CQ Press has released new City Crime Rankings. Check out this great report by Peter Katel on fighting crime.
Introduction to the Feb. 8, 2008 CQ Researcher report on Fighting Crime
Efforts to reduce violent crime are succeeding in some, but not all, areas of the country. The number of violent crimes fell by about 2 percent during the first half of 2007. But crime still grips parts of cities large and small, where guns remain plentiful and many young men are caught up in a cycle of attack and revenge. In Washington, D.C., for example, there were 181 killings last year, up from 169 in 2006. But in the capital and elsewhere, homicide rates are significantly lower than during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early '90s. Experts attribute some of the improvement to better policing techniques, such as closely tracking neighborhood crime and quickly responding to upticks. But a countertrend of persistent violent crime is plaguing impoverished inner cities, where city officials and grassroots activists are struggling to keep young men from joining the ranks of victims and perpetrators.
* Can violent crime be significantly reduced in inner cities?
* Are "stop-and-frisk" programs the best way to cut gun violence?
* Does joblessness cause crime?
To read the entire CQ Researcher Online report, click here. [subscription required]
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Other related CQ Researcher reports on crime issues
Click to read the overview of the CQ Researcher report on Juvenile Justice.
Click to read the overview of the CQ Researcher report on Gun Rights Debate.
Click to read the overview of the CQ Researcher report on Public Defenders.
CQ Researcher Report on Fighting Crime
The New Report: The National Debt
By Marcia Clemmitt, November 14, 2008
Has it gotten too big?
With the national debt now more than $10 trillion -- twice what it was eight years ago -- the country faces a dire financial future, some analysts argue. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has run larger and larger annual deficits, adding to the national debt and restricting the government’s ability to respond to a new crisis. Now, with the U.S. and global financial meltdown ushering in a potentially catastrophic economic slowdown, the next president -- newly elected Sen. Barack Obama -- will be under pressure to use government fiscal policy, such as tax cuts and government spending, to bolster the economy, even though those actions will raise the debt further. Besides wrestling with that dilemma, the new president also must face the question of how to pay for spiraling Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits for the nation’s 77 million baby boomers.
* Is the national debt too big?
* Will Social Security bust the federal budget?
* Do foreigners hold too much of our national debt?
To read the Overview of this week's report, click here.
To read the entire CQ Researcher Online report, click here. [subscription required]
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Coming Up in CQ Researcher
Falling Birthrates
Nations around the globe worry that falling birthrates will cause severe economic problems, including shortages of workers to pay into Social Security system to support ever-growing numbers of retirees. Japan is already facing labor shortages and declining demand for its products. And Europe, the United Kingdom, China and the United States are also worried about the future. Politicians are casting about for solutions, including cutting government spending on the elderly and letting older people work longer. Meanwhile, the nonprofit organization Civic Ventures is matching up people who are of retirement age with new, socially conscious careers. They argue that rather than increasing birthrates, one solution to the coming Social Security crisis is having older people work longer. But critics say that defeats the purpose of retirement and isn’t a realistic solution.
By Sarah Glazer
Reducing Your Carbon Footprint
As climate change rises on the government’s policy agenda -- and an economic crisis looms -- more and more consumers are trying to change their behavior so they pollute and consume less. To reduce their individual so-called carbon footprints, many are cutting gasoline and home-heating consumption, choosing locally grown food and recycling. While such actions are important in curbing global warming, the extent to which consumers can reduce or reverse broad-scale environmental damage is open to debate. Corporate and government policy must lead the way, many environmental advocates say. And well-intentioned personal actions can have unintended consequences that cancel out positive effects.
By Thomas J. Billitteri
Mexico’s Drug War
A violent drug war between police and vicious drug gangs is escalating just over the border in Mexico – and causing concern among U.S. law enforcement officials and the incoming Obama administration. The cartels already effectively control significant stretches on the Mexican side of the border, and they’re establishing themselves on the U.S. side. More than 4,000 people have been killed this year compared with 2,500 last year. Some victims have been beheaded. Mexican soldiers and police fighting the narcos are among the victims, along with journalists and innocent civilians. The Bush administration has stepped up security assistance to Mexico, but the aid hasn’t dented the gangs’ firepower, which depends on smuggled U.S. weapons. Moreover, extraditing drug kingpins to the United States seems only to have spurred the conflict, by creating new opportunities for rival gangs.
By Peter Katel
In the News: Overworked Public Defenders Refuse New Cases
Public defender offices in at least seven states, including Kentucky, Florida, Missouri and Michigan, have refused to take on new cases, contending they cannot adequately represent impoverished clients due to an increasing workload and a lack of time to prepare cases. Low pay, state budget cuts to public defender programs and high lawyer turnover rates have been blamed for the problem. In September, a Florida judge ruled that the Miami-Dade County public defender’s office could refuse to represent lower felony clients in order to focus on defendants charged with more serious crimes. The state has appealed, arguing the public defender’s office must share the weight of Florida’s declining revenues. If the decision is upheld, the state will be forced to hire private lawyers at greater expense to work with the smaller pool of public defenders.
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In the News: Paulson Shifts Bailout Strategy
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced that the government is officially abandoning the original $700 billion effort to rescue the nation’s financial system approved by Congress and President Bush last month. The Treasury Department will still continue to invest in financial institutions but will also focus on struggling consumers. He said the Fed will try to increase the availability of credit cards as well as student and car loans, perhaps through a new Federal Reserve lending facility aimed at unlocking the frozen consumer credit market. The Treasury is also examining ways to help prevent future foreclosures.
