Policy Dilemma : Federal Crime Policy and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, 1968-1978 [1 ed.] 9780816655533, 9780816609017

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THE POLICY DILEMMA

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he John K. Fesler Memorial Fund provided assistance in the publication of this volume, for which the tl University of Minnesota Press is grateful.

THE POLICY DILEMMA Federal Crime Policy and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration Malcolm M. Feeley and

Austin D. Sarat

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS o MINNEAPOLIS

Copyright© 1980 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55414 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Feeley, Malcolm. The policy dilemma. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. United States. Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. 2. Criminal justice, Administration of — United States. I. Sarat, Austin, joint author. II. Title. HV7921.F38 364.4'046'0973 80-18174 ISBN 0-8166-0901-2 ISBN 0-8166-0904-7 (pbk.) The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

To Edith and Silas Peller and

Lauren, Emily, and Deborah

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Acknowledgments

We have incurred debts to a great many people in preparing this book. Our initial curiosity about the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was sparked by work we undertook with Susan White several years ago, and we are deeply grateful to her for involving us in that inquiry. Samuel Krislov has been another longstanding friend and colleague who has given us encouragement and wise counsel from the outset of this enterprise. Numerous officials in a dozen state planning agencies, the Washington offices of LEAA, and several other institutions interested in LEAA were extremely generous in sharing their experiences and knowledge with us. It goes without saying that this book could not have been completed without their cooperation. In particular we wish to thank David Sherwood, formerly of the Connecticut Planning Commission on Criminal Administration, and Carl Stenberg, of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. Many people discussed our ideas with us at length or spent a good deal of time reading drafts of our manuscript, and their perceptive comments have helped improve it. Among those on whom this onerous chore fell most heavily were Matthew Crenson, Milton Cummings, Roger Hanson, Herbert Jacob, Paul Nejelski, Ira Sharkansky, and John Witte. Each of them has helped in concrete ways to improve our manuscript, although none should be held liable for its shortcomings. We must also acknowledge our appreciation to the Florence vii

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Burden Foundation for financial support, and to its two successive executive directors during the period of our study. Robert Higgins was instrumental in obtaining support for us and bolstering our confidence in the project, and his successor, Harriet Warm, has continued to give us encouragement and be tolerant of our many missed deadlines. Finally we must note our thanks to Lindsay Waters of the University of Minnesota Press, whose patience and good-natured nudging were required to see this project through to completion. M.M.F. A.S.

Contents

Introduction

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1. The Policy Dilemma and the Problem of Crime

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2. Federal Crime Policy: The Safe Streets Act of 1968

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3. Thinking about Crime: Comprehensive Planning and the Idea of Rationality

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4. New Answers to Old Problems: Innovation

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5. Finding Out What Works: Evaluation and the Limits of the "Scientific" Paradigm

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6. Conclusions: Incoherence, Implementation and the Dilemma of National Crime Polic

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Notes

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Index

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THE POLICY DILEMMA

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Introduction

Crime, criminality, and what to do about both have proven to be major problems for the American people and for government officials since the founding of the republic. Crime traditionally has been per ceived as a threat not only to individual well-being but also to the maintenance of social trust and community solidarity.1 Yet concern about the problem of crime and attempts to deal with it have been episodic. Periodic crime waves have met with—or perhaps been caused by—marked increases in citizen concern and generally futile efforts to "stamp out" crime. Despite its persistence, the crime problem and ef forts to control crime typically have been regarded as the responsibility of state and local government. Federal criminal law and federal efforts have never been a major means of crime control in the United States; the national police force—the FBI—has continued to be severely circumscribed in its mission, and until the late 1960s little federal money was spent on crime control.2 The mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in attitude. Crime, while a problem with local origins and impacts, was recognized to be national in scope, suggesting a national response. Furthermore, the issue of crime and what to do about it became an important national political issue largely as a result of the presidential campaign of 1964. At this same time, the national government was caught up in a "war mentality"; domestic social ills, as well as foreign enemies, were dealt with through a massive mobilization of resources on a national level. The federal government's response to the problem of crime was found in 3

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INTRODUCTION

the application and elaboration of the war metaphor in this area, and culminated in the passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (P.L. 90-351). This Act was the master plan for the national war on crime;3 it established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, mandated the creation of state planning agencies, and provided a mechanism for funneling federal funds to state and local criminal justice agencies. Although part of the "war on . . ." approach of the times, the Safe Streets Act represented a major departure from the strategy of intervention embodied in other government programs like the war on poverty. Instead of direct national intervention, the Act developed a block-grant approach, in which the national government's role was to be primarily a provider of revenue and ideas to state and local governments, which would in turn develop programs for their own use. Although an effort requiring new approaches and expanded sources of funds, fighting crime was to remain a state and local function. Emerging at the time it did, the Safe Streets Act antedated general revenue sharing and thus became one of the first major expressions of the New Federalism later elaborated during the Nixon Administration. The Safe Streets Act of 1968 was surely a major policy innovation in the area of crime and criminal justice. Our purpose in this study is to assess the first ten years of the Safe Streets program. Scholars and policymakers are regularly assessing the effectiveness of such governmental efforts to combat crime. Indeed Congress is itself preoccupied with devising and adjusting them. Of particular interest to us, as well as to the Congress, is the question of how well the Safe Streets program has been administered and implemented. Ambitious, complex public policies create major problems of process and procedure. New structures are created, new mandates developed, new political relationships emerge. Each is a potential source of difficulty; each requires a major investment of energy. The implementation of policy is never unproblematic, and, with a policy like that embodied in the Safe Streets Act, it may become a major barrier to the success of a policy effort. Thus our proximate concern is to analyze the experience of ten years of implementation activities in the federal government's war on crime. It is, however, impossible to separate our concern for policy implementation from a concern with policy effectiveness. Surely the question of whether the expenditures of billions of dollars under the Safe Streets Act helped to reduce the crime rate, alleviate the crime prob-

INTRODUCTION

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lem, or increase government's crime fighting capabilities cannot be put aside. Yet we are skeptical about our own ability to provide more than suggestive answers to such a question. The analysis of important public policies, especially in the area of crime and law enforcement, does not lend itself to conventional impact analysis; it does not easily lend itself to even the most hard-fought conclusions about what is marginally effective in reducing crime. Crime is, and should be acknowledged to be, an intractable social problem. There is no technology for nor very many convincing ideas about how to go about eliminating crime. To measure the success of any single public policy against that standard is to measure it against an unrealistic standard. Policies, like those embodied in the Safe Streets Act, are usually aimed at improving the capability of government to manage continuing and complex social processes rather than obtaining specific goals in the pursuit of soluble social problems; they have multifaceted and ambiguous goals rather than precise and definite objectives. As a consequence, their impact is long in coming, indirect, and intertwined with a host of other disparate efforts. Thus what can be said about the effectiveness of the Safe Streets program is limited. This does not mean that no conclusions about its effectiveness can be reached. What it does suggest is that the problem of policy impact can best be addressed indirectly by examining implementation. In contrast to a study of the consequences of a policy decision like the Safe Streets Act, our study of implementation examines factors that contribute to the realization or nonrealization of the proximate policy objectives of this Act. Those objectives include an attempt to foster a new and efficient organizational capability at the state level, as well as a capability to strengthen and improve local law enforcement and criminal justice agencies. We ask, then, whether the Act has generated new organizational structures and capacities which can combat the continuing and complex problem of crime. While we cannot speak with confidence about the ultimate impact on crime of specific projects supported under the Safe Streets Act, we can speak with relative confidence about whether or not these new structures are in an institutionalized position of political authority and strategic location to make a difference in the long run. Our answer to this latter concern is that the Act has not had this effect. Despite good intentions and bold pronouncements, it has not led to the creation of institutions which have developed the authority

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and expertise to significantly alter traditional crime fighting strategies. In this respect the Act must be considered a failure, or its importance must be downgraded and it must more modestly be considered little more than a structure for distributing federal funds to hard-pressed local law enforcement and criminal justice agencies. Even here, however, its success is in doubt because there are other more cost-effective ways to achieve this same aim. Analysis of the difficulties encountered in creating new crime fighting capabilities, encouraging new ways of thinking about crime, and efficiently distributing large amounts of federal money constitutes the core of this book, and is reported in detail in Chapters 3-5. The responsibility for implementing the major provisions of the Safe Streets Act lies with organizations created under its mandate. At the national level, the most important of these organizations is the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA); at the state level the most important are what are generically called state planning agencies (SPAs) and regional planning units (RPUs). The success or failure of the Act during its first ten years was heavily influenced by the conceptual, technical, and political constraints under which the policy delivery system created by the Act had to work. Thus, in this study we focus primarily on SPAs and on how they have dealt with the problems of planning, innovation, and evaluation, for these are the functions that lie at the heart of the Safe Streets Act's approach to crime. To this end we conducted lengthy interviews with LEAA officials in Washington and SPA staff members in twelve states, talked informally to officials in several other states, and held formal and informal discussions with numerous and varied state and local criminal justice officials. Our purpose in these interviews and conversations was to gather information about the operations, functions, and problems of the Safe Streets Act and the criminal justice federalism that it fostered. More particularly we sought to identify the variety of meanings those charged with implementing the Act gave to their major functions and understand how these same officials coped with the conceptual confusion which they frequently encountered. A few words about approach and method are in order. Some people familiar with the evolution of our study were concerned because we were not clearly "scientific" in our research. We neither systematically sampled the opinions of SPA officials in a cross-section of states, nor

INTRODUCTION

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carefully categorized and ranked SPAs' performances with respect to the three major functions—comprehensive planning, innovation, and evaluation —which were the objects of our study. This type of study of public policy seemed to us neither appropriate given the circumstances of the first ten years of the Safe Streets Act nor as useful as a more phenomenological, contextual approach. Systematic sampling, we concluded, had little meaning because of high turnover, frequent reorganization, shifting emphases, and noncomparability of functions among those holding similar official titles. To rely on responses of a sample of respondents connected with LEAA at any particular moment would have yielded a frozen image of what in fact is a fluid process. It was more valuable, we felt, to pursue open-ended interviews in depth, so that we could delve into the histories of the organizations which concerned us, and to probe the meanings people brought to bear on their work. To this end we conducted lengthy interviews—lasting from an hour or two to marathon sesssions involving a number of meetings over several afternoons—with members of SPA staffs in a dozen states, as well as interviews with state and local criminal justice officials, national LEAA officials, former LEAA officials, other researchers, and as well several staff members of congressional committees which have oversight responsibilities for the LEAA. All told, well over five dozen interviews were conducted. At the outset we sought to rank individual SPAs according to their performance in carrying out the major mandates of the Safe Streets Act, explaining variations in terms of organizational and environmental factors commonly used in policy studies. Here too we abandone our initial strategy, and shifted our emphasis. Our understanding of implementation as a policy process became less mechanical and formal and more conceptual. We found much confusion and uncertainty among those charged with administering the Act about its meaning and their own responsibilities. This uncertainty and confusion was widespread. We found a conceptual crisis and a process of adaptation and coping which shaped the operations of Safe Streets programs. We are reluctant to focus on systematic variation among SPAs. This is not due to a lack of differences, but to the fact that there were so many differences and that they were often so fleeting. In the absence of clear authority and a clear mandate, LEAA and the SPAs were, during their first ten years, constantly changing, grasping after new ideas and

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INTRODUCTION

mounting new campaigns. What was true on an institutional level was true on the individual level as well. The staffs of the state and regional planning agencies were in constant flux. The ambition and ambiguity of the mandate of the Safe Streets Act generated a vacuum for these people, a vacuum they sought to fill by breathing their own senses of mission into the Act. People within the same agency could often hold quite different views of the goals of their organization; and over time the views of the same people might change considerably. Here too we found a pluralism of responses; we sought to investigate the variety of meanings that SPA and RPU staff brought to bear on their tasks as they themselves understood them. While we highlight differences among organizations and individuals in our discussions of the major mandates of the Safe Streets Act, we are, in fact, interested in exploring underlying similarities among such organizations and individuals in their ability to identify a mission and mobilize resources to pursue it. Under the circumstances to have dwelt on differences, and most certainly there are some, would have meant ignoring and downgrading the significance of such similarities, and hence understating the magnitude and nature of a policy dilemma as it applied to the development of national crime policy during LEAA's first decade. In the end our interest in the Safe Streets Act and our exploration in this book is intended to illustrate and illuminate what we believe is a major and continuing challenge in the arena of public policy. Ours is, thus, a case study which, like many others, seeks to examine an ongoing and general policy problem.

1 The Policy Dilemma and the Problem of Crime

Splashy, highly publicized, expensive federal programs are a regular and well-known part of the landscape of American politics. Whether through incremental addition or ambitious undertaking, the scope of the federal policy domain is beyond the imagination and comprehension of even the most skilled political analyst. It is almost impossible to conjure up an area of private life for which there is not an array of federal programs and policy commitments. In each of those areas federal intervention has either displaced or supplemented private regulation or the reach of state and local interest. One of the most recent as well as striking and important examples of such intervention has been in the area of crime. Beginning in 1968 with the passage of the Safe Streets Act and the establishment of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the federal government has become a major partner in state and local crime fighting efforts. The shape and dimensions of this partnership are by no means fully established; yet the experience of the last decade does present a clear picture of evolving federal interest and activity. Our interest in federal crime policy is in how it evolved from 1968 to 1978. During this ten-year period, under the Safe Streets Act, the reach of the federal presence in the area of crime and criminal justice has been extended dramatically. This extension has not been without its problems, but the processes and procedures through which the federal government has become a major player in state and local efforts to fight crime is, nevertheless, instructive about the strengths and weak9

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nesses of federal policy activity. In telling the story of those processes and procedures, processes and procedures administered by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, one might well conclude that LEAA is overly bureaucratic, suffers from the lack of firm leadership, is overly politicized, and on balance has been ineffective.1 This book concurs with many of these judgments, but in doing so takes a quite different tack. While we do not deny the importance of these factors, our analysis sees them more as effects than causes of the problems of LEAA. We regard LEAA as an example of a more general failing of the policy process, one which is endemic in the modern welfare state. To understand the problems of LEAA, we must understand the shortcomings of the philosophy and politics of the policy process in America. Thus our book is something other than one more case study of bureaucratic bungling. It is an excursion into applied political theory. We see in LEAA problems common to the efforts of modern government generally. While these problems may be more obvious or more deeply etched in LEAA than elsewhere, they are problems encountere in all spheres of public policy. These problems, which we term the "policy dilemma," arise from the combination of ever-increasing demands for government services and diminished capacity to deliver such services efficiently or effectively. In part this diminished capacity arises from the form in which such demands are presented. What we observe is that federal policy broadens the area of federal responsibilities often without specifying particular strategies for addressing social problems. Money is "thrown" at problems. Some response is better than none. Or, processes and procedures for reallocating decisionmaking responsibilities are established without, or instead of, specific policy direction. Bureaucratization substitutes for innovation. Public authority is moved around rather than concentrated on public problems. As process substitutes for purpose, authority is squandered and policy flounders. The result is that the very things government promises to do it cannot do, for it lacks authority. The problem of lost authority is only one portion of the policy dilemma; a related problem deals with implementation. As new service functions are added to government responsibility, their ability to be implemented decreases. The more government tries to do, the less it can do well. Politicians all too often ignore the technical difficulties of effectively administering the programs they enact. American public

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policy is too little tailored to the capabilities of the administrative or policy delivery system. These two factors are of course closely related; weak authority is likely to lead to problems of implementation, and inability to implement undercuts authority. But even if there is ample authority to act, problems of implementation may arise because of inattention to details and carelessness in creating delivery systems. Despite their relattionship, these two diagnoses imply different agendas for reform: the former implies a reassertion of authority; strong government issuing bold commands. The latter is more skeptical; while it suggests that policymakers should be more concerned with the problems of implementation, it also urges them to lower expectations, to reduce government involvement, and to resist demands for more services. Together these two arguments outline what we term the policy dilemma, the imbalance between demand for public services and the capability of government to deliver them. THE POLICY DILEMMA Government is today caught in a policy dilemma, a dilemma in which constant and continuing demands for government services ar matched by a growing recognition of the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of much of what government does.2 The two sides of the policy dilemma, the high level of public demand for government services and the problems of efficiency and effectiveness, exist independently, al though they are clearly interrelated. What is striking about American politics is the inelasticity of the demand for spending and programs in the public sector.3 Organized into interest groups, segments of the public respond slowly, if at all, to information about the problems of the policy system. This, in turn, further complicates those problems because it means that the system is subject to new demands even as it is unable adequately to cope with old and ongoing ones. Simply stated, the policy dilemma refers to the combined inability of government to enact and implement programs that work and to the political pressure for still more government programs. The policy dilemma is, in one respect, a peculiarly contemporary problem, yet in another it is very much a part of the apparatus of the post-New Deal welfare state.4 In its contemporary aspect the policy

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dilemma is a problem "created" by recently developed techniques for and an increased interest in policy assessment. In recent years, scholarship on public policy has caught up with the explosion of the public sector. Social science has brought to policy analysis skills useful in evaluating the cost-effectiveness of at least some kinds of government spending and government programs. We are not arguing that such skills did not exist earlier or that they have been, in any sense, perfected, but we are suggesting that as policy analysis has become more widely undertaken and more sophisticated, social science scholarship has become more skeptical about the ability of government to cope effectively with social problems, and more attuned to the limits of expenditure, service delivery, and regulation.5 It is now quite the fashion to ask "What works?" in this or that political area, and to answer "Nothing," or "Very little," or "Much less than one would expect."6 Waste and inefficiency are arguably inevitable parts of government efforts. But now we are told that even with the overinvestment made necessary because of that inefficiency, government programs produce much less in the way of positive benefits than most of us would have comfortably assumed. The refinement of policy analysis coincided with and was spurred on by the optimism of the 1960s, by the expectation that government would, if it could be mobilized, resolve the unresolved problems of the economic and social order.7 The Great Society was simultaneously an affirmation and an admission of failure. It affirmed the capacity of the economy, supported and structured by government intervention, to produce a high standard of living and security for most citizens. But it admitted the enduring and institutionalized inability of the economy to ensure either for particular segments of society. The promise of the Great Society was to mobilize the public sector to alleviate problems of poverty and, in the long run, to allow all able citizens to become productive participants in the market economy.8 The rise of policy analysis brought widespread and critical attention to the problems of the Great Society.9 Such attention has raise serious questions about the accomplishments of the Great Society and about the limits of government's capacity to resolve social problems; but such questions go far beyond the era of the Great Society and their source can be found outside the development of any particular social science technique. These questions and the policy dilemma it-

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self seem to be almost an inevitable part of the structure of the welfare state. As we see it, the welfare state is, in its conception, expansionist and especially so when it is linked to mechanisms of democratic accountability—namely, elections. Once the government takes as one of its primary responsibilities the management of its economy, then the government becomes the problem solver of last resort. The policy dilemma arises in part because government is expected to cope with problems which have not been resolved elsewhere. The most difficult problems are regularly those about which public expectations of governmental intervention are highest. With the welfare state comes an expanded apparatus for regulating and servicing. This apparatus may be established for particular and singular purposes, but the existence of the apparatus itself seems to invite the growth of new purposes. This results partly from capital investment and partly from bureaucratic momentum and bureaucratic displacement. Programs outlive their initial purposes; agencies grow unaffected by changing social conditions. "Are government programs immortal?"10 The answer, now widely recognized, is yes. The underlying logic of the welfare state is intervention, not restraint. The institutions of the welfare state grow so long as there is no concerted political action to stop them. There has been no such action, nor any hint of such action at least until very recently. At present, the rhetoric of limits, of slow growth or no growth, is very much in the air.11 What the ultimate political impact of this rhetoric will be remains to be seen. But if one looks closely at it, it does not appear to pose a fundamental challenge to the welfare state. The rhetoric focuses on finances, not programs; the concern is with taxation and budget; the worry is that individual purchasing power is receding as a result of continued government expansion and slowed economic growth.12 The rhetoric of spending limitations is not readily identified with specific programs to be eliminated. So long as it is not, one cannot know whether it poses a real challenge to the interventionist ethic of the welfare state or will only marginally dampen the rate of its expansion. Government policy is most effective when it is directed to clearly specified, narrowly drawn problems for which there is a known or readily available technology, and when the problem is primarily one

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of resource allocation. Government is good at spending money to purchase material goods; the development of the interstate highway system is one example of a relatively successful government policy. When the problem to be dealt with is diffuse or multifaceted or embedded in the fabric of social organization, public sector intervention is as likely to complicate matters as it is to ameliorate them. Yet it is precisely problems of this type that, since the New Deal, and especially since the 1960s, have been the regular fare of the public agenda. THE POLITICS OF PROMISE The policy dilemma arises from both the expansionist tendencies and the limits of the welfare state. As we have argued above, the former causes some of the problems which strain those limits. As Senator Daniel Moynihan recently argued, "Government growth has not added to the effectiveness of government, but may even have impeded it."13 The bigger government becomes, the less effective it becomes; the more government does, the less it does well. The natural tendency of politicians seeking electoral victory in the era of the welfare state is to promise more for more people.14 Once the apparatus of service and regulation is developed and defended, then the atmosphere of politics becomes permeated with the ideology of distribution. Government is a gigantic store of goods; the role of the politician is to ensure that his constituents get their share. Service delivery rather than some rational plan for the appropriate use of public resources becomes the political litmus test. Elections become a form of competitive advertising through which politicians are judged by how much they promise or retrospectively by how much they have been able to deliver.15 The politics of pork barrel is an essential aspect of American government because pork barrel allows politicians to vindicate their claims to service in highly visible ways. We do not mean to suggest that the politics of promise is a particularly new or recent development in America. We think, however, that as it has become increasingly important with the growth of the welfare state, the politics of promise has contributed to the emergence of the policy dilemma. It does so because it generates demands and expectations for more and more government service, while at the same time it is unable to provide the authority adequate to assure their delivery.16

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The public sense of what government should do is largely formed in reaction to politicians' expressed views about what government can do. The mode of electoral activity is one in which the promise to distribute some public sector good leads the public to think that it is entitled to such a good. Political wants are created by political leaders.17 The electoral politics of the welfare state produces a cycle of rising expectations in which last year's promise, no matter how substantial, cannot satisfy this year's wants. Once the politics of promise is established it is very difficult to derail. Saying that things cannot be done would be an odd electoral strategy when one's opponents are promising more and more. The politics of promise is, however, a two-edged sword. As expectations grow, room for disappointment expands. Promises are not kept, or promises kept do not eliminate problems or achieve anticipated results. It may be that we are currently reaching the boundary line for the politics of promise. Political cynicism and mistrust is widely regarded as reaching new highs.18 It is not clear how deep or how broad public disillusionment with government will have to become in order for it significantly to affect the operations of the welfare state. The demand for government programs, services, and regulations is institutionalized. It is embodied in the posture of pluralist politics which generates a continuous stream of demands for more government activity.19 Interest group pressure is directed in the first instance toward a translation of general public expectations into the design of particular policies. Interest groups help to shape the configuration of those policies. Those groups act reflexively to protect policies they have helped to design, or which they support against either particular criticisms or general cutbacks.20 However, the strategy of interest group activity is rarely simply defensive. Like the bureaucracies with which they have ongoing relations, interest groups logically favor expansion in the policies, services, and regulations from which they benefit or through which they are protected. The likelihood of any diminution in the growth of government which might be predicted on the basis of public cynicism and mistrust must be tempered by the recognition of the resistance which any proposal for specific retreats is likely to encounter in the realm of interest group politics. This means that even as the limits of government policies are recognized, the continuity of demand

