PANEL CALLS RESEARCH KEY TO FIGHTING CRIME

School Programs Labeled Ineffective

A commission reviewing the Commonwealth's criminal justice system
recommended yesterday that the state take a computerized, research-based
approach to fighting crime while de-emphasizing some strategies that have
been popular in the past, including school-based programs and the so-called
scared-straight approach.

Among the recommendations are building a new forensics laboratory center,
increasing the links between agencies for sharing data, establishing a
central computer repository for forensic information; and mandating an
associate's degree as the minimum education level for anyone going into law
enforcement.

While arguing for those initiatives and changes, the report criticized as
outdated 23 programs and strategies that the US Justice Department said had
failed to stop crime nationally. The department's 1998 report said those
approaches, including neighborhood watches and summer-job programs for
teenagers, should be discarded.

Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, who led the commission, released the
100-page report, which she called a blueprint for changes in the criminal
justice system, at a news conference at Boston police headquarters.

Without significant changes, Governor Mitt Romney said, the state will
"continue to fight 21st-century criminals with 20th-century technology."

Healey said a subcommittee studying "cross-agency information sharing has
created an integrated, criminal justice [information technology] plan that
will allow criminal justice data not only to flow between agencies, but
also, in the context of homeland security, to flow up, seamlessly,
accurately, from an officer making an arrest to the state or federal agency
that can turn that information into intelligence."

Eric Ferhnstrom, a spokesman for Romney, said later that the state has
already stopped funding virtually all the programs the report criticized as
ineffective.

"We don't have to fund programs just because they feel good," he said. "We
want to fund programs because they work."

For example, Fehrnstrom said, the last time the state funded summer jobs
was 2002; funding for neighborhood watch groups was eliminated three years ago.

"You have to be extremely cold-blooded about how you invest in social
programming," Healey said, referring to the list of 23 programs and
approaches. "If something doesn't work, you have to peel that funding back."

Afterward, Healey said that many recommendations could be implemented
administratively.

However, upgrading forensic services would require millions of dollars in
new appropriations, and Healey did not say where that money would be found.

"We hope our partners in the Legislature will look at this report and see
that it is a strategic plan that we will be moving toward fulfilling" in
next year's budget, Healey said. "But right now our goal is to have these
recommendations in place for our budget season next year."

Healey said parts of some programs could be retained after a review on a
case-by-case basis. One program that the report says has failed is DARE, or
Drug Abuse Resistance Education.

"Maybe there are aspects of that program that did work," Healey said.
"Should they be teaching the DARE curriculum? Apparently not. The DARE
folks have come up with a new curriculum. . . . Let's have it evaluated."

Michael C. Mather -- chairman of DARE Massachusetts Inc., a nonprofit
organization -- said a new DARE curriculum started last year shortens the
program from 17 weeks to 10 weeks and reduces the role police officers play
in the classroom, while still instructing students and pupils on the
dangers of drug abuse.

"The DARE program does work," said Mather. "It is all in how it is
implemented."

Mather, formerly the leader of the state's antidrug efforts, said the state
last funded DARE in fiscal 2002, spending $4.3 million. Some municipalities
fund the program out of their own budgets.

Superintendent Paul F. Joyce, chief of the Bureau of Operations of the
Boston police, was one of about 150 officials, community members, and
criminal justice specialists who participated in drafting the
recommendations. He downplayed the list of 23 programs deemed ineffective,
which appears near the beginning of the report. "That list was one of
multiple resources used to generate discussion" among the commission
members, Joyce said. "Putting it in the report, where it was located, takes
away from some of the recommendations."

Some of the other programs cited as failed are: gun buyback, school-based
leisure-time enrichment programs, arrests of juveniles for minor offenses,
storefront police officers, correctional boot camps, scared-straight
programs, and residential programs for juvenile offenders that use
challenging experiences in rural settings.

"We don't agree with all these findings," said Mariellen Burns, the Boston
police director of media relations. "For example, we feel very strongly
that summer jobs offer an important alternative."

Burns said Boston police will continue to have officers work with
neighborhood residents who organize into crime watch groups because those
groups bring police and residents together.