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In the News: Connecticut to Permit Same-Sex Marriage
Connecticut began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples after the state Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 10 that excluding same-sex couples from marriage was unconstitutional. The court said gay marriages could officially be performed starting Nov. 12. Connecticut voters recently decided against holding a convention to amend the state’s constitution, which could have offered supporters of traditional marriage a chance to ban same-sex marriage in the state. In 2005 Connecticut legalized civil unions, which offer similar rights and benefits for gay couples. Meanwhile, California voters recently approved Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. The vote overturned a California Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage.
To view the entire CQ Researcher Online report, "Gay Marriage Showdowns," click here. [subscription required]
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Overview of the New Report on the National Debt
Osama bin Laden is not America’s gravest threat, says former Comptroller General David M. Walker.
“The most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility,” Walker told CBS News earlier this year. “We’re spending more money than we make. . . . We’re charging it to the credit card . . . and expecting our grandchildren to pay for it. And that’s absolutely outrageous.”
In February, Walker quit his job as head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) -- the nation’s auditing agency -- to barnstorm the country full time as president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The new organization, founded by investment banker and Nixon administration Secretary of Commerce Peterson, is dedicated to alerting the public to an approaching tidal wave of budget deficits just as waves of retiring baby boomers begin claiming trillions of dollars in Social Security and Medicare benefits.
The sum of deficits year after year -- including money raised by selling Treasury securities here and abroad -- is the national debt, now more than $10 trillion.
In a year of catastrophic financial news, three milestones stand out. In February, 62-year-old retired Maryland teacher Kathleen Casey-Kirschling became the first baby boomer to receive a Social Security check, ushering in a flood of retirees whose retirement and Medicare benefits will strain federal coffers.
In October the annual federal budget deficit hit a record $455 billion, up from the previous record of $413 billion in 2004. The increase alarmed many budget analysts, not only because it continued the recent series of deficits but also because it came before the economy and financial markets nose-dived, prompting Congress to approve a $700 billion bailout in October. Also in October the National Debt Clock in New York City’s Times Square topped $10 trillion for the first time -- double the national debt when President George W. Bush took office eight years ago.
Most analysts agree with Walker that two budget issues especially threaten the nation’s future financial health: The recent string of annual federal budget deficits -- which have persisted even in economic good times -- and skyrocketing health-care costs, which threaten to swamp Medicare, Medicaid and the private health-care system over the next several decades.
“As alarming as the size of our current debt is, it excludes many items, including the gap between future promised and funded Social Security and Medicare benefits, veterans’ health care and a range of other commitments and contingencies that the federal government has pledged to support” in the future -- thus understating the true magnitude of budget problems, Walker told the Senate Budget Committee in January.
When countries have obligations they couldn’t otherwise meet, rather than raise taxes or cut programs to save money, governments that already carry substantial debt burdens have a tendency to simply print more money -- called “monetizing” debt. But with more cash available, demand for goods and services swells and prices rise higher in an inflationary cycle, says Herbert I. London, president of the conservative Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank. And when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, “the government is not going to cut these programs,” so “monetizing” may prove irresistible, London says.
Much as with any other debt, such as credit-card debt, the national debt matters because the government has to pay interest on it each year, explains Michael Hudson, a research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, in Forest Hills, N.Y. If the debt rises too high, interest payments can “crowd out other things” the government might want to do, he says.
“We’re already spending twice as much on debt interest as on the Iraq War” -- or over $400 billion a year -- points out Andrew L. Yarrow, author of the 2008 book Forgive Us Our Debts: The Intergenerational Dangers of Fiscal Irresponsibility.
And with foreign central banks now holding a sizable portion of America’s debt in the form of Treasury securities, those interest payments don’t end up back in Americans’ pockets as they did in the past, when “we mostly owed the debt to ourselves,” says Linda Bilmes, a professor of public budgeting at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and coauthor of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. Unlike government spending on items like roads, for example, “interest payments made to the central bank of China” don’t help build the nation or the economy, Bilmes says.
The recent practice of running deficits during both good economic times and bad disturbs most economists. In a healthy economy, deficits typically increase during economic downturns -- when tax revenues fall -- and shrink during boom times.
“But in the mid-2000s the economy grew, but deficits grew too,” as Congress continued to spend while giving out tax breaks, says Hashem Dezhbakhsh, a professor of economics at Emory University in Atlanta. “This is a structural deficit,” which not only causes the total debt to balloon but indicates that the government isn’t behaving conscientiously, he says.
Worse, over the past quarter-century the federal government has run deficits almost every year, even though large, annual Social Security surpluses were borrowed to help shore up federal finances during the entire period.
“The government has used this accounting legerdemain” -- borrowing Social Security surpluses to fund programs, including wars and tax cuts -- says Yarrow, who is vice president of the nonpartisan, public opinion research group Public Agenda. As baby boomers reach retirement age, those IOUs will come due as Social Security is forced to pay promised benefits. When that happens, the government will have to make some tough choices to cope with the loss of ready cash, he says.
Despite concerns, particularly among skeptical younger Americans who fear Social Security will be broke by the time they retire, most economists say it can survive the fiscal tsunami with only some tweaks. Sometime in the next few decades, Congress will have to either increase Social Security taxes paid by workers and employers or cut the benefits, but the change needn’t be drastic, says Roberton Williams, a principal research associate in tax policy at the nonpartisan, mainly center-left-leaning Urban Institute. “We’ll probably have to work a little longer or see our benefits cut a little bit,” he says.
But the health-care system -- Medicare and Medicaid as well as other public and private services -- is another matter. Health costs have been rising faster than the rest of the economy for decades -- a trend widely seen as unsustainable.
“One hundred percent of the problem” with the nation’s fiscal future lies in health care, says Henry J. Aaron, a senior fellow in economics at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. If we solve the health-care problem, “there won’t be a long-term fiscal problem,” he says.