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remains unabated. Perhaps only the growth of the arena of participation is retarded. THE POLITICS OF EFFECTIVENESS: TWO VIEWS OF FAILURE The problem of excess demands is but one side of the policy dilemma. The other side focuses on effectiveness. What is an effective public policy? There is no ready or reliable answer to this question. Even as the techniques of policy analysis have become more sophisticated, judgments about policy effectiveness have remained problematic. It is, we think, useful to discuss effectiveness in terms of a match between policy goals and policy impacts.21 Yet, identifying goals and measuring impacts is rarely easy, and is, in many cases, impossible. Policy goals are often ambiguous, unstated, or conflicting; policy impact is often hidden by changes or permutations in the object of the policy which would have otherwise occurred. Nonetheless, the need for conclusions about the effectiveness of policy is widespread and deeply felt. At a general level, such concern seems to stem from two divergent sources. First, there are those who believe that public policies fail because, even as it expands, government is weak and is both unwilling and unable to marshal the authority necessary to clearly define policy problems, establish goals, identify strategies, and enforce directives.22 The problem is one of timidity and the reluctance of the government to govern. Second, there are those who believe that public policies fail because the government is too ambitious in its policy designs and in its ambitions inattentive to problems in the policy delivery system.23 This diagnosis sees the problem as one of the lack of technology and overload. The first perspective focuses on the legislative process, the second on administration. The first is, at its root, sympathetic with government-based attempts to resolve social problems; the second is skeptical, if not hostile, to them. POLICY AND AUTHORITY The first perspective on policy effectiveness is embodied in Theodore Lowi's book The End of Liberalism. According to Lowi, the

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policy system is best understood in terms of values and beliefs widely shared by the general public, special interest groups, and political leaders. These values and beliefs define what is legitimate and proper in how the policy system is organized and how it operates. Lowi argues that political values must be taken seriously as influences on public policy, that they help organize how power is exercised and how decisions are made. Furthermore, he believes that such values have a recognizable coherence to them, a coherence which, he suggests, justifies the label "public philosophy." Every era has its own public philosophy. Shifts in the direction of policy occur slowly because they are rooted in changes in underlying public values. Lowi's analysis is an attempt to identify the values and beliefs which explain why American government has not been able to cope successfully with social problems. He argues that the policy system has failed to do so because it has been reluctant to exercise authority and that this reluctance derives from the prevailing public philosophy.24 The post-World War II philosophy, that is, the philosophy of the contemporary era, is labeled by Lowi as "interest group liberalism." This philosophy is a successor to classical and laissez-faire liberalism, a successor whose particular genius lies in its ability to reconcile the imperatives of the welfare state with the tenets of those earlier philosophies. Both of those earlier philosophies placed the problem of authority at the center of politics. Each was concerned to reconcile the exercise of public authority and individual freedom and each attempted to do so by strictly limiting the occasions for governmental intervention in matters of the economy or society. Accord ing to both, government is neither interested nor competent enough to deal effectively with problems in the private sector. The shift to the interest group variant of liberalism arises with the widespread recognition that government intervention is both necessary and inevitable where economic enterprise is highly complex and not fully responsive to the unseen directives of the market. The shift to interest group liberalism does not move attention away from the problem of authority. It does, however, alter the focus of that attention. What is recognized is that the play of politics cannot be fully captured by the interaction of single individuals and the government. Organized groups acting with a growing emphasis on the administrative aspects of government become the central political actors in the politics of interest group liberalism. The concern of that philo-

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sophy is to ensure that government is responsive to such groups, groups which mobilize to enhance their interests and which are believed to represent most significant sectors of society.25 The question for interest group liberalism is not whether the government will intervene or even how much intervention there will be; instead, it is concerned with the manner in which this intervention will occur. American politics is the politics of process and procedure. The problem for interest group liberalism is to ensure that government intervention does not threaten the viability of private activity even as the government attempts to preserve such activity. The resolution is to legitimize the exercise of public authority only insofar as it is responsive to and can be, in fact, controlled by those whose activities are affected by government programs, services, or regulations. Like classical liberalism, the interest group variant is based upon the idea that those closest to a problem and most interested in it will usually be the most competent to deal with it. As it seeks to cope with social problems, interest group liberalism encourages government to actively engage a multiplicity of groups in both the design and implementation of policy. Low! argues that policymaking in the system operates through widespread delegation of authority in which legislatures delegate responsibility to administrative agencies who, in turn, delegate it to interest groups with whom they have close and ongoing relationships.26 Interest group liberalism combats public authority by encouraging government officials to pass public power into private hands and by substituting process for a concern for a clear vision and an authoritative voice. Interest group liberalism combats public authority by discouraging public officials from making clear policy choices and from formulating precise strategies for achieving policy goals. Accordingly, it sees the function of legislatures as the identification of problems to which the government must attend and the enactment of legislation which commits the government to undertake remedial action. However, in deciding on such action legislatures should formulate policy which is as broad as possible and state policy goals in the most general terms. Furthermore, legislatures should either create administrative agencies or delegate to already existing organizations (public and private) the power to determine how to achieve those goals and the necessary remedies. Policy, then, is established not by legislatures, but by

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creating groups which in turn refine policy goals and develop implementation strategies.27 While proponents of this type of policymaking defend it because it encourages participation and responsiveness,28 Lowi and other opponents argue that this philosophy weakens democracy by weakening governmental authority, and especially the legislative process through which majorities can rule and be held accountable for their public actions. By discouraging legislatures from making clear and binding choices, interest group liberalism allows private groups directly affected by policy to fix the content of public policy, while at the same time obscuring the direction and implications of that policy. Interest group liberalism thus weakens and restricts authority in both legislatures and administrative agencies. It seems to promote "popular" decision making but "derogates from the decision so made by mis-applying the notion to the implementation as well as to the formulation of policy. It derogates from the process by treating all values . . . as equivalent interests."29 The inability of the public sector to cope effectively with social problems stems in large part from the reluctance or inability of elected officials to establish basic policy objectives, to plan and to create structures which mobilize resources and political support in the service of achieving established goals.30 Rather, according to the "new" public philosophy, a "good" policy is one which is open-ended, ambiguous, and flexible. The policy process works by keeping the question of objectives alive long after the legislature has acted and by keeping access open for groups with a recognizable stake in policy and with the resources necessary to make their views known. Continuous activity by interested groups rather than an articulated vision of national needs and an authoritative national response is the ongoing result. The policy process is, insofar as it is governed by interest group liberalism, characterized by scramble, not reflection, and negotiation, not decision. Policy is ineffective because policymakers are indecisive and public authority too little used. According to Lowi, effective policies require clarity, choice, and closure, but interest group liberalism eschews all of these. As a consequence, Lowi concludes, policies do not succeed or are woefully inefficient. The result: government is more likely to throw money at social problems than undertake a careful diagnosis and prescription.

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The ineffectiveness of policy is, if Lowi is correct, in the first instance a problem of power and access. Borrowing from E. E. Schattschneider, we can see in Lowi's theory a suggestion that policies will vary in their ability to achieve their goals in accordance with the size of the arena of decision in which policy choices are made.31 Like Schattschneider, Lowi argues that interest group liberalism allows those with the least stake in change to preside over programs whose object is to produce change. As the arena of decision narrows, the power of those groups grows, as does their ability to ensure that change is neither fundamental nor threatening to their interest. Strategy in government's self-proclaimed wars on various social problems is regularly devised by those whose interest and power are threatened. Thus, mayors and state officials play important roles in the War on Poverty; the Department of Energy relies on oil companies for its intelligence in the "moral equivalent of war" in the energy field; regulatory agencies become captives of those they are supposed to regulate.32 Such policies are useful both to politicians interested in presenting an image of commitment and concern and to the target of reforms. They take "the heat off" while at the same time they preserve the possibility of "orderly"—that is, minimal—change or no change at all. In its extreme, interest group liberalism leads to symbolic politics, the symbols of change without the substance. By broadening access to power and by fragmenting its exercise, interest group liberalism assumes that the outcomes of group deliberations will yield a continuously self-correcting system. In so doing, this view embraces competition as the primary mechanism through which policy should be made and implemented. However, group participation need not generate a "natural" equilibrium and power need not generate complementary and countervailing powers.33 There is no assurance that the result of group struggle will be balanced or that the process will be self-corrective.34 It may very well facilitate the opposite. By celebrating competition and fragmentation, it promotes a narrowing vision and runs the risk of freezing out new ideas and of obscuring understanding. It promotes balkanization and stalemate, even as it promotes intense "activity." It leads to immobilization, handicaps the power of government, destroys accountability, and obliterates the meaning of administration. The results more often than not are contradictory policies, ambiguous goals, stalemates produced by strategically placed veto groups—a process of cumulative conservatism.35

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Policy ineffectiveness, the inability to achieve goals or promote change, is above all, then, a problem of authority and its underutilization. Yet, Lowi's argument is not necessarily an argument for a more active, interventionist government. It is, however, an argument that the government should govern. His prescription is for a clearer use of public authority in which mechanisms of accountability and avenues of participation are focused on the legislature. He charges elected officials with the primary responsibility for establishing policy goals and devising means to achieve those goals. Unless there is a clear choice and a clear commitment to follow through on those choices, the policy process will be characterized by drift and lack of direction. Lowi argues that, once made, choices can, if authority is asserted, be translated into action. For him, what is problematic is the will to choose. According to this view, we experience the policy dilemma because government's response to public demand is indecisive and unclear. POLICY DELIVERY Others see the policy dilemma not primarily in terms of the lack of will to choose but in terms of the incapacity to translate choices into action.36 The policy dilemma results from the inability of government to structure the policy delivery system so that goals once known are obtainable. The problem is one of technology and communication; it is a problem of effective public administration, caused in large part by the failure to fully appreciate how political administration actually is. Even if one were able to cure the problem of legislative reluctance to legislate, one would have no guarantees that what came out of the policy system would bear any substantial resemblance to the originally designed policy.37 This view would regard Lowi's analysis as overly "formal." It sees the problem of the policy dilemma elsewhere, in the inherent complications of the bureaucratic processes involved in policy implementation. Lowi's argument seeks to restore a "command" model of governmental decision making. The legislature, in a democratic political system, formulates or should formulate clear and decisive commands which are then passed to executive or administrative agencies for implementation. Lowi believes that the clearer the command, the less discretion those agencies will have in carrying out policy choices. Eliminating discretion would, according to Lowi, go a long way toward in-

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suring the success of public policy and, at the same time, redirect political energies and choices into the legislative arena, where they properly belong. Critics can point to the shortcomings of the command model,38 which are, they might argue, to overstate the efficacy of rules as guides to behavior, to ignore the difficulty of formulating rules to deal with social problems involving political trade-offs, and to ignore the structures of incentives, controls, and fragmentation built into the federal system. Rules made by legislative bodies are of necessity general and vague. There are inherent limitations on the ability of legislative institutions to make choices which will effectively bind those charged with implementing policy. These limitations are a matter of both expertise and responsiveness.39 Legislators are, for the most part, generalists, and even when they specialize in their legislative activities, their specialization does not generally lead to a high level of technical expertise. As a result, critics of Lowi contend, legislatures are not in a position to know how best to deal with social problems. Their function is to identify areas of concern to the electorate and to provide the necessary resources to those trained and able to work in specific policy areas. Furthermore, legislative rule-making is inefficient. Conditions change, new variants of old problems emerge as solutions are tried. It is important that administrators have the flexibility necessary to respond to changing conditions. There is no technology for resolving social problems. No one really knows how to end poverty or prevent crime. In the absence of technical clarity, legislative choices are inappropriate. In order to formulate a rule which will work it is necessary to have a fairly precise fix on a problem and a fairly clear sense of the range of alternative possibilities for coping with that problem. In the area of social policy, neither is likely to be present. This can be, and has been, taken as an argument against any public sector action. Thus Lowi is criticized for not addressing the contention that some social problems may not be soluble, or at least are certainly not soluble through the formulation of rules. What would result from such an effort would be either rigidity or confusion. Given the politics of promise and the play of interest groups which keeps pressure on politicians to deliver on their promises, the best that government can do may be the distribution of money. The more money that is spent the more politicians are able to claim that they are doing something about a problem.40 However, ex-

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penditure in the absence of a purpose and a technology inevitably leads to waste and ineffectiveness. Still, it may be that interest grou liberalism was born of frustration, a felt need to "do something" in the face of real social problems and public demands, but no identifiable technology. Government cannot solve social problems simply by spending money, but politicians may be able to claim credit for such efforts. At the same time, there are interests which demand that money be spent even in the absence of a design for policy success. Thus, the politics of the policy process is not the politics of rules; it is, instead, the politics of money. As Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky describe it, the policy process frequently begins in an aura of emergency and ends with a "financial aid" program: Do something! Do anything! Do it right away! Poor cities, like poor countries are in trouble. They need so much so fast. They are always conscious that time is running out on them; hence, they are always tempted to engage in short run expedience to overcome long run problems. Perhaps one major project . . . will enable them to catch up and move ahead. Donors of aid are also caught up in the 'Great-Leap Forward' psychology combining undue pessimism about the past with wild optimism about the future; if they only could contribute to the one big project that would turn the tide.41

Policy activity with respect to social problems is more like gambling than rational rule-making. Policymakers look for one big hit without knowing which, if any, investment will provide the big return, but they pretend that each new policy is the "sure thing." A final criticism of Lowi's analysis is that it misconstrues the structure of incentives which governs the process of policy implementation, especially in a federal system.42 Administrators have no built-in incentives to strictly adhere to the choices made or rules formulated by legislative bodies. Lowi assumes that, if properly drawn, legislation can be virtually self-enforcing, that administrators develop agendas of their own only because legislatures leave them so much discretion. In contrast, critics contend that administrators always develop agendas of their own no matter how clear their legislative mandate. In part this is because they have loyalties to their own organization and its clients, and in part this is because policymakers (legislators) usually do not anticipate all the roadblocks impeding the presumed straight course to policy implementation. These problems are especially likely to surface when national policies dealing with "intrac-

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table" problems are administered at the state and local levels. At each of those levels the play of interests at work in any policy area will be substantially different from the play of interests at the national level.43 Administrators will be responsive to interests which may be much stronger in state or local politics than in Washington. Lowi's assumptions about the efficacy of rules thus seem at odds with the operation of the federal system. Federalism aside, the administrative process itself may be the source of problems which lead to policy ineffectiveness and contribute to the policy dilemma. Policies fail because the policy delivery system is either inadequate or ill-equipped to marshal a concentrated attack on a policy problem. Most recently Pressman and Wildavsky have become spokesman for this viewpoint. Their argument emerges most clearly in a case study of the implementation of the Economic Development Act. They argue that this legislation was relatively clear in its conception and in its goals. For them, the EDA represents an approximation of a kind of "best case" legislative choice, presumably one which Lowi approves. However, they conclude that even when a legislature exercises decisive authority and does make a clear choice, the "normal expectations should be that new programs will fail to get off the ground [and that] the remarkable thing is that new programs work at all."44 According to Pressman and Wildavsky, implementation is and always will be political. No law can be written or policy designed which can eliminate all discretion from a policy delivery system or anticipate all obstacles and hidden agendas. The question is not whether discretion can be eliminated but who has access to and/or control over discretionary power in administration. Policy fails because the process of policy implementation inevitably allows for the continuation of conflict about not only the means, but also the ends of policy. Policy fails because implementation inevitably requires joint action on the part of mutliple actors, each of whom brings to the implementation process distinct interests and goals. The problem of policy effectiveness, accord ing to Pressman and Wildavsky, is largely a result of the failure of policymakers to anticipate and to plan policies to take account of (not eliminate) these problems arising in the implementation process. Their position is a direct attack on the assumption that policy is or can be self-enforcing. They suggest that policymakers must not ignore problems likely to arise in the delivery system:

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the great problem . . . is to make the difficulties of implementation a part of the initial formulation of policy. Implementation must not be conceived as a process that takes place after, and independent of, the design of policy. Means and ends can be brought into somewhat closer correspondence only by making each particularly dependent on the other.45

Although implicit, this is the harshest criticism of Lowi's thesis. Implicit in Pressman and Wildavsky's position is a belief that by wishing away the problem of interest group participation in the administrative process, Lowi's position only ensures that the power of interest groups will be further enhanced. Pressman and Wildavsky argue that policymakers must accept this participation, anticipate it, and design programs that accommodate it. They claim no recipe for success, only that the chances for avoiding failure might be marginally increased; on balance they are fundamentally skeptical of the capacity of government to tackle social problems. Even if policy formulation takes into account the problems of implementation, these policies are still likely to fail because of the "distance" between the source of the policy and its object. Propositionally, distance not only provides opportunity for distortion of policy goals, it also impedes the gathering of intelligence and the ability to make corrective adjustments when unforeseen problems arise. Even with the best of intentions, distance produces the same effect for public policy that it does for players of the parlor game "secret." As in the game, repetition of the same message along a chain of people eventually leads to distortion and misunderstanding so that what is finally produced is often quite different from what was originally said. Similarly, policies formulated in Washington and passed along to officials charged with implementing them across the country are also subject to distortion, misinterpretation, willful avoidance, and the play of local politics so that the final result is frequently far from a faithful translation of an initial policy directive. When there are differences in a tightly knit policymaking organization, the real choices may very well be exit, voice, or loyalty. In the implementation process involving a long sequence of decisions and many different decision makers, the choices are most likely to be neither exit, voice, nor loyalty; instead, what occurs is both systematic and random distortion of policy goals—an alternative that can be pursued with great success, as students of public administration have repeatedly shown. With public policies the process of distortion is exaggerated because

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policy initiators are so remote from those who must implement policies that they are often ignorant of the specific contexts, personalities, and alternative agendas which influence how policies are put into practice. As a result, policy initiators fail to anticipate and plan for these implementation difficulties. They fail to foresee major obstacles that can redirect, shift, or derail their initiatives. Even simple and seemingly straightforward directives must be filtered through many layers of officials, and in the process are likely to be altered, delayed, or changed. The more participants, the more precarious will be agreement, and the more likely there will be distortion. Agreements once made may break down in the face of changing circumstances. Policies fail because politics does not end when implementation begins. As Pressman and Wildavsky argue, the apparently simple and straightforward is really complex and convoluted. We are initially surprised because we do not begin to appreciate the number of steps involved, the number of participants whose preferences have to be taken into account, the number of separate decisions that are part of what we think of as a single one. Least of all do we appreciate the geometric growth of interdependences over time where each negotiation involves a number of participants with decisions to make.46

The experience of formulating policies and developing widespread public support for them only to see them produce unexpected results is explained by Pressman and Wildavsky in terms of what they call a "theory of the complexity of joint action."47 Reduced to its essentials, this theory can be stated as follows: as the number of decision clearance points increases—as the number of individuals or levels through which a policy must be passed multiplies—the probability of program success decreases geometrically. As Pressman and Wildavsky found, this theory operates even when programs have widespread political support, have no organized opposition, involve only one federal agency and only one city, and contain a substantial commitment of readily available federal funds. In examining a seemingly ideal situation, they found that it was not opposition to the substantive goals of the program, but the problem of multiple perspectives, uncertainty, and lack of coordination that frustrated implementation. Pressman and Wildavsky list seven factors which they believe must be taken into account in explaining why public policies fail :48 (1) the incompatibility among policies seeking to accomplish similar purposes;

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(2) the commitments which those charged with initiating a program have to other potentially incompatible programs; (3) the extent to which there is already extant a simultaneous commitment to other "more important" programs; (4) the extent to which implementation requires the actions of individuals or agencies lacking in a sense of urgency; (5) differences of opinion on the leadership or organizational roles of institutions and officials necessary to the administration of a program; (6) legal and procedural differences operative between program initiatives and already ongoing programs; (7) disagreement over program goals or an operative lack of authority to achieve even the consensual purposes of the program. Like Lowi, Pressman and Wildavsky see the problem of policy effectiveness as largely a problem of access and participation. However, they do not believe that the answer to the problem is one of exerting greater authority through the channels of majoritarian politics. There is in their view no way around the problem of access and participation in the administrative process. However clear the commands, they will be distorted as they are being "administered." Going outside established bureaucratic channels will not work; it simply recreates the problem in a different setting. In its final analysis, Pressman and Wildavsky's call for a closer integration of policy formulation and implementation is, in fact, a call for restraint, a caution against the expansionist tendencies of the welfare state. Their analysis of the difficulties of implementation is an implicit plea to discourage policy activism. The lesson of the policy dilemma is, in their view, that the government cannot be efficient or effective, no matter how clear the choices of legislatures. If Pressman and Wildavsky are correct, Lowi's analysis and optimism are either irrelevant or dangerous. Pressman and Wildavsky's argument is then something of an indictment of the social welfarism of the two last decades. It is part of a general critique whose central tenet is that government is increasingly becoming a clumsy giant, whose own powers work against policy effectiveness, and whose central prescription is for less, not more government. Sometimes called "neoconservative," this critique calls for lowered expectations, diminished public sector activity in the area of social policy, but at the same time a strong national defense posture.49 The lesson the neoconservative position draws from the problems of implementation is an invitation to retreat, to restrain government,

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rather than to tackle the problems with greater resolution and concentration of authority. It is not, however, that the neoconservative position fears authority; indeed, the position is based, at least in part, on the fear that the dilemma of ineffective policy will lead to a condition of political bankruptcy in which the authority of the state will be weakened by widespread disillusionment and that this will in turn affect its capacity to govern at home and represent national interests abroad.50 The answer to the question of what government can do well is that which it does least. POLICY AND CRIME We have outlined two competing and to some extent conflicting explanations for the policy dilemma. One holds that at its root is a fear of exercising authority, the result being fragmented and ill-conceived policymaking. The other emphasizes the problems of policy implementation, suggesting that it is distortions arising from long distance which undercut the impact of even the most "authoritative" of commands. Each emphasizes a different cure for the policy dilemma. The former calls for a renewed exercise of public authority, while the latter implies a lowering of expectations and a reduction in the scope of government activities. Each of these views may accurately characterize some subset of public problems. But our concern in this book is with one particular type of problem, the problem of crime, and our goal is to determine how accurate and helpful each of these positions is in understanding this problem. It may be that any government policy in this area will fail, not because of a failure of legislative will or administrative ability, but because the problems tackled are intractable, given the ideological constraints placed on policymakers. Thus we must add still one more consideration to our analysis of the policy dilemma, the intractable nature of the problem itself. Crime, is by definition, a public problem. It is one which cannot be left to private authority for its resolution. It is one which affects the minimal claims to legitimacy of any government. Unless or until a government is able to promulgate norms which effectively bind citizens, it can hardly be said to rule at all, let alone effectively. In recent years in America the crime problem has been one to which public attention has been regularly focused. Public opinion polls report that

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the American people consider crime to be among the most serious of our national problems and that they expect government to "do something" about the crime problem.51 Government efforts to deal with the problem of crime can be broken down into those directed at enforcement and those directed at prevention. It must, however, be recognized that there are important linkages between enforcement and prevention. Such linkages are illustrated by the deterrence doctrine in which overall crime rates are thought to vary in accordance with rates of apprehension and levels of punishment. However, in efforts at enforcement and prevention, government at all levels is faced with a policy dilemma, that is, with the necessity of applying limited technologies in the face of intense public demands for effective action. The attempt to "do something" about crime begins with some effort to understand the causes of crime. There are almost as many arguments about crime causation as there are criminologists, but three seem most prominent today. The first of these arguments portrays crime as a response to deprivation. Crime, it is suggested, occurs where people live in conditions of poverty and experience all of its social side effects, including family instability and poor quality education.52 In this view, crime is considered to be one part of the pathology of poverty, the equivalent to a socially induced illness. In its extreme form, this position holds that the criminal is not morally at fault for his criminality.53 The blame for crime rests with the social conditions in which it breeds. The appropriate response to crime is a recognition of the need to change those conditions and an expectation that doing so will reduce or eliminate crime. The dilemma is, of course, that these concerns fall well beyond the purviews of those charged with tackling the "crime problem." A second explanation for crime is that it is subcultural and agerelated. This view holds that crime is primarily the expressive behavior of the young.54 The more young people there are in a population, the higher will be the crime rate.55 Furthermore, the tendency of young people to commit crimes is reinforced by patterns of peer group formation. Adolescence is a time when the influence of peers is particularly strong, and it is a time when young men are under intense pressure to prove themselves. Often proving themselves takes the form of criminality, since crime may be seen as an assertion of self against adult, mainstream values.

