RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA PAYS PEOPLE AT RISK OF VIOLENT CRIME TO STAY AWAY FROM TROUBLE
In 2006, the Contra Costa city of Richmond, CA had one of the highest homicide rates in the nation. The situation was so dire, the city authorized an unheard of new program that would identify the most likely to shoot someone or be shot, and pay them to keep out of trouble.
Four times per year, the Office of Neighborhood Safety, conceived and developed by DeVone Boggan, selects 50 candidates under 25, and enrolls them in an 18-month program. Participants receive a monthly stipend between $300 and $1000 for 9 of those months, along with education, mentoring, and other services.
The program has its critics, and it has yet to be thoroughly evaluated, but it may actually be working. In 2013, Richmond saw its lowest homicide rate in 33 years, and 65 of 68 of the young men who had been enrolled in the program over the previous four years were still alive.
Tim Murphy has the story for the July/August issue of Mother Jones Magazine. Here are some clips:
It was a crazy idea, but Richmond, California, wouldn’t have signed off on DeVone Boggan’s plan if it had been suffering from an abundance of sanity. For years, the Bay Area city had been battling one of the nation’s worst homicide rates and spending millions of dollars on anti-crime programs to no avail. A state senator compared the city to Iraq, and the City Council debated declaring a state of emergency. In September 2006, a man was shot in the face at a funeral for a teenager who had been gunned down two weeks earlier, spurring local clergy to urge city hall to try something new—now. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten,” says Andre Shumake Sr., a 56-year-old Baptist minister whose son was shot six times while riding his bicycle. “It was time to do something different.”
Richmond hired consultants to come up with ideas, and in turn, the consultants approached Boggan. It was obvious that heavy-handed tactics like police sweeps weren’t the solution. More than anything, Boggan, who’d been working to keep teen offenders out of prison, was struck by the pettiness of it all. The things that could get someone shot in Richmond were as trivial as stepping out to buy a bag of chips at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Boggan wondered: What if we identified the most likely perpetrators and paid them to stay out of trouble?
Boggan submitted his proposal. He didn’t expect the city to come back and ask him to make it happen. “They asked me for a three-year commitment and told me to put on my seatbelt,” he recalls.
In late 2007, Boggan launched the Office of Neighborhood Safety, an experimental public-private partnership that’s introduced the “Richmond model” for rolling back street violence. It has done it with a mix of data mining and mentoring, and by crossing lines that other anti-crime initiatives have only tiptoed around. Four times a year, the program’s street team sifts through police records and its own intelligence to determine, with actuarial detachment, the 50 people in Richmond most likely to shoot someone and to be shot themselves. ONS tracks them and approaches the most lethal (and vulnerable) on the list, offering them a spot in a program that includes a stipend to turn their lives around. While ONS is city-funded and has the blessing of the chief of police, it resolutely does not share information with the cops. “It’s the only agency where you’re required to have a criminal background to be an employee,” Boggan jokes.
So far, the results have been promising: As this story went to press, 65 of the 68 “fellows” enrolled in the program in the previous 47 months were still alive. One had survived a shooting and three had died. In 2007, when Boggan’s program began, Richmond was America’s ninth most dangerous city, with 47 killings among its 106,000 residents. In 2013, it saw its lowest number of homicides in 33 years, and its homicide rate fell to 15 per 100,000. Rates are dropping nationwide, but not so steeply. (In 2013, nearby Oakland’s homicide rate was 23 per 100,000; Detroit’s was 47 per 100,000.)
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Here’s how it works: A team of seven “neighborhood change agents” patrol the streets like beat cops, keeping tabs on the 50 high-risk members of what Boggan calls the “focus group.” The coordinators, most of them former convicts, check in with their sources at corner stores, barbershops, and churches and report back daily on what they’ve heard. “I want us to hunt ’em like they hunt, and I want us to hunt for information,” Boggan says. “We have better information than the police.” Once a certain level of trust has been established between the coordinators and their targets, a meeting is arranged, and the pitch is made.
In exchange for shunning dangerous behavior, ONS fellows receive anywhere from $300 to $1,000 per month, depending on their progress following a “life map” of personal and professional goals. If they team up with someone from a rival community to renounce violence altogether, they can get even more money—though that’s yet to happen. Fellows can receive stipends for 9 of their 18 months in the program. The city gave ONS $1.2 million for its operating budget last year, but the money for the stipends came from a handful of private donors, including the health care giant Kaiser Permanente. (A Kaiser spokeswoman says the program is good for “diffusing community tensions and reducing violence,” thereby limiting stress-related health risks like heart disease, strokes, and diabetes.)
