![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyOn Decimated Shore, a Second Life for Christmas Trees
http://nyti.ms/UjHbs
LONG BEACH, N.Y. — It is February, but the smell of Christmas wafts up from the shores of Long Beach these days.
Thousands of Christmas trees, stripped of lights and ornaments, have been arranged along the beach here as part of an unusual plan to restore the protective dunes washed away by Hurricane Sandy. The trees are supposed to catch sand blown by the wind, until gradually the dunes grow up around them.
Long Beach, one of the localities in the New York region most devastated by the storm, is a thin ribbon of land between Long Island and the Atlantic Ocean. The storm washed away about half a million cubic yards of sand, officials said, leaving residents dangerously exposed to even modestly inclement weather.
“Some areas lost three to five feet in elevation on the beach,” said Jim LaCarrubba, the director of public works here. “We’ve become that much more vulnerable to storms.”
From a distance, the trees resemble a somewhat bizarre gathering on the beach, like a large pod of exceptionally fuzzy seals. There are about 3,000 in all. The local Home Depot donated some. Others stood in the living rooms of residents until recently, adorned with decorations.
Other localities in New York and New Jersey are also using Christmas trees to buttress beaches damaged by Hurricane Sandy.
Healthy sand dunes are the first line of defense for coastal towns during storms because they keep the ocean from invading backyards and basements. But sand alone is not enough. An anchor, often naturally growing grasses, is needed to prevent the sand from blowing or washing away.
But the grasses cannot grow without a significant accumulation of sand, and in Long Beach these days there simply is not enough. That is where the Christmas trees come in.
“The trees act in place of natural plant growth,” said Charlie Peek, a spokesman for the parks service in North Carolina, which has been using Christmas trees to spur dune revival for years. “It gives it a little head start, a little bit of a helping hand. In an ideal situation, the plant growth comes in after it and starts building a natural dune.”
The method is not uncommon, particularly in areas like the Carolinas and Florida that are prone to hurricanes. It can take two to three years for dunes to become fully re-established after a major storm.
The afterlives of Christmas trees can be quite dynamic. In southern Louisiana, the trees are woven into fences and used to block dangerous levels of saltwater from flowing into coastal wetlands. They have been used in Illinois to create nesting structures for herons and egrets forced from natural habitats by development.
In Long Beach, several residents proposed placing the trees in the dunes. City officials approved the plan, and about 100 volunteers gathered on the beach the other day to arrange the trees with their tops facing toward the surf. The configuration, officials hope, will catch sand blowing from all directions.
“It was a very nice healing thing for residents to do to contribute to our protection,” said Jack Schnirman, the city manager.
The town and local volunteers have promoted several other projects to aid the recovery while also lifting spirits. There have been benefit cookouts and street festivals to help local businesses. Residents have planted what city officials called “recovery bulbs,” which will bloom into flowers in spring.
“There are so many things bringing this community together, which is great,” said Alison Kallelis, 33, who was among those to propose the Christmas tree idea.
If all goes well, Ms. Kallelis said, laying the trees on the beach could become an annual tradition here.
“Every year you keep adding more trees,” she said, “and keep building it up higher and higher.”
Focus on Mental Health Laws to Curb Violence Is Unfair, Some Say
http://nyti.ms/YmMdl9
In their fervor to take action against gun violence after the shooting in Newtown, Conn., a growing number of state and national politicians are promoting a focus on mental illness as a way to help prevent further killings.
Legislation to revise existing mental health laws is under consideration in at least a half-dozen states, including Colorado, Oregon and Ohio. A New York bill requiring mental health practitioners to warn the authorities about potentially dangerous patients was signed into law on Jan. 15. In Washington, President Obama has ordered “a national dialogue” on mental health, and a variety of bills addressing mental health issues are percolating on Capitol Hill.
But critics say that this focus unfairly singles out people with serious mental illness, who studies indicate are involved in only about 4 percent of violent crimes and are 11 or more times as likely than the general population to be the victims of violent crime.
And many proposals — they include strengthening mental health services, lowering the threshold for involuntary commitment and increasing requirements for reporting worrisome patients to the authorities — are rushed in execution and unlikely to repair a broken mental health system, some experts say.
“Good intentions without thought make for bad laws, and I think we have a risk of that,” said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied rampage killers.
Moreover, the push for additional mental health laws is often driven by political expediency, some critics say. Mental health proposals draw support from both Democrats and Republicans, in part because, unlike bans on semiautomatic weapons or high-capacity magazines — like the one proposed in the Senate last week — they do not involve confrontation with gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association.
“The N.R.A. is far more formidable as a political foe than the advocacy groups for the mentally ill,” said Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association.
Indeed, the N.R.A. itself, in response to the massacre in Newtown, argued that mental illness, and not the guns themselves, was at the root of recent shooting sprees. The group called for a national registry of people with mental illness — an alternative that legal experts agree would raise at least as many constitutional alarms as the banning of gun ownership.
For mental health groups, the proposals under consideration are tantalizing: By increasing services for those with mental illness, they raise the possibility of restoring some of the billions of dollars cut from mental health programs in recent years as budgets tightened in the financial downturn. The measures also hold out hope for improvement of a mental health system that many experts say is fragmented and drastically inadequate. And some proposals — those to revise commitment laws, for example — have the support of some mental health organizations.
But some mental health and legal experts say that politicians’ efforts might be better spent making the process of involuntary psychiatric commitment — and the criteria for restricting firearms access once someone has been forcibly committed — consistent from state to state. And some proposals have caused concern, raising questions about doctor-patient confidentiality, the rights of people with psychiatric disabilities and the integrity of clinical judgment.
Especially troublesome to some mental health advocates are provisions like New York’s, which expand the duty of practitioners to report worrisome patients — a model likely to be emulated by other states. New York’s law, part of a comprehensive package to address gun violence, requires reporting to the local authorities any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.” Law enforcement officials would then be authorized to confiscate any firearm owned by such a patient.
John Monahan, a psychologist and professor of law at the University of Virginia, said that such laws are often superfluous.
Although many mental health practitioners mistakenly believe that federal laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act forbid them to disclose information about patients, such statutes already include exceptions that permit clinicians to give information to the authorities when a patient presents a threat to others, Dr. Monahan said.