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A third explanation for crime is that it is an expression of rational calculations and normal behavior taken to an extreme. Here crime is seen as the result of deliberate calculations of costs and benefits; people commit crimes when there is more to be gained from criminal activity than from law-abiding behavior.56 The criminal is assumed to be like everyone else in his motivations. While there are instances in which crimes of passion occur, most criminality, or at least that criminality of most concern to a frightened public, is not the result of deepseated personality problems nor the pressures of social circumstances or peer groups. Each of these theories of crime causation captures part of an explanation for some kinds of crime. None can be said to explain all types of crime or to be relevant to all types of criminals. Why any particular person commits any particular crime cannot be known with any precision or any certainty. In the aggregate no one has been able to offer a convincing explanation as to why crime rates vary.57 As a result, no meaningful policy can be based upon a causal explanation for crime. Any such efforts will, of necessity, be based upon assumptions which may not apply widely or are subject to considerable challenge. As a result, crime policy will always be, at least partially, out of step with the social problems to which it is addressed. This is equally true of prevention and enforcement activities. Some, and in particular James Q. Wilson, acknowledge that crime policy cannot and should not be based upon causal theories or assumptions.58 Because they direct attention either to macrosocial conditions or subjective states of individuals, causal theories place government in the position either of trying to change things that cannot readily be altered or of abandoning a search for an effective policy until a convincing theory is developed. Wilson argues that crime policy must respond to the latter problem. In the stead of causal explanation, he suggests that crime policy be tailored to the achievement of attainable ends and that it should be concentrated on the manipulation of objective goods or conditions which are easily within the government's control. As he describes it, rational policy does not ask what is the "cause" of a problem, but what is the condition one wants to bring into being, what measures do we have that will tell when that condition exists, and what policy tools does a government . . . possess that might . . . produce at reasonable cost a desired alteration in the present condition and progress toward the desired condition? In this case, the desired

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condition is a reduction in specified forms of crime. The government has at its disposal certain . . . policy instruments . . . a policy analyst would ask what feasible changes in which of those instruments would, at what cost . . ., produce how much of a change in the rate of a given crime.59

According to Wilson, a rational crime policy must be crime-specific and oriented toward manipulating the risks of criminal behavior. But even this modest suggestion is based upon an expressed recognition of the limited ability of any government to significantly affect risk and hence control crime. Crime is an irreducible fact of social life; it cannot be eradicated. It may even be that crime is functional in the sense that it serves to remind the law-abiding of the common values and in so doing solidifies traditional norms of conduct.60 Furthermore, the restrictions of our constitutional tradition require that the government restrain its appetite for crime control. At a minimum, the constitution requires that government withdraw from some of the affairs of its citizens, that a zone of protection be drawn around the citizenry and that it be difficult for government to intrude into that zone. This means that public security will be lax, surveillance minimized, and law enforcement practices severely circumscribed. In short, it means that law enforcement has inefficiency built into it.61 Finally, at some point crime is cost effective for a society. Although the concentration of the costs of crime raises problems of equity, it is clear that there is some optimal level of crime in a society, where the costs of enforcement outweigh the gains it produces. The relatively high cost of enforcement suggests that a relatively high crime rate is socially acceptable. Limitations on the power of the state means that individual citizens will have the opportunity to abuse their freedom. Limited government means that crime will be attractive and that some substantial portion of society will be willing to take the risk associated with engagement in criminal activity. Democratic theory must accept some level of crime as one of the prices to be paid for freedom. And rational social policy leads to an ideal of much less than full enforcement of the laws. What all this means for the policy dilemma is that there are limitations on the effectiveness of government policy built into the nature of the problems to which policy may be addressed. In the area of crime, these limits are part of the fabric of social and political life as well as part of the enterprise of social science. Problems of govern-

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mental structure and ideology serve only to reinforce the policy dilemma as far as the problem of crime is concerned. This, then, is a third component of the policy dilemma as it applies to the formulation of a crime policy. CONCLUSION: THE POLICY DILEMMA IN A CASE STUDY Crime, criminality, and what to do about both have proven to be major problems to the American people and for government officials, especially in the modern era. As we have argued, in spite of the problem of the policy dilemma, government cannot abandon a commitment to reduce or control crime. To do so would be to come close to abandoning its claim to legitimacy and authority. Our purpose in this study is to analyze the development and implementation of federal crime policy under the Safe Streets Act of 1968. This Act and the more general policy of which it is an expression embody and respond to what we believe are the key elements of the policy dilemma: public demand for government action, ideological and structural barriers to policy effectiveness, and limited understanding of and technology for dealing with important social problems. Our perspective is skeptical. In one sense we are skeptical about the ability of any single program or indeed of most public sector activities to escape or resolve the policy dilemma. It would be hard for anyone studying the politics of the 1970s not to be skeptical. Yet skepticism does not necessarily mean resignation. We worry about the tendency of policy analysts to conclude that because nothing seems to work or nothing seems to work very well that government ought to do nothing. Policy is more than instrumental; by virtue of what it tries to do or by virtue of its commitments, it defines the quality of a government and sets examples for the ways in which nongovernmental institutions deal with the problems of their constituents or consumers. It continues to articulate aspirations. This is not to say that we or anyone else should dismiss the policy dilemma or ignore its implications. The opposite is true. The policy dilemma is perhaps the most fundamental challenge to liberal democracies everywhere. We need, however, to be cautious about the conclusions we draw as we work our way through an explication of that dilemma in any policy area. Government acts for its citizens and, in

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so doing, expresses and defines their collective values. To have polity we must have policy. To improve polity it is not necessary to perfect policy. This process of articulating idealized aspirations can, of course, have the effect of increasing expectations and in so doing spawn resentment and cynicism even as the process was meant to instruct and encourage.62 But even as we focus particularly on the problem of the policy dilemma with respect to crime reduction and control efforts in the Safe Streets Act, we are also skeptical about the possibility of making meaningful and valid statements about policy impact. Analysis of the policy dilemma begins with questions of process; that is, with questions of how policy choices are made and implementation activities carried out. The success and failure of a policy is determined, in the first instance, by the conceptual, technical, and political constraints within which the policy delivery system must work. Analysis of the policy dilemma must account for those constraints and describe the way in which policymakers and administrators respond to them. Our interest in this study then is to report and reflect on those responses as they are understood by those involved in the policy process themselves. We shy away from assessing behavior without reference to the meaning of that behavior. It is important to recognize that the policy dilemma imposes on government officials difficulties in defining their proper responsibilities and in understanding their mandate. To understand their dilemma and its implications for the Safe Streets Act and federal crime policy we focus on those difficulties.

2 Federal Crime Policy: The Safe Streets Act of 1968 CRIME AS AN ISSUE IN NATIONAL POLITICS Crime and what to do about it have occasionally been important issues in American electoral politics. The crime issue is, in a large part, an aspect of the symbolic drama of politics. The sensational murder, the uncovered plot, the outbreak of riot are the cornerstones on which electoral politics are from time to time built.1 As an issue, however, crime has generally been most important at the local level. Crime waves and crusades to combat them by and large have been constructed, uncovered, and fought by candidates criticizing the performance of local police and prosecutors.2 Only episodically, as in the 1920s and the 1960s, has the issue of crime become important in national elections and politics. In the 1960s the issue of crime was a major item on the national agenda.3 It was placed on that agenda during the 1964 presidential election campaign by Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, who were reacting to the emergence of civil rights demonstrations and a rising crime rate. Both of those candidates organized their campaigns around a "law and order" theme, and faulted the incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, and others for fostering permissiveness and leniency which encouraged criminality. Included in their attack was the Supreme Court, whose decisions had been favorable to the rights of criminal defendants. 34

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The crime issue was, however, part of a larger complex of campaign themes aimed to exploit fear of rapid social change, themes of racial competition, moral conventionality, and defense against the "new morality." These themes, labeled by election analysts Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg as "Social Issues,"4 mobilized public hostility against all those elements of contemporary culture which seemed to threaten the values of hard-working, upstanding middleclass Americans. Crime and the rhetoric of law and order were symbols of that threat. As Senator Goldwater put it in accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Tonight there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elderly, and there is a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success toward the inner meaning of their lives. . . . The growing menace in our country tonight, to personal safety, to life, to limb and to property, in homes, in churches, in the playgrounds and places of business, particularly in our great cities, is the mounting concern of every thoughtful citizen in the United States. Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any government, and a government that cannot fulfill this purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens.5

Goldwater was, by no means, speaking to an unsympathetic audience. By the mid-1960s public opinion polls consistently found that the public ranked crime and other aspects of the social issue among our most important national issues.6 While neither Goldwater nor Wallace was able to translate the social issue into a significant voting issue, they did effectively place it at the center of domestic political concerns. Furthermore, their campaigns helped to stimulate a new and vocal law enforcement lobby, the major focus of which was the modification or reversal of the Supreme Court's criminal rights decisions. This lobby pressed at the local, state, and federal levels for more resources for agencies concerned with preventing crime or apprehending criminals. Both the campaign themes of 1964 and the activities of the law enforcement lobby spurred the Johnson Administration to undertake a new national effort to deal with the crime problem. It was clear that the fall campaign of 1964 had sharpened the voters' mood of frustration and that presidential leadership of the "war against crime" was expected. . . . In this context it was understood that the effect of

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Senator Goldwater's lopsided defeat in 1964 was not to bury crime as an issue, but merely to transfer the official responsibility to the Democratic administration.7

The response was twofold, the creation of a small grant-in-aid program to help state and local law enforcement, and an executive order establishing a presidential commission to study and make recommendations about the crime problem. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 authorized the attorney general to make grants to public and private organizations to finance establishment of programs designed to improve the efficiency and capability of law enforcement.8 The Act lodged responsibility for distributing grants solely with the attorney general and such advisory committees as he might establish. After its passage, the attorney general in turn created the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (OLEA) within the Justice Department to administer the grant-in-aid program. Over its three-year lifetime OLEA awarded approximately $20 million in grants,9 concentrating heavily, although not exclusively, on projects designed to aid law enforcement in the District of Columbia, an announced interest of President Johnson, and on projects designed to aid local police in other areas of the country. At the same time it began to cultivate and encourage a working relationship with the International Association of Chiefs of Police in order to win the backing of powerful police interests, and simply because those interests were already most active in seeking funds.10 The OLEA did not develop a clear set of priorities or plans to guide its funding activities, nor did it have a clear congressional mandate to guide its funding decisions. However, it did provide a visible, if small-scale, response to the politics of crime, one which committed the federal government to action without dramatically increasing federal "control" overstate and local law enforcement. The OLE A experience was a significant step forward in nationalizing the concern for crime. Politically it served to strengthen the law enforcement lobby. It legitimized the view that the federal government should provide financial assistance to state and local law enforcement. It provided federal officials with experience in dealing with grant-inaid problems in the field of criminal justice. It stimulated interest in long-range thinking about crime and criminal justice. And, finally, it performed a hold ing action for the Johnson Administration; it demonstrated the commitment of that administration to "doing something

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about crime" while at the same time it provided the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice time to do its work. That Commission began work in July 1965; two years later, its finished products consisted of nine separate reports on specific aspects of crime and the administration of criminal justice, reports which had been prepared with the services of over 500 professionals in either staff or consultant capacities.11 President Johnson's charge to the Commission was typically ambitious: Crime is a sore on the face of America. It is a menace on our streets. It is a drain on our cities. It is a corruptor of our youth. It is cause of untold suffering and loss. But just saying this does not solve the problem that we have before us. We must bring it under control and then root out the cause. So let the nation know today that we have taken a pledge not only to reduce crime but to banish it.12

The Commission organized itself into a set of task forces, each of which dealt with a separate aspect of the crime problem (e.g., organized crime) or of the criminal justice system (e.g., police, corrections). The work of these task forces was coordinated by the Commission's staff and integrated into a series of over 200 conclusions and recommendations. The general diagnosis and prescription in those conclusions and recommendations was that crime was a problem deeply rooted in American social structure and social conditions and that reduction in crime would not readily be achieved simply by upgrading the capacity of law enforcement agencies. This is not to say that the Commission ignored the need for improvement in those agencies. However, its view of the crime problem was considerably broader and more long-term than could be encompassed by improving capacities for apprehension, conviction, and punishment. The criminal justice system has a great potential for dealing with individual instances of crime, but it was not designed to eliminate the conditions in which crime breeds. It needs help. Warring on poverty, inadequate housing and unemployment is warring on crime. . . . To speak of controlling crime only in terms of the work of the police, the courts and the correctional apparatus, is to refuse to face the fact that widespread crime implies a widespread failure by society as a whole.13

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The Commission also documented widespread inadequacies in law enforcement procedures and institutions, and went on to recommend that the federal government make available substantial sums of money to allow state and local governments to develop a capability to engage in systemwide criminal justice planning, upgrade the training of criminal justice personnel, and improve law enforcement delivery systems.14 The Commission also proposed that the federal government support a limited number of innovative demonstration projects to develop and test modern technology in law enforcement in the areas of communications and information systems. In sum, it proposed that the federal government become an active partner in combating crime at the state and local levels.15 Neither the formation of a presidential commission nor the proposal for an increased federal role in law enforcement and criminal justice is unprecedented. There are striking parallels between the background and experience of the 1960s and President Hoover's National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, popularly known as the Wickersham Commission, established in 1929.16 Like the Commission created by President Johnson, the impetus for the Wickersham Commission grew out of a national election—1928, when the issue of prohibition and the enforcement of prohibition laws was a major point of contention between Hoover and his rival Al Smith.17 While the origin of the Wickersham Commission had its roots in immediate problems and electoral politics, Hoover's mandate—like President Johnson's—clearly covered the entire problem of crime. The findings and recommendations of the two groups are also similar. The report of the Wickersham Commission began with an inventory of the deficiencies in knowledge about the crime problem and about the operation of criminal justice agencies. Like its latter-day incarnation, it went on to emphasize the relationship of crime and various deficiencies in the social order, and it recommended the development of a national inventory of the causes of crime and the creation of a national effort to compile statistics on the incidence of crime. Furthermore, both emphasized the need to upgrade the training of police, improve the operation of the prosecutorial function, eliminate the problems of lower criminal courts, streamline criminal procedure, and expand the provision of counsel to unrepresented criminal defendants.18 The ambition and scope of the recommendations of the Wickersham Commission were never developed into a concerted program for fed-

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eral crime control efforts. Like so many other presidential commissions, the impact of the Wickersham Commission was to make the problem of crime and law enforcement more visible and to stimulate academic interest in those problems without having any immediate and concrete effect on how these concerns were pursued. The Wickersham Commission developed no vehicle for implementing its proposals, nor did its reports and recommendations generate political support in the Hoover Administration. In this respect the two commissions were quite different; President Johnson's led to a major nationaj involvement in crime fighting. The creation of the Wickersham Commission and its relationship to the development of federal crime policy in the 1960s must also be seen within a larger context, the traditional American fear of a national police force. Whatever its precise historical origins, this fear reflects a desire to limit the power of government and to preserve the distinction between various units of authority within the federal system. While the scope of the federal criminal law has expanded considerably in the course of this century, most of our criminal laws have continued to be enforced at the state and local levels. The major arm for the enforcement of the federal criminal law has been and continues to be the FBI. Despite its recent troubles,19 the FBI has played and continues to play an important role in establishing a federal presence in state and local law enforcement activities, offering what amounts to technical assistance (for example, fingerprint identification and laboratory analysis) as well as training programs to local law enforcement agencies.20 Responding to the Wickersham Commission's recommendation, the FBI has, since 1930, compiled the Uniform Crime Reports, which in effect puts the FBI in the position of being the major source of information about the extent and nature of the nation's crime problem. However, despite all its functions, the FBI has never put the federal government in the position of directly shaping the operations and policies of state and local law enforcement agencies. Nevertheless, during the 1950s and 1960s there were some efforts to move in this direction. The focus of those efforts was clearly on the problem of juvenile delinquency.21 In 1955 President Eisenhower proposed a federally supported grant-in-aid program to provide approximately $3 million to help local governments develop programs to cope with juvenile delinquency. Although Eisenhower was never able to

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secure the passage of this legislation, the idea was picked up by President Kennedy, who in 1961 proposed a $10 million grant-in-aid program to provide funds for training, research, and experimentation in the field of delinquency prevention and treatment. At the same time, Kennedy created the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime, an intragovernmental committee whose mission was to coordinate federal activities and to develop programs to be funded upon the establishment of federal grant-in-aid authority.22 Passage of the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act in 1961 placed responsibility for administering the program with the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, sug gesting the extent to which it was necessary to go to avoid the impression of federal usurpation of a traditionally local function. The Act lodged total responsibility for deciding how the grant-inaid money would be spent and who would receive it at the federal level; no provisions for state involvement in the implementation of the program were included. The major focus of the acitivities carried out under the Act was, however, to encourage communities to develop "comprehensive" plans for dealing with the problem of juvenile delinquency.23 While there were other smaller programs which engaged the federal government on an ongoing basis with state and local enforcement problems, the juvenile delinquency effort provided the most important model for the creation of OLEA in 1965 and the much larger effort stimulated by the recommendations of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Criminal Justice in 1966 and 1967. THE ORIGINS OF THE SAFE STREETS ACT Politically the issue of crime was as important in 1967 as it had been in 1964, kept alive by continuing racial tensions and a high crime rate. Indeed, with the election of 1968 on the horizon, the Johnson Administration desired some relatively quick and visible translation of the work of the Crime Commission into legislation. Johnson sought to preempt the law and order issue and in so doing demonstrate that he was not soft on crime. The result was a detailed message on crime presented to the Congress in February 1967, which included legisla-

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tive proposals to restrict the sale of firearms, and to restrict domestic wiretapping and electronic surveillance. However, the centerpiece of the president's message was a proposal for the enactment of the Safe Streets and Crime Control Act of 1967 which would locate within the Justice Department a large-scale grant-in-aid program to assist state and local units of government in their crime reduction and law enforcement efforts. As proposed, this grant-in-aid program empowered the attorney general, acting through a Director of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Assistance, to underwrite the costs of preparing comprehensive plans for dealing with local crime problems, to make grants pursuant to such plans for innovative projects, to finance capital construction projects, and to finance research and demonstration projects. The proposal required state matching contributions and limited the amount which could go to any one state. In addition, it provided for the creation of a federally supported institute to undertake research on crime and a program to support education and training for criminal justice system personnel. The major authority for running the proposed program was to be vested in an Office of Law Enforcement Assistance in the Department of Justice, and allowed the attorney general broad discretionary powers in developing the program and directing its funding decisions. There were two related reasons why this proposal took the form of direct grants-in-aid to local government. First, this was a form long favored by the Johnson Administration in establishing Great Society programs, and one quite compatible to the problem at hand. Since crime was perceived as essentially a local and not a state problem, the Administration reasoned that federal assistance should go directly to those units of local government most in need of it. Second, this type of program had great political appeal. It was the nation's large urban centers which had given President Johnson their overwhelming support in 1964, and it was their continuing support he was seeking a he anticipated the 1968 elections. Despite the president's past legislative success and despite the growing consensus that the nation was in the midst of a crisis of law and order, the president's bill met with stiff resistance by the Congress. Law enforcement officials were at best lukewarm, citing a long tradition of local control of police and hinting at the possibility of a national police force. Many law enforcement officials expressed alarm

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at the prospects of a liberal attorney general (Ramsey Clark) dictating conditions under which they could receive federal funds. Congress too was skeptical, having grown increasingly disenchanted with many of the Great Society programs which had promised so much but delivered so little and at such a high cost. Many congressmen were sympathetic to the aims of the president, but nevertheless questioned the wisdom of direct categorical grants, having found that they frequently supported insurgent political organizations and frequently spawned Washington-directed bureaucratic nightmares, both of which challenged established political groups in their own constituencies. Even key officials in the Department of Justice, OLEA, and the president's own Crime Commission privately expressed skepticism over a categorical grant approach and maintained a. conspicuous silence on the president's bill. They too feared the bureaucratic headaches of administering a program which would make grants-in-aid to each of the nation's thousands of units of local government. Despite widespread questioning of the idea within the Administration, it was the Republicans in Congress who mobilized opposition to the Administration's bill. Having watched the president skillfully use other grant-in-aid programs to mobilize the urban centers for the Democratic party, they were not about to passively watch this happen one more time, particularly after the humiliating defeat of 1964. Capitalizing on the growing disenchantment with the Great Society programs (particularly among Southern Democrats), the intense personal dislike many had for Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and the lack of a firm consensus within the Administration's own ranks, Republicans in the House and the Senate set about to rewrite the Administration's bill to their own liking. Caught up in the backlash against the Great Society grant-in-aid programs, the Administration's bill was propelled forward in this revision by a tide of enthusiasm for New Federalism and revenue sharing, which the Republicans offered as an alternative. This emerging theory, which at the time had received the blessing of conservative Republicans as well as liberal Democrats at the Brookings Institution, held that it is the state governments which must be revitalized if the nation's social ills are to be coped with effectively. It is the states, the New Federalism suggests, which are both close enough to the citizens to understand their problems yet large enough to be able to effectively

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deal with them. In contrast, Washington is too remote and local governments too small. By the time the House of Representatives first began considering the Administration's bill, the question before it was not whether there should be federal support for local law enforcement, but rather how this federal support should be provided. The subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee responsible for first considering the bill began its hearings against the backdrop of a national wave of violence. Before the House as a whole had begun debate on the Committee's report, twenty-three people had died in five days of noting in Newark, forty-three had lost their lives in Detroit, and numerous others had been killed or injured in a wave of violence which affected most of the nation's major cities and, as a whole, constituted the worst series of civil disturbances in this nation's history. And before Congress had concluded final action on the bill, additional violence had claimed the lives of two of the nation's champions of racial justice, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Furthermore, and perhap as important as these dramatic events, as debate over the proposal continued into late spring 1968, the "law and order" issue began t take shape as a central electoral issue. Both Richard Nixon and George Wallace skillfully played on this issue in developing their respective campaigns. They attempted to use the law and order issue to channel resentment against the challenges to conventional values which were so much a part of the politics of the late 1960s. They argued that something could and should be done about crime, and that that something meant getting tough by backing more stringent enforcement of the criminal law.24 The Nixon and Wallace campaigns, plus the traumatic events of 1968, served to raise public expectations about the possibilities of and need for a clear governmental response to the crime problem. They took general concerns and anxieties and focused them on the failure of national political institutions to act in a clear and unequivocal manner to ally themselves with the "peace forces" as against the forces of disorder. Yet arousing public concern and providing a clear program for action did not go together: the Nixon and Wallace rhetoric clearly affected Congressional action on the Safe Streets Act without at the same time providing content to the question of how to reduce crime. Their rhetoric and the events of spring 1968 not only spurred the bill on to a relatively