ONS staffers help fellows take concrete steps toward stability, from providing assistance in getting a driver’s license or a GED to helping raise $5,000 for a merchant-marine training class. Though the program officially cuts off when fellows turn 25, Boggan says ONS tries to stay in touch with them as long as possible.
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“The analogy here is infectious disease,” says Barry Krisberg, a UC-Berkeley criminologist who has advised Boggan. For years, crime fighters had combated epidemics of violence by quarantining criminals in prison. Boggan took what he’d seen in other cities and adopted a new course of treatment: By inoculating the carriers of violence, perhaps you can protect an entire community.
HOW MUCH DO INNOCENT PEOPLE RECEIVE AFTER THEY ARE EXONERATED?
NPR’s Planet Money takes a look at what kind of payment people who are wrongfully convicted receive for every year of their incarceration.
The federal government and 17 states pay a fixed amount per year, and some states evaluate compensation case-by-case, but there are 21 states that offer no money to innocent people who go to prison.
From the pool of states paying a fixed amount to people who have been exonerated, Texas pays the most at $80,000 per year spent behind bars, and Wisconsin pays the least at $5,000. Experts say that the states offering a moderate fixed amount are likely trying to avoid a lawsuit and a higher settlement later.
Here’s a clip:
Several states and the federal government offer $50,000 per year for people wrongly convicted in federal court. Why is that such a common figure?
Federal payments were set by a law passed a decade ago. At that time, Alabama had the highest compensation at $50,000 per year, so the feds simply decided to match that, according to Stephen Saloom, policy director at the Innocence Project. Other states may have followed the lead of the federal government.
“There doesn’t seem to be any other rationale behind the number,” said Paul Cates, also at the Innocence Project.
Unfortunately, even in states that offer compensation, the claim process is often complicated. For instance, California pays $36,500 per year of wrongful incarceration, but (as of 2013) only 11 of 132 exonerees from the year 2000 on, have actually received the money. (Late last year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that would make the process easier.)
SOCAL SCHOOL DISTRICTS LOWER SUSPENSIONS, BEAT THE STATE AVERAGE
According to a new UCLA study, four out of five Southern California counties achieved lower suspension rates than the statewide average. The study compares data from the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 school years. Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside, and San Bernardino together reduced their suspensions by 37,325 over the previous year, while also decreasing the racial disparity.
The LA Times’ Teresa Watanabe has more on the data. Here’s a clip:
Districts in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties imposed 37,325 fewer suspensions last year than the year before and posted sharper declines in their respective suspension rates than the statewide average, according to an analysis of selected California counties by the UCLA Civil Rights Project.
L.A. County, for instance, reduced its rate by about 42% more than the state; the other counties outperformed the state by 12% for San Bernardino, 59% for Riverside and 60% for Ventura.
Orange County’s reduction equaled the state average. But Orange reported the lowest number of suspensions per 100 students last year — 3.4 compared with 9.12 for San Bernardino County and 5.10 for Los Angeles County, according to the analysis of state discipline data released last week.
“These are unquestionably positive results. California school districts are beginning to understand that extreme suspension-first policies neither improve school climate nor boost academic achievement,” said Daniel J. Losen, the study’s lead author and director of the UCLA project.
Losen added, however, that suspension rates remained too high and that students are still sent home on a daily basis for minor infractions unrelated to fighting or drugs.
In another interesting example of why stamping out harsh school discipline is so critical, data from the New York Dept. of Probation shows that, last year, kids entered the juvenile justice system at a rate 53% higher in May than in August. Because summer is traditionally a higher crime season, the data suggests that schools are pushing kids into the juvenile justice system.
WNYC News’ Kathleen Horan has the story. Here’s how it opens:
New York City has the largest school district in the country and a reputation for doling out harsh penalties. Even the Justice Department has warned that routine infractions should land a student in the principal’s office — not in a police precinct. As another school year wraps up, pressure is on Mayor Bill de Blasio to announce discipline policy reforms.
The kind of trouble that can land students in jail is more likely to happen while while they’re in school rather than out on summer break. Fifty percent more juveniles went through the criminal justice system in May 2013 than in August that year, according to Department of Probation intake data. “They aren’t better behaved during the summer than the winter,” observed former DOP Commissioner Vincent Schiraldi, in February. “They’re just less surveilled.”
As senior advisor in the administration’s Office of Criminal Justice, Schiraldi is now focused on coming up with a plan that will help reduce the number of kids getting hauled out of school in handcuffs, attempting to close what has come to be known as the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
Yes, paying people to do nothing. Welfare comes in all forms but paying people to stay out of trouble….our society doesn’t have much time left.