Most states also have laws requiring mental health professionals to notify the authorities and any intended victim when a patient makes a direct threat.
New York’s provision, Dr. Monahan said, differs from virtually every other state’s laws in allowing guns to be taken not only from those committed against their will but also from patients who enter treatment voluntarily.
“The devil is in the details,” he said of New York’s new law. “The two fears are that people will be deterred from seeking treatment that they need or that, once they are in treatment, they will clam up and not talk about violence.”
Most mental health experts agree that the link between mental illness and violence is not imaginary. Studies suggest that people with an untreated severe mental illness are more likely to be violent, especially when drug or alcohol abuse is involved. And many rampage killers have some type of serious mental disorder: James E. Holmes, accused of opening fire in a movie theater in Colorado in July, was seeing a psychiatrist who became alarmed about his behavior; Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and injured 13 others in Arizona, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was severely mentally ill.
But such killings account for only a tiny fraction of gun homicides in the United States, mental health experts point out. Besides the research indicating that little violent crime can be linked to perpetrators who are mentally ill, studies show that those crimes are far more likely to involve battery — punching another person, for example — than weapons, which account for only 2 percent of violent crimes committed by the mentally ill.
Because of this, some criminal justice experts say it makes more sense to pass laws addressing behavior, rather than a diagnosis of mental illness. In Indiana, for example, firearms can be confiscated from people deemed a potential threat, whether or not they have a mental illness.
Proposals in a number of states seek to redefine the threshold for involuntary commitment to psychiatric treatment. But in doing so, they have reignited a longstanding debate about the role of forced treatment.
In Ohio, lawmakers are expected to consider a proposal to increase access to outpatient commitment instead of hospitalization, while also doing away with language requiring people with mental illness to show a “grave and imminent risk to substantial rights” of themselves or others before they can be committed.
In Colorado, where legislators are undertaking a broad overhaul of the state’s mental health system proposed by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, the proposal also includes changing the criteria for involuntary commitment.
Under the state’s current laws, caregivers can place patients on 72-hour mental health holds only if they are believed to pose an “imminent danger” to themselves or others. The governor’s plan would allow caregivers to commit people if they believe there is a “substantial probability” of harm. Virginia and some other states already have standards based on “substantial probability.”
But some mental health advocates are wary about lowering the threshold. “The evidence that we have tells us that that’s not an appropriate solution, it’s not an effective solution to this problem,” said Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an advocacy group for people with psychiatric disabilities.
But Cheryl Miller — whose 21-year-old son, Kyle, was shot by the police last June after he pointed a toy gun at them — believes that a revised law might have saved her child.
Two weeks before Kyle was killed she took him to an emergency mental health clinic to get him hospitalized. But the staff refused to commit him.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to take him home; he needs to go to the hospital,’ ” Ms. Miller said. “They didn’t think so. It goes back to, was he an imminent danger to himself? And it was ‘No.’ ”
Mutations Found in Melanomas May Shed Light on How Cancers Grow
http://nyti.ms/WpggGz
In a leap forward in understanding the basic science of one of the most lethal cancers, two groups of researchers have found mutations in most melanomas that are unlike any they have seen before in cancer. The changes are in regions that control genes, not in the genes themselves. The mutations are exactly the type caused by exposure to ultraviolet light, indicating they might be among the first DNA changes in a cell’s path to melanoma.
The discoveries, published online Thursday in two papers in the journal Science Express, do not immediately suggest new treatments or ways to prevent melanoma, researchers said. But the findings help explain how melanomas — and, possibly, other cancers — develop and what drives their growth, insights that may be critical to long-term efforts to develop ways to prevent or stop the cancer.
For years, cancer researchers have searched for mutations in genes, but this time, they looked for — and found — mutations in a region that regulates genes. They did it by examining the entire DNA of multiple tumors, studying not just genes but also what has been called the dark matter, the 99 percent of the DNA that includes regions that control genes.
“You could think of this as one glimmer in what has been called cancer’s dark matter,” said Dr. Levi A. Garraway of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T.
The DNA sequences of 70 malignant melanomas led to the new discovery. A small control region was mutated in 7 out of 10 of the tumors, and also, the investigators found, in liver and bladder cancers. The cancer cells had one of two tiny changes that together were more common than any mutation ever found in the genes of melanoma.
A team led by Rajiv Kumar of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and Dirk Schadendorf of the University of Essen looked for the mutations in a family whose members tended to get melanoma. Four relatives who developed melanoma had inherited one of them, while four who remained melanoma-free did not have it. They also found the mutation in a 36-year-old member of the family who had not developed melanoma but had had many moles, often a sign of risk in families prone to melanoma.
Their findings indicate that those who inherit the mutations might be born with cells that have taken a first step toward cancer.
The mutations spur cells to make an enzyme, telomerase, that keeps cells immortal by preventing them from gradually losing the ends of their chromosome, the telomeres. When telomeres erode, a cell dies. But the enzyme also has other, poorly understood functions that are thought to keep cancer cells alive, said Robert Weinberg, an M.I.T. researcher who studies telomerase and cancer and was not involved with the research. “The paradigm that it does nothing but extend telomeres is a gross oversimplification,” he said.
Abundant telomerase is so important to cancers that it occurs in 90 percent of them, said Immaculata De Vivo, a Harvard Medical School researcher who studies telomerase and cancer and directs a DNA sequencing program. She, too, was not involved with the research.
The results of the two studies presented in the papers “are like a court of law — it’s the preponderance of the evidence,” she said. “We all knew telomerase was important for cancer, but now we are finding the mechanisms, the machinery.”
Scientists were surprised that the mutations in the dark matter of melanoma tumors were so commonplace. Dr. Garraway and his colleagues had the entire DNA sequences for a collection of melanomas — genes as well as the rest of the DNA, including areas that turn genes on and off.
“We said, ‘Let’s just take a look and see if there are any mutations in a regulatory region,’ ” Dr. Garraway said.
At first, they looked at the DNA sequences of 19 tumors. They were amazed to find one or the other of the two mutations in 17 of them. So the researchers decided to look at 51 additional melanomas and a handful of bladder and liver cancers. The mutations popped up again.