The health-care system must be redesigned to offer incentives for providing only the most effective and cost-effective care, “but we don’t know yet what ‘effective care’ is,” says James R. Horney, director of fiscal policy at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Medicare spending growth rates reflect not only the burgeoning beneficiary population but also health-care costs that are growing faster than the inflation rate, said former Comptroller General Walker. “Total health-care spending,” he said, “is absorbing an increasing share of our nation’s GDP [gross domestic product]” -- the total amount of goods and services the country produces in a year. It has risen from about 8 percent of GDP in 1976 to 16 percent in 2006, and is projected to reach about 20 percent of GDP in 2016 -- crowding out other vital spending.
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The New Report: Juvenile Justice
By Peter Katel, November 7, 2008
Are sentencing policies too harsh?
As many as 200,000 youths charged with crimes today are tried in adult courts, where judges tend to be tougher and punishments harsher -- including sentencing to adult prisons. But with juvenile crime now on the decline, youth advocates are seizing the moment to push for major changes in iron-fisted juvenile justice systems nationwide. Above all, they want to roll back harsh state punishments -- triggered by the crack cocaine-fueled crime wave of the late 1980s and early ‘90s -- that sent thousands of adolescents to adult courts and prisons. Many prosecutors say the get-tough approach offers society the best protection. But critics say young people often leave prison more bitter and dangerous than when they went in. Moreover, recent brain studies show weak impulse control in young people under age 18, prompting some states to reconsider their tough punishments. Prosecutors respond that even immature adolescents know right from wrong.
* Should states roll back their tough juvenile crime laws?
* Did tough laws lower crime rates?
* Does the prospect of facing the adult court system deter juveniles from crime?
To read the Overview of this week's report, click here.
To read the entire CQ Researcher Online report, click here. [subscription required]
To buy a PDF of this report, click here.
Coming Up in CQ Researcher
The National Debt
With the national debt at around $10 trillion and the government running substantial annual budget deficits, the country faces a dire financial picture, some analysts argue. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has begun running larger annual deficits, even when economic times are good, and most economists agree that the ever-rising debt load restricts the government’s ability to respond to a new crisis. Now the country is entering what could be a long economic slowdown, and the next president will be under pressure to use government fiscal policy – tax cuts and government spending – to bolster the economy, even though those policies will raise the debt further. Besides wrestling with that dilemma, the new president also must face the question of how to pay for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits for the large, soon-to-retire baby boom population.
By Marcia Clemmitt
Reducing Your Carbon Footprint
As climate change rises on the government’s policy agenda -- and an economic crisis looms -- more and more consumers are trying to change their behavior so they pollute and consume less. To reduce their individual so-called carbon footprints, many are cutting gasoline and home-heating consumption, choosing locally grown food and recycling. While such actions are important in curbing global warming, the extent to which consumers can reduce or reverse broad-scale environmental damage is open to debate. Corporate and government policy must lead the way, many environmental advocates say. And well-intentioned personal actions can have unintended consequences that cancel out positive effects.
By Thomas J. Billitteri
Falling Birthrates
Nations around the globe worry that falling birthrates will cause severe economic problems, including shortages of workers to pay into Social Security system to support ever-growing numbers of retirees. Japan is already facing labor shortages and declining demand for its products. And Europe, the United Kingdom, China and the United States are also worried about the future. Politicians are casting about for solutions, including cutting government spending on the elderly and letting older people work longer. Meanwhile, the nonprofit organization Civic Ventures is matching up people who are of retirement age with new, socially conscious careers. They argue that rather than increasing birthrates, one solution to the coming Social Security crisis is having older people work longer. But critics say that defeats the purpose of retirement and isn’t a realistic solution.
By Sarah Glazer
In the News: Obama Elected President in Historic Election
Sen. Barack Obama’s historic election as the nation’s first African-American president set off celebrations worldwide, but attention quickly turned to the transition to an Obama administration. The transition team is being led by John D. Podesta, who was President Bill Clinton's chief of staff; Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of Obama's; and Pete Rouse, Obama's former Senate chief of staff. Obama hopes to quickly name a Treasury secretary, a decision that will set the tone for his relationship with the battered financial world. Meanwhile, he named Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., as his chief of staff.
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In the News: Voters in Several States Approve Bans on Gay Marriage
California voters Tuesday approved Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the state. California's secretary of state late released semi-official results showing the amendment passed 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent. Similar bans were also passed by voters in Arizona and Florida, while Arkansas voters passed a measure that bans gay partners from adopting children. Gay-rights backers have already filed three lawsuits to challenge the measure in California, and many legal analysts expect the issue will have to be ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court.
To view the entire CQ Researcher Online report, "Gay Marriage Showdowns," click here. [subscription required]
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In the News: Democrats Gain Seats in House, Senate
Democrats gained at least six Senate seats to raise their majority in the 100-member body from 51 to 57. Democrats have gained 19 seats in the 435-member House, raising their majority to 254. Seven races remained undecided on Wednesday. Results are still not in from Senate races in Minnesota, where Republican Norm Coleman was in a virtual tie with Al Franken; Alaska, where incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, who was recently convicted on seven felony bribery charges, was holding a slim lead; and Georgia, where no candidate secured 50 percent of the vote, forcing incumbent Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss into a run-off election against his Democrat and Libertarian opponents.
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Overview of the New Report on Juvenile Justice
Washington, D.C., lawyer Matthew Caspari has developed some strong feelings about punishing teenage criminals since last August. That’s when he wrestled with a knife-wielding 17-year-old who’d been harassing one of his neighbors on Capitol Hill.
Caspari had been taking a walk with his wife and their 6-month-old daughter when he saw a neighbor in trouble. As he was calling 911, the young man threatened him, and they began to fight. When Caspari’s dropped cell phone picked up his wife’s screams, police raced to the scene and arrested the man.