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quick, though by no means easy, passage, they also contributed to the sense of urgency surrounding the debate and the "hard-line" provisions contained in parts of the Act. These events also contributed to a subtle shift in emphasis away from the Administration's initial concern with trying to tackle the "roots" of the crime problem and its emphasis on upgrading the quality of police to an orientation which is best summarized as an effort to increase the efficiency of law enforcement officials. Despite a lack of enthusiasm for the Administration's bill, under the guidance of its venerable chairman, Emmanuel Celler, the House Judiciary Committee reported out a bill which provided for direct federal grants to local law enforcement agencies and in most other respects was in accord with the version the Administration had submitted to Congress. However, twelve of the fifteen Republicans on the Committee issued a sharply worded dissent, and when the bill was introduced on the floor, they took their case to the House as a whole. Under the active leadership of Congressman William Cahill (R-New Jersey), Thomas Railsback (R-lllinois) and Edward Beister (R-Pennsylvania), and with the blessing of House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, this group mobilized their Republican colleagues and Southern Democrats to oppose the Administration's bill as reported out by the Judiciary Committee, arguing that it would further erode state's rights and allow the attorney general to dictate policies to local law enforcement officials. As an alternative they proposed an amendment—known after its sponsor as the Cahill Amendment—which authorized block grants rather than grants-in-aid, which would be received by a state agency, state planning agencies (SPAs) appointed by each governor, rather than local units of government. Turning to the newly established National Governor's Conference, opponents of the Administration's bill were eventually able to gain the support of forty-seven of the fifty governors, who were in turn able to offset the generally feeble voices of the few big-city mayors who pleaded the grant-in-aid cause. Two other factors served to turn the tide in the House in favor of the minority's version of the bill. First, the President's Crime Commission was never strongly supportive of the grant-in-aid approach. By identifying one of the primary problems of the criminal justice system as the lack of coordination, the Commission's conclusions could be interpreted as being consistent with support for the more in-

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elusive units of government—the states—as the primary receipients of federal funds. If systemwide planning and improvement were the goals, it was reasoned, then city and county units of government were not particularly well-suited for this purpose for they were too fragmented themselves. Despite White House desires to the contrary, many middle-level officials and Commission staffers agreed with this view, and quietly expressed a preference for the block grant approach favored by the Republicans. A second reason for the House defeat of the Administration's approach was the personality of Ramsey Clark, President Johnson's attorney general. Clark had been widely criticized for what many regarded as his being "soft on crime." Many thought he had been excessively lenient in his role in handling the racial disturbances which had recently plagued the nation's cities. He had gained the wrath of still more for his advocacy of plans to severly restrict the sale of guns, and had engendered the anger of still more with his outspoken criticisms of many police practices and his spirited defense of the Supreme Court's decisions affecting police practices and criminal procedure. In retrospect, his support of the Administration's grant-in-aid program probably cost the bill many more votes than it won. All these factors came together to contribute to the defeat of the Administration's version of the bill on the House floor and to promote the adoption of a bill which provided for a strong state role. With the stinging defeat in the House, the outcome in the Senate was largely a foregone conclusion. If anything, the Senate version of the bill was an even greater affront to the Administration because it contained two essentially unrelated titles which in effect attempted to overrule the Supreme Court's Miranda decision by granting the admissibility of confessions at trial (Title II) and expanded the use of electronic wiretapping (Title III), two items which the attorney general and the White House had strongly opposed. At the outset of Senate consideration of the matter, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, John McClellan (D-Arkansas), took a dim view of the Administration's bill. Even before it was reported out of Committee, four Southern Democrats—including the chairman—had joined with the minority members to rewrite the Administration's bill to resemble the House version and tack on the two additional titles. The Administration was fortunate to obtain one

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compromise—on the block grant provision—designed to ally the fears of those who felt that the bill was anti-city. This compromise provided that at least 40 percent of the planning grant funds and 75 percent of the action grant funds had to be passed through the state planning agencies to local units of government. Again, the nation's governors were mobilized to support this bill, and all but two of them indicated their support for it. As in the House, the Republicans and Southern Democrats were able to form a majority coalition to defeat the president's bill and substitute their own version. In conference, the Administration's most prestigious supporter, Chairman Celler, found himself overwhelmed, and was unable to do anything to salvage the bill. The Senate version of the bill was later passed without question by a stunned House of Representatives still reeling from the recent murder of Robert F. Kennedy. Eventually, it was signed by a reluctant president who could only comment that he was signing the bill because on balance it contained "more good than bad." Beginning its journey through Congress as one more Great Society categorical grant program, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, as the Act was known, emerged as a first tentative step toward New Federalism and revenue sharing, a block grant program which transferred funds to the states which in turn would be responsible for planning for their use and distributing them. Although it did not begin as a "bold new experiment" in federal-state relations, the Safe Streets Act ended as one.25 As finally enacted, Title I of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act contained five major provisions: 1. Administration: Established a Law Enforcement Administration (LEAA) within the Department of Justice, headed by a "troika," bipartisan in nature, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. (The "troika" provision was later replaced with a single administrator and two deputies.) 2. Planning: Provided for grants to cover up to 90 percent of the total cost of operating state planning agencies (SPAs) designated by the governor to develop comprehensive criminal justice plans. Each state was to be allocated an initial amount of $ 100,000, with additional funds distributed on a population basis. Forty percent of these funds were to be made available to local jurisdictions. 3. Action Grants: Action grant funds were to be made available to the states. Eighty-five percent of them were to be distributed according to population as block grants and 15 percent were to be distributed at the discretion of

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LEAA. Seventy-five percent of the block grant funds were to be passed through to local governments. These funds would cover up to 75 percent of the cost of organized crime and riot control projects, 50 percent for construction projects, and 60 percent for other action projects. Personnel compensation was limited to no more than one-third of any action grant. 4. Training, Education, and Research: Established within LEAA a National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, which was charged with administering research, demonstration programs, and training efforts. Funds were also provided for loans and grants for criminal justice educational assistance. 5. Funding: Authorized approximately $ 100 million for FY 1969 and $300 million for FY 1970 for support of the above provisions. (This amount reached a high of $1.75 billion in FY 1973.)

The strategy of the Safe Streets approach to the crime problem is embodied in the first three of these provisions. Those provisions embody a middle ground between a Great Society categorical grant formula on the one hand and revenue sharing or outright abandonment of federal responsibility on the other. In political terms the Act was a significant victory for critics of the Great Society; however, in terms of its implementation the middle ground was and has continued to be a source of significant problems. Congress was not able to formulate a clear vision of what to do about the crime problem. The legislative history of the Safe Streets Act shows considerable vacillation and uncertainty about proper responses to that problem. That history reveals the difficulties of the Great Society coalition in coming to terms with the social issues of the late 1960s. What Congress did agree to was a formula for making federal funds available to state and local governments for use in dealing with crime, a procedure for passing out federal funds in which the states would exercise the leading role in defining both the nature of the crime problem and appropriate responses subject to a structure of federal supervision. The structured supervision was designed to ensure that the legislative purposes of relying upon the states to ensure coordination and planning were achieved. The Safe Streets Act embodied a procedure for distributing federal funds rather than a coherent definition of and attack upon the crime problem. The triumph of process over policy in the Act is nicely evidenced in an assertion attributed to Senator Roman Hruska (R-Nebraska), the chief sponsor of the version of the bill which was eventually adopted."All the national Law Enforcement Assistance Administration

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Office needs," he is reported to have said, "is a secretary and a checkwriting machine." National crime policy in this view is nothing more than a formula for distributing funds, process without substance.26 This perspective was not unique to Senator Hruska. Rather, it was an attitude that characterized a good portion of the debate in Congress and within the Administration. The central question of that debate was "who would dispense funds and who would be eligible to obtain them?" The Great Society coalition pressed for a formula that would channel funds to its supporters in central cities, while the reemerging conservative coalition, united in its desire to derail Great Society programs, sought to divert funds to groups more supportive of their efforts by using a state-based distribution structure. The latter position won the day, due in some part to the quiescence of the Administration's stalwarts who feared the chaos that would be created if thousands of groups were to participate in the development of policy and be eligible to apply directly to Washington for funds. Thus, despite heated controversy and extended debate over the Act, never was there any sustained consideration of the substance of a national crime policy. Never was purpose taken seriously.27 The legislative history of the Safe Streets Act is, above all, a history of compromise. Beginning in the mode of previous grant-in-aid programs in which federal bureaucracy would play the leading role in administering the distribution of federal funds, what emerged was a block grant approach in which the states would play a leading role in a partnership with the federal government. This approach represented a rejection of the Great Society style of dealing with domestic problems and an experiment in devising administrative forms through which the initiation of a federal crime policy could be reconciled with the precise details of the crime problem at the state and local levels. The distinguishing features of a block grant program are that: A block grant authorizes federal aid for a wide range of activities within a broad functional area; Recipients are given substantial discretion in identifying problems and designing programs to deal with them; Administrative . . . requirements are geared to keeping grantor intrusiveness at a minimum while recognizing the need to ensure that national goals are accomplished; Grants are distributed on the basis of a statutory formula which narrows gran tor discretion and provides some sense of fiscal certainty for grantees; and

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Eligibility provisions are fairly specific and tend to favor general purpose • *7ft government units.

The possibilities and problems of the block grant vehicle seem best summarized in the third of these elements. This vehicle expands the range of interests which will play a part in defining the substance of a federal program. This multiplication of interests makes possible the inclusion of a wide range of perspectives and competencies in the pro cesses through which such a program is given life. Yet it also provides the opportunity, as Pressman and Wildavsky suggest, for the continuation of political contest and for the development of an elaborate sys tem of multiple vetoes so that no exercise of authority from any source is likely to be definitive. The block grant vehicle was a logical outgrowth of the inability or unwillingness of Congress to make choice as to what approaches would be taken in coping with crime. Through it the Congress delegated its authority broadly. ADMINISTERING THE SAFE STREETS ACT AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL The Safe Streets Act created or invited the creation of new administrative structures at both the national and the state levels. These structures were charged with implementing the block grant provisions of the Act and establishing the substance of a national strategy for coping with crime. At the national level, the Act established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration which had three primary functions: (1) to oversee the distribution and expenditure of the planning funds and action grants to the states; (2) to sponsor research and demonstration projects under the auspices of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (NILECJ);and (3) to provide technical assistance to the states. Administering the Block Grants. As a condition of receiving federal funds, the Act required that states designate or establish state planning agencies which would develop comprehensive plans for the expenditure of those funds. In most states no such agency was in existence in 1968. If there was a bias in the 1968 Act, it is fair to say that it was a tilt in favor of independence for the states. Crime fighting experience wa

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after all, greatest at the state and local levels and, even more importantly, Congress did not trust Attorney General Ramsey Clark to develop and carry out an effective anticrime strategy. The administrative structure at the national level was explicitly designed to prevent the attorney general from controlling LEAA or the administration of the block grant program. Although LEAA was located within the Justice Department, it was to be headed by a bipartisan "troika" appointed by the president subject to senatorial confirmation. The troika, composed of the administrator and two associates, was empowered by the Act to provide direction to LEAA, but the Act did not differentiate among the administrator and his associates, nor did it specify how divisions would be made. From its origins, however, it was widely accepted that major policy and personnel decisions would be made only when there was unanimity among the members of the troika. In its earliest years, LEAA was hamstrung by this peculiar administrative arrangement. What Congress had done was to provide for a national administrative role, but structured it in such a way as to ensure that an important and intrusive federal role would have difficulty developing.29 The 1968 Act provided for two types of grants to the states, planning grants and action grants. Planning grants would cover 90 percent of the total cost of the state planning agencies responsible for the preparation of state comprehensive plans. Each SPA was allocated a minimum of $100,000 for planning purposes, with the remainder of the planning funds distributed to the states on a population basis. Action grants were intended to cover the cost of projects funded pursuant to the development of these plans. The Act provided for varying combinations of federal contributions to different kinds of projects (for example, it provided that federal funds could pay 75 percent of the total cost of organized crime or riot control projects, but only 50 percent of the cost of construction projects).30 In order for any state to be eligible to receive action grants, it would have to prepare, on an annual basis, a comprehensive plan for the expenditure of those funds and submit that plan to LEAA for its approval. LEAA could withhold funds if the plan that was submitted did not meet its understanding of the Act's mandate that states engage in comprehensive criminal justice planning, although LEAA had no explicit veto power over projects within that plan. In order to carry out this review and approval function, LEAA un-

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dertook to formulate a set of Guidelines in which it defined what it would consider an acceptable comprehensive plan. From the beginning LEAA's real power over state efforts under the Safe Streets Act was in the promulgation of such Guidelines. And from the beginning these Guidelines have been the subject of hostility from administrators at the state level. The first Guidelines were issued in August 1968 and were both detailed and inclusive. Indeed, the first Guidelines included several provisions and requirements that clearly went beyond what the Act itself required. The Guidelines stated, for example, that state agencies responsible for planning had to be located in the executive branch of state government, had to have a supervisory board to oversee and approve the preparation of the state plan, and had to have a full-time administrator and staff, while the Act only required that the recipient agencies be designated by the governor and that they be "representative" of the state's law enforcement agencies and local units of government.31 With respect to the actual state plan, the Guidelines required that they begin with a description of existing law enforcement capabilities and available resources, as well as a diagnosis of the crime problem in each state. Furthermore, LEAA identified a number of discrete functions which had to be addressed (for example, upgrading personnel, prevention and control of riots, and improvement of the capability for detecting and apprehending criminals) if the plan was to meet minimal conditions of "comprehensiveness." The promulgation of the Guidelines has from the beginning embodied what might be called a "national perspective" on crime-fighting strategy under the Safe Streets Act. That perspective emphasizes that the crime problem requires two central responses. The first response is comprehensiveness and coordination of efforts. The second respons is the development of genuinely new ideas for improving law enforcement and criminal justice procedures. The Guidelines have allowed national LEAA officials to keep the pressure on the states to use Saf Streets funds to think broadly and to try new approaches.32 They have been the key vehicle through which the national-level administration has articulated its understanding of what a national crime program carried out through a block grant should look like. Yet the Guidelines are a limited vehicle for ensuring that the vision prevails. They are, in essence, a recipe for a compliance document, not an integrated statement of crime policy reinforced with a voice of authority. They are and have been more a laundry list than a theory of crime

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and crime reduction. The more that they include as requirements, the easier for states to comply. Their very breadth has left the states with considerable discretion and liberty in describing projects that could meet the guideline requirements. The Discretionary Grant Program. The Safe Streets Act of 1968 provided that LEAA retain 15 percent of all action grant funds and develop its own discretionary grant program. The purpose of this provision was to allow LEAA to "encourage innovative projects, to establish na tional priorities, to correct imbalances in state programs and simply to fund projects that fall outside a given state's planning priorities."33 Before they were abolished by order of Attorney General Griffin Bell in 1978, LEAA's regional offices (varying in number through that period from seven to ten) administered these discretionary grant programs. These offices received and processed requests for discretionary grants, although responsibility for direction of the program lay in Washington. The central feature of the discretionary grant program and more generally of the administrative structure of all of LEAA throughout the period 1968-78 was its fluidity and its volatility. Offices, divisions, and centers were created, consolidated, and abolished frequently, sometimes in response to congressional amendments to the original Act, sometimes in response to congressional pressure, and sometimes in response to shifting administrative priorities. But the real fluidity of LEAA can be seen most dramatically in the frequency of changes in its top leadership. Five individuals served as administrator of LEAA during the first seven years of its existence, and there was no permanent administrator from 1976 to 1979, during which time the Carter Administration considered its own ideas for reorganizing the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The effect of this instability is reflected most clearly in the administration of discretionary funds. Under Jerris Leonard, who became administrator in 1971, discretionary funds were used in an attempt to demonstrate the impact of concentrated efforts in particular geographic areas. The major initiative undertaken was the Impact Cities Program, in which federal funds were channeled into eight major cities in an effort to demonstrate the effectiveness of crime-specific planning in reducing local crime rates. Donald Santerelli, Leonard's successor appointed in 1973, shifted the emphasis in discretionary funding to four major initiatives, in the areas of citizen awareness and participation, court improvement, ju-

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venile delinquency, and the dissemination of criminal justice standards and goals. With each new administrator came new priorities for discretionary funds, priorities which did not cumulate. Although discretionary funds have been used to support some valuable programs, no truly national approach to crime has ever been developed. Further, discretionary funds have frequently been used to support state projects that could not or would not have received funding at the state level. At times the result has been to undermine the authority of those state agencies responsible for planning and administering block grant funds, and to further squander the potential authority of a national program designed to foster improvements among a group of reluctant states.34 The National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. The third major responsibility of LEAA is the operation of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. That Institute was charged by the 1968 Act "to encourage research and development and to improve and strengthen law enforcement" by making grants for research and undertaking its own research. In theory the Institute was to play a leading role in the development of new understandings of and approaches to the problem of crime. The inability or unwillingness of Congress to provide such understandings or to define such approaches, however, posed special problems for the Institute. In theory, Institute-sponsored research would play an important role in the granting and planning activities carried out with block grant funds. There is no evidence, however, that this has been the case.35 Instead, the Institute has, at least until recently, operated without a clear and comprehensive vision of the role of research in dealing with crime. Its priorities have been as varied as those of the discretionary grant program. Its greatest successes have been in the development of hardware and equipment, and its funding decisions have also been easily influenced by political pressure. Recent reforms have altered some of these conditions, but the problem of articulating the relationship between research and the rest of the Safe Streets program remains.36 These three functions of LEAA—administering the planning and ac tion grant funds passed on to the states, developing the discretionary grant program, and fostering research through a newly created National I nstitute—are only a portion of the activities generated under the

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Safe Streets Act. None of them can be fully understood in the absence of the other major provisions of the Act, which required the creation of a new set of state agencies, state planning agencies, to receive and administer the planning and action grant funds provided for by the Act. Before turning to consider the tensions this arrangement has caused, we must first outline the basic structure and functions of these new agencies. ADMINISTERING THE SAFE STREETS ACT AT THE STATE LEVEL The Safe Streets Act differs markedly from the many grants-in-aid programs of the Great Society that preceded it. It also differs from other block grants that shortly followed it. Not only did it involve the national government in the area of law enforcement and criminal jus tice on a massive scale for the first time, it required that new state administrative structures be created to receive and administer the federal funds. It not only sought to combat crime with money, it sought to create a new and more effective statewide organization capable of taking a comprehensive view of the problem of crime and developing an appropriately broad plan to combat it. The effort to create an entirely new and unprecedented organization in state government—known generically as state planning agencies—may in fact be the most fundamental innovation to derive from the Act. State Planning Agencies. If there is any single idea that characterized the approach of the Safe Streets Act to the crime problem, it is embodied in the phrase "comprehensive planning." What the authors of the Act believed was that the effectiveness of government responses to crime was hampered significantly by the lack of coordination among the various agencies responsible for law enforcement and the administration of criminal justice. In order to cope with that problem and en sure the most effective use of federal funds, the Act required that each state planning agency produce an annual comprehensive plan. The Act assigned responsibility for this product to a statewide organization in the belief that only a state administrative unit was both large enough to encompass the full range of crime problems and law enforcement agencies and yet close enough to the local level to be responsive to the particular shape of local crime problems. To this end, the Act required

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that the governor of each state designate an executive-level agency to carry out the planning function and to administer each state's share of federal block grant funds. It provided "planning grant" funds to support the operations of these new agencies. Those agencies provide, in effect, state-level counterparts to LEAA. Although the precise configuration of each SPA varies in detail, most operate under the direct control of the governor.37 The interest and involvement of the governor is, however, highly variable. In some states the governor has used the SPA to try to support his or her own priorities in the area of law enforcement and criminal justice. In others the involvement of the governor has been sporadic and most often exercised in support of specific projects. In almost every state the influence of the governor has been most clearly felt in the appointment of the chief administrator of the state planning agency and the members of its supervisory board. State planning agencies were charged by the Safe Streets Act and by LEAA Guidelines with the following functions: A. Preparation, development and revision of comprehensive plans based on an analysis of law enforcement and criminal justice problems within the State; B. Definition, development and correlation of action programs under such plans; C. Establishment of priorities for law enforcement and criminal justice improvement in the State; D. Providing information to prospective aid recipients on procedures for grant application; E. Encouraging grant proposals from local units of government for law enforcement and criminal justice planning and improvement efforts; F. Encouraging project proposals from state law enforcement and criminal justice agencies; G. Taking action within 90 days after official receipt of local applications for aid and awarding of funds to local units of government; H. Monitoring progress and expenditures under grants to state law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, local units of government,and other recipients of LEAA grant funds; I. Encouraging regional, local and metropolitan area planning efforts, agency projects and cooperative arrangements. J. Coordination of the state's law enforcement, criminal and juvenile justice plan, with other federally supported programs relating to or having an impact on law enforcement and criminal justice; K. Oversight and evaluation of the total state effort in plan implementation and law enforcement and criminal justice improvements;

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L. Provide technical assistance for programs and projects contemplated by the state plan and by units of general local government; M. Collecting statistics and other data relevant to law enforcement and criminal justice in the state and in state criminal justice planning management, and evaluation purposes, as required by the administration.38

Responsibility for carrying out these functions is shared between a supervisory board and a full-time professional staff. The supervisory board has general policymaking authority and possesses final responsibility for the content of the state plan. The Act requires that the board include representatives of law enforcement and criminal justice agencies and local government units. LEAA Guidelines specify eight "interests" that must be represented, including elected local government officials, each major law enforcement agency, and citizens.39 In most states the governor makes these appointments. There are two important points to be made about SPA supervisory boards. First, their involvement in the actual details of planning and granting varies considerably from state to state. In some states they routinely rubber-stamp plans that are presented to them. In others they play a veto role, simply checking to ensure that the plan takes care of each of the interests represented on the board. In still others the board is quite active in fashioning priorities and developing the state plan. This varying pattern of activity is especially significant in light of a second point about SPA boards. Those boards provide the fulcrum for the politics of distributing federal block grant funds. To some extent they act as minilegislatures. Like Congress itself, few have developed a coherent state-based crime policy. In most cases their "legislative" role has taken on the appearance of logrolling, in which each interest gets a share of the relatively small pot of federal funds made available to each state. The presence of such boards and their essentially political orientation ensures that the administration of the Safe Streets Act at the state level is continuously under pressure to distribute funds to satisfy interests in law enforcement rather than to develop coherent policy. Policy is ineffective because policy is absent. The day-to-day administrative responsibilities, including responsibilities for preparation of the annual plan, rest with professional staffs in each state. Although again the pattern varies, SPA staffs have typically had very high rates of turnover. The average tenure of SPA di-

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rectors is approximately two years.40 In the early years of the Safe Streets program much of the SPA staff was recruited from on-line law enforcement agencies. However, with the development of criminal justice programs in many universities, an increasing proportion of the staff has specialized training in criminal justice planning. State planning agency staff operations are typically divided into at least three areas. First, there are criminal justice planners. These people are responsible for preparing the plan and receiving and processing grant applications. They are typically organized in such a way that there is a planner for each major law enforcement function, that is, there is typically a police planner, a corrections planner, etc. Th is organization suggests that in most states comprehensive planning is seen as the additive result of planning for each separate function. A second area of SPA operations is in grant management and audit. Finally, some state planning agencies have special sections devoted to and responsible for evaluating their projects. As in the area of planning, there have been difficulties in recruiting trained evaluation staff. In addition, there has been in many states little attention to defining the mission of the evaluation staff or to ensuring some minimal level of coordination between planning and granting decisions and evaluation results. Regional Planning Units. Although the Safe Streets Act required that planning be a state-level responsibility, it also mandated that local units of government participate in that activity. In implementing this requirement, LEAA Guidelines have encouraged the development within states of regional planning units, units covering a number of local jurisdictions. The responsibilities and structures of RPUs roughly parallel those of SPAs, except that they are more localized.41 In most states RPUs prepare regional plans and review grant applications prior to their submission to the state planning agency. The division of responsibility and effective authority between regional planning units and state planning agencies varies from state to state. In some states the state plan is nothing more than an amalgam of the plans of the various RPUs; in others RPU recommendations about particular projects are influential; in still others the RPUs play no effective role in either planning or granting decisions.