“It was really quite striking,” Dr. Garraway said.
But it is not clear how to reverse the mutations’ cancer-causing effects, Dr. Garraway said. And although people have long wanted to block telomerase production in cancer cells, they have not found a drug to do it.
Still, the findings are highly significant, experts said.
“We have always known that just looking at genes alone would provide a limited number of answers about why cancer develops,” said Elaine Mardis of Washington University, who was not involved with the research. “The brakes or the gas that control the genes that cause cancer are as important as gene mutations,” she said. The new papers, Dr. Mardis added, “show where additional answers may lie.”
Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets
http://nyti.ms/V6ftvL
January 25, 2013
Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets
By JOHN TIERNEY
Now that the United States has the world’s highest reported rate of incarceration, many criminologists are contemplating another strategy. What if America reverted to the penal policies of the 1980s? What if the prison population shrank drastically? What if money now spent guarding cellblocks was instead used for policing the streets?
In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?
As the American prison population has doubled in the past two decades, the city has been a remarkable exception to the trend: the number of its residents in prison has shrunk. Its incarceration rate, once high by national standards, has plunged well below the United States average and has hit another new low, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced recently. And crime in the city has fallen by more than 75 percent, almost twice as much as in the rest of the country.
Whatever has made New York the safest big city in America, that feat has certainly not been accomplished by locking up more criminals.
“The precise causes of New York’s crime decline will be debated by social scientists until the Sun hits the Earth,” said Michael Jacobson, a criminologist who ran the city’s Correction and Probation Departments during the 1990s and is now the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice research group. “But the 50,000-foot story from New York is that you can drive down crime while decreasing your jail and prison population — and save a huge amount of money in the process.”
New York’s singular success has attracted attention across the country from public officials whose budgets have been strained by the prison boom. The 2.3 million people behind bars in America, a fifth of the world’s prisoners, cost taxpayers more than $75 billion a year. The strict penal policies were intended to reduce crime, but they have led to a historic, if largely unrecognized, shift in priorities away from policing.
“The United States today is the only country I know of that spends more on prisons than police,” said Lawrence W. Sherman, an American criminologist on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Cambridge University in Britain. “In England and Wales, the spending on police is twice as high as on corrections. In Australia it’s more than three times higher. In Japan it’s seven times higher. Only in the United States is it lower, and only in our recent history.”
Before the era of mass incarceration began in the 1980s, local policing accounted for more than 40 percent of spending for criminal justice, while 25 percent went to prisons and parole programs. But since 1990, nearly 35 percent has gone to the prison system, while the portion of criminal justice spending for local policing has fallen to slightly more than 30 percent.
New York, while now an exception to the mass-incarceration trend, also happens to be the place that inspired it. When New York State four decades ago commissioned an evaluation of programs to rehabilitate criminals, the conclusions were so discouraging that the researchers were initially forbidden to publish them.
Eventually one of the criminologists, Robert Martinson, summarized the results in 1974 in the journal Public Interest. His article, “What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform,” was soon known as the “nothing works” thesis. Dr. Martinson concluded that rehabilitation strategies “cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendencies of offenders to continue in criminal behavior.”
An outgrowth of the study was a consensus to eliminate parole for many offenders and to mandate long sentences determined by formulas rather than rely on the discretion of judges and parole boards.
Dr. Martinson wrote an article in 1979 recanting his “nothing works” conclusion, but by then it was too late. The trend toward tougher sentences continued, causing prison populations to grow rapidly in the 1980s throughout the country, including in New York. When crime kept rising anyway, sentences often were further lengthened.
But New York diverged from the national trend in the early 1990s, when it began expanding its police force and introduced a computerized system to track crimes and complaints. Officers also aggressively enforced laws against guns, illegal drugs and petty crimes like turnstile jumping in the subways. Arrests for misdemeanors increased sharply.
Yet serious crime went down. So though more people were being locked up for brief periods — including many who were unable to make bail and were awaiting trial — the local jail population was shrinking and fewer city residents were serving time in state prisons.
“Even with more people coming into the system, the overall bed count was declining because people weren’t staying as long,” Dr. Jacobson, who was correction commissioner from 1995 to 1998, recalled.
“It was a nightmare to administer because there was so much churning and turnover, but it was good news for the city.”
Saving $1.5 Billion a Year
Even as the city grew by nearly a million people in the last two decades, the number of New Yorkers behind bars fell by a third, to below 40,000 today.
If the city had followed the national trend, nearly 60,000 additional New Yorkers would be behind bars today, and the number of city and state correction officers would have more than doubled since 1990, said Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
By not expanding the jail and prison populations, he calculates in his 2011 book, “The City That Became Safe,” the city and the state have been saving $1.5 billion a year, more than twice as much as it cost to finance the additional police officers in the 1990s.
The crime decline, which has lasted for two decades, has been so striking that some critics wonder if the police stopped reporting some offenses. The police vehemently deny that, and numbers have continued dropping even for crimes that are difficult to hide — homicides, most notably.
Policing, of course, is not the only possible explanation for the safer streets. A shift in demographics, the arrival of new immigrants, the waning of the crack epidemic, and other economic and social changes had an impact on neighborhoods in New York — and in the rest of the country, where crime also declined in the 1990s.
But the drop was much steeper and more prolonged in New York than elsewhere. And while researchers attributed about a quarter of the decline in the rest of America to the stricter penal policies, that explanation did not apply to a city that was locking up fewer people. Something else was responsible, and criminologists have been trying to figure out how to repeat it.
“The intellectual tragedy of the New York crime miracle is that it had no experiments to identify just what worked,” Dr. Sherman said.
His frustration is shared by David Weisburd, a criminologist at George Mason University in Virginia and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
“As long as crime is going down, New York’s police don’t seem to want to know which strategies are working and which aren’t,” Dr. Weisburd said. “When I proposed an experiment to one police official in the last administration, he replied, ‘You could only bring me bad news.’ ”
Elsewhere, studies have shown that crime drops when more police officers are hired, so it is not surprising that the expansion of New York’s police force in the 1990s by more than a third was accompanied by a drop in crime. But during the past decade, the force has shrunk by 15 percent, and yet crime has mostly continued falling.