But what happened afterwards was equally disturbing, Caspari told a City Council hearing in October. After a Family Court judge released the youth while he awaited sentencing, he was back on the street hanging out with a tough crowd, Caspari said. That’s why he said he opposed legislation to rescind the U.S. attorney’s sole power to try teenagers 15 and older in adult court for violent crimes.
“Family Court is no deterrent,” said Caspari. “Punishment and consequences are simply not taken seriously by the offenders. If you want to instill a sense of accountability in these teens and provide therapy and services -- there’s no reason why you can’t provide that in the adult system -- while protecting the community.”
Democratic Councilman Phil Mendelson, who is co-sponsoring the proposal to reign in the U.S. attorney, says statistical evidence shows adult-court prosecution tends to reinforce -- rather than diminish -- young offenders’ criminal tendencies.
“The inclination is, if somebody commits a crime, particularly a violent crime, then lock ‘em up,” Mendelson told the hearing. “And the research shows that is statistically counterproductive.”
Mendelson’s comment echoed the views of a growing number of juvenile justice experts and activists. With violent juvenile crime trending downward for the past 13 years, they say it’s time to replace the tough sentences that state lawmakers enacted in the 1980s and ‘90s and handle more youth cases in juvenile court. The hard-line policies reflected skyrocketing juvenile crime and the prediction -- later proved baseless -- that violent, young “superpredators” would take over the nation’s inner cities.
The get-tough measures eased the transferring of juveniles to adult courts where they faced tougher sentences. Some states allowed prosecutors to “direct file” juvenile cases in adult court; others left the decision to a judge, or made transfers automatic for certain charges.
But standards differ on when courts legally recognize that adulthood begins. In most states -- especially those striving for more rehabilitation -- 18 is the threshold age. In 10 states -- Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin -- teens become adults at 17; in New York and North Carolina, it’s 16.
Experts say they haven’t determined how many convicts are serving time for crimes committed before they were 18. But the Campaign for Youth Justice, a Washington-based advocacy group, estimates that on any given day 7,500 youths under 18 are in jail or awaiting trial or transport to prison or juvenile detention.
Adult court sentences often are tougher than those in juvenile courts. Until 2005, they could include the death penalty, which the U.S. Supreme Court then banned for anyone who committed a capital crime before turning 18.
The backdrop to that decision was a decline in youth crime, and the drop continues. According to the most recent statistics, the 2007 arrest rate for youths ages 10-18 was down to fewer than 300 per 100,000 -- the same level as in 1982.
To counter assertions by prosecutors that tougher laws brought crime rates down, opponents of harsh penalties point to studies showing that juveniles tried as adults come out of prison more dangerous than when they went in, and hence more prone to become adult criminals. A nationwide Task Force on Community Preventive Services, appointed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concluded in late 2006: “Overall, available evidence indicates that use of transfer laws and strengthened transfer policies is counterproductive for the purpose of reducing juvenile violence and enhancing public safety.”
Indeed, at a recent conference on juvenile rehabilitation at the Brookings Institution, Bart Lubow, director of programs for high-risk youth at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, said the punitive laws of the 1980s and ‘90s had “resulted in the criminalization of delinquency.” The Baltimore-based nonprofit is advising 100 cities and counties on how to reorganize their juvenile systems so that they rely less on incarceration.
Many prosecutors say they also want to channel more juveniles into detention alternatives -- but not all of them.
In Oregon, says Clatsop County District Attorney Joshua Marquis, “We went from an extreme -- ‘everyone needs a hug and cup of Ovaltine’ -- to a more nuanced system. Delinquents who need a minimum of incarceration and a maximum amount of structure get treated one way. And then there are the young criminals who for all intents and purposes are young adults -- they don’t act like children, don’t respond like children and you can’t treat them like children.”
Oregon voters approved the present system in 1994, when the tough-on-crime approach was sweeping the nation. Measure 11 stiffened sentences for certain violent offenses and applied them to defendants as young as 15.
By 2003, 31 states had passed laws requiring juveniles charged with certain crimes to be tried as adults. Also during the ‘90s, 13 states lowered the top age for juvenile court jurisdiction to 15 or 16. As a result, the number of inmates serving life without parole for crimes committed when they were under 18 began climbing; today 2,484 youthful offenders are serving such sentences.
But rollback advocates have scored a few successes. Connecticut last year raised its age threshold for adult court from 16 to 18. In 2006, Colorado abolished juvenile life without parole. In addition, several states have restricted adult-court transfers, and advocates are readying legislation for introduction in other states next year.
Hard-liners can claim some victories as well. This year, a California proposal to abolish life without parole for juveniles failed to get the required two-thirds majority needed for passage. And in Colorado, Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter Jr., a former district attorney, vetoed a bill that would have stripped prosecutors of their sole authority to charge juveniles in adult court.
“They wanted to take away our discretion -- there’s still a movement in our state to do that,” says Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey. “They wanted to have more hearings and more experts and cost a lot more money.”
Morrissey and other supporters of tough laws argue that prosecutors use them sparingly. In the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Dakota County Prosecutor James C. Backstrom tells of resisting heavy pressure in 2006 to press for life without parole for two 17-year-olds who gunned down one of the boys’ parents in cold blood. Instead, the prosecutor accepted pleas to a charge that didn’t carry the no-parole proviso, giving them a chance to apply for release after 30 years.
“They knew right from wrong; there was no question they should be convicted of first-degree murder,” Backstrom says, “but they had no criminal history whatsoever. I just did not feel that locking them up for the rest of their natural lives was the right thing to do. They’ll have a chance to salvage some part of their lives. There were some strong disagreements, even from the victims’ family.”
Prosecutors everywhere can recall horrendous cases that warranted tough sentences. But rollback advocates argue such cases tend to obscure the fact that more than half of juvenile cases that end up in adult court don’t involve crimes against people.