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ADMINISTRATIVE COMPLEXITY AND THE POLICY DILEMMA The block grant structure through which the Safe Streets Act is implemented is unusually complex. The legislation requires that the implementation process involve federal, state, and local authorities and creates a multiplicity of bureaucratic structures with overlapping responsibilities. Decisions made at any one level are subject to review and nullification at others. The decision-making process is itself open and fluid, so that there is little chance for closure and finality in the development of plans or the development of funding priorities.42 Further, there is and has been no separation within the implementation process of planning and granting responsibilities. At all levels, this has generated tremendous pressure to use planning only to service the distribution of funds, with the result being a minimal satisfaction of the planning requirements. The block grant approach to the crime problem requires this administrative dualism; it does so because it requires interaction, coordination, and exchange of information between grantor and grantee. This administrative dualism institutionalizes conflict; it ensures that the question of how much freedom grant recipients will have in the expenditure of funds is a continuing one. The block grant strategy contributes to the policy dilemma by dividing authority and diffusing responsibility. It compounds the problem of excess delegation identified by Low! by multiplying recipients of that delegated authority. As such, it ensures that the energy of officials in the policy delivery sys tem will be absorbed in an ongoing quest to win greater authority to define goals and to select programs. It keeps alive the struggle for purpose that was not initially resolved in the legislation. Finally, by dividing administrative responsibility between and among different "arenas of power," the block grant establishes different constituencies and different audiences for each of its administrative components, thus further frustrating authoritative planning. In fairness, however, we should emphasize that the Safe Streets Act did not simply provide new funds or a new program in an ongoing bureaucratic structure. Rather, it created entirely new agencies and procedures, and in the process generated new organizations and new coalitions to implement its objectives. The history of its first ten years, in its full picture, is a history of bureaucratic start-up. Even if the Act

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had contained a clear idea of how to deal with the crime problem, it is unlikely that it could have been fully realized at the same time that that start-up was taking place. The policy dilemma is geometrically compounded when new structures have to be established and new political relationships developed. It is further complicated when those structures and relationships are as complex as those we have described. Much of the energy of the first ten years of the Safe Streets Act has been absorbed in trying to establish these new structures and relationships. The result has not been to alleviate the policy dilemma. Instead, as those structures and relationships have become more regularized, the inability to provide substance to federal crime policy is now clearly recognizable. Participation rather than purpose, distribution rather than reform, have becomethe bureaucratic routines in which these new structures administer the provisions of the Safe Streets Act. The block grant nature of federal involvement assures that process will predominate over policy on a continuing and permanent basis, not just during the early period of start-up. Yet even the establishment of these troublesome structures and relationships has been confounded by frequent changes in emphasis and direction carried out through amendments to the original Act. Amendments enacted in 1971, 1973, 1974, and 1976 have served to keep the issues of structure and political relationships alive, and to perpetuate a continuing but unfulfilled quest for "mission." The general direction of those amendments has been to narrow the flexibility of the block grant approach by adding specific requirements to the formula and process through which funds are distributed. Those amendments have been enacted serially in reaction to the complaints of interests at the state and local level that they have been excluded or ignored in the distribution of federal funds. Through the amendments Congress has acted to provide a fair share for interests or purposes unable to win such a share through the state planning process. In 1971 the first set of amendments added what were called Part E funds to the original Act. This section provided funds for the acquisition, construction, and renovation of correctional institutions, paying up to 75 percent of the cost of such projects. Another provision earmarked 25 percent of all action grant funds for corrections programs. Another amendment required states to set aside funds for major cities and counties which wanted to engage in their own criminal justice planning activities, thereby strengthening the positions of the RPUs.

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The amendments of 1973 disbanded the cumbersome troika, lodging policy and administrative responsibility in a single administrator. Other provisions broadened representation on SPA and RPU supervisory boards to include representatives of citizen, professional, and community organizations, and required that RPU boards include a majority of locally elected officials. Most importantly, the 1973 amendments required the states to provide for the evaluation of projects supported with federal funds, and gave the National Institute an expanded role in conducting evaluation research and disseminating the results of that research. The 1974 amendments created the Office of J uvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in LEAA, required state planning agencies to develop a parallel structure to deal with juvenile justice and delinquency, and earmarked funds specifically for programs aimed at juvenile justice and delinquency prevention. In 1976 Congress amended the Act, this time earmarkingfundsfor courts and court improvement projects. Each of the amendments has added new responsibilities to LEAA and the SPAs, and each of them has broadened the sphere of participation for law enforcement and criminal justice agencies. Some of them have also rearranged the formula for distributing block grant funds or earmarked categories for special consideration. However, none of the amendments nor all of them taken together has establishe a clear congressional expression of how crime should be dealt with or of what would constitute improvement of law enforcement capabilities. If anything, they reinforced the dominance of process by institutionalizing a formula basis for the distribution of funds. In late 1977 and early 1978, anticipating the reauthorization of LEAA during 1979, the Carter Administration proposed basic change in the administrative structure created by the Safe Streets Act. Among the most important of those proposed changes was the establishment of a new national-level agency entitled the Office of Justice Assistance, Research and Statistics. This office was to be an umbrella agency containing within it three separate structures. The first of these would be a successor to the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, with a broadened mandate for justice-related research. The second, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, would be responsible for collection and dissemination of statistical information on the justice system. The third of these structures would be LEAA, which would retain responsibility for administering block grant funds. Within the

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block grant program two key changes would be made: first, the planning cycle would be altered so that states would have to submit comprehensive plans every three years instead of every year; and second, funds for planning and for action grants would be merged so that each state could determine for itself how much it wished to allocate to each.43 None of these proposals represents a fundamental departure from the strategy of the Safe Streets Act. They would again lead to the creation of new structures and new political relationships in the implementation process, and while they simplify the administration of the block grant process, they do not provide any new directions to a national crime policy. CONCLUSIONS The Safe Streets Act was a product of a political atmosphere in which the Great Society coalition was in decline and in which no single political vision had arisen to replace it. It was at once bold and yet continuous with other federal policies; its boldness was in the creation of an entirely new administrative structure to carry out a new national program; its continuity lay in its reliance on the distribution of federal funds as a response to a social problem. While the Act and its subsequent amendments established broad goals for the implementation process, those goals did not rest on a clear vision, nor specify what types of efforts should be supported. They did, however, establish procedures for going about making such determinations. In this sense the operating goals of the Act are formal rather than substantive. In the chapters that follow we examine LEAA's major mandates and describe the problems that have been encountered in trying to achieve them. In each we analyze how the implementation of the Safe Streets Act has been shaped by the policy dilemma—by too little clarity of purpose, by too much emphasis on political contest, by too little effective authority, and by conceptual confusion and bureaucratic inefficiency.

3 Thinking about Crime: Comprehensive Planning and the Ideal of Rationality

If, as we have argued, the policy dilemma in American politics centers on the lack of congruence between public demand for government services and the structural and ideological capacity to provide them, nowhere is that dilemma so well illustrated as in the Safe Streets Act's requirement to plan. Even as the Act mandated the creation of state and regional agencies for the purpose of developing comprehensive plans, it created a structure that was incapable of meaningfully carrying out this function. To be successful, planning and planned intervention in complex systems require several distinct stages: (1)the construction of a map or model of the system, detailing the interconnections among separate elements and the shortcomings and needs of each; (2) the ability to select the most efficient policies for overcoming these deficiencies and attaining the objectives of the plan; (3) the ability to mobilize resources for implementing these policies; and (4) the authority to oversee the application of these resources to the identified tasks.1 The Safe Streets Act requires that the state planning agencies engage in all of these stages of the planning/policymaking process. At one end of this sequence they are charged with the responsibility of constructing a map of the criminal justice system as a first step toward coordinating a jumble of separate and autonomous criminal justice agencies. At the other end, they are charged with translating this plan into action, creating what could truly be called a criminal justice svs62

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tern. The SPAs were not only invested with the power to think about and analyze future needs; they were also expected to act and spend. The politicsof planning requires that if plans are to be implemented, officials must possess both authority and liquid resources. LEAA's policy dilemma is that the SPAs possess neither. To be effective, planners must not only have vision, they must have the capacity to speak and act authoritatively. Their diagnoses and goals must be accepted a legitimate by those who will be affected by them. Despite this need, the SPAs have remained weak adjuncts to the larger and much more powerful state and local criminal justice agencies. They remain, at best, precarious appendages to these agencies, and are tolerated only because they hold the strings to small but attractive purses. In short, they are barely audible, far from firm and authoritative voices. To be effective, officials must also have resources at their disposal which can be allocated to effect their plans. Although the Act calls for SPAs to administer federal funds to support the plans, the SPAs quickly became capitves of the existing agencies, in part because the money under their control constitutes only a small fraction of all criminal justice funds (no more than 3-5 percent of an agency's operating budget). It is a case of the proverbial tail trying to wag the dog. Even the liquidity of these funds was quickly reduced; multiyear projects committed substantial portions of these funds in advance, re ducing still further an already weak power. These, of course, are not unique problems in the policy planning and policymaking process. They are standard problems of all social planning and intervention efforts, where means often become ends in themselves. In his classic study, TV A and the Grass Roots, Philip Selznick examined these problems at length.2 TVA officials, he found, made a conscious effort to coopt potential opponents by offering them benefits, but in so doing significantly altered their original objectives. In the case of the Safe Streets Act, this process was carried to an extreme. I n order to survive, SPAs became subservient to entrenched and politically powerful criminal justice agencies. In order to give the appearance of speaking with authority and developing acceptable plans they had to plan for and fund projects agreeable to these interests. Implicit in the Safe Streets Act is the belief that the central problems of the criminal justice system are the lack of coordination and the limited perspectives of its individual components. Yet the SPAs were only able to establish themselves by, in effect, accepting a role

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which did not challenge these agencies. In short, their public appearance of leadership and authority depends upon their abilities to anticipate the interests of the existing agencies and develop programs consistent with them. Our perspective on the SPA planning function differs significantly from other recent efforts to understand the problems of LEAA. Some have suggested that the root of those problems is found in the failure of public programs to anticipate the complications of implementation, and that greater attention to detail and political context might make a difference. This is the general theme developed by Pressman and Wildavsky which we examined in Chapter 1. While it contains considerable truth, this explanation is incomplete as it applies to LEAA. Others have argued that the SPA planning efforts have failed because "Washington" (meaning the LEAA national office and Congress) has bogged state officials down in a sea of red tape. A cursory examina tion of LEAA Guidelines and congressional amendments imposed on the SPAs seems to confirm this position, although, as we will show, these factors are in fact efforts to rescue the faltering SPAs rather than causes of the faltering. More generally, we believe that the failings of the planning process are instances of what we have termed the policy dilemma: dramatic increases in the demands on government which are not coupled with authority commensurate for the task. It is, as we have suggested, a failing of concept and political theory, not simply administration.3 This problem as to purpose and function was clearly demonstrated in interviews with SPA and RPU officials, who, despite the common label "planners," demonstrated no common understanding as to the nature of planning. We found that they held quite different conceptions of their goals and objectives, and were engaged in widely varying tasks. As this chapter unfolds, it will, we hope, suggest that the failure of comprehensive planning under LEAA is not the fault of untrained or incompetent personnel, but more fundamentally it is a failure of vision. The result has been institutionalized incoherence.

PLANNING AND THE SAFE STREETS ACT If the Safe Streets Act is emphatic about anything, it is planning. Part A of Title II of the Act conditions the state receipt of federal funds upon the creation of a state planning agency and specifies that

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its primary purpose is to generate a plan for spending the federal "action grant" funds allocated under Part B of the same title. Not only are the SPAs charged with the responsibility of planning for the expenditure of the Part B action grant funds, they are mandated to develop ''comprehensive plans for improvement in the criminal justice system as a whole." The 1968 Act charges this task directly, and as amended over the years this mandate has been reinforced and expanded. The relevant portions of the Act as amended in 1973 read as follows: Sec. 203. The state shall(1) develop, after appropriate hearings and consultation with elected representatives of units of general local government, representatives of law enforcement agencies, and of public agencies maintaining programs to reduce and control crime and delinquency, a comprehensive statewide plan for the reduction and prevention of crime and delinquency; (2) define, develop, and correlate programs and projects for the State and the units of general local government in the State or combinations of States or units for the reduction and prevention of crime and delinquency; (3) establish priorities for the reduction and prevention of crime and delinquency throughout the State; (4) adopt measures designed to bring to the attention of the citizens of the State the contents of the comprehensive statewide plan and any substantial modification thereof immediately following the adoption of such plan or any such modification by the State; (5) provide for the expenditure of amounts received under special revenue sharing in accordance with the laws and procedures applicable to the expenditure of its own revenues; (6) adequately take into account the plans, needs and requests of the units of general government in the State and encourage local initiative and interlocal cooperation in the development of programs and projects for the reduction and prevention of crime and delinquency, and provide for an appropriately balanced allocation of funds between the State and the units of general local government in the State and among such units provide in the plan for the allocation of an adequate share of assistance for law enforcement problems in areas characterized by both high crime incidence and high law enforcement activity. Not only does the language of the Act clearly require planning but all of the administrators of LEAA have taken the charge to plan comprehensively seriously and have insisted that the state's planning documents be detailed and comprehensive. To this end LEAA has prepared an extensive set of Guidelines detailing its expectations for the state plan, issued a steady stream of pronouncements and orders in an

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effort to clarify, define, and determine the elements of successful comprehensive planning, held numerous conferences to elaborate on these themes, established an elaborate process of review prior to the acceptance of the state plans, and mounted a number of publicity campaigns to encourage SPAs in this task. These admonitions have not been lost on the SPAs, nor could they easily be. The weight of the Guidelines document itself is heavy enough that few would forget it, long enough to require considerable time to read, and detailed enough to require close attention. The first such Guidelines were around 100 pages, and through the years they have doubled in length. For instance, the 1975 Guidelines were over 200 pages and devoted two full pages to a formal definition of comprehensiveness. This emphasis on comprehensive planning has in effect generated a minitheory of the problems of the criminal justice system. This theory and LEAA's proposed solution are captured in the frequent reference to such terms as "system," "integrated analysis," "coordination, cooperation and combination of efforts," and "long-range." Comprehensive planning, in this view, is an effort to overcome the soluble problems of the criminal justice system, problems which are caused largely by a lack of coordination and by the criminal justice system's inability to function as an integrated unit.4 The requirement of comprehensive planning is, itself, an attempt to reform the way in which criminal justice practitioners think about their work and the problems of crime. By bringing the concerns of the hitherto separate agencies under one roof and tackling the problem of crime and its control with a single concerted effort, many of the problems of the administration of criminal justice should, this position maintains, be reduced. Comprehensive planning is a first step in this direction. SETTING THE CONTEXT FOR SPA PLANNING Because LEAA officials take the requirements of comprehensive planning seriously, so too must the SPAs.5 Considerable time and effort goes into the production of the annual plans, whose length at times has exceeded 1,000 pages. Generally, however, they are documents between 200 and 300 pages. Prepared annually by each state's SPA internal planning staff and approved by the SPA's supervisory board, they have, until recently, had to be approved by LEAA offi-

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cials in a network of regional offices in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle.6 Although LEAA has the power to disapprove the SPA plans and withhold transfer of the Action Grant funds, no funds have ever been permanently withheld. Until they were abolished in 1977, LEAA's regional offices did frequently place "special conditions" on annual plans, which in turn forced SPAs to spend considerable time and energy rewriting them. There are a variety of reasons LEAA gave for these "special conditions." The most typical was that the plan did not address all the problem areas specified in the Guidelines. Another was that the plan did not adequately document the need for a certain program area or project. Both these reasons are frustrating to SPA officials, who point out that the Guidelines contain long catalogs of program areas, so that almost any plan will of necessity be unable to address every single issue specified in the Guidelines. In their effort to be exhaustive, the Guidelines must be vague, which means, SPA officials complain, that it is easy for LEAA officials to show that any plan is lacking in one way or another. These same officials resent the requirements for documentation. What constitutes "adequate documentation" of needs, they point out, is subjective. Furthermore, they continue, most state and local criminal justice agencies have inadequate or nonexistent recordkeeping capabilities, so that the production of even the simplest bit of information that LEAA insists on often involves painstaking and time-consuming effort. The result, they argue, is that they have to spend inordinate amounts of time documenting the obvious in order to satisfy the whims of officials in remote offices. Finally, SPA officials complain, LEAA Guidelines are revised so frequently and are often received so late in the year that SPAs often have no up-to-date set of Guidelines when they begin to prepare their annual plans. Many special conditions arise simply because the SPAs have not met conditions they had not known about when they were preparing their plans. Another major complication in the planning process involves the structure of state government. Under the Safe Streets Act, the SPAs are responsible for submitting the annual state plan to LEAA. Yet the Act also authorizes local and regional units of government to create regional planning units, and specifies that 40 percent of all Part B ac-

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tion grant funds must be passed through and spent at the local level, and that RPUs as well must develop comprehensive plans. Designed primarily to assure that funds are distributed throughout a state, and that high-crime urban areas receive substantial portions of the funds, these provisions have created tensions within most states, since the RPUs are charged with many of the same functions as SPAs and often claim that they have the "right" to plan for and control the expenditure of at least a share of the Part B funds. State responses to the requirement to establish RPUs and pass through funds vary widely.7 Some states have relatively weak and ineffectual RPUs, whose primary function is to help local law enforcement and criminal justice officials prepare grant applications to be submitted to the SPA. Other states have relatively small SPA staffs and large RPUs. In such cases the annual state plans are often little more than collations of the separate RPU plans. It is difficult to generalize about the relative positions of these two entities because they are often unstable and are constantly changing as a result of shifts in SPA leadership and turnover in the govenor's office. The division of responsibility between SPA and RPU planning functions is largely a function of the organization of the state's criminal justice agencies. If the corrections function, for example, is administered at the local level, then the RPUs are likely to occupy a larger role in planning for correctional programs than if correction is administered by a centralized statewide department. In each state the functions of various criminal justice agencies are organized differently— there may be a central judicial department or corrections department but a highly decentralized system of law enforcement, or a formally centralized agency may be decentralized informally—and the division between SPA and RPU planning functions reflects these realities. Similarly, the size and geography of the state are important. Generally, if a state is relatively small in terms of both population and size (e.g., New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island), or dominated by one large metropolitan area (e.g., Massachusetts, Minnesota), it is likely to have a strong SPA and relatively weak RPUs. If it is large or comprises distinct regions, it is likely to have stronger RPUs and relatively weaker SPAs (e.g., Pennsylvania, New York, California). Still, however organized, it is the SPA and not the RPUs which are ultimately responsible for submitting the annual state plans, and even in states where the SPA acts as little more than a conduit to pass through fed-

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eral funds to the RPUs (e.g., probably the clearest example of this is New York State's relationship with New York City's Council on Criminal Justice), it exercises considerable power in shaping the types of plans and projects the RPUs can consider. In these states, the SPA is in much the same relation to the RPUs as it in turn is in relation to the LEAA regional offices. Its powers are primarily negative; it can refuse to accept the RPU plans until they conform to its expectations. In theory, the primary function of the SPAs is to engage in comprehensive planning for the purpose of improving the operations and effectiveness of the criminal justice system. In practice, few would claim that the SPAs are engaged in effective planning or even planning of any sort. Frustrated by the conditions enumerated above and supervised by a board of powerful public officials, SPA staffs are often said to do little more than divide a federal pie according to fixed formula in rough proportion to the power of those agencies represented on their supervisory boards. It is for such reasons that many SPA officials—the vast majority we interviewed—regarded their annual plan as little more than a compliance document, prepared to satisfy the requirements of the Safe Streets Act and LEAA rather than containing a real vision of the state of affairs and needs of the state's agencies. This impression is not unique to us; it is shared by many others who have also observed the operations of the SPAs and LEAA. A recent report by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) places the blame for the problems of SPA planning squarely on LEAA itself, claiming that "LEAA has been unwilling or unable to establish meaningful criteria against which to determine and enforce state planning comprehensiveness and SPA effectiveness."8 A task force report prepared by the Twentieth Century Fund concluded that the Guidelines LEAA has forced on the SPAs are "so complex and fluid that, instead of streamlining the planning process, they have reduced it to drudgery and irrelevance."9 Similar conclusions have been reached by many others, and are widely acknowledged by both friend and foe of LEAA. Ways to overcome these problems vary widely. The recently effected reorganization of LEAA will, for example, simplify the Guidelines and substitute multiyear for annual planning. Implicit in this revision and in defeated alternative proposals is the belief that comprehensive planning can take place if the identified obstacles of an overly bureaucratic LEAA are overcome.

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This assumption is based upon a belief that there is some consensu as to what constitutes comprehensive criminal justice planning and innovation, an assumption we believe to be unwarranted. It also fails to consider whether state planning agencies have adequate resources and authority to engage in meaningful assessment, or the expertise to do so. We began our study with a belief that the problem of planning was a technical and organizational one, one of overcoming organizational impediments to effective SPA planning. Our initial aim was to identify those states which were and were not engaged in effective comprehensive planning and to explain the variation in terms of the structure, context, and setting of each state. However, once our investigation was underway, we came to question this approach and doubt the arguments of LEAA, as well as its critics. What we found were not only bureaucratic obstacles to effective planning but, more basically, conceptual obstacles. Despite all LEAA's emphasis on comprehensive planning, there is no consensus among SPA officials as to what the term means. Those who call themselves planners have quite different conceptions of the planningfunction. This and notawkard bureaucratic relationships is at the heart of the planning problems of the SPAs. As a result, our research strategy shifted. We took as a given that the several problems enumerated above would frustrate the efficiency of SPA planners. What we then focused on was not the specific political and bureaucratic factors which worked against goal achievement, but what in fact these ultimate goals were. Before one can draw conclusions about the effectiveness of SPA planning, one first needs to find out just what it is that those called criminal justice planners want to do. In essence, we sought to determine what others have taken for granted, what the planners themselves envisioned and understood as comprehensive planning.

