive law-enforcement estimate indicates that youth gang membership fell from 850,000 in 1996 to 760,000 in 2004, and the proportion of jurisdictions reporting gang problems has dropped substantially. "Gang membership accounts for a relatively small share of crime. With the exception of Los Angeles and Chicago, where gang members are believed to be responsible for a significant share of crime, the available evidence indicates that gang members play a relatively small role in the national crime problem despite their propensity toward criminal activity," the report says. For example, gang members are responsible for fewer than 1 in 10 homicides, fewer than 1 in 16 violent offenses, and fewer than 1 in 20 serious crimes. "Gangs themselves play an even smaller role, since much of the crime committed by gang members is self-directed and not committed for the gang's benefit," the report states. "Gangs do not dominate the drug trade. Studies of several jurisdictions where gangs are active have concluded that gang members account for a relatively small share of drug sales and that gangs do not generally seek to control drug markets. Investigations conducted in Los Angeles and nearby cities found that gang members accounted for 1 in 4 drug-sale arrests. "Most gang members join when they are young and quickly outgrow their gang affiliation without the help of law-enforcement or gang-intervention programs. A substantial minority of youth (7 percent of whites and 12 percent of blacks and Latinos) goes through a gang phase during adolescence, but most youth quit the gang within the first year." Still, people believe there's a gang problem. So we get tough. Sounds like the same failed approach that has loaded our prisons. "Since the early 1970s the prison and jail population in the United States has increased at an unprecedented rate," according to a recent report on incarceration rates by the Sentencing Project, another criminal-justice think tank in Washington. "The more than 500 percent rise in the number of people incarcerated in the nation's prisons and jails has resulted in a total of 2.2 million people behind bars." Most of that growth has been fueled by drug arrests, which have tripled in the last 25 years; in 2005, there were 1.8 million drug arrests. Nearly 6 in 10 persons in state prisons for drug offenses have no history of violence or high-level drug-selling activity, the Sentencing Project reports. People of color are disproportionately represented in prison. African Americans, for example, make up 14 percent of all drug users, but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 56 percent of persons in state prison for drug offenses. Additionally, a black person serves nearly as much time in federal prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as a white does for a violent offense (61.7 months), largely because of a 100-to-1 disparity for crack versus powder-cocaine sentencing, according to the Sentencing Project. Today, the United States imprisons the largest proportion of its citizens - 737 per 100,000 - than any other nation in the world, including Russia. By comparison, England has a rate of 148 per 100,000; Australia, 126; Canada, 107; France 85; and Japan, 62. Of 2,200 juveniles around the world sentenced to life in prison without parole, all but 12 are in the United States. If we get tough with gangs but fail to address what encourages gangs to form, we'll go down the same road, and our prison-industry complex will just get worse. George E. Curry, a former Washington correspondent and New York bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, was editor in chief of Emerge magazine. He can be reached at gcurry@phillynews.com. |
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