“You could certainly say that when you expand the use of adult court transfer you are likely to capture more serious offenders,” says Jeffrey A. Butts, a research fellow at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall Center for Children. “But it’s a blunt instrument, so you pull a lot of youth into that pathway in the attempt to grab all serious offenders.”
According to the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), about 51 percent of all 6,885 juvenile cases transferred (“waived”) to adult court in 2005 (the most recent figures available) involved “person” offenses -- that is, crimes against individuals. The rest were property crimes (27 percent), drug offenses (12 percent) and public order violations (10 percent), such as weapons, sex or liquor violations.
No national statistics exist on the total number of juveniles tried in adult court. The closest estimate, based on calculations by Butts, is 200,000 a year.
To be sure, statistics don’t capture the nitty-gritty of crime in the streets. Lawyer Caspari says the teen who pulled a knife on him wasn’t eligible for transfer to adult court because Caspari was never cut or stabbed. But he could have been.
That’s why Caspari opposes allowing judges -- instead of prosecutors -- to send cases to adult court. The relative speed of the present system, he says, tells young offenders that they’ll be held accountable quickly. “The practical reality is the defendant’s lawyer can gum up the system by requesting it go back down to juvenile court, and that’s another nine months,” he says. “Is that the message you want to send to these kids?”
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The New Report: Gun Rights Debates
By Kenneth Jost, Oct. 31, 2008
Should restrictions on firearms be relaxed?
The Supreme Court gave gun rights advocates a major victory on June 26, recognizing for the first time an individual right under the Second Amendment to own and possess firearms. The 5-4 decision struck down a handgun ban adopted by the District of Columbia in 1976. Gun rights advocates the very same day began challenging similar bans in Chicago and elsewhere. In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia said the decision did not invalidate laws establishing qualifications to buy weapons, limiting the carrying of weapons in “sensitive” places or barring possession by felons or the mentally ill. Dissenting justices argued the ruling misinterpreted the history of the Second Amendment and would lead the court into striking down many gun laws. Gun control groups hope the ruling sets the stage for more reasoned debate over gun regulations by removing the specter of confiscation of weapons. But gun owners plan to use the ruling to challenge licensing schemes and to urge state legislators to ease restrictions on carrying weapons in public.
* Should laws restricting ownership of firearms be relaxed?
* Should laws regarding concealed weapons be relaxed?
* Should criminal penalties for gun-related offenses be relaxed?
To read the Overview of this week's report, click here.
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Coming Up in CQ Researcher
Juvenile Justice
With juvenile crime on the decline, youth advocates are seizing the moment to push for major changes in iron-fisted juvenile justice systems nationwide. Above all, they want to roll back harsh state punishments – triggered by the crack cocaine-fueled crime wave of the late 1980s and early '90s – that diverted adolescents to adult courts and prisons. Today, as a result, an estimated 25 percent of all youth charged with crimes are now tried in adult courts, where judges tend to be tougher and sentences harsher. Many prosecutors say the get-tough approach offers society the best protection. But critics say young people often leave prison more bitter and dangerous than when they went in. Moreover, recent brain studies show weak impulse control in adolescents under age 18, prompting some states to reconsider their tough punishments. But youth advocates concede that any new uptick in juvenile crime could stop such efforts in their tracks.
By Peter Katel
The National Debt
With the national debt at around $12 trillion and the government running substantial annual budget deficits, the country faces a dire financial picture, some analysts argue. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has begun running larger annual deficits, even when economic times are good, and most economists agree that the ever-rising debt load restricts the government’s ability to respond to a new crisis. Now the country is entering what could be a long economic slowdown, and the next president will be under pressure to use government fiscal policy – tax cuts and government spending – to bolster the economy, even though those policies will raise the debt further. Besides wrestling with that dilemma, the new president also must face the question of how to pay for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits for the large, soon-to-retire baby boom population.
By Marcia Clemmitt
Reducing Your Carbon Footprint
As climate change rises on the government’s policy agenda -- and an economic crisis looms -- more and more consumers are trying to change their behavior so they pollute and consume less. To reduce their individual so-called carbon footprints, many are cutting gasoline and home-heating consumption, choosing locally grown food and recycling. While such actions are important in curbing global warming, the extent to which consumers can reduce or reverse broad-scale environmental damage is open to debate. Corporate and government policy must lead the way, many environmental advocates say. And well-intentioned personal actions can have unintended consequences that cancel out positive effects.
By Thomas J. Billitteri
In the News: Two Students Shot and Killed at Arkansas School
Two students were shot and killed at Central Arkansas University outside a residence hall on Oct. 26. Police charged four men with capital murder for what they say may have been a random shooting; another student was injured. The men apparently drove up to a group of students near the Arkansas Hall dormitory and fired at least eight rounds from at least one semiautomatic pistol. The university cancelled classes the next day but resumed on Oct. 28, when more than 300 students, faculty members and local residents attended a memorial for the slain students.
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, 20080215 (Feb. 15, 2008)
In the News: UN Urges U.S. to Lift Cuba Trade Embargo
The United Nations overwhelmingly voted for a resolution that calls on the United States to lift its trade embargo on Cuba. It is the 17th-straight year the General Assembly called for the U.S. to lift the economic and commercial embargo “as soon as possible.” The measure won support from 185 countries, one vote more than last year; the U.S., Israel and Palau opposed the measure. U.S. diplomat Ron Goddard said every country has the right to restrict trade and that the embargo, which was imposed in 1962, is justified because the Cuban government is undemocratic and restricts political and economic freedom. Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said it will be up to the next U.S. president “to admit” whether the embargo is “a failed policy.”
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Overview of the New Report on the Gun Rights Debates
Joseph Tartaro, the longtime executive editor of Gun Week magazine, looked out at a meeting room filled with hundreds of gun owners and gun rights advocates and announced that, at last, good times had arrived.