SIX VIEWS: THE PLANNING FUNCTION While the SPA officials we talked to all expressed frustration because they were unable to spend as much time as they would like in planning, there was no consensus among them as to what it was that they would like to do if they had the time. In our interviews we focused intensively on the various meanings of planning, drawing each respondent out with a series of questions about what he or she took the term "comprehensive planning" under the mandate of the Safe

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Streets Act and LEAA Guidelines to mean. Six relatively distinct and conflicting conceptions of comprehensive criminal justice planning emerged: (1) comprehensive planning as comprehensive control of the criminal justice budget; (2) comprehensive planning as providing the "cutting edge" for innovation; (3) comprehensive planning as prep aration of a list of good ideas; (4) comprehensive planning as advocac of agency interests; (5) comprehensive planning as providing technical assistance and preparing grant applications; and (6) comprehensive planning as preparation of compliance documents. Each of these orientations toward comprehensive criminal justice planning is an ideal type. We did not ask SPA staff to self-select themselves into one or another category, nor did we even identify these categories as such during our interviews. Rather, after we had completed most of our research, we categorized the different conceptions of planning which the planners themselves had identified. 1. Comprehensive Planning as Comprehensive Control of the Budget. To some, comprehensive planning is a long-range ideal, working toward a unified approach to the problem of crime by means of creating a single, criminal justice budget. In the words of one planner: "I would very much like to be involved in the overall criminal justice plan and budget determination. I'd like to see a central planning an coordinating unit and become part of it." This theme was repeate by a number of other SPA planners. They took the LEAA mandate to integrate and coordinate literally, and expressed considerable frustration at their inability to unify the diverse elements which together constitute the criminal justice system. For these people, comprehensive planning would only become a reality if and when there was a single, unified criminal justice system. To plan for only a small portion of the funds used to run the criminal justice system—LEAA supplies only 3-5 percent of the state's criminal justice funds, they pointed out—was silly and not likely to be productive. They envisioned that one day their offices might be incorporated into a permanent state office whose function would be to oversee the state's entire criminal justice system. This notion was best captured in the ideal of a single criminal justice budget. Several planners holding this view pointed to the state of Kentucky as an instance of moving in the right direction. In 1973 the Kentucky legislature created a permanent state criminal justice planning agency

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and assigned to it duties beyond those prescribed to SPAs by the Safe Streets Act. Despite this encouraging move, most of those holding to this notion of planning were not optimistic about the evenutal realization of their ideals. As structured, they pointed out, the SPAs have no authority to command the respect and compliance of preexisting criminal justice agencies. These agencies, they argued, were almost wholly autonomous from each other and all but independent from the SPA itself. Their sense of frustration came from their inability to imagine how the SPA would be able to expand and absorb authority into a single centralized criminal justice superagency. Still, to many this wa the goal toward which they were or would like to be working, and one way to do this was to use the SPA as a forum for bringing representatives of the disparate criminal justice agencies together for the purpose of exploring their mutual concerns and coordinating efforts to overcome them. 2. Planning as Developing Cutting Edge Innovations. Others had a quite different conception of what it was they were trying to do. They regarded their primary task as engaging in research and development of new and innovative ideas, and rejected the idea that they should take responsibility for coordinating day-to-day concerns of line agencies. They envisioned themselves as isolated and protected R&D units of the criminal justice "industry," playing only a small but essential role. This view was expressed by one planner as follows: We control only a small amount of money—so we cannot do everything. What we should do—but are not able to do now—is focus on really innovative ideas. We can't worry about everything, we should use our limited resources and freedom to develop and promote only a few good ideas.

When queried about the charge to engage in comprehensive planning, this respondent said in effect: "Yes, we want to be comprehensive on those things we focus on." This sentiment suggests that the SPA should organize itself in order to use LEAA funds for strategic purposes, for only the cutting edge of innovation. This view links planning with intensive experimentation, not systemwide coordination. Comprehensiveness, if it means anything here, means thoroughness, in contrast to its meaning above, where it suggests inclusiveness. To the extent that they embrace and are able to pursue their goal, such planners want to be removed from any considerations of the system as a whole.

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Planners who hold this view of their role express irritation with LEAA Guidelines which force them to address a long list of problems of the criminal justice system, a requirement which they argue dissipates their efforts. Because they are forced to consider everything, they complain that in practice they can consider nothing. Their way of coping—or the way in which they try to cope—is to give perfunctory attention to most problems and then concentrate on a few ideas which for various reasons they have come to regard as worthwhile. When confronting planners who expressed such views, we asked them how they would recognize those few good ideas when they saw them, and in the absence of a prior examination of the whole system, how they would know which of them would be most effective. We presented them with the conventional view that "comprehensiveness" requires rational planning, and that a rational decision must be preceded by clear specification of goals, an assessment of all available resources, a survey of all alternatives, and selection of the more efficient of them. There was a nearly uniform response to this prod, which is summarized as follows: An examination of the whole area of criminal justice is impossible—it is a fragmented, disjointed process and the attempt to carefully survey the entire system, anticipate the systemwide consequences of all the seemingly good ideas available, is a task which is time-consuming, likely to fail if attempted, and in short not worth the effort.

Some of the more sophistcated respondents extended this argument, alleging that comprehensive planning is a pipe dream because it involves comparison between apples and oranges. Because there is no common denominator to compare their impact on crime, they argued, there is no way to know whether it is more efficient to concentrate efforts in corrections programs or police departments. As a consequence, they believed that any effort to develop a comprehensive assessment of needs for the purpose of efficiently allocating resources is little more than an exercise in futility and a colossal waste of time. To illustrate this point, many SPA planners pointed to the ill-fated "crime-specific" planning campaign which was promoted by LEAA from 1972 to 1974. This campaign, enthusiastically endorsed by the Nixon White House and Department of Justice and actively promoted by LEAA Administrators Donald Santarelli and Richard Velde, was an effort to overcome the apples and oranges problem that had frus-

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trated so many planners and had stymied the LEAA's efforts to press the states for more thorough statements of their plans. It was deceptively simple, holding that in the last analysis all criminal justice programs should be designed to pursue a common target, the reduction of the incidence and severity of crime. Given this, LEAA sought to provide the SPAs a formula for planning, a device for comparing seemingly diverse and disparate programs and projects. Each was to be compared against the other in terms of its effect in reducing the incidence of crime. Those judged most effective were to receive priority for support. While some dismissed this campaign as little more than a symbolic response to a serious social problem by a cynical White House, it is clear that the idea was taken quite seriously by a great many people, including LEAA officials who were at the time being grilled by a restive Congress as to the utility of their agency. In turn, SPAs were required to take the campaign seriously and charged with the task of evaluating their various and disparate projects in terms of their potential for "crime-specific" impact. Despite the efforts, most SPA officials remained skeptical, arguing that the link between any particular program and the crime rate was so remote, indirect, and dependent upon other inherently uncontrollable events as to be a parody of serious analysis. The proponents of a "cutting edge" philosophy hold that when se lecting programs to be supported, one must rely on intuition, commonsense judgment, and the talents and quality of the particular individuals who will administer the projects. They argue for the importance of intuition, experimentation, and personality, and feel that they should be allowed to take risks by experimenting with new and entirely different programs. To them elaborate surveys of needs and comparisons of the inherently incomparable dissipate the creative impulse and waste precious resources. The two positions outlined above represent the views of a number of the more contemplative and reflective planners with whom we talked. This group was but a small minority of all SPA planners who were interviewed. Most planners we spoke to had not developed such abstract ideas about their jobs. When queried about the meaning of comprehensive planning and what it was that they would like to be doing if they could, most planners tended to provide us with operational definitions of their roles. Typically, they would provide descrip-

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tions of the activities they thought would be useful, not a theory of planning per se. Again, we found a wide range of perspectives; even within the same office different people held quite different views. Furthermore, there was little continuity of views within the same office, and as a consequence, we were unable to categorize individual SPAs meaningfully. While the views of individual planners may remain stable, the types of views represented within any SPA could change dramatically as a consequence of high turnover. 3. Comprehensive Planning as a Creation of a Cafeteria Menu. Another view of comprehensive criminal justice planning is a literal reaction to the text of the Safe Streets Act and LEAA Guidelines, both of which provide a lengthy list of problems to be addressed by the SPA planning staff. As an indication of comprehensiveness the Act and the Guidelines identify each of the major components of the criminal justice system and indicate that the plan must speak to each of their problems. The list is extensive—it includes courts, public defense sys tems, prosecutors, corrections, police, community crime projects, etc.—and details a series of concerns for each agency. What we term the "cafeteria menu" approach to planning is a position which holdsthattobe "comprehensive" a plan must speak to each of these areas by providing a list of good ideas—projects and programs which have received the blessing of the national LEAA office or are otherwise ideas in good currency—from which the agencies and the governing board of the SPA can then select. Such an approach emphasizes the types of projects which are currently "in" or by their conspicuous absence or explicit prohibition are frowned upon by national officials. In the mid-1970s, police communications equipment was an example of the latter, while pretrial diversion was an instance of the former. This perspective takes as a given the limited authority of the SPA planners and accepts the fact that, in the words of one planning director, "no $12,000 a year SPA planner is going to tell a big city police chief what to do." It adopts a more modest approach consistent with what these SPA officials view as a realistic assessment of their capacities If the first notion of comprehensive planning we discussed embraces a notion of trying to "maximize" the role and function of the SPA, this approach might be termed the "satisficing" method. Here SPA planners simply want to provide a list of good ideas and then let the consumers—the criminal justice agencies themselves—take their pick.

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How is the menu for this cafeteria prepared? Who is the master chef? When pressed about how the list of approved ideas was put together, few planners could provide us with a clear explanation. Many of them noted the "political realities" enumerated earlier, and acknowledged that there "has to be a little something for everybody"—cops, courts, and corrections. Some identified a few program areas and types of projects which were being pushed by LEAA, and said that they were actively promoting them in their own criminal justice "constituency." For instance, one planning agency in the Midwest actively campaigned to get local police departments to apply for money to establish property identification programs, while a number of other SPAs were vigorously promoting the consolidation of police departments in small towns. When asked how such programs fit into a comprehensive plan, or how they knew such efforts would be effective, most acknowledged that they did not know, or that LEAA was "pushing" them and as a consequence they too were prominently featuring them in their plans. 4. Comprehensive Planning as Agency Advocacy. A fourth distinct position which is held by a small but nevertheless substantial number of planners holds in essence that SPA and RPU planners are representatives of one or another of the criminal justice agencies. They view their primary job as one of getting a "fair share" for "their" agency. SPA and RPU police planners become in effect emissaries of police chiefs and corrections planners become representatives of correction departments. During the first two or three years of LEAA's existence, this perspective was probably fostered by the dominance of the police in LEAA's funding process. During that period many SPA planners were in fact police planning personnel on short-term assignment to the SPAs. Although there is now a high degree of professionalization within many SPA staffs, this agency perspective continues to run strong. It is particularly strong in RPUs where, in many instances, the RPU planners are actually housed with and for all practical purposes are part of local criminal justice agency staffs. This close identification with particular agencies, and at times even particular officials within these agencies, is also encouraged by the organization of SPAs and RPUs into specialized units which correspond to traditional divisions within criminal justice, police, courts, and corrections. Having so specialized, they spend a major portion of their time with representatives of only one agency. While this does

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facilitate familiarization with the problems of their agency, it often leads to the adoption of its perspective as well. This process of specialization and "cooptation" is also fostered by the fact that a number of SPA and RPU planners may eventually "transfer" to a more secure position in that agency. "What I will eventually do," one SPA correc tions planner half-joked, "is write a planning position for myself into one of the Department of Corrections grants." Even before the "crisis" in LEAA brought about by increasing financial plight of the cities and the election of Jimmy Carter, many planners acknowledged a concern for their future in the SPAs, expressing a belief that the prospects for secure employment were brighter in the permanent criminal justice agencies than in their current precarious positions with SPAs or RPUs. Two other factor's also served to foster this "agency representative" planning perspective. One is an unarticulated but deeply held belief in a model of change which runs counter to the theory implicit in the administration of the Safe Streets Act. The second is the history of the Act itself. Implicit in the language of the Safe Streets Act is a theory which holds that many of the (at least soluble) problems of criminal justice administration are exacerbated, if not caused by, the fragmentation of the criminal justice system, or in the words of one knowledgeabl person who played a role in the creation of LEAA, the "nonsystem of criminal justice."10 This theory holds that better coordination and cooperation between the traditionally autonomous, isolated, and often antagonistic agencies will result in a more effective and efficient administration of criminal justice. According to one SPA planner, "the real problems we try to tackle are those which normally fall between the cracks of the different agencies. This is what 'system' planning is all about." This view is reinforced by the language of the Act, which repeatedly insists on comprehensiveness, cooperation, and coordination. To this extent, the Act seeks to impose a "synoptic" view of planning and change on a system which is best characterized as frag mented and uncoordinated. I n contrast is another view, which one prominent scholar has terme "muddling through." Many SPA planners have come to adopt its central thesis, which holds that partial and inadequate information, fragmentation, antagonism, and confusion are givens, problems to be lived with, not overcome. It holds that little is to be gained by trying to

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grasp the "whole" picture in a complex system. Even if this were possible—and most planners holding this view feel strongly that it is not— conditions for effecting change are so limited that it would not be worth the effort. Instead, this group of planners has adopted a strategy of focusing on targets of opportunity, concentrating on them, wherever they are. Rather than investing heavily in canvassing the entire system to spot problems and mount solutions, these planners claim that they try to foster good working relationships with agency personnel, see problems through their eyes, and then respond by proposing programs to meet their particular needs as seen by the agency personnel themselves. Comprehensive planning in this view is not the development of a mas ter plan, produced as a result of extensive and systematic surveys or pieced together from a series of public meetings; rather it is quietly working behind the scenes with those officials who show an interest in ameliorating obvious nuisances and implementing some of their long-standing desires. Planning, to these people, is coping with the obvious. There is a considerable range of attitudes among those who subscribe to this "agency representative" perspective. Some conceive of themselves as agents of specific criminal justice officials, others view themselves as supporters of particular factions within the agency, and still others view themselves as "guerrilla administrators" trying to effect change within an agency by "bribing" it to improve itself. The first position is illustrated by a planner in a Western state who, while paid from SPA planning grant funds, actually viewed himself as an employee of his region's police departments: I rarely see the people at the SPA. They simply don't know what the score is. They sit up there talking about grand schemes of planning while I'm out helping the police department implement relatively simple ideas and showing them how they can get money to try out some new ideas. A chief will come in and say he has a problem and I'll tell him how the chief in the next town has tried to solve it. If he sounds interested, I tell him that there may be some "federal money" in it for him, and then I help him get it. This position was carried even further in one New England state, where the RPU police planners were, in effect, administering programs for the local police departments. Individual departments had agreed to pool their resources to support a regionwide communications and in-

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formation retrieval system, and the responsibility of administering the resulting program was delegated to the planners. A variation on this theme is the position taken by the chief SPA planner in a major Northeastern state. When queried about "comprehensive planning," he responded as follows: I don't think a systemwide view gets you very far. [Once you start talking to agency officials] you are immediately forced to deal with questions about what's happening in prison, or youth home, or other specific problems. You take these things as given, and then try to improve on them.

This same director also proudly acknowledged that his agency had "run interference" for one aggressive youth corrections agency head by granting it disproportional funds, "red taping" other competitive projects to death, and masking the agency's radical proposals in bland language which were acceptable to the SPA supervisory board. In this instance, the planner saw his role in "helping" a bold new administrator change the direction and philosophy of a traditionally sluggish and patronage-laden organization. The last thing this SPA director would have wanted was to have a detailed "needs assessment" and an open discussion of this agency's head's proposals. To have done so, he assured us, would have meant certain defeat of the idea. A related position, one which can be termed the "guerrilla perspective," is best expressed by a planner in California. When pressed about the meaning of "comprehensive planning," he responded as follows: It's a myth. There is no need for comprehensive planning. If you develop a program to reduce shoplifting [you don't need a systemwide plan]. . . . All you want to do is make that project marginally effective. There are so many obvious things to get done that are pressing, that if you sit around talking about comprehensive planning, you spend all your time and effort spinning out great theories and getting nothing accomplished. We take specific things and try to make them better. . . . We spend much more time [politic] ing change than we do planning for it. We're project-specific.

Or, as another planner said, I don't believe in long-term perspectives. It's part of the comprehensive planning myth. There are only short-term goals and we should be frank and recognize this.

This planning director went on to describe his experiences with some officials in a local youth service agency, complaining that many of

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them were incompetents and would not respond to what he said were the agency's most pressing problems. His reaction was to give aid to insurgent minorities within the agency and mobilize private groups to press for changes. Despite these great differences, a common experience among all those who hold what we have labeled an "agency perspective" is a belief in quiet, behind-the-scenes work. All of them argued that comprehensive planning, at least as LEAA envisions it, requires detailed and lengthy analysis and open and public consideration of the issues, all of which have the effect of alerting opposition. This, in the final analysis, may be their strongest objection to the notion of systemwide comprehensive planning. In their view, substantive change is best pursued by quiet, behind-the-scenes support of those people and programs which they believe are most creative and innovative, and in many instances these are the people who are most likely to have their ideas defeated if they were permaturely exposed to public scrutiny. 5. Planning as Grant Writing. A number of planners we spoke to envisioned their function as grant writers and expediters, hired hands for criminal justice agencies, whose primary function is to help agencies prepare successful grant applications. They differ from agency advocates in that they have a more passive conception of their role. They are not strategists in behalf of agencies, nor activists in behalf of good causes. Rather they see themselves as expeditors, bureaucrats whose task is to help agencies weave their ways through the unchartered and constantly shifting labyrinth of the federal LEAA bureaucracy. They are attendant to details, informing agencies of the deadlines for the submission of applications, explaining procedures, and explicating arcane requirements—in short, giving advice on how to properly complete the "paper work" that must accompany a successful proposal. People come to this perspective for quite different reasons. A passive personality might account for some of this, but often it appears to have more to do with rational adaptation to the situation in which the planners find themselves. Some work with strong and aggressive agency heads who have definite ideas as to what they want and expect the SPA planners to "fill in the details" and do the "leg work" for their applications. Other planners explain this conception of their role by pointing to an aggressive SPA supervisory board overseeing their work, saying that the important decisions are made by the board and not its staff.

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Still others explain this conception of their role by pointing out that up to 80 percent (in a number of states) of the Part B action grant funds for any given year are committed in advance as a result of multiyear funding. In such situations, they argue, there is little of substance to plan for, and their primary tasks are reduced to routine review and updating of these multiyear programs, and, of course, complying with the LEAA requirement to submit an annual plan. Despite the widespread support for multiyear programs, until 1977 LEAA required annual review, so that each year's expenses had to be submitted in a "new" application. While such applications almost invariably received refunding—according to all our interviews it was the rare exception when the life of a projected multiyear program was cut short—preparing assessments, updating the application, and fitting it to meet the requirements of ever-changing LEAA Guidelines was a time-consuming process. All the SPA officials we talked to acknowledged that multiyear commitments posed a serious threat to their creativity and flexibility. During the optimistic and expansive years of the early 1970s, their budgets increased dramatically and one result was a casual attitude toward the number of multiyear commitments they would make. The expanded budget of the following year could cover multiyear commitments and provide for new programs. As LEAA's honeymoon with Congress ended and the recession hit, LEAA's budget was cut and the cumulative impact of these commitments hit home, often leaving the SPAs with few uncommitted funds to work with. While most SPAs have rules about the number of years they can continue to support a program (usually three) and the percentage of local or state matching funds (usually on a sliding scale, with 10 percent the first year and up to 50 percent in the third), they have often honored these rules in the breach. With the financial crisis, however, the SPAs have become more rigorous in enforcing these rules and now insist on shorter terms of support and increasingly larger portions of matching funds from state and local sources. 6. Comprehensive Planning as the Production of a Compliance Document There is a last planning role adopted by a small but still significant number of SPA and RPU planners. We term this conception of planning compliance production. Many planners complain that their time is occupied with the preparation of a document—the annual plan—

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whose sole function is to satisfy remote LEAA administrators. In this document the SPA staff is supposed to show how it has met LEAA's requirements to be comprehensive, identify the types of programs and projects it contemplates during the coming year, document the need for these programs, and show how they relate to an overall plan. LEAA Guidelines are not general; they are detailed and specific, and—as many planners are quick to point out—require inordinate amounts of time and effort to understand and apply. While most SPA officials are willing to admit that LEAA has a right to hold them accountable in some way or another, most of them bitterly complain about the excessive "red tape" required to produce their annual plans. Meeting the requirements of the Guidelines, they say, has become an end in itself. California Governor Jerry Brown, who is outspoken in his criticism of LEAA, has been quoted as characterizing the preparation of the annual plan as a "make-work, leaf-raking project for unemployed social scientists." Some planners, however, have come to see this requirement as "natural," and apparently accept it unquestioningly. This was indicated by the response we received from one chief planner in a Southern state. When queried as to what a "good comprehensive plan" was, he responded without a trace of irony that it was a plan which would pass the LEAA regional and national offices without receiving a "special condition." His staff was, he went on to say, engaged in the process of altering past years' plans in order to remove "special conditions" which had been placed on them, despite the fact that money for the projects detailed in these old plans had long since been spent. When queried as to what the obstacles to effective comprehensive planning were, this same SPA official again referred to the Guidelines and his relationship with regional LEAA officials: There is rarely any personal communication from DC as to what these Guidelines mean. . . . [LEAA] requires us to submit data that we cannot possibly get on time. We only get feedback . . . after we have sent in ou final plan, and then we get "special conditioned" which means that we need to spend the next two or three months reworking our plan, and many of the changes are superfluous.

This chief planner's experience and perspective may be an extreme case. Nevertheless the preoccupation with production of the annual plan looms large in the minds of a great many SPA planners, and many

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of them—albeit with more irony than this respondent exhibited—describe their primary tasks as the production of acompliance document. RESPONSES TO PLURALISM IN PLANNING The Safe Streets Act clearly conditions the receipt of federal funds upon the establishment of a planning capability at the state level. As our interviews suggest, the clarity of that mandate is in sharp contrast to the confusion over the meaning of planning held by SPA officials themselves. LEAA has, from its creation, attempted to overcome this difficulty by providing such a definition. Yet these attempts are frequently seen by state and local planners as either unrealistic or illegitimate. In the absence of a clear legislative definition, they believe that the spirit of the block grant concept accords to them the right to plan in their own way. What results is the pluralistic situation which we have just described. Resisting this pluralism, LEAA has mounted several campaigns to instill a common understanding of planning and induce the states to follow its own model of comprehensive planning. The initial effort involved the publication of the very detailed Guidelines. A second was the campaign for "crime-specific planning," which was supposed to impose uniformity, comparability, and rationality into what was an admittedly ad hoc and haphazard planning process. The third major campaign was the Standards and Goals project. A fourth effort was mounted by Congress; through the amending process Congress sought to cure what it regarded as imbalances in SPA plans, and mandated that specific problems receive special attention from the SPAs and receive specific portions of the SPA action grant funds. The last and most recent effort—spurred more by the attorney general's office and the SPAs themselves than LEAA—might be termed the "state of nature" campaign. It has been fueled by a belief that meaningful planning can take place only if the state and local officials are relieved of the overly burdensome task of coping with the federal LEAA bureaucracy. Although quite different in emphasis and conception, each of these efforts had one basic goal in common, to instill a minimum notion of planning in the SPAs. 1. Creating Comprehensive Plans through Guidelines. For all practical purposes LEAA is a governmental institution which was started from

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scratch. Its predecessor, OLEA, was only a few years old and had had neither the resources nor the responsibilities granted to LEAA under the 1968 Act. Such was the case in the states as well. Prior to 1968 few states had any statewide criminal justice organization capable of even thinking about the functions mandated by the Act. Most governors had to create entirely new institutions to meet the Act's state planning requirements. While some of them may have thought that these institutions and their staffs would be little more than funnels through which funds would be transferred from federal to state and local officials, the national LEAA office quickly came to have a different notion. Created in a time of national turmoil, LEAA officials were under intense political pressure to "show results." Shortly after the Act was signed into law, Richard Nixon was elected president. He viewed LEAA as one vehicle through which he could carry out the "law and order" commitments he had articulated throughout his campaign. In response to the president's interests, LEAA mounted several expensive and showy programs to "combat crime." The most ambitious of these efforts was the "High-Impact Anti-Crime Program," an ill-conceived but highly visible plan to reduce crime by supplying law officials in selected cities with large amounts of federal money. Initially billed as an experiment to see what works and why, it subsequently came to be little more than a public relations gimmick. Another LEAA program was the "Pilot Cities Program." This, too, sought to bring about crime reduction by concentrating funds and planning in a few well-supported pilot cities. Like the Impact Cities Program, it too was later widely judged to have been more a symbolic program than a serious commitment to criminal justice planning and reform. The bureaucratic counterpart to these glamorous symbolic responses was the creation of the Guidelines. As crime rates and public perceptions of the crime problem increased, the president and Congress turned to LEAA national officials and not the fifty separate SPA directors or their boards for explanations. Despite the professed commitment to rely on state and local governments, the Nixon Administration found it easier to pry answers from a central office, LEAA, in Washington, D.C. Thus, under pressure to produce results for a law and order administration and an increasingly restive Congress, LEAA officials in turn put the SPAs under the gun. Giving a broad interpretation to their own powers under the Safe Streets Act, they moved to transform it informally into some new form of grant-in-aid which

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would make the SPAs and RPUs more directly accountable to a national office. Thus even as it was propounding the New Federalism and revenue-sharing doctrines, the Nixon Administration was encour aging its officials, at least in LEAA, to undercut these doctrines by insisting on more responsiveness to directives from Washington. The vehicle for pursuing this activist, interventionist stance was found in the Act's requirement that state planning agencies must submit annual comprehensive plans which had to be approved by LEAA as a condition for receiving action grant funds. Taking the charge to engage in comprehensive planning seriously and disappointed with the initial state efforts to engage in "planning by themselves," LEAA officials prepared the Guidelines to serve as a model for SPAs in their preparing plans. LEAA has continued to use this document to force the states to pursue what it regards as comprehensive planning. Through such Guidelines national LEAA officials have attempted to rationalize and standardize the planning process and planning documents submitted by over 50 SPAs annually. But that attempt has also created new resistance to national "interference," resistance which has reinforced the centrifugal tendencies already inherent in the very language of the Safe Streets Act. .

