Thirty years after the report of the National Commission was released, the Milton Eisenhower Foundation sponsored a
review of the recommendations of the Commission, the present state of justice and domestic tranquility in the U.S., and what seems not to have worked and what did work. "What doesn't work particularly well includes prison building, bootcamps, "zero tolerance" policing, the "war on drugs," supply side tax breaks for the rich, Enterprise Zones and the Job Training Partnership Act for high school dropouts."
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What works, based on scientific evaluation? Leading examples include Head Start preschool, safe havens after school, the public School Development Plan of Professor James Comer at Yale University, full service community schools in which nonprofit organizations partner with individual inner-city schools, the Ford Foundation's Quantum Opportunities Program to keep inner-city youth in high school and "training first" (not "work first") job preparation for out-of-school youth modeled after the Argus Community in the South Bronx. All of these successes reduce crime. All also improve educational performance and develop youth in positive directions. Most also reduce drug involvement and improve employability. All have been successfully replicated.
Other examples of what works include YouthBuild USA, in which dropouts rehab housing; nonprofit community development corporations, modeled after Robert Kennedy's Mobilization for Youth, to generate inner city jobs; community-based banking to generate inner-city capital; problem oriented,
community-equity policing in which young minority officers mentor youth; diversion of nonviolent offenders from prison to treatment as begun by the State of Arizona; proven high quality drug treatment in the community closely integrated with local drug courts; the Delancey Street model in San Francisco for self-sufficiently reintegrating ex-offenders back into the community; and in-prison drug treatment like Delaware's Key Program.
Together, these existing successes simultaneously reduce crime and fear, improve education, increase employment and economically develop the community. Replicated to scale by knowledgeable leaders, what we already know to work can create a comprehensive, interdependent, national urban
and criminal justice policy that simultaneously establishes justice and insures domestic tranquility. Such investment needs to be supported by a national economic policy that gives first priority to eliminating child poverty and creating full employment for all, including, especially, the hard-to employ
in the inner city and pockets of rural poverty.
The United Kingdom may find that the causes of the riots are unlike those that America experienced in the late 1960s and thus that the solutions that (partly) work here are irrelevant there. The important thing is that it ask such questions. The answer is almost certainly not to be found in better-equipped and better-trained police, water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Those tactics stop riots; they do not prevent riots.
Perhaps something can be learned from the policing of one of the most notorious favelas of Latin America: the City of God in Rio de Janeiro.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/10/ ... f-god.html
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