Thirty years earlier, Tartaro told the Second Amendment Foundation’s annual conference in Phoenix on Sept. 28, only four states allowed the carrying of concealed weapons in public. And the District of Columbia had just enacted one of the strictest gun control laws in the country.
Today, explained Tartaro, the foundation’s president, more than 40 states have so-called “shall issue” laws that allow carrying concealed firearms in public. And three months earlier -- on June 26 -- the Supreme Court had struck down Washington’s handgun ban. The precedent-setting decision established an individual right to own and possess firearms for self-defense, at least in one’s home.
“We’ve reached the good days,” Tartaro continued. More handguns are being sold than at any other time in history. Long gun sales would be up too but for the bad economy. “People have discovered,” he said, “that guns are not as scary as they thought they were.”
“Law-abiding people should be able to defend themselves, their families and their communities,” Tartaro concluded.
Gun rights advocates indeed have much to celebrate thanks to the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which transforms a decades-long dispute over the meaning of the Second Amendment. The awkwardly phrased 27-word provision proclaims: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Following a 1939 Supreme Court decision, federal courts had ruled all but uniformly for more than 60 years that the amendment’s opening clause limited its scope to protecting the states’ rights to organize militias. But the amendment did not establish an individual right to own or possess firearms, courts held. Under the so-called collective-right view, Congress and state and local governments remained largely free to regulate guns as they saw fit.
Gun rights advocates stepped up their efforts to challenge that doctrine in the 1960s and ‘70s. Over time, they gained support for their claim that the amendment established an individual right -- first from many politicians, then from some academics and eventually from the general public.
The Supreme Court finally took up the issue after the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia struck down the D.C. gun ban in March 2007. The high court’s 5-4 ruling gave gun rights advocates the victory they had awaited for so long.
Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said the amendment established an individual right for “law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” D.C.’s ban on handguns -- the “quintessential self-defense weapon” -- was invalid, he said, along with the law’s provision requiring that any weapons in the home be either disassembled or trigger-locked.
Writing for the four dissenters, Justice John Paul Stevens said the ruling upset a “settled understanding” that the Second Amendment allowed virtually unlimited regulation of civilian use of firearms. He said the D.C. gun ban could be “just the first of an unknown number of dominoes to be knocked off the table.”
Leading advocates and experts disagree on the likely impact of the ruling. “Many laws [regulating guns] will be upheld -- the laws that make more sense,” says Alan Gura, the Alexandria, Va., lawyer who successfully represented D.C. private security guard Dick Heller and other plaintiffs in challenging the gun ban. “But laws that serve no legitimate governmental purpose but merely serve to harass gun owners, laws that make gun owning difficult or expensive -- those laws are going to be struck down.”
Gun control advocates are playing down the possibility that lots of gun regulations are now in constitutional jeopardy. They emphasize passages in Scalia’s opinion that limit the Second Amendment right to weapons “in common use” and that leave standing laws setting “conditions and qualifications” on the commercial sale of arms.
“We’re actually quite encouraged by comments that the majority made in the course of that decision offering some reassurance that some very broad categories of gun laws . . . are what the court called presumptively lawful,” says Dennis Henigan, vice president for law and policy at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, the non-partisan policy arm of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a political action committee.
A leading gun rights lawyer for the National Rifle Association (NRA) somewhat similarly plays down the likely impact of the ruling. “It’s not as though all the gun regulations in the country are going to go by the wayside,” says Stephen Halbrook, author of a number of pro-gun rights books and articles. But Halbrook says the court’s decision represents “a “tremendous moral defeat” for gun control advocates.
Other academic experts disagree. “In practice, the legislatures are not that limited in the kind of gun controls they can pass,” says Gary Kleck, a professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice in Tallahassee, who describes himself as a supporter of “a moderate amount” of gun control. “They can do virtually everything they could before the decision.”
But Philip Cook, a professor of economics and sociology at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and a supporter of stronger regulation, says gun control supporters are engaging in “happy talk” when they minimize the ruling’s potential effects. “The decision has been a litigation magnet,” says Cook. “At this point it remains hard to say how far the Supreme Court and the [federal] circuit courts are going to push this.”
The Second Amendment Foundation, in fact, filed the first post-Heller lawsuit on the same day of the decision, challenging a Chicago handgun ban similar to the D.C. law. The NRA followed with a package of suits challenging handgun bans in Chicago and several nearby suburbs. Separately, the foundation and other gun rights groups challenged a San Francisco provision banning handguns in public housing.
Criminal defendants in federal courts are also citing the Heller decision to try to set aside sentence enhancements under federal provisions increasing prison terms for use or possession of guns by offenders. So far, judges appear to be rejecting those arguments. But the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Nov. 10 testing a federal law making it a crime for someone convicted of domestic violence to own a gun.
The ruling is also renewing the debate touched off by the Virginia Tech shootings in April 2007 over college and university rules prohibiting possession of firearms on campuses. A student group advocating the right of licensed students to carry concealed weapons on campus claims to have attracted more than 30,000 members -- but is also drawing criticism from gun control groups that say increasing the number of firearms will make campuses less instead of more safe.
In Washington itself, the city council quickly responded to the Supreme Court decision by establishing a registration system for handguns while retaining other restrictions, including the requirement to store weapons disassembled or trigger-locked. The council adopted a significantly revised interim measure in September under the threat of a bipartisan measure in Congress to strip the district of all authority to regulate firearms. The new “emergency” legislation permits registration of semiautomatic pistols as well as single-shot pistols and eliminates the trigger-lock requirement. Those provisions are expected to be included in a permanent law to be adopted later.