2. Crime-Specific Planning. Another effort used by LEAA in its effort to improve the SPAs' capacities to engage in what it regards as meaningful comprehensive planning was the promulgation of planning models. While LEAA has publicized a number of notions and theories of planning and has subsidized a host of conferences and organizations for criminal justice planners, it mounted one particularly intensive effort. This campaign, first mounted during the summer of 1972, promoted crime-specific planning, a process which LEAA officials argued would allow planners to make comparisons and choices between programs that had hitherto been considered inherently noncomparable. Designed by LEAA administrator Jerris Leonard, this campaign took several forms: additions to the Guidelines required that all programs planned by the SPAs had to demonstrate their crime-specific efficiency; numerous LEAA-sponsored conferences, retreats, speeches, memoran da, and newsletters fostered the concept, by translating the methodological sophistication of the idea into laymen's terms. Beneath this all was the vague threat that if states did not comply with this orientation, LEAA might cut off their action grant funds.

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Although intense while it lasted, the crime-specific campaign was never well-received and was short-lived. Its abandonment may have been due to the different philosophy of Donald Santarelli, the LEAA administrator who succeeded Jerris Leonard in April 1973, but more probably it was due to the inefficiency of LEAA as a crime-fighting institution, inefficiency which the campaign unwittingly advertised. By focusing on crime reduction as the primary, if not sole, objective of LEAA, its administrators called attention to their own failures in the face of a rising crime rate. It may have been as much for political reasons as philosophical ones that Santarelli called a halt to the crimespecific planning campaign and announced that "the national government is not in a position to achieve what the family, church and neighborhood has been unable to do—to stop people from committing crime."11 Santarelli's more modest goal was "criminal justice agency improvement," incremental increases in the efficiency and effectiveness in the operations of the system. SPA officials greeted Santarelli's announcement with enthusiasm. They recognized that the link between cause and ultimate effects of so many of their programs was so diffuse, indirect, and dependent upon other uncontrollable events as to make crime-specific planning little more than a sterile exercise. Many planners we talked to indicated that they had never taken the notion very seriously, other than to adopt its language when necessary in order to please LEAA's regional offices. Crime-specific planning, in the view of these many SPA officials, amounted to little more than the strategic use of "buzz words" calculated to please the powers residing in LEAA's offices. It was, in their opinion, just one more indication that Washington did not know much about the problems of the criminal justice system and the realities of the role and function of SPAs. Its demise, they felt, eased their tasks somewhat; and because of this, they were pleased to see the end of the campaign. 3. Standards and Goals. In 1971, using discretionary funds made available to him under the Safe Streets Act, LEAA administrator Jerris Leonard commissioned a report summarizing the findings of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, a follow-up commission to the earlier Presidential Crime Commission, whose task was to offer specific recommendations to meet the problems identified in the earlier Commission reports.12 The National

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Commission eventually produced a seven-volume report which offered a long list of recommendations for improving all phases of the criminal justice system, from tackling the causes of crime to improving conditions in prisons. Released in 1973, the report immediately became a guide for LEAA administrators. Finally, the new LEAA leadership felt, they had been provided with the key to combating crime and improving the quality of justice. In light of this report, they came to regard comprehensive planning as a process which addressed itself to each of the concerns addressed by the Commission. Thus the hallmark of a "good" comprehensive plan from this perspective was the ability to address each of the recommendations in the Standards and Goals report. Here, too, LEAA Guidelines were altered to reflect this goal, and in an effort to make the Standards and Goals campaign even more visible, LEAA officials distributed a huge three-by-four-foot chart which enumerated over 900 specific recommendations drawn from the Commission's report. This effort too was greeted with skepticism by SPA officials, and it too was short-lived. LEAA adminstrators first began actively pressing the states to use the Standards and Goals volumes as guides for planning in late 1973, but this effort was abruptly abandoned with the resignation of its primary proponent, Donald Santarelli, less than a year later. Despite a $15 million LEAA-financed campaign to explain them to the states, Standards and Goals had only minimal impact on the state planning process. None of the SPA planners we interviewed said that the Standards and Goals project was ever taken seriously in setting their planning agendas. 4. Congressional Response to the Planning Requirement. Still another national effort which sought to cure deficiencies in the SPA planning process was initiated on Capitol Hill. A series of amendments in 1971, 1973, 1974, and 1976 added new functions to the SPAs, altered their priorities, and required them to distribute resources differently. The earliest amendments sought to redress what Congress saw as imbalance of emphasis during LEAA's first years by shifting priorities away from the police and to corrections. Since then Congress has several times redefined the composition of membership of the SPA boards, trying to widen the spectrum of representation. Initially these efforts sought to assure that views beyond those of the

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police were reflected; later they sought to assure that both local and private citizen interests were represented. Finally, with the passage of the Juvenile Justice Act of 1975, Congress sought to assure adequate representation of public and private spokesmen for juvenile interests as well. Congress has expressed its uneasiness with the SPA planning processes in still other ways. Most notably, it has added several "special parts" to the Safe Streets Act in an effort to assure that there will be what it considers fair and adequate distribution of federal resources. A 1971 amendment, Part E, earmarks specific funds for improvement of state corrections programs, and a 1977 amendment provides that funds for court planning be made available. Other amendments have made it more difficult to purchase capital expenditures with LEAA funds, and still others have fostered community crime prevention programs. Adoption of these provisions reflects congressional disappointment with the way the original Act was being interpreted by the states. In essence, these amendments were efforts by Congress to add to the definition of comprehensiveness by forcing SPA planners and LEAA itself to address problems it, Congress, felt had been neglected. Many SPA officials opposed such changes, arguing that in effect they created categorical-aid programs for specific criminal justice institutions, a practice they viewed as antithetical to the goal of statewide comprehensive planning and the spirit of block grants. Allocating resources by statute, they argued, meant that these agencies could then lay claim to funds as a matter of right rather than on the basis of demonstrated need. Such moves toward categorical grants—"creeping categorization" as it came to be known—tended to reinforce continued fragmentation in the criminal justice administration, and not its integration. 5. Planning as a Management Problem. The most recent response to the problems of planning at the state and local level, embodied in the 1980 reauthorization of LEAA, is to treat the planning problem as a problem of management, to treat it as a problem of overbureaucratization. A task force appointed by Attorney General Bell concluded: "The detailed statutory specifications of the content of the required state comprehensive plan has encouraged state and local governments to focus mo re on ensuring statutory compliance rather than on undertaking effective planning."13

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Implicit in this view is what we referred to earlier as the "state of nature fallacy." It is based on a naive belief that if there were fewer guidelines and fewer conditions, the states could do a better job of planning. What this position fails to appreciate is that these conditions arose out of an earlier felt necessity, a widespread belief by Congress and LEAA that most states could not or would not develop rational, comprehensive plans on their own. What the Act anticipated and sought to correct for in advance, and what LEAA administrators experienced firsthand, was a belief that the states needed guidance to assure the development of a meaningful planning capability. If this analysis is correct, then the most recent impulse, as exemplified in the 1980 amendment reorganizing and reauthorizing LEAA—to simplify and reduce the national LEAA role in the SPA planning process—will prove to be no more satisfying than most of the previous efforts mounted by the several previous LEAA administrators. In the words of Paul Nejelski, a dissenting member of the attorney general's study group Report, "such proposals do little more than provide more of the same under slightly different names."14 CONCLUSIONS The block grant concept complicates the already complicated policy delivery problems in the area of crime and criminal justice.15 Block grants as the vehicle for federal efforts in this area serve two perhaps irreconcilable goals. On one hand, the object of block grants is to minimize the federal presence, to free states to pursue their particular interests as they themselves see them. On the other hand, federal funds are provided for support in areas in which the states have been unsuccessful in coping on their own. In some cases it may be lack of money alone which is the reason for the shortcomings, and if so, perhaps block grants may be efficient and effective ways to overcome the problems. Whatever the case, it is clear that the Safe Streets Act was not premised on the belief that more money alone was the answer. The Act contains an implicit theory which holds that the major impediment to meaningful criminal justice reform is the fragmented and decentralized nature of the criminal justice system. In response, the Act attempts to generate a new way of thinking about the problems of crime and the control of crime. This new approach, embodied in the ideal of comprehensive planning, is foreign to a great many state

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and local criminal justice officials, and from our perspective it is unlikely that the relatively weak SPAs with their relatively small block grants are in a position to do much about the problem. They are extremely weak relative to the entrenched permanent state and local criminal justice bureaucracy, and they spend only a small fraction of the local outlay for criminal justice-related programs. They are inherently unstable, existing by virtue of executive order and surviving on precarious federal handouts. If anything, one could conclude that the national perspective and the federal presence has not been strong enough to achieve the lofty objectives of the Act. But to pursue the ultimate objectives of the Act might require the national government to intervene even more directly in an activity that, under a viable federal system, and given the tradition of the local law enforcement, we may not find palatable. The problem of planning under the Safe Streets Act is a problem of the disjuncture of theory and practice in the extreme. Simply grafting a weak planning process onto the ongoing operations of strong and entrenched law enforcement agencies has not changed and cannot change the way these agencies think about crime. If the ideal of planning is to be taken seriously, then a fundamental reorganization of the operations of state and local law enforcement would be required, a reorganization not contemplated under the spirit of interest group liberalism which animates the Safe Streets Act.

4

New Answers to Old Problems: Innovation The Safe Streets Act marked a substantial departure in the federal government's involvement with the crime problem. The strategy of this new involvement was to establish the federal government as a source of money and technical assistance to state and local agencies who would retain primary law enforcement responsibilities, but would use this assistance to support planning, self-study, and new and innovative projects. The rationale behind the Act was that the infusion of federal money would allow law enforcement officials to try new approaches for which there was little room in the already tight budgets of state and local governments. The problem envisioned by the Act was to upgrade the existing law enforcement and criminal justice processes. The political strategy was to use federal money to provide "space" for state and local agencies to develop new ideas and funds to try them out. Implicit in the Act was the assumption that these agencies would not of their own accord invest resources to develop such new methods. Through the Act the federal government would provide the carrot to lead law enforcement criminal justice agencies to think in new ways about old problems. It is this commitment—to improving law enforcement activity without substantially altering the structure of law enforcement agencies—that characterizes the Safe Streets Act. It is this commitment, as much as any other, which helps to explain why LEAA's interest in promoting new ideas has produced such mixed results. Here, too, it involves the expansion of demands for government services without significantly 91

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altering authority to cope with the task. The Safe Streets Act required the federal government to demand innovation in criminal justice policy and state and local governments to respond to those demands. It created a mini-policy dilemma in which the intensity of those demands was paralleled by relatively few genuinely new ideas about how to fight crime. Innovation as a policy purpose is both ambitious and ambiguous. Since its entire premise was to avoid a federal "takeover" of law enforcement responsibility, the Act itself did not specify how its goal of innovation could be accomplished, other than to insist it flow from a "comprehensive plan." Indeed, all it did was to express vague goals and then establish them as the standards by which the SPAs should judge individual requests for help. Following the tenets of interest group liberalism, the Safe Streets Act established system improvement through innovation as a broad goal without specifying the meaning or the strategy for achieving improvement through innovation. The responsibility for defining goals was left to those who were to administer and implement the legislation, the SPAs. In a sense, the most significant innovation in the Act was the creation of an "innovative" organization, which in turn was supposed to generate innovations. It is no overstatement to suggest that this responsibility is more than the SPAs could be expected to effectively manage. SPA and RPU staffs were weak in comparison to the existing state and local agencies, which the Act itself recognized to be complacent in their attitudes and resistant to change. Thus, when the Act charges that federal money be used to develop and deploy innovative techniques, it states a goal which the very structure it created serves to undermine.1 The involvement of the federal government in the crime problem was a reform designed to buy reform and an innovation designed to stimulate innovation. The message of the Act was, in a sense, simple —money would be given, innovation produced. What this did was to place the burden squarely on state and local criminal justice agencies to define specific goals and in effect to become laboratories for fighting crime. It was their responsibility to identify and devise new methods for dealing with crime, methods which would depart from past "failures." The problem of implementation was thus from the start a problem of conceptualization; linked to the requirement for planning, the Safe Streets Act required each state each year to devise a new crime-fighting package of new ideas. It is paradoxical that the role

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as envisioned for those agencies whose primary commitments over the years had been to law enforcement and presumably to the reduction of crime would be to plan and implement, with the assistance of federal revenues, new ideas or ideas which in the past they had resisted. In order to understand the federal effort for improving the nation's crime-fighting capability, it is necessary to think about what it means to structure the implementation of a national strategy by placing upon officials at the state and local levels the burden of devising the content of that strategy. What does it mean to require that federal money be used to buy innovation? How could an administrator at the state or local level understand that requirement? The Act itself provides no ready solutions to these problems, and in this sense offers no national policy at all. It did not create a structure designed to enhance the flow of new ideas. It did not define nor exemplify what it meant by innovation and it did not provide standards for judging when that requirement has been met. Rather, it created a process, one which we have suggested lies at the heart of the policy dilemma and one which is endemic in the dominant form of liberalism. In its theory, the theory of the New Federalism, and in its practice, the practice of local and state law enforcement, the Safe Streets Act and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration attempted to promote reform by restructuring and reordering state and local law enforcement priorities without first identifying new priorities. Instead of a strategy of categorical aid in which goals and programs are established by the funding agency, the strategy of the New Federalism was to make it "worth the while" of those state and local agencies to do things differently, even though "differently" was never clarified. It was therefore a new kind of federal buy-off; federal money was to be used to get state and local agencies concerned with crime to be innovative without telling them what innovation was. The problem from the beginning has been that no one, not the planners, not the state planning agencies, not politicians at the state or local level, not law enforcement officials, no one has been able to demonstrate or to understand precisely what it means to be innovative in one's approach to the crime problem.2 In the following two sections we examine these two problems: the politics and structure of innovation and the idea of innovation. Both must be understood to fully comprehend the implementation of the Act, and the import of the policy dilemma.

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THE POLITICS AND STRUCTURE OF INNOVATION The creation of state planning agencies was to have had a dramatic impact on the ability to generate new ideas for fighting crime. SPAs were to be, and have functioned as, the major organs of planning; they were also to be the major organs for passing out federal money. What has happened at the state level is that SPAs have been called upon to provide and perform a dual function; a function of both thinking and granting, a function whose requirements and whose demands undercut the former goal in service of the latter. Innovation requires distance from those whose primary interest is in the continuation of past practices. Yet it requires a close enough proximity to be familiar with the problems to be overcome and enough authority to have one's voice heard. This task is difficult enough under the best of circumstances, but the structure provided by the Safe Streets Act almost assured that it would not be carried out in the SPAs. The pressure of having to develop a comprehensive plan, the task of passing out federal money within a fiscal year framework, and the power position of SPAs vis-a-vis established agencies made it extremely difficult and perhaps unrealistic to expect that planners would have much time to plan or think about innovation or to expect that they would have the power to act on their ideas if they did. The inevitable and at times overwhelming pressure was for them to become grant administrators, dominated by entrenched interests. What has come to pass in many states is that the granting function has eaten up both the planning and the innovation function; passing out money has become more important than the question of what the money is used for. I nstead of a creative process of interaction in which state planners and local law enforcement agencies work together to devise innovative strategies for fighting crime, the planners, swamped with requests for funds, have been overwhelmed by entrenched state and local agencies. The problem is, of course, more than one of time. The SPAs exist in a dilemma not of their own making. If they were free from the demands of "managing grant requests," they would have more time to "think." But whatever little authority they do possess would shrink still more. Established agencies would have no reason to deal with them at all; they would be frozen out, not even able to obtain basic

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information about the crime control functions about which they are charged to think. Their paradox—the nature of the policy dilemma as it applies to innovation in this area—is that they have access and authority only when they are engaged in grants administration; but because they are, they have no time to plan. This dilemma is exacerbated by the way SPAs have organized themselves in order to maximize access, information, and even their survival. In most states SPA planning functions are divided along the traditional organizational lines of criminal justice agencies—that is, into planning units for police, corrections, and courts. While this facilitates specialization and access to these agencies, it also fosters an "agency perspective." Thus the planners quickly come to adopt the views of the stronger and more powerful agencies. This organization of the planning function within the SPAs makes possible and facilitates what many at the state level call "pie carving," dividing federal funds according to a formula negotiated among the agencies themselves. The vision of the Act was that a central problem of criminal justice was the limited perspectives of individual components of the "nonsystem," and the solution embodied in the Act was the creation of a statewide agency to overcome this parochialism. Yet its structure complicates the implementation of innovation in criminal justice by allowing SPA planners to become captives of the existing agencies who have little if any strong interests in innovation. Thus the very structure of SPAs and RPUs undercuts their abilities to apply the federal mandate. Some SPAs anticipated the likelihood that their planners would be coopted by the agencies they were supposed to lead and sought to counteract such tendencies. In Kentucky, for example, the SPA create an "innovative systems section," whose primary responsibility was to develop ideas for innovative programs. At the same time, Kentucky also maintained an agency-based planning program as well. The innovative systems section was a small group of planners whose responsibility was to deal with problems which did not have a particular agency focus or fell between the gaps of traditional agency concerns. Its responsibility was to try to develop interagency ideas and to deal with those ideas which could not be generated at the agency level. The fact that an SPA would feel obliged to have two planning structures—an agency-based planning unit and an innovation planning structuresignals a significant defeat of the vision of the Act. To expect that innovation would occur at the state level, yet pro-

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vide for a planning activity geared to serving primarily local criminal justice agencies, seems at best inconsistent. The incentive to colonize the planner is overwhelming, as is evidenced in the recruitment patterns of state planning agencies. We found that SPA planners serving police or corrections had often been drawn from those agencies for which they now had planning responsibility. Furthermore, in some states we found a reverse pattern of movement—for example, SPA police planners would frequently take jobs within the agencies for whom they had been planning. In either case this means that the agency perspective is never far removed from the planning process. Yet, it may be—and the Act suggests it to be the case—that innovation and the development of innovative ideas will require a departure from traditional agency perspectives. In attempting to make "new ideas" palatable to law enforcement agencies, planners at the state level have little, if any, statutory authority, and must depend upon the threat of refusing funds in an effort to achieve their aims. However, in many places, especially in big cities, such threats are empty. Since the SPA supervisory boards are themselves largely composed of leading criminal justice officials—people whose entire careers have been shaped by their agencies' perspectives —such threats by the planning staff are easily counteracted by the supervisory board. These boards, we found, quickly learned to function smoothly and minimize disruption by fostering "pie slicing"— each agency getting its share—rather than fostering new ideas, which they tend to view as disruptive. Even where SPAs have freedom from their boards and are able to insist on their priorities, they have difficulty promoting innovation. Given the fact that the LEAA budget for any particular state is never more than 3-5 percent of the state's criminal justice expenditures, planners quickly find that they do not have great financial leverage. When prodded to try new things reluctant agencies can easily afford to turn their backs on the federal "hand-out." While the extent to which this takes place varies, the pattern is clear and inescapable. Despite the vision manifest in the Safe Streets Act, the commitment implicit in its structure is one of minimal disruption. Federal monies were to be used for new ideas, but the structure of the SPAs insures that the "new ideas" never depart very far from past practice. The structure of the SPAs which insures close relations among agen-

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cies, planners, and their supervisory boards diminishes the likelihood that federal money will promote truly new ideas. This problem of structure might, however, have been overcome had the mandate to innovate been given some substance. But as we have seen and as will become still clearer in this chapter, the absence of substance left SPA officials charged with implementing the Act in a state of confusion, and, therefore, even more vulnerable to colonization by powerful and entrenched agencies. Given such confusion, the power of the status quo at the state and local level has been almost insurmountable. The attempt to buy innovation through the New Federalism not only ignored basic lessons about structure, but about the process of implementation as well. Resistance to new ideas is lessened if those ideas appear to be generated from within rather than outside the organizations whose functions are being called into question.3 Yet the SPAs quickly came to be seen as "outsiders" by state and local criminal justice officials. In a system long characterized by fragmentation and local autonomy, the creation of new statewide agencies—which were publicized from Washington as "powerful new forces"—met with suspicion, resistance, and ultimately colonization. Even when they have sought to overcome this problem and organized themselves in such a way as to facilitate "easy" relationships with agencies, they have nevertheless frequently been unable to escape the tag of "federal agents." The reason for this dilemma is clear. Although there was a clamor from a great many sources for Washington to "do something" about crime, there was never a demand from state and local criminal justice officials for afederal program of the type provided in the Safe Streets Act. The attachment of a mandate for innovation as a condition of receipt of federal funds came from above, from the Congress. It was part of the process of compromise which characterized the passage of the Safe Streets Act.4 It was the type of compromise characteristic of interest group liberalism: bold pronouncement about a problem, followed by lack of specific mission, weak authority, and the creation of a process by which the problem appears to be effectively pursued. In the case of LEAA, the block grant structure appears to be a nearperfect instrument for launching a bold vision, while at the same time assuring that it will have no fundamental impact.