When Dr. Zimring and other criminologists look at this trend, and compare it with the fluctuating crime rates in other cities, they conclude that the retreat in crime in New York is not just a matter of the number of police officers. Those officers must be doing something right, but what exactly?
The most likely answer is a shift in strategy called hot-spot policing.
In the 1970s, research had shown that a small percentage of criminals committed a large share of crimes, so it had seemed logical to concentrate on catching repeat offenders and locking them up.
But after computerized crime mapping was introduced, it turned out that crime was even more concentrated by place than by person.
In city after city, researchers found that half of crimes occur within about 5 percent of an urban area — a few buildings, intersections and blocks, often near transit stops and businesses like convenience stores, bars and nightclubs.
The criminal population keeps changing as men in their 30s drop out and are replaced by teenagers, but crimes keep occurring at the same places.
A Focus on Hot Spots
Researchers suggested: Perhaps the authorities should pay less attention to individual criminals and more attention to the hot spots where they operate.
Dr. Sherman, Dr. Weisburd and colleagues have tested the idea in randomized experiments in Jersey City; Houston; Kansas City, Mo.; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Sacramento; and cities in Britain and Australia.
Typically, a list of hot spots was identified, and then half were randomly chosen to receive extra police attention, like more frequent patrols. Other strategies were also used, like improving street lighting, fencing vacant lots or arresting people for minor violations.
As hoped, there were fewer crimes and complaints at the hot spots chosen for extra attention than at those that were not. And once police officers started to show up often and at unpredictable intervals, they did not need to stay more than 15 minutes to have a lasting impact.
Nonetheless, the hot-spot strategy was initially met with skepticism by police veterans.
“We assumed that if we hit one area hard, the crime would just move somewhere else,” said Frank Gajewski, a former police chief of Jersey City, who worked with Dr. Weisburd on the experiments there.
But Dr. Weisburd won over Mr. Gajewski and other skeptics — and also won the 2010 Stockholm Prize, criminology’s version of the Nobel — by showing that crime was not simply being displaced. Moreover, he and his colleagues reported a “spatial diffusion of crime prevention benefits” because crime also declined in adjoining areas, as the police in Jersey City had observed.
“Crime doesn’t move as easily we thought it did,” Mr. Gajewski said. “If I’m a robber, I want to be in a familiar, easily accessible place with certain characteristics. I need targets to rob, but I don’t want people in the neighborhood watching me or challenging me. Maybe I work near a bus stop where there are vacant buildings or empty lots. If the police start focusing there, I can’t just move to the next block and find the same conditions.”
After more than two dozen experiments around the world, criminologists generally agree that hot-spot policing is “an effective crime prevention strategy,” in the words of Anthony Braga, a criminologist at Harvard and Rutgers who led a review of the research literature last year.
Many experts also see it as the best explanation for the crime drop in New York. Although the city’s police did not participate in randomized experiments, they did use computerized crime mapping to focus on hot spots in the 1990s. This strategy was intensified with a program called Operation Impact, which was started in 2003 by Raymond W. Kelly, then and now the police commissioner.
Commissioner Kelly gives the strategy credit for the continued decline of crime despite the reduced police force.
There is supporting evidence from Dennis C. Smith, a political scientist at New York University who led an analysis of trends in the dozens of precincts where the city’s police focus on “impact zones,” as the hot spots are called. Rates of murder, rape, grand larceny, robbery and assault declined significantly faster in precincts with hot-spot policing than in those without it.
The Stop-and-Frisk Debate
One part of the hot-spot strategy in New York has been highly controversial: the stopping and frisking of hundreds of thousands of people each year, ostensibly to search for weapons or other contraband.
Some critics say that the tactic has been used so often and so brusquely in New York that it has undermined policing by arousing disrespect for the law, especially among young black and Latino men, who are disproportionately stopped and searched. Research shows that people who feel treated unfairly by the police can become more likely to commit crimes in the future.
“The million-dollar question in policing right now is whether there are ways to get the benefits of stop-and-frisk without the collateral costs,” said Jens Ludwig, an economist who directs the University of Chicago Crime Lab. He found benefits from the tactic — a decline in gunshot injuries — in an experiment with the Pittsburgh police.
“Getting the police to stop people more often and search them for illegal guns does help keep guns off the street and reduce gun violence,” Dr. Ludwig said. “That’s not to say whether or not stop-and-frisk is worth the costs that the practice imposes on society. But there’s a complicated trade-off here that needs to be acknowledged.”
Defenders of stop-and-frisk, including Mayor Bloomberg, argue that when it is done properly and politely, the practice prevents crimes that disproportionately hurt the city’s minorities.
“If New York went back to the policing of the 1980s,” Dr. Smith said, “there would be hundreds of thousands more victims of serious crimes every year, and the great majority of them would be African-American and Hispanic.”
Police officials note that if the homicide rate of the 1980s persisted, 1,200 additional New Yorkers, most of them black or Latino men, would have been killed last year — when the police recorded 417 murders. Further, if the city’s incarceration rate had followed the national trend, an additional 100,000 black and Hispanic men would have been sent to prison in the past decade, Dr. Zimring calculates.
Whether or not other cities adopt New York’s specific stop-and-frisk tactics, social scientists say the rest of the country could benefit by adding police officers and concentrating on hot spots.
Dr. Ludwig and Philip J. Cook, a Duke University economist, calculate that nationwide, money diverted from prison to policing would buy at least four times as much reduction in crime. They suggest shrinking the prison population by a quarter and using the savings to hire another 100,000 police officers.
Diverting that money to the police would be tricky politically, because corrections budgets are zealously defended in state capitals by prison administrators, unions and legislators.
But there is at least one prison administrator, Dr. Jacobson, the former correction commissioner in New York, who would send the money elsewhere.
“If you had a dollar to spend on reducing crime, and you looked at the science instead of the politics, you would never spend it on the prison system,” Dr. Jacobson said. “There is no better example of big government run amok.”
That is the same lesson that William J. Bratton draws from his experience as New York’s police commissioner in the 1990s. “We showed in New York that the future of policing is not in handcuffs,” Mr. Bratton said. “The United States has locked up so many people that it has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but we can’t arrest and incarcerate our way out of crime. We need to focus on preventing crime instead of responding to it.”
http://nyti.ms/UjHbs
LONG BEACH, N.Y. — It is February, but the smell of Christmas wafts up from the shores of Long Beach these days.
