DEEP TROUBLE SEEN AMID PLENTY

Update On Landmark Crime Study Says Rosy Economy Masks Persistent Violence

Three decades after a landmark study described crime and poverty as tearing
away at the nation's fabric, a sobering update released yesterday concludes
that the United States has moved backward in fighting these ills and
remains ''a society in deep trouble'' because of misguided policies.

The widely publicized decline in crime rates during the 1990s has stemmed
primarily from unusual levels of prosperity, the report said, and masks
society's failure to come to grips with underlying causes of violence and
crime. The report was issued by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, a
nonprofit research group that grew out of a commission created by President
Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

The group said violence is much more prevalent today than 30 years ago, and
the odds of dying in a violent crime remain much higher in the United
States than in almost any other industrialized nation.

In part, the report suggested, this is because the number of firearms has
doubled to nearly 200 million, many of them high-powered, easily concealed
models ''with no other logical function than to kill humans.''

Worse yet, crime has been aggravated by a ''vast and shameful inequality in
income, wealth and opportunity,'' the report said, noting that more than
one-quarter of US children live in poverty.

Several Clinton administration officials and law enforcement specialists
questioned the report, saying it underestimates the importance of gains in
recent years.

The Eisenhower Foundation's contention that the war on drugs has not
worked, for instance, flies in the face of data showing a recent decline in
consumption among young people and other users, said Bob Weiner, spokesman
for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

''This is a widely respected group, and I hope they've done their homework.
... But they obviously haven't looked at our strategy,'' Weiner said.
''There is a reality to the fact that America is safer.''

When Johnson originally created the commission, he tapped Milton
Eisenhower, a diplomat and brother of former President Dwight Eisenhower,
to head it and charged the panel with investigating the strife and violence
that culminated in Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in 1968.

The commission's 1969 report offered chilling predictions about urban
residents trapped in ''places of terror'' and heavily armed suburbanites
living in ''fortified cells.''

Although Eisenhower and most other commission members who delivered the
landmark study in 1969 have died, a number of the original staff members
contributed to the new report.

Elliott Currie, now a criminologist at the University of California's legal
studies program in Berkeley, was one of them.

''I would not really have dreamed in 1969 that violent crime would get so
much worse in the '80s and early '90s and that I'd be helping write a
report saying that we have made so few gains,'' Currie said. ''By some
measure, I'd have to say we've gone backwards. I think we made a lot of
wrong choices.''

Those wrong choices, foundation members said, have included a national
preoccupation with hard-line policies - building prisons, waging the war on
drugs, and creating ''zero tolerance'' policies on crime. The get-tough
approach has come at the expense of longer-term solutions such as early
intervention with troubled youth, job training, and drug rehabilitation,
the report said.

''Prisons have become our nation's substitute for effective policies on
crime, drugs, mental illness, housing, poverty and employment of the
hardest to employ,'' the report said.

Numbers on serious crime compiled by the FBI from around the country have
actually gone down for an unprecedented seven straight years, declining to
the lowest levels since the 1970s.

The Eisenhower Foundation maintained that the trend is largely the result
of the booming economy - not get-tough policies.

The Justice Department said yesterday that women commit about 2.1 million
violent crimes each year in the United States, three-quarters of which are
simple assaults on other women, the Associated Press reported.

By comparison, men commit about 13 million violent crimes each year, just
over half of which are simple assaults - one of the mildest forms of
violent crime - and 70 percent of their victims are men, the department's
Bureau of Justice Statistics reported.

The figures were based on averages for the years 1993 to 1997 as measured
in the annual National Crime Victimization Survey of about 100,000 people.