The Heller decision came at a time of relative quiet in the gun control debates -- debates that often seem to be as much clashes of cultures and values as disagreements on law and policy. Gun control has receded as an issue over the past two years in Congress and state and local legislative bodies. Both major party presidential candidates endorsed the Supreme Court ruling to recognize individual rights under the Second Amendment: Republican John McCain strongly, Democrat Barack Obama more ambiguously.
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The New Report: Finanical Bailout
By Thomas J. Billitteri, Oct. 24, 2008
Will U.S. and overseas action stem the global crisis?
Bowing to doomsday warnings that the U.S. and global financial systems could collapse, Congress passed a $700 billion rescue bill early this month. Part of a sweeping $1 trillion government plan to calm the stock market and unfreeze credit – the unprecedented rescue came amid mounting fears of a deep recession and the collapse of such major financial institutions as Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. The government’s efforts included the federal takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together hold or guarantee $5.4 trillion in mortgage loans – 45 percent of the national total. The quasi-governmental firms were dragged down by investments in subprime mortgages and other “toxic” financial instruments. Meanwhile, even as the Bush administration and congressional leaders were calling the bailout plan vital, fundamental questions were being raised, including: Is the bailout big enough? And did risky lending by Fannie and Freddie and poor regulatory oversight fuel the crisis?
* Will the bailout plan work?
* Did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac cause the financial crisis?
* Should Congress adopt tougher regulatory reforms?
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Coming Up in CQ Researcher
Gun Rights Debates
The Supreme Court gave gun rights advocates a major victory on June 26, recognizing for the first time an individual right under the Second Amendment to own and possess firearms. The 5-4 decision struck down a handgun ban adopted by the District of Columbia in 1976. Gun rights advocates began filing suits the very same day challenging similar bans in Chicago and elsewhere. In his opinion for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia said the decision did not invalidate laws establishing qualifications to buy weapons, limiting the carrying of weapons in “sensitive” places or barring possession by felons or the mentally ill. Gun control groups hope the ruling sets the stage for more reasoned debate over gun regulations by removing the specter of weapons confiscation. But gun owners plan to use the ruling to challenge licensing schemes and urge state legislators to ease restrictions on carrying weapons in public.
By Kenneth Jost
Juvenile Justice
With juvenile crime on the decline, youth advocates are seizing the moment to push for major changes in iron-fisted juvenile justice systems nationwide. Above all, they want to roll back harsh state punishments – triggered by the crack cocaine-fueled crime wave of the late 1980s and early '90s – that diverted adolescents to adult courts and prisons. Today, as a result, an estimated 25 percent of all youth charged with crimes are now tried in adult courts, where judges tend to be tougher and sentences harsher. Many prosecutors say the get-tough approach offers society the best protection. But critics say young people often leave prison more bitter and dangerous than when they went in. Moreover, recent brain studies show weak impulse control in adolescents under age 18, prompting some states to reconsider their tough punishments. But youth advocates concede that any new uptick in juvenile crime could stop such efforts in their tracks.
By Peter Katel
The National Debt
With the national debt at around $12 trillion and the government running substantial annual budget deficits, the country faces a dire financial picture, some analysts argue. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has begun running larger annual deficits, even when economic times are good, and most economists agree that the ever-rising debt load restricts the government’s ability to respond to a new crisis. Now the country is entering what could be a long economic slowdown, and the next president will be under pressure to use government fiscal policy – tax cuts and government spending – to bolster the economy, even though those policies will raise the debt further. Besides wrestling with that dilemma, the new president also must face the question of how to pay for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits for the large, soon-to-retire baby boom population.
By Marcia Clemmitt
In the News: Google Receives 150,000 ‘Great Ideas’
Search engine Google has received over 150,000 online submissions for its “Project 10 to the 100th" initiative seeking ideas with potentially broad and beneficial effects on society. For the past month Google has been soliciting projects that can build communities, improve health, broaden education access and sustain the global ecosystem. Guided by an advisory board, Google will whittle the entries down to 100 semifinalists by Jan. 27, 2009. Up to five winners will be announced in February, all of whom will share $10 million provided by Google to help turn the ideas into reality. Google launched the project in celebration of its 10th anniversary.
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In the News: New Regulations Aim to Reduce Terror Watch List Errors
The Department of Homeland Security has unveiled a new plan in which airline passengers will be asked to provide their full name, date of birth and gender when making reservations. The program – Secure Flight – will transmit the encrypted information to the Transportation Security Administration for checking against terror watch lists. The new regulations are intended to dramatically reduce the number of people being incorrectly identified as being on such lists. The FBI says about 400,000 individuals are on its list, but each year thousands of airline passengers not on the list are misidentified and kept off flights. The American Civil Liberties Union has welcomed the new privacy protections, but says they wouldn’t be necessary if the government didn’t make the terror list “hopelessly bloated.”
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In the News: Chinese Dissident Wins Human Rights Prize
Controversial Chinese dissident Hu Jia has won the European Union’s top human rights prize despite warnings from the Chinese government that his selection could harm relations with the 27-nation bloc. Hu had chronicled the arrest and harassment of other human rights activists before being sentenced in April to three-and-a-half years in prison. Beijing authorities say he plotted to work with foreigners to disturb the Summer Olympic Games in August. Hu was selected by members of the European Parliament from a shortlist of three candidates that also included activists from Belarus and Congo. He began his work by fighting for the rights of AIDS patients, but his scope expanded once he concluded that China’s problems were rooted in what he determined was a nationwide lack of human rights.
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Overview of the New Report on the Financial Bailout
Anger was palpable this fall as Congress scrambled to quell a financial wildfire that began in the overheated home-mortgage market, raged through Wall Street, spread ominously to Main Street and then flared into a global financial catastrophe.
“We were told that markets knew best, and that we were entering a new world of global growth and prosperity,” declared Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “We now have to pay for the greed and recklessness of those who should have known better.”