Thousands of Christmas trees, stripped of lights and ornaments, have been arranged along the beach here as part of an unusual plan to restore the protective dunes washed away by Hurricane Sandy. The trees are supposed to catch sand blown by the wind, until gradually the dunes grow up around them.
Long Beach, one of the localities in the New York region most devastated by the storm, is a thin ribbon of land between Long Island and the Atlantic Ocean. The storm washed away about half a million cubic yards of sand, officials said, leaving residents dangerously exposed to even modestly inclement weather.
“Some areas lost three to five feet in elevation on the beach,” said Jim LaCarrubba, the director of public works here. “We’ve become that much more vulnerable to storms.”
From a distance, the trees resemble a somewhat bizarre gathering on the beach, like a large pod of exceptionally fuzzy seals. There are about 3,000 in all. The local Home Depot donated some. Others stood in the living rooms of residents until recently, adorned with decorations.
Other localities in New York and New Jersey are also using Christmas trees to buttress beaches damaged by Hurricane Sandy.
Healthy sand dunes are the first line of defense for coastal towns during storms because they keep the ocean from invading backyards and basements. But sand alone is not enough. An anchor, often naturally growing grasses, is needed to prevent the sand from blowing or washing away.
But the grasses cannot grow without a significant accumulation of sand, and in Long Beach these days there simply is not enough. That is where the Christmas trees come in.
“The trees act in place of natural plant growth,” said Charlie Peek, a spokesman for the parks service in North Carolina, which has been using Christmas trees to spur dune revival for years. “It gives it a little head start, a little bit of a helping hand. In an ideal situation, the plant growth comes in after it and starts building a natural dune.”
The method is not uncommon, particularly in areas like the Carolinas and Florida that are prone to hurricanes. It can take two to three years for dunes to become fully re-established after a major storm.
The afterlives of Christmas trees can be quite dynamic. In southern Louisiana, the trees are woven into fences and used to block dangerous levels of saltwater from flowing into coastal wetlands. They have been used in Illinois to create nesting structures for herons and egrets forced from natural habitats by development.
In Long Beach, several residents proposed placing the trees in the dunes. City officials approved the plan, and about 100 volunteers gathered on the beach the other day to arrange the trees with their tops facing toward the surf. The configuration, officials hope, will catch sand blowing from all directions.
“It was a very nice healing thing for residents to do to contribute to our protection,” said Jack Schnirman, the city manager.
The town and local volunteers have promoted several other projects to aid the recovery while also lifting spirits. There have been benefit cookouts and street festivals to help local businesses. Residents have planted what city officials called “recovery bulbs,” which will bloom into flowers in spring.
“There are so many things bringing this community together, which is great,” said Alison Kallelis, 33, who was among those to propose the Christmas tree idea.
If all goes well, Ms. Kallelis said, laying the trees on the beach could become an annual tradition here.
“Every year you keep adding more trees,” she said, “and keep building it up higher and higher.”
Focus on Mental Health Laws to Curb Violence Is Unfair, Some Say
http://nyti.ms/YmMdl9
In their fervor to take action against gun violence after the shooting in Newtown, Conn., a growing number of state and national politicians are promoting a focus on mental illness as a way to help prevent further killings.
Legislation to revise existing mental health laws is under consideration in at least a half-dozen states, including Colorado, Oregon and Ohio. A New York bill requiring mental health practitioners to warn the authorities about potentially dangerous patients was signed into law on Jan. 15. In Washington, President Obama has ordered “a national dialogue” on mental health, and a variety of bills addressing mental health issues are percolating on Capitol Hill.
But critics say that this focus unfairly singles out people with serious mental illness, who studies indicate are involved in only about 4 percent of violent crimes and are 11 or more times as likely than the general population to be the victims of violent crime.
And many proposals — they include strengthening mental health services, lowering the threshold for involuntary commitment and increasing requirements for reporting worrisome patients to the authorities — are rushed in execution and unlikely to repair a broken mental health system, some experts say.
“Good intentions without thought make for bad laws, and I think we have a risk of that,” said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied rampage killers.
Moreover, the push for additional mental health laws is often driven by political expediency, some critics say. Mental health proposals draw support from both Democrats and Republicans, in part because, unlike bans on semiautomatic weapons or high-capacity magazines — like the one proposed in the Senate last week — they do not involve confrontation with gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association.
“The N.R.A. is far more formidable as a political foe than the advocacy groups for the mentally ill,” said Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association.
Indeed, the N.R.A. itself, in response to the massacre in Newtown, argued that mental illness, and not the guns themselves, was at the root of recent shooting sprees. The group called for a national registry of people with mental illness — an alternative that legal experts agree would raise at least as many constitutional alarms as the banning of gun ownership.
For mental health groups, the proposals under consideration are tantalizing: By increasing services for those with mental illness, they raise the possibility of restoring some of the billions of dollars cut from mental health programs in recent years as budgets tightened in the financial downturn. The measures also hold out hope for improvement of a mental health system that many experts say is fragmented and drastically inadequate. And some proposals — those to revise commitment laws, for example — have the support of some mental health organizations.
But some mental health and legal experts say that politicians’ efforts might be better spent making the process of involuntary psychiatric commitment — and the criteria for restricting firearms access once someone has been forcibly committed — consistent from state to state. And some proposals have caused concern, raising questions about doctor-patient confidentiality, the rights of people with psychiatric disabilities and the integrity of clinical judgment.
Especially troublesome to some mental health advocates are provisions like New York’s, which expand the duty of practitioners to report worrisome patients — a model likely to be emulated by other states. New York’s law, part of a comprehensive package to address gun violence, requires reporting to the local authorities any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.” Law enforcement officials would then be authorized to confiscate any firearm owned by such a patient.
John Monahan, a psychologist and professor of law at the University of Virginia, said that such laws are often superfluous.
Although many mental health practitioners mistakenly believe that federal laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act forbid them to disclose information about patients, such statutes already include exceptions that permit clinicians to give information to the authorities when a patient presents a threat to others, Dr. Monahan said.
