More Punishment: Simple but Senseless : ‘Get-tough’ laws won’t stop brutalized children, whom we’ve neglected, from growing up to victimize others.

Some years ago, I was invited to speak to the wards at a California Youth Authority facility on the occasion of Victims Awareness Week. I was sternly cautioned by the event director never to suggest to the wards that they also were victims. “They have victimized and need to know it,” I was told. I can’t recall what I said to them that day, but as I looked out at their faces, I knew that there was not one of them who hadn’t been brutalized, victimized and a witness to violence. But we kept it simple that day--no mention made of how those kids got there, just punish them because they had.

When the public safety committee of the Los Angeles City Council balked last week at endorsing Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Federal Gang Violence Act of 1997, the senator was startled by their “ostrich approach” to this urgent issue. Not to cosign on her one-note, draconian bill was seen as a “non-recognition of what’s happening” with the ever-increasing reach of gang violence.

The council members decided not to keep it simple that day. They chose not to keep their heads in the sand. With a remarkable reverence of the complexity of this social ill, the council demonstrated its weariness and intolerance of any gang-reduction proposal that did not match the density of the problem with an equally dense set of strategies and approaches.

This council knows that enforcement and suppression represent only one-third of a city’s response to gang violence. Prevention and intervention need their equal allocation of resources and emphasis. The council members attending the meeting with Feinstein were uneasy with the analysis that undergirds the senator’s bill. Gang members aren’t frightened into acceptable behavior by increased penalties, enhanced punishments and the promise of new detention facilities. Our city council knows that gangs are the place kids gravitate to once they’ve given up. “Tougher than thou” bills can’t touch them.

At the Republican National Convention last summer, Bob Dole asked rhetorically in his acceptance speech, “You want to know the cause of crime in America? I’ll show you the cause of crime in America: Criminals!” This assertion drew the delegates to their feet in what would be the most sustained, enthusiastic ovation of the evening. And it is arguably the dumbest utterance ever made on crime in America.

When law enforcement officials point to gang violence and say, “We need more money to handle it,” we have obediently handed them a blank check.

In what was a significant moment of political courage, the council refused to embrace another simplistic, business-as-usual response to an increasingly daunting social problem.

As the president seeks to spend $200 million for more prosecutors to address juvenile violence--something akin to handing half of our AIDS budget to morticians--we can be heartened by our city council’s newfound maturity and vision. As our mayor proposes yet another injunction against a Los Angeles street gang, we can find encouragement in the council’s courageous insistence that we do more than punish.

The truth is this: Brutalized, victimized children invariably will brutalize and victimize when they grow up. Is our only response to this the certain promise that we will penalize them when they do? Or will we commit to keeping our children safe from brutality and victimization?

No matter how the full council votes on Feinstein’s bill in several weeks, for one brief, fleeting moment the council called us all to be stakeholders in finding a solution, for the long haul, to gang violence. They refused to keep it simple, and we’re all better off when that happens.