Such emotions have been widespread in the wake of the nation’s – and perhaps the world’s – worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But agreement on the root causes and likely outcome of the crisis has been harder to find.
Early this month Congress overcame bitter ideological differences and passed a $700 billion bailout bill that permitted an immediate infusion of $250 billion into the banking system. Along with other loans, the government’s potential tab for rescuing the American economy totaled at least $1 trillion in mid-October. The federal government also announced on Oct. 23 it would guarantee up to $2.8 billion in debt and money market deposits.
Initially, the bailout’s chief aim was to buy up “toxic” loans on lenders’ books in the hopes of thawing the nation’s frozen credit markets. As the crisis spread overseas, however, European central bankers – led by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown – began infusing their shaky banks with cash. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. followed suit, committing the government to pumping $250 billion directly into U.S. banks to induce them to begin lending to each other again – vital to easing the nation’s credit woes and bolstering confidence in the financial system.
As policy makers grasped for new options, experts remained divided over how much the plan will ultimately cost taxpayers, who should be held accountable for creating the economic debacle in the first place and whether the rescue plan would prevent a deep recession – an increasingly unlikely prospect.
The financial storm had been brewing for months, but it broke wide open in September with a shocking cascade of events over several tumultuous weeks. In the United States alone:
* Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were seized by the federal government, which promised to inject up to $100 billion into each firm as concerns grew over the two mortgage titans’ cash reserves;
* The investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed in the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history;
* Brokerage house Merrill Lynch narrowly averted Lehman’s fate by selling to Bank of America;
* Global insurer American International Group (AIG) was propped up with an initial $85 billion federal bridge loan (since raised to as much as $123 billion);
* Washington Mutual failed, in the biggest bank collapse in U.S. history;
* Struggling Wachovia Bank planned to sell out to Wells Fargo, and
* Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converted to commercial banks subject to stringent federal regulation, leaving Wall Street without major investment banks.
As the crisis intensified, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Secretary Paulson and President George W. Bush urged quick congressional action. In a prime-time televised speech on Sept 24, Bush warned that without a rescue plan, “ America could slip into a financial panic” and “a distressing scenario” of business failures, job losses and home foreclosures would follow.
But support for a bailout was far from universal, even within the president’s own party. Sen. Jim Bunning, a Kentucky Republican, said spending $700 billion in taxpayer money to “prop up and clean up the balance sheets of Wall Street” is “financial socialism” and “un-American.”
Still, many experts viewed the bailout as painful but necessary. “We have to do something,” said Tony Plath, an associate professor of finance at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “We can’t let the American system melt down.”
The crisis has clearly spooked Main Street. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released on Oct. 6 found that nearly six in 10 Americans thought an economic depression was likely.
How the financial system reached the brink of collapse is a complex story that economists and congressional leaders will be untangling for years. But as the crisis deepened, experts pointed to a variety of likely and alleged culprits, including:
A collapsing real estate market – Spurred by record-low interest rates earlier this decade, lenders fueled a massive housing bubble, betting that borrowers – even ones with bad credit or lacking the documented means to repay – could refinance based on ever-rising home values. That gamble proved catastrophically wrong. When home prices fell, millions of homeowners found themselves owing more than their homes were worth, sparking a flood of mortgage defaults and foreclosures. That squeezed lenders who had made subprime, “Alt-A” and other shaky loans as well as investment banks that borrowed heavily to buy mortgage-backed securities based on such loans.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – Some blame the Federal National Mortgage Association and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation for fueling the market for reckless lending. The government-backed companies own or guarantee $5.4 trillion in mortgage loans – about 45 percent of the nation’s total. Fannie alone bought or guaranteed at least $270 billion in risky loans between 2005 and 2008, The New York Times reported.
Credit-default swaps – Ultimately, many experts say, the crisis was caused by little understood, unregulated, insurance-like contracts that are intended to guarantee against loan defaults. Subprime and other loans were backed by trillions of dollars in credit swaps. When home buyers began defaulting, financial institutions that sold the swaps lacked enough capital to make good on the guarantees, and investors who had purchased risky mortgage-backed securities were left hanging.
Plunging confidence in the financial system – Many major financial institutions, both in the United States and overseas, borrowed heavily to invest in mortgages, and their highly leveraged positions put them at risk of insolvency when defaults rose. As the financial crisis intensified, banks found it harder and harder to raise new capital to avert trouble. Meanwhile, investors and creditors began worrying that all kinds of assets on the books of financial institutions – not just residential real estate – might be grossly overvalued, further eroding confidence. When banks even became leery of lending to each other, consumer and business credit began freezing up.
The failure of government regulators – The 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that split commercial banking from investment activities, helped set the stage for the current crisis, some experts say. Others cite what they argue was Congress’ failure to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Critics also point to the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which prohibited regulation of most swaps. Also under scrutiny is a 2004 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decision to loosen capital rules for brokerage units of investment banks, which freed billions of dollars for investments in mortgage-backed securities, credit derivatives and other instruments.
Whatever the policy roots of the crisis, its resolution has been maddeningly elusive. In the days following the rescue plan’s passage, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst single-week decline in its 112-year history. Stock markets around the world also plunged, a grim reminder that the crisis is global and threatens not only major European and Asian economies but emerging markets and poor nations as well.
In the United States, many economists remained skeptical that the infusions of capital and the purchase of toxic assets would lead banks to lend anew and get the economy moving again.
“Rather than jump into this morass again, a lot of commercial banks are going to opt for liquidity on their balance sheets,” says a skeptical Robert Ekelund, professor emeritus of the economics of regulation at Auburn University.
Indeed, many see more pain ahead for the financial system and U.S. economy, including rising defaults on credit cards. “We have to be prepared that it gets a lot worse,” said Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan Chase.
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