Most states also have laws requiring mental health professionals to notify the authorities and any intended victim when a patient makes a direct threat.
New York’s provision, Dr. Monahan said, differs from virtually every other state’s laws in allowing guns to be taken not only from those committed against their will but also from patients who enter treatment voluntarily.
“The devil is in the details,” he said of New York’s new law. “The two fears are that people will be deterred from seeking treatment that they need or that, once they are in treatment, they will clam up and not talk about violence.”
Most mental health experts agree that the link between mental illness and violence is not imaginary. Studies suggest that people with an untreated severe mental illness are more likely to be violent, especially when drug or alcohol abuse is involved. And many rampage killers have some type of serious mental disorder: James E. Holmes, accused of opening fire in a movie theater in Colorado in July, was seeing a psychiatrist who became alarmed about his behavior; Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and injured 13 others in Arizona, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was severely mentally ill.
But such killings account for only a tiny fraction of gun homicides in the United States, mental health experts point out. Besides the research indicating that little violent crime can be linked to perpetrators who are mentally ill, studies show that those crimes are far more likely to involve battery — punching another person, for example — than weapons, which account for only 2 percent of violent crimes committed by the mentally ill.
Because of this, some criminal justice experts say it makes more sense to pass laws addressing behavior, rather than a diagnosis of mental illness. In Indiana, for example, firearms can be confiscated from people deemed a potential threat, whether or not they have a mental illness.
Proposals in a number of states seek to redefine the threshold for involuntary commitment to psychiatric treatment. But in doing so, they have reignited a longstanding debate about the role of forced treatment.
In Ohio, lawmakers are expected to consider a proposal to increase access to outpatient commitment instead of hospitalization, while also doing away with language requiring people with mental illness to show a “grave and imminent risk to substantial rights” of themselves or others before they can be committed.
In Colorado, where legislators are undertaking a broad overhaul of the state’s mental health system proposed by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, the proposal also includes changing the criteria for involuntary commitment.
Under the state’s current laws, caregivers can place patients on 72-hour mental health holds only if they are believed to pose an “imminent danger” to themselves or others. The governor’s plan would allow caregivers to commit people if they believe there is a “substantial probability” of harm. Virginia and some other states already have standards based on “substantial probability.”
But some mental health advocates are wary about lowering the threshold. “The evidence that we have tells us that that’s not an appropriate solution, it’s not an effective solution to this problem,” said Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an advocacy group for people with psychiatric disabilities.
But Cheryl Miller — whose 21-year-old son, Kyle, was shot by the police last June after he pointed a toy gun at them — believes that a revised law might have saved her child.
Two weeks before Kyle was killed she took him to an emergency mental health clinic to get him hospitalized. But the staff refused to commit him.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to take him home; he needs to go to the hospital,’ ” Ms. Miller said. “They didn’t think so. It goes back to, was he an imminent danger to himself? And it was ‘No.’ ”
Mutations Found in Melanomas May Shed Light on How Cancers Grow
http://nyti.ms/WpggGz
In a leap forward in understanding the basic science of one of the most lethal cancers, two groups of researchers have found mutations in most melanomas that are unlike any they have seen before in cancer. The changes are in regions that control genes, not in the genes themselves. The mutations are exactly the type caused by exposure to ultraviolet light, indicating they might be among the first DNA changes in a cell’s path to melanoma.
The discoveries, published online Thursday in two papers in the journal Science Express, do not immediately suggest new treatments or ways to prevent melanoma, researchers said. But the findings help explain how melanomas — and, possibly, other cancers — develop and what drives their growth, insights that may be critical to long-term efforts to develop ways to prevent or stop the cancer.
For years, cancer researchers have searched for mutations in genes, but this time, they looked for — and found — mutations in a region that regulates genes. They did it by examining the entire DNA of multiple tumors, studying not just genes but also what has been called the dark matter, the 99 percent of the DNA that includes regions that control genes.
“You could think of this as one glimmer in what has been called cancer’s dark matter,” said Dr. Levi A. Garraway of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T.
The DNA sequences of 70 malignant melanomas led to the new discovery. A small control region was mutated in 7 out of 10 of the tumors, and also, the investigators found, in liver and bladder cancers. The cancer cells had one of two tiny changes that together were more common than any mutation ever found in the genes of melanoma.
A team led by Rajiv Kumar of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and Dirk Schadendorf of the University of Essen looked for the mutations in a family whose members tended to get melanoma. Four relatives who developed melanoma had inherited one of them, while four who remained melanoma-free did not have it. They also found the mutation in a 36-year-old member of the family who had not developed melanoma but had had many moles, often a sign of risk in families prone to melanoma.
Their findings indicate that those who inherit the mutations might be born with cells that have taken a first step toward cancer.
The mutations spur cells to make an enzyme, telomerase, that keeps cells immortal by preventing them from gradually losing the ends of their chromosome, the telomeres. When telomeres erode, a cell dies. But the enzyme also has other, poorly understood functions that are thought to keep cancer cells alive, said Robert Weinberg, an M.I.T. researcher who studies telomerase and cancer and was not involved with the research. “The paradigm that it does nothing but extend telomeres is a gross oversimplification,” he said.
Abundant telomerase is so important to cancers that it occurs in 90 percent of them, said Immaculata De Vivo, a Harvard Medical School researcher who studies telomerase and cancer and directs a DNA sequencing program. She, too, was not involved with the research.
The results of the two studies presented in the papers “are like a court of law — it’s the preponderance of the evidence,” she said. “We all knew telomerase was important for cancer, but now we are finding the mechanisms, the machinery.”
Scientists were surprised that the mutations in the dark matter of melanoma tumors were so commonplace. Dr. Garraway and his colleagues had the entire DNA sequences for a collection of melanomas — genes as well as the rest of the DNA, including areas that turn genes on and off.
“We said, ‘Let’s just take a look and see if there are any mutations in a regulatory region,’ ” Dr. Garraway said.
At first, they looked at the DNA sequences of 19 tumors. They were amazed to find one or the other of the two mutations in 17 of them. So the researchers decided to look at 51 additional melanomas and a handful of bladder and liver cancers. The mutations popped up again.
“It was really quite striking,” Dr. Garraway said.
But it is not clear how to reverse the mutations’ cancer-causing effects, Dr. Garraway said. And although people have long wanted to block telomerase production in cancer cells, they have not found a drug to do it.
Still, the findings are highly significant, experts said.
“We have always known that just looking at genes alone would provide a limited number of answers about why cancer develops,” said Elaine Mardis of Washington University, who was not involved with the research. “The brakes or the gas that control the genes that cause cancer are as important as gene mutations,” she said. The new papers, Dr. Mardis added, “show where additional answers may lie.”
Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets
http://nyti.ms/V6ftvL
January 25, 2013
Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets
By JOHN TIERNEY
Now that the United States has the world’s highest reported rate of incarceration, many criminologists are contemplating another strategy. What if America reverted to the penal policies of the 1980s? What if the prison population shrank drastically? What if money now spent guarding cellblocks was instead used for policing the streets?
In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?
As the American prison population has doubled in the past two decades, the city has been a remarkable exception to the trend: the number of its residents in prison has shrunk. Its incarceration rate, once high by national standards, has plunged well below the United States average and has hit another new low, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced recently. And crime in the city has fallen by more than 75 percent, almost twice as much as in the rest of the country.
Whatever has made New York the safest big city in America, that feat has certainly not been accomplished by locking up more criminals.
“The precise causes of New York’s crime decline will be debated by social scientists until the Sun hits the Earth,” said Michael Jacobson, a criminologist who ran the city’s Correction and Probation Departments during the 1990s and is now the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice research group. “But the 50,000-foot story from New York is that you can drive down crime while decreasing your jail and prison population — and save a huge amount of money in the process.”
New York’s singular success has attracted attention across the country from public officials whose budgets have been strained by the prison boom. The 2.3 million people behind bars in America, a fifth of the world’s prisoners, cost taxpayers more than $75 billion a year. The strict penal policies were intended to reduce crime, but they have led to a historic, if largely unrecognized, shift in priorities away from policing.
“The United States today is the only country I know of that spends more on prisons than police,” said Lawrence W. Sherman, an American criminologist on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Cambridge University in Britain. “In England and Wales, the spending on police is twice as high as on corrections. In Australia it’s more than three times higher. In Japan it’s seven times higher. Only in the United States is it lower, and only in our recent history.”
Before the era of mass incarceration began in the 1980s, local policing accounted for more than 40 percent of spending for criminal justice, while 25 percent went to prisons and parole programs. But since 1990, nearly 35 percent has gone to the prison system, while the portion of criminal justice spending for local policing has fallen to slightly more than 30 percent.
New York, while now an exception to the mass-incarceration trend, also happens to be the place that inspired it. When New York State four decades ago commissioned an evaluation of programs to rehabilitate criminals, the conclusions were so discouraging that the researchers were initially forbidden to publish them.
Eventually one of the criminologists, Robert Martinson, summarized the results in 1974 in the journal Public Interest. His article, “What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform,” was soon known as the “nothing works” thesis. Dr. Martinson concluded that rehabilitation strategies “cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendencies of offenders to continue in criminal behavior.”
An outgrowth of the study was a consensus to eliminate parole for many offenders and to mandate long sentences determined by formulas rather than rely on the discretion of judges and parole boards.
Dr. Martinson wrote an article in 1979 recanting his “nothing works” conclusion, but by then it was too late. The trend toward tougher sentences continued, causing prison populations to grow rapidly in the 1980s throughout the country, including in New York. When crime kept rising anyway, sentences often were further lengthened.
But New York diverged from the national trend in the early 1990s, when it began expanding its police force and introduced a computerized system to track crimes and complaints. Officers also aggressively enforced laws against guns, illegal drugs and petty crimes like turnstile jumping in the subways. Arrests for misdemeanors increased sharply.
Yet serious crime went down. So though more people were being locked up for brief periods — including many who were unable to make bail and were awaiting trial — the local jail population was shrinking and fewer city residents were serving time in state prisons.
“Even with more people coming into the system, the overall bed count was declining because people weren’t staying as long,” Dr. Jacobson, who was correction commissioner from 1995 to 1998, recalled.
“It was a nightmare to administer because there was so much churning and turnover, but it was good news for the city.”
Saving $1.5 Billion a Year
Even as the city grew by nearly a million people in the last two decades, the number of New Yorkers behind bars fell by a third, to below 40,000 today.
If the city had followed the national trend, nearly 60,000 additional New Yorkers would be behind bars today, and the number of city and state correction officers would have more than doubled since 1990, said Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
By not expanding the jail and prison populations, he calculates in his 2011 book, “The City That Became Safe,” the city and the state have been saving $1.5 billion a year, more than twice as much as it cost to finance the additional police officers in the 1990s.
The crime decline, which has lasted for two decades, has been so striking that some critics wonder if the police stopped reporting some offenses. The police vehemently deny that, and numbers have continued dropping even for crimes that are difficult to hide — homicides, most notably.
Policing, of course, is not the only possible explanation for the safer streets. A shift in demographics, the arrival of new immigrants, the waning of the crack epidemic, and other economic and social changes had an impact on neighborhoods in New York — and in the rest of the country, where crime also declined in the 1990s.
But the drop was much steeper and more prolonged in New York than elsewhere. And while researchers attributed about a quarter of the decline in the rest of America to the stricter penal policies, that explanation did not apply to a city that was locking up fewer people. Something else was responsible, and criminologists have been trying to figure out how to repeat it.
“The intellectual tragedy of the New York crime miracle is that it had no experiments to identify just what worked,” Dr. Sherman said.
His frustration is shared by David Weisburd, a criminologist at George Mason University in Virginia and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
“As long as crime is going down, New York’s police don’t seem to want to know which strategies are working and which aren’t,” Dr. Weisburd said. “When I proposed an experiment to one police official in the last administration, he replied, ‘You could only bring me bad news.’ ”
Elsewhere, studies have shown that crime drops when more police officers are hired, so it is not surprising that the expansion of New York’s police force in the 1990s by more than a third was accompanied by a drop in crime. But during the past decade, the force has shrunk by 15 percent, and yet crime has mostly continued falling.