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The absence of a grass roots demand for innovation within the state and local criminal justice and law enforcement agencies meant that planners, even as they were organized to serve the interests of agencies, had no ready clientele for new ideas.5 Any new idea, any proposal for interagency cooperation or for departures from agency practice would, in such a situation, be likely to be seen as an implicit criticism of agency practice from an "outsider," and, as a result, it would likely be resisted. Given the structure of LEAA, SPAs and RPUs have not been in a position to threaten or to appeal to the interests of powerful and entrenched criminal justice agencies. It must also be emphasized that law enforcement organizations are intrinsically resistant to extensive innovation. The literature on complex organizations suggests that organizations are least likely to be receptive to innovation when they are hierarchically organized and formal,6 and the organization of police and corrections fits nicely into Weber's model of rigidly formal and hierarchical organizations. Given such characteristics and the close relationship between local law enforcement and local politics, it is not surprising that the agencies on the firing line in the criminal justice system have not been supportive of what might appear to be an outside initiative for change.7 In recent years, resistance to SPA-defined innovation has only intensified. Budget tightening at the state and local level has led criminal justice and law enforcement agencies to search for new sources of funds simply to maintain ongoing functions, and in many instances these agencies have been successful in diverting LEAA funds for this purpose. Given the federal requirement for innovation, this has simply meant that these agencies have had to become masters at repackaging old ideas as "innovations." These recent budgetary crises have, however, only served to highlight and intensify long-standing practices within the SPAs and RPUs. From the outset, the dominant approach to innovation within the structure of LEAA might be ca\\ed public re/ations. Planners in criminal justice and law enforcement agencies have been quick to find new ways of describing traditional functions, and SPA planners have been more than quick in accepting them as such. Lest it appear that we are arguing that innovation within the structure of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration has failed simply because of these organizational factors and the power of its "constituents" at the local level, we must turn to examine still another

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important problem, the failure of theory. Recall that our thesis is that the problems of LEAA are problems of both practice and theory. THE IDEA OF INNOVATION What does it mean to innovate? The social science literature on innovation is massive and diverse.8 Its major concern has been to identify the proper meaning of innovation and to suggest optimal conditions under which innovation is likely to occur. Reviewing that literature suggests that academics have been unable to decide among themselves what it means to be innovative. When academics insulated from the pressures of operational responsibility are not able to do so, it is not surprising that planners and administrators at the state and local level are equally unable to do so. The term innovation is usually employed in at least three different contexts. In one context, innovation is comparable to invention.9 It refers to a process of creation where ideas are combined and recombined in some novel way to produce something which was previously unheard of. The metaphor of Edison innovating by inventing the electric lightbulb is applicable. Such invention in dealing with social problems is rare. A second way in which innovation might be understood is what the academic literature calls diffusion or adoption.10 Something is said to be innovative when it is new to a setting, even though individuals within that setting may have long been aware of its existence in other settings. A third meaning for innovation is experimentation.11 In this meaning an agency is said to be innovative when it "tries out" an idea not previously recognized or sanctioned within that organization in such a way as to suggest its willingness to endorse or accept the new idea after an initial trial stage. But the idea of innovation as experimentation requires that those innovating be prepared to admit the failure of an innovative idea. To experiment with public programs is to employ a method of trial and error in a politicized environment. Thus, those experimenting must understand and be willing to accept the political costs of dealing with inevitable failures. The problem of theory in the Safe Streets approach is that, although the Act called for innovation, it did not clarify which, if any, of these understandings it sought. Nor since its formation has LEAA been able

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to instill a coherent meaning to the concept. When, drawing upon the language of the Safe Streets Act, LEAA calls officials at the state and local level to innovate, it is not clear whether it is asking for invention, adoption, or experimentation. Indeed, in one or another of its incarnations LEAA has asked for all three. The task of the planner at the state and local level has been to make sense of this confusion, one which the original authors of the Act were themselves unable to clarify and one which since then has been a major preoccupation of LEAA officials. As with our original design to investigate SPA planning, we first set out in the tradition of social science research to try to identify the factors that made it possible for some SPAs to be more innovative than others, seeking to explain differences in terms of organizational structure and environment. What this would have required was the ability to recognize innovative practices when we saw them, to measure degrees of innovativeness, and to be able to relate them to variables whic might be able to account for the presence or absence of innovation.12 Our original plan was revised when, upon beginning to interview SPA and RPU staff members, we found that they did not feel comfortable with the term innovation. Most had no ready understanding of it. Nor was there any agreement as to what types of specific programs were "innovative." In short, we found no consensus about the meaning of the term or about specific instancesof innovation. Indeed, many questioned whether it was possible to use such a term to describe what they actually did or what LEAA really wanted. When we encountered such diverse views and such reluctance to serious use of the term innovation, we decided that here too it would be more profitable to abandon our original intention and try to understand what these planners actually thought they were doing when they expended federal funds upon "innovative" projects. If they did not understand what it meant to innovate, then it seemed inappropriate for us to try to conceptualize and measure their behavior in such terms. When asked what it meant to innovate, several officials responded by admitting that they had no idea. The following is characteristic: "Oh, that's just a word, I don't think that anybody around here pretends really to understand it." In the absence of a clear understanding of the mandate to innovate, the task of SPA officials becomes one of devising ways of coping with both the uncertainty and the banality of language, in that the language of the Act and LEAA Guidelines requires that they must use the term. This coping generally takes the

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form of a self-imposed and self-consciously arbitrary understanding of innovation. In each of the SPAs we studied, we found evidence of each of the three major ideas of innovation—invention, adoption, and experimentation. The idea that to innovate is to invent means that, for some, innovation speaks to the question of where new ideas come from; who thinks them up and how. To speak of innovation as adoption refers to the question of whether new ideas can be used: whether or not there is a constituency for change or reform within the criminal justice system. To speak of innovation as experimentation raises the question of whether it is possible within the politicized environment of the criminal justice system to get people to try new ideas without being able to assure them of their success. These three ideas about what innovation is run through many of our interviews. Yet what our respondents revealed, when they use the term innovation in their official documents and reports, is a posturing, public-relations attitude taken to meet the terms set forth by LEAA. Given the uncertainty surrounding the term innovation and its application to criminal justice, those responsible for administering and implementing the Safe Streets Act have developed a wide variety of strategies for incorporating its meaning into their work. Each of those strategies may seem peculiar as an adaptive mechanism, especially given LEAA's original interest in using federal money as the cutting edge for change within state and local law enforcement. At the same time, each seems in its own way appropriate to the circumstances and conditions of those who employed them. In the following pages we describe those strategies and then suggest their implications for the operation of LEAA and for reform in law enforcement and criminal justice administration. ADAPTIVE STRATEGIES FOR INNOVATION Evasion. Given the uncertainty which surrounded the passage of the Safe Streets Act in terms of its commitment to innovation, it is not surprising that many SPA and RPU officials simply ignore its mandate. But, given their position, they are unable to admit openly, to either themselves or others, that they are ignoring this mandate. Instead they deny in more or less sophisticated ways the possibility of change with-

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in the criminal justice system, especially the possibility of change purchased by federal money. As one of our respondents put it, "Money can't buy change." His view characterized the position of many SPA and RPU officials. In order for change to come about in the criminal justice system, he continued, there would have to be changes in personnel. Old practices, he felt, would only give way when new officials with new perspectives were brought in. And this, he reasoned, would not be brought about by federal funds. For him it was fruitless to think that individuals whose commitments were to the status quo could be prodded by the small amounts available from LEAA and the weak SPAs and still weaker RPUs to give up those commitments. In his perception, most officials in the criminal justice system do not care about change, and when they do, they can succeed without new funds.13 For this planner and others like him, "real" innovation is unlikely to occur given the present structure of local law enforcement. But his expectations run unusually high. When he thought of innovation, he thought about invention—that is, the creation of new ideas. He believed that in order to say that LEAA was innovative one had to be able to point out new ideas which were not present in the criminal justice system prior to a specific effort by LEAA. Others, while more ready to accept the idea that everything had not been invented, described innovation and innovative ideas as "gimmicks." They argued that the attempt to be innovative was a fad. Unlike LEAA officials in Washington, officials in local criminal justice systems were resistant to fads.14 For these people, like those ready to deny that it was possible to innovate, the strategy of denigrating innovation within the criminal justice system was a liberating one. Shedding the obligation to pursue an impossible task, they were free to turn to more realistic goals, defined as they themselves best saw fit. When questioned about how LEAA funds ought to be used, those who denied the ability to innovate argued that their goal was system improvement and efficiency. For them, federal money was appropriately spent when it was used to upgrade existing facilities and efforts. To them, if the term innovation meant anything, it meant efficiency. Their approach was technocratic. Politically, the jobs of these planners were relatively easy because their expectations were "low." Their approach to the criminal justice agencies was not to say, "Let's get together to find new ideas to do better what you've already done." Rather, it was to accept the ade-

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quacy of the old ways of doing things and defer to the expertise of practitioners, at best suggesting that whatever problems there were with the old ways were largely ones of resources. They could easily join hands with criminal justice agencies, for they did not require the agencies to acknowledge their own inadequacies in order to meet the requirements of federal funding. People who subscribed to this position saw their roles neither as architects for wholesale restructuring nor as salesmen for "fads" or "gimmicks." Rather they saw themselves as sympathetic aids, people whose responsibility it was to work with state and local criminal justice agencies in accordance with the wishes of those agencies which, because of their long-standing responsibilities, were most likely to know about the problems of crime and how to tackle them. Often they saw themselves as representatives of these agencies, helping them do battle against an awkward and insensitive federal bureaucracy. By and large, these SPA and RPU planners believed that the function of LEAA was not to reform the criminal justice system but to facilitate its continued operations. For them innovation was a code word for disruption; innovation was a symbol of the rejection of traditional approaches to the crime problem by social engineers and posturing bureaucrats in Washington. Some went further and saw innovation as an altogether fraudulent concept. They believed that state and local criminal justice agencies had a right to federal money as long as it was spent for criminal justice purposes. They saw LEAA's Guidelines as illegitimate, an attempt to force diverse criminal justice agencies into a single national mold. They saw the Guidelines as an effort to transform a block grant program into the equivalent of a categorical aid program, and argued that the Guidelines were unduly intrusive on those whose primary responsibility it was to fight crime. They saw it as one of their functions to "creatively subvert" the Guidelines in order to be able to use federa money to promote improvement and efficiency along the lines desired by state and local criminal justice agencies. This approach to innovation meant that for many of the people in SPAs there was neither the need to fight the conceptual battles involved in trying to determine whether programs were innovative, nor the need to fight the political battles required to build support for programs which would be genuinely new and different. This approach deferred all judgment to the receipients of the funds, criminal justice officials themselves.

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Research and Development. A second group of planners accepts the legitimacy of innovation as a standard for judging the requests of local criminal justice agencies for federal funds. In their view, the real purpose of having a federal crime-fighting program is to allow criminal justice and law enforcement agencies the opportunity to try new approaches, approaches which do not easily fit into their ongoing programs or are not possible within their tight budgets. For these planners the key to innovation is insulation from the pressures of state and local officials. In their view the pressures of day-to-day operations mean that criminal justice and law enforcement agencies are unable to devote the time and effort necessary to think about new ways to cope with their problems. In order for innovation to occur, "space" must be available for such thinking, space which is unlikely to be available to those faced with the immediate problems of a rising crime rate. In the view of several of the planners to whom we spoke, if innovation is to be possible at all, it has to emerge from the operations of the state planning agencies themselves. Freed from the pressures of actually operating a crime-fighting agency, they see it as their responsibility to do the kind of thinking which is difficult for those on the firing line. Even as they accept the responsibility for innovating, or at least promoting innovation within the criminal justice system, these planners believe that the structure of LEAA and the SPAs hinders their ability to do so. For them, the key error in the original conception of the Safe Streets Act was to link the planning function with the granting function. As one planner put it: The first mistake for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was to give us the responsibilities for planning and for granting. Before we even had a chance to think about what we were doing, we found ourselves with a pot of federal bucks and we were inundated with requests for it. From then on what we found was that the year by year planning and granting cycle meant that we didn't have enough time to sit around and think about what we ought to be doing. You can't expect people to do everything that we're called upon to do and at the same time to devise really new ways for spending federal money.

For him and others like him, the problem of innovation is not conceptual but is instead strategic. For such planners, the pressures of passing out federal money make innovation impossible. They believe that, in order for innovation to

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occur within the structure of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, state planning agencies have to act as research and development (R&D) units. In their views, it is the responsibility of planners in the SPAs and RPUs to develop ideas for reforming criminal justice operations. Some went so far as to argue that in order for this to occur there should be a cessation of federal "action grant" money for a period of time while SPA planners are given the opportunity to develop truly new and innovative approaches. People who see state planning agencies as R&D units also tend to think of innovation as invention. As one planner put it, "when you talk about innovation, you talk about the creation of knowledge. When you talk about innovation in the criminal justice system, you talk about creating new ways to deal with the crime problem." Planners who hold this research and development approach believe that they can devise new ways for dealing with the ongoing problems of crime. In the absence of a cessation of federal funding at the state level, many of these planners devise ways of forestalling demands for federal funds. They develop strategies for denying requests even from the most powerful of the crime-fighting agencies. In this way they are able, although in a truncated way, to find some space for working out some new approaches and fostering them through selective grants. Some of them rely upon LEAA's Guidelines in this strategy, using them to "red tape to death" requests for funds of which they personally disapprove. Rather than rejecting proposals on the merits, and thereby precipitating a battle, they interpret the Guidelines narrowly and selectively, and argue that proposals do not qualify under the Guidelines. Using the Guidelines to resist requests without exercising political muscle allows them to accomplish their purpose without having to appear personally responsible for saying no to anyone. Planners who believe in the possibility of innovation try to protect the federal treasury from the very real and very strong pressures to siphon off Safe Streets funds for other programs. At the same time they recognize that they do not have the political power necessary to refuse requests constantly. They need to devise new ways for dealing with the crime problems, but in order to do so, they need to be able to "defend" themselves within the granting cycle. The most creative of these individuals were able to develop some degree of "space" without at the same time losing credibility within the justice system.

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Those employing a research and development strategy often try to bring new ideas to the attention of appropriate agencies. They argue that if truly new approaches are ever to occur in state and local crim inal justice agencies, they have to be sold piecemeal. This strategy of salesmanship requires that professional planners not lose touch with the needs of the agency which they serve. At the same time, it requires that they remain sufficiently distant from that agency to be able to appreciate the fit between that agency's needs and their own views of the mandate of the Safe Streets Act. Devising new ideas to deal with the ongoing problem of crime is of no use if such ideas could not be made attractive to those who are the primary recipients of federal funds. As one respondent suggested: My problem is that I have to be able to talk to these people on a day-to-day basis without beginning to think like them. . . . I have to maintain sufficiently good relations so that they will take my ideas seriously. I must appear sympathetic to them and their needs, and indeed I am, but at the same time I have to place their needs and problems within a larger picture, a picture which they themselves may not appreciate.

The dilemma of the advocates of the R&D position can be seen as an "approach-avoidance" problem. They need distance from the agencies which they serve, but at the same time they need access. They need detachment in order to devise new ideas, but they also need the opportunity to sell them. The real fear of these R&D planners was that even if new ideas could be generated, there would be no political support for them. As a group, however, R&D planners see themselves as working on an ad hoc basis for specific projects to which they are committed. Instead of taking a comprehensive approach to the problems of planning, they most often identify one or two areas into which they put their energy and to which they devote considerable time. Their commitments in these areas generally mean that they were unreceptive to pressures for evaluation. As we saw in one state in which a substantial portion of the energy of the entire state planning agency had been devoted to a major reform in the juvenile justice system, those planners who saw the SPA as a research and development unit were not committed to the kind of scientific evaluation which the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration has attempted to encourage. Despite their unprecedented and bold goals, the planners could not "afford" in a psychic or political sense to be proven wrong when so much of

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their activity has been devoted to creating this opportunity and selling it to practitioners and politicians. Experimentation. A small but not insignificant number of planners understand innovation to require experimentation. The following response is illustrative: "innovation is an unproven, not a new, idea." For these people, to be innovative was simply to be willing to try approaches whose effects could not be clearly foreseen; for them the infusion of LEAA money was an opportunity for such experimentation Criminal justice agencies are laboratories in which approaches and strategies for dealing with crime can be tested. To be consistent with the mandate of the Safe Streets Act, these "experimentalists" argued, the SPAs must use their limited resources to test out intriguing but untested ideas. They need not be new inventions, only ideas not yet tried in their jurisdictions. As they see it, their job is to help state and local law enforcement agencies determine which of these ideas might be suitable for their particular problems. Most who equated innovation with experimentation also believe that the way action grant funds are being used should be revised. Experimental to them implies that as soon as something has proven workable, LEAA support should be withdrawn and directed elsewhere. The real barrier to innovativeness is the commitment to continuation funding. If the local agencies refuse to adopt the proven success, federal money should not be used to continue its support. Innovation for the experimentalists also requires distance. But unlike the R&D planners who seek distance from the agencies, the experimentalists want distance from the ideas themselves. They see them selves as scientists in the pure sense of that word. It is their task to encourage state and local agencies to try approaches even when there is a likelihood that those approaches will not produce dramatic results. Indeed, as one respondent put it, "if we are to be innovative, then we need to be ready or should I say eager to admit failure." The opportunity provided by the availability of federal funds for criminal justice reform is quite unusual. The potential of state and local law enforcement has been fundamentally altered by the infusion of federal money. For the first time LEAA provides these agencies with the opportunity to try out new ideas without putting them in the position of being criticized for wasting local tax money. Indeed, what is most important to the experimentalists is that the goals of in-

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novation and improvement are often in conflict. While innovation focuses on the untested, implies a willingness to try many things, and requires a commitment to scientific evaluation, system improvement seeks to do fewer things more effectively. When innovation is understood as experimentation, the function of the planner at the state level is to sell new ideas without being committed to them. In contrast, when innovation is understood as improvement, the task of the planner is to promote guaranteed success through incremental change. The barrier which many of our experimentalists identify as being most significant in deterring experimentation is found in the politics of planning and granting. Experimentation requires focused energy. In contrast, the politics of LEAA insures that all the major criminal justice agencies are able to claim a portion of the federal "pie" every year, thereby diffusing efforts. As one of our respondents argued, "what we need to do is to stop trying to pass out some money to everybody. Instead what we ought to do is to identify on a year-toyear basis those aspects of the crime problem to which we should devote our attention. Then what we should do is to devise experiments, test new ideas and move on." Adoption. A related variant of the experimental approach to innovation focuses on the problem of federalism. Perhaps the most popular response to the question, what does it mean to be innovative, was that innovation means transferring ideas developed in one environment or jurisdiction to another. It is, according to some planners, their job to get local and state criminal justice agencies to try ideas which have proven useful elsewhere but which have not yet been employed within their state or region. These planners acknowledge, however, that the crime problem is different in every state and what works in one state may not in another. Here innovation is not understood as invention or experimentation; as one respondent said, "Our job as planners is to find out what has worked elsewhere and to communicate that within our state. Then if people are interested in it, we ought to be willing to fund it." An idea is innovative if it is new to a jurisdiction no matter what its prior history in other areas. Planners who see innovation in these terms are frustrated by the concept itself. One respondent complained, "They all tell us to be innovative but they don't tell us what an innovation is." Their strategy of coping is to understand LEAA's mandate to innovate as an invita-

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tion to borrow ideas from other jurisdictions. This allows them to justify widely varying types of programs depending on the nature of the requesting agencies. What is old hat in Massachusetts may be a radical breakthrough in Alabama, or at times what is standard in Boston may be novel just a few miles away. One RPU official stated this concern succinctly: "What might seem like pretty tired stuff to you seems to us down here to be really new and different." When it comes to thinking about new ways of fighting crime, in many states those new ways might be police cars for rural policemen or elementary police communication systems when none existed before. Bringing new ideas into a jursidiction, in the view of many of our respondents, is an accomplishment of no mean significance. Innovation-as-adoption is often carried beyond the position "new to the state," to include "new to the area" or "new to this agency." The rural-urban difference is very substantial. Accordingly, planners cannot be rigid in their conceptions of what innovative projects might be. They have to be sensitive to the needs of particular areas. Following the "new-to-an-agency" view to its conclusion, SPA officials holding this position argue in support of equipment purchases for some "backward" agencies. At times this leads to considerable conflict with other SPA officials and the national LEAA. One respondent observed: What good is it to try to get people who never have even seen a computerized information system to talk about computerizing their entire law enforcement effort? It's just silly. Some of the higher-ups in Washington don't seem to realize that unless the project can be written up and described in one of those glossy brochures which we get from Washington, then it doesn't seem to be worthwhile let alone innovative. But from where we stand, innovation means bringing in ideas which haven't been seen before. There's nothing new under the sun but there's a lot new about fifty miles west from here.

Innovation-as-adoption is consistent with the thrust of New Federalism which was, as we have argued, a significant part of the impetus for the particular form of the LEAA. To those holding this position, the planner is not to be an isolated thinker or even a seller of ideas, but rather a facilitator, a clearinghouse of ideas tried elsewhere. To them, innovation need not require a leap of faith or dramatic new technology; rather it requires a general knowledge about ideas tried elsewhere and a sensitivity to local needs. According to those holding this position, if planners respond in this way, they will be effective.

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But if they insist they know better or act as if the criminal justice system is a laboratory for testing their own ideas or abstract theories, they will have little impact. Those who define innovation-as-adoption complain that the LEAA Guidelines and national pronouncements take an "absolutist" perspective. They believe, therefore, that it is necessary, as much as possible, to ignore such Guidelines or to evade them. To them innovation is possible bnly so long as one tempers one's expectations about what it means to be innovative and understands it in relation to the needs of particular agencies. I n the absence of obvious technological "breakthroughs," their best strategy is to remain closely tied to state and local criminal justice agencies and to be responsive to their needs. This means that within many states there is a genuine pluralism in how federal funds are expended. In some areas they may be expende on projects which are routine or standard within the context of the nation as a whole, while in other areas innovation may be fostered by SPA planners only if it is "path-breaking." To bring new ideas into a state does not require a high degree of professionalism among planners. Indeed, it seems to require more in the way of sensitivity than insight, more in the way of representativeness than imagination, more in the way of access than distance. Few of those who perceive innovation as adoption regard the structure of the state planning agencies as a problem. They see nothing inconsistent in the close connections between planning and granting or the domination of their supervisory boards by agency officials. However, what is frequently cited as a problem is the tension between SPAs and RPUs. Those who see the wisdom of the adoption approach often criticize the RPUs for failing to gather critical data or for being too far removed from local agencies to produce effective project proposals. In their view, the state plan should be little more than the compilation of requests received from regional planning units. To them the primary function of the SPA is screening such requests and providing minimal coordination. CONCLUSION The attempt to mandate innovation through a federal program designed to provide funds at the state and local level when coupled with

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the unwillingness to legislate a clear definition of innovation has resulted in conceptual pluralism, yielding a multiplicity of competing and conflicting views, not a coherent vision of how to proceed. The most characteristic response to the question what does it mean to innovate was uncertainty and confusion. This response arises from confusion of both theory and practice. There is no consensus as to what it means to innovate within the criminal justice system, nor are the SPAs and RPUs situated in such a way that they have access and authority to impose a definite meaning and carry out its implication. The language of the Safe Streets Act does not make clear what was intended, and while the LEAA Guidelines identify in a general way the kinds of approaches which ought to be taken, neither they nor the Safe Streets Act grant adequate authority to fulfill their charges. Asked to be innovative, planners at the state level frequently have no idea what they are being asked to do. Their response is, therefore, to devise their own definitions of innovation, definitions which allow them to cope with the pressures of their jobs. One cannot expect that the implementors of a program will come close to identifying the goals of that program when those goals were insufficiently specified in the first place. The theory and structure of LEAA have made it impossible for planners to be responsive to its broad vision and intent. We have encountered not so much a failure of will as a failure of imagination; not so much a studied evasion or recasting of the Act's mandate as an inability to determine what it means. In the absence of clear authority and vision, we found preoccupation with the process and a pluralism of responses. It is a problem more closely akin to Lowi's concern for the demise of a public philosophy than Pressman and Wildavsky's concern with the problems of implementation. Running throughout many of our interviews is the belief that innovation could not be introduced from above, from LEAA or the SPAs. The structure and operation of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration at both the national and state level insures that individuals and officials whose primary commitments are to the maintenance of the status quo will prevail in the planning