As part of our endless quest in the face of slow news days to provide you relevant info on how to deal with the forces facing correction sentencing as we approach 2020, we will every Sunday provide the familiar “book review.” Well, not so familiar, actually. We intend to focus on books that don’t fit into the reigning “inside the silo” paradigm that has so successfully gotten us where we are today. Sometimes that may mean corrections and/or sentencing books that challenge the existing mantras. Other times, it may mean books that don’t even touch on corrections and/or sentencing but have significant relevance that we would otherwise miss by insisting on staying inside our silo. And, so you won’t have to worry about bookmarking or coming back and scrolling through archives when you want to check something we said,we will gladly post each review over on the left-hand side of the blog for easy reference. Please. Don’t thank us. The astonishment in your eyes is enough.
I got elected to a small town school board just when the “reform” efforts in public education were shifting to the “one size fits all,” “top down” approach that dominates the ridiculous testing mentality of current education policy (detailed in this book review a few weeks back). While all that was swirling, my wife and I were busy working with the principals of my son’s schools, making sure as best we could that his teachers would be well matched to his needs and talents. We weren’t the only ones, although being a school board member may have helped us a bit more than others. The point is that we knew even then that you maxed a kid’s education by getting that kid hooked up with the teachers whose strengths matched up right, not by constant testing and elimination of all subjects that can’t be tested easily. Good outcomes have to take into account context and the people actually in play. Pronouncements from on-high, “solutions” pre-packaged and shipped in any and all locations, ignorances of context and situations—they looked good on paper maybe, but the results didn’t get you where you said you wanted to be.
We’ve noted regularly here that the country in recent years has tried this blunderbuss approach to practically all policy areas, not just education. And it’s very pronounced in Corrections Sentencing, with its bazooka mandatory minimums and longer sentences for actually going to trial, where sentencing commissions and guidelines were dropped on native populations like manna and then replaced by recitations of one from column A, one from column B by current reformers when the results of the first on-high pronouncements became clear. And they will be replaced soon by different on-high pronouncements.
Too gloomy? Off base? We would like you to read the truly remarkable Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America by the equally remarkable David Kennedy. Maybe you’re already familiar with Kennedy and his well-traveled and effective Ceasefire program that concentrates on high-offending criminals, drugs and guns, and cooperative partnerships among all the folks in a neighborhood who want all that stopped (including as a rule most of the offenders themselves). As he recounts, he and his colleagues sorta blundered into it in Boston where extraordinary humility and openness to reality convinced them that on-high wasn’t going to understand or get it done. Basically, the cops would call in hard core offenders and say, look, we want this stopped, you want this stopped, everyone wants this stopped so everyone can live lives without neverending fear. You keep it up and we will drop a giant hammer on you. You work with us, we’ll work with you. The key ingredient is building trust and legitimacy, among the participants, within the participants that they can see this through and have an impact. The program has been so successful that many other cities have taken it on, as described effectively in the book.
The book itself is a partial autobiography, a policy history, and a manual for both effective ground-up program and policy planning and learning on the fly as contexts differ and change. As someone who’s been involved in not nearly as dangerous but just as hands-on efforts in both public education and criminal justice, I read these accounts with satisfaction that somebody out there actually does get it, the flux of personalities and events and luck that mix in ways statistical models just can’t capture. One of the most pleasant parts of the book for me was Kennedy’s description of how his request for NIJ assistance was bound for the trash can since the project was conjectural and couldn’t stand NIJ’s academics’ insistence that value is found in research design, not policy impact. Only Jeremy Travis, an NIJ director with actual street-level experience, saved the day and the rest, as they say . . . . I gave up reviewing NIJ proposals because I was seeing too many important and useful topics and policies cast aside due to what were often inherent flaws in designability while ultimately comparatively irrelevant projects were approved because they checked all the design boxes. It was too depressing to continually see this insistence on academic purity derail what those of us in the field really needed to know even if imperfectly. That Travis inadvertently delivered proof of that through Kennedy and colleagues is a nice affirmation.
Kennedy is a terrific writer, and his passion for his work and topic, the people he sees doing the grunt level work, living the dangerous lives, the need for us to wake up and stop these things from happening when they don’t have to almost literally jump off the pages. He got into this through writing up policy cases for Harvard’s public affairs school, and that talent is extraordinary. I won’t promise you that “you won’t be able to put it down” and all that hype. I actually was able to put it down. But I came back and you will, too. The subject is essential, existential even, and the drama of it rings throughout. I dare you not to be convinced by him.
Kennedy hit some points that we hit on here. For one thing, his book echoes the guest series that Eduardo Barajas posted for us last week, which describes how it can work beyond violence and drugs. Kennedy’s points don’t intentionally reinforce a point we make here about much of the “crime decline” of the 1990s being the result of violent guys killing and maiming violent guys, but his stats and descriptions of who was offing whom do make that point. Ever see that modeled in the famous “prisons account for 25% of the crime drop” research? And it poses the question of the imprecise but very real impact of cultural flows rather than active government effort in influencing policy outcomes. The idea that crime itself could be a fire that flares and then consumes itself rarely gets consideration, much less counsel our reactions and perhaps inactions.
A couple of other points. We argue that “stakeholders” with stakes in the process to hold onto should not be involved in setting policy goals but should be directly involved in explaining and constructing how those goals are achieved when/if they are involved. Kennedy’s program basically achieves the strengths in that. Ceasefire is brought in, the people on the ground and in the communities make it work even if they don’t make the decisions to bring it in. Another point—we have sometimes questioned the utility of the “drug court works” research here because we know from drug court case studies themselves that context and people are fundamental to drug court success, just as to Ceasefire success. Thus, it’s not important to hear that “drug court reduces recidivism such and such %” if that’s just an average that hides bad drug courts and underplays the really good ones. We don’t need an average stat. We need to know the above-average stats, who has them and what they do, and then work on the ground to fit every drug court that can do it into the general principles given their contexts.
But enough. We’ve made the point that this is an important policy book, not just for Corrections Sentencing but for criminal justice overall and all policy areas, like small town school board policies. It’s thick with insights and guidance that can’t be covered in a book review. You really will just have to read it yourself to get everything it has to offer. The book’s lessons for Corrections Sentencing are not just that there are more effective ways to stop violent and/or drug crime than prisons. Kennedy makes clear that preventing events from getting to the point where prisons are an option is the goal. And that goal is dealt with directly and immediately, unlike so many policy recommendations that can take even generations to bear fruit. Kennedy’s book also drives home the importance of context and listening to the people who know, of putting away stereotypes on all sides and building the trust and legitimacy that are the only real long-term protections. Yes, there are prescriptions that have to be followed, but there’s a difference between the doctor who works with you and the doctor who tells you just to take the damn pills. Kennedy shows that in eloquent and passionate ways. It’s time we learn it.