America’s “tough on crime” approach has harmed not only perpetrators of crime, but also their victims, advocates said at Cleveland’s City Club last month.
Lenore Anderson, president and co-founder of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, joined the organization’s chief of federal advocacy Shakyra Diaz and founder and CEO of the Brenda Glass Multipurpose Trauma Center, Brenda Glass, at the February 15 event to discuss public safety and her new book “In Their Names.”
So-called “tough on crime” policies rose to prominence in the 1980s and were characterized by mandatory minimum sentencing, with long sentences particularly notable in nonviolent drug offenses. These policies further expanded through the ‘90s and ‘00s, contributing to America’s incarcerated population of nearly 2 million, the highest in the world.
Yet advocates say those policies haven’t succeeded in lowering crime rates or helping victims. When the Alliance for Safety and Justice conducted a national survey of victims, it found they supported rehabilitative justice over punitive justice at a rate of two to one. Additionally, six times as many respondents said they preferred investing in mental health treatment than prisons and jails and eight times as many said they supported investing in schools and education rather than prisons and jails.
“All of that spending on criminal justice for the last 40 years has actually done more harm than good, specifically for people hurt by violence and crime, so unpacking this myth was really what inspired me to write this book,” said Anderson at the forum. “I wanted to expose the other side of the coin. Chronic victim disregard and mass incarceration are the same thing. They’re two sides of the same coin.”
Anderson started her career representing parents of incarcerated youth in California, where she says she witnessed the failings of the justice system and over-incarceration. When she later worked in the prosecutor’s office, she says she saw the justice system failing victims — especially victims of color — through systemic disregard.
“This kind of violence is occurring at the community level, and the justice system is incapable of doing a whole lot about it. And what I found was that those realities were affecting the same people,” Anderson said. She cited “a mother who has one child who’s incarcerated and one child in a grave — and it’s the same justice system that created that context.”
Rather than viewing the victims’ rights movement as oppositional to criminal justice reform, the panelists called for a reexamination of the way victims and perpetrators are considered and treated.
“We often look at crime victims as one body of people, and people who are in contact with the justice system as another body, and in reality there is a lot of [overlap] and that is because unaddressed trauma can also lead somebody to have contact with the justice system — unaddressed trauma and indifference,” said Diaz. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way.”
Since its creation in 2012, the Alliance for Safety and Justice has expanded from California to Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. It advocates for victims, the incarcerated and the many people who are both. An important part of the alliance’s work is the Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, a network of more than 150,000 members hurt by crime and violence.
“One of our members shared that she was a victim of child sexual abuse when she was five years old. There was no support for her, but what was plentiful around her were drugs, so she numbed through substances,” said Diaz. “And we don’t have the infrastructure and the support available in communities that experience harm to be able to get someone to stability but we have a lot of other things. Those are the choices that are left to us and our communities and that’s what leads us to this path of incarceration.”
These “choices” are another major focus of “In Their Names” and the work done by organizations like ASJ. In her book, Anderson details the way law enforcement and the justice system’s priorities can do little to protect communities or help victims.
“In the ’90s and in the early 2000s federal money was coming in to fight the war on drugs. There was no federal money coming in to improve prosecution offices’ or police offices’ capacity to support victims…if you train to do one thing, that’s what they get really good at,” said Anderson.
Through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant program, 90 percent of the cost of weapons and technologies were covered. Anderson said that led to massive spending on surveillance equipment including cameras and wiretaps, as well as funding undercover officers and informants.
“It’s not so much that there’s one decision maker who’s saying we’re going to prioritize this and not that. It’s more so what did we build up our justice system to be really good at, and what’s the muscle that it’s most used to using,” Anderson said. “And what we’ve done is we’ve built up a justice system that’s really good at surveillance in communities of color.
“But that was surveillance for mostly low-level stuff and it never got very good at the more complex, nuanced prosecutions where you have to have real relationships and you have to have trust.”
A local example of this prioritization comes from Diaz’s own experience in Cleveland’s Fifth District police station after her home was burglarized in 2015. In the station’s lobby, Diaz witnessed a disoriented teenage victim who was struggling to share a traumatic assault being interrogated by a male officer until she begged her mother to let her leave.
“She was kidnapped and sexually assaulted for three days straight and the officer who was interviewing her was screaming at her,” Diaz said. “While victims could not get help, while there was no funding to test rape kits, there was plenty of funding to test crack pipes to send people to prison and saddle them with felony convictions.”
That was the same year that Ohio passed a law requiring law enforcement submit rape kits for testing within 30 days after the Plain Dealer exposed a backlog of thousands of untested rape kits dating back to 1993.
“This kind of intimidation and disregard has long-term consequences. This girl isn’t going to report again,” Diaz says in Anderson’s book. “The mentality this officer demonstrated, it was pervasive.”
The panelists say they’re continuing to pursue change through support for victims, including those who have been incarcerated, and education for lawmakers.
Trauma recovery centers like the Brenda Glass Multipurpose Trauma Center work to eliminate “so many barriers to getting the help that [victims] need; that’s why I say the right help at the right time is what is expected,” Glass said at the forum. “If we don’t heal that perpetrator, what are they going to do? They’re going to go inside the law and wreak havoc in there. If they get out they’re going to come back out on the street and wreak havoc out here again. That’s the reason I call this the same coin, as Lenore puts it. Everybody has to heal.”
With eight trauma recovery centers, two in Cleveland, Ohio has made strides to support victims.
Recovery costs like medical and mental health treatment, counseling, transportation and safety measures can prove costly, sometimes prohibitively so.
A national survey found that half of violent crime survivors want to relocate, but less than a quarter were able. The same survey found that 70 percent of survivors experienced anxiety, 52 percent feared for their safety, 16 percent feared being or were evicted and 10 percent lost their jobs or were demoted.
Landmark legislation in 2021 took major steps to address these problems, expanding victim support through eligibility for compensation for victims and their families.
By sharing survivors’ stories with legislators, advocates hope to continue to shift priorities away from “tough” criminal justice to community safety.
“This country leads the world in incarceration. That’s what we’re investing in,” Diaz said. “We’re not investing in health, we are not investing in prevention, we are not investing in the overall humanity and restoration of people when they experience harm.”
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This article appears in Feb 22 – Mar 7, 2023.