When Dr. Zimring and other criminologists look at this trend, and compare it with the fluctuating crime rates in other cities, they conclude that the retreat in crime in New York is not just a matter of the number of police officers. Those officers must be doing something right, but what exactly?
The most likely answer is a shift in strategy called hot-spot policing.
In the 1970s, research had shown that a small percentage of criminals committed a large share of crimes, so it had seemed logical to concentrate on catching repeat offenders and locking them up.
But after computerized crime mapping was introduced, it turned out that crime was even more concentrated by place than by person.
In city after city, researchers found that half of crimes occur within about 5 percent of an urban area — a few buildings, intersections and blocks, often near transit stops and businesses like convenience stores, bars and nightclubs.
The criminal population keeps changing as men in their 30s drop out and are replaced by teenagers, but crimes keep occurring at the same places.
A Focus on Hot Spots
Researchers suggested: Perhaps the authorities should pay less attention to individual criminals and more attention to the hot spots where they operate.
Dr. Sherman, Dr. Weisburd and colleagues have tested the idea in randomized experiments in Jersey City; Houston; Kansas City, Mo.; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Sacramento; and cities in Britain and Australia.
Typically, a list of hot spots was identified, and then half were randomly chosen to receive extra police attention, like more frequent patrols. Other strategies were also used, like improving street lighting, fencing vacant lots or arresting people for minor violations.
As hoped, there were fewer crimes and complaints at the hot spots chosen for extra attention than at those that were not. And once police officers started to show up often and at unpredictable intervals, they did not need to stay more than 15 minutes to have a lasting impact.
Nonetheless, the hot-spot strategy was initially met with skepticism by police veterans.
“We assumed that if we hit one area hard, the crime would just move somewhere else,” said Frank Gajewski, a former police chief of Jersey City, who worked with Dr. Weisburd on the experiments there.
But Dr. Weisburd won over Mr. Gajewski and other skeptics — and also won the 2010 Stockholm Prize, criminology’s version of the Nobel — by showing that crime was not simply being displaced. Moreover, he and his colleagues reported a “spatial diffusion of crime prevention benefits” because crime also declined in adjoining areas, as the police in Jersey City had observed.
“Crime doesn’t move as easily we thought it did,” Mr. Gajewski said. “If I’m a robber, I want to be in a familiar, easily accessible place with certain characteristics. I need targets to rob, but I don’t want people in the neighborhood watching me or challenging me. Maybe I work near a bus stop where there are vacant buildings or empty lots. If the police start focusing there, I can’t just move to the next block and find the same conditions.”
After more than two dozen experiments around the world, criminologists generally agree that hot-spot policing is “an effective crime prevention strategy,” in the words of Anthony Braga, a criminologist at Harvard and Rutgers who led a review of the research literature last year.
Many experts also see it as the best explanation for the crime drop in New York. Although the city’s police did not participate in randomized experiments, they did use computerized crime mapping to focus on hot spots in the 1990s. This strategy was intensified with a program called Operation Impact, which was started in 2003 by Raymond W. Kelly, then and now the police commissioner.
Commissioner Kelly gives the strategy credit for the continued decline of crime despite the reduced police force.
There is supporting evidence from Dennis C. Smith, a political scientist at New York University who led an analysis of trends in the dozens of precincts where the city’s police focus on “impact zones,” as the hot spots are called. Rates of murder, rape, grand larceny, robbery and assault declined significantly faster in precincts with hot-spot policing than in those without it.
The Stop-and-Frisk Debate
One part of the hot-spot strategy in New York has been highly controversial: the stopping and frisking of hundreds of thousands of people each year, ostensibly to search for weapons or other contraband.
Some critics say that the tactic has been used so often and so brusquely in New York that it has undermined policing by arousing disrespect for the law, especially among young black and Latino men, who are disproportionately stopped and searched. Research shows that people who feel treated unfairly by the police can become more likely to commit crimes in the future.
“The million-dollar question in policing right now is whether there are ways to get the benefits of stop-and-frisk without the collateral costs,” said Jens Ludwig, an economist who directs the University of Chicago Crime Lab. He found benefits from the tactic — a decline in gunshot injuries — in an experiment with the Pittsburgh police.
“Getting the police to stop people more often and search them for illegal guns does help keep guns off the street and reduce gun violence,” Dr. Ludwig said. “That’s not to say whether or not stop-and-frisk is worth the costs that the practice imposes on society. But there’s a complicated trade-off here that needs to be acknowledged.”
Defenders of stop-and-frisk, including Mayor Bloomberg, argue that when it is done properly and politely, the practice prevents crimes that disproportionately hurt the city’s minorities.
“If New York went back to the policing of the 1980s,” Dr. Smith said, “there would be hundreds of thousands more victims of serious crimes every year, and the great majority of them would be African-American and Hispanic.”
Police officials note that if the homicide rate of the 1980s persisted, 1,200 additional New Yorkers, most of them black or Latino men, would have been killed last year — when the police recorded 417 murders. Further, if the city’s incarceration rate had followed the national trend, an additional 100,000 black and Hispanic men would have been sent to prison in the past decade, Dr. Zimring calculates.
Whether or not other cities adopt New York’s specific stop-and-frisk tactics, social scientists say the rest of the country could benefit by adding police officers and concentrating on hot spots.
Dr. Ludwig and Philip J. Cook, a Duke University economist, calculate that nationwide, money diverted from prison to policing would buy at least four times as much reduction in crime. They suggest shrinking the prison population by a quarter and using the savings to hire another 100,000 police officers.
Diverting that money to the police would be tricky politically, because corrections budgets are zealously defended in state capitals by prison administrators, unions and legislators.
But there is at least one prison administrator, Dr. Jacobson, the former correction commissioner in New York, who would send the money elsewhere.
“If you had a dollar to spend on reducing crime, and you looked at the science instead of the politics, you would never spend it on the prison system,” Dr. Jacobson said. “There is no better example of big government run amok.”
That is the same lesson that William J. Bratton draws from his experience as New York’s police commissioner in the 1990s. “We showed in New York that the future of policing is not in handcuffs,” Mr. Bratton said. “The United States has locked up so many people that it has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but we can’t arrest and incarcerate our way out of crime. We need to focus on preventing crime instead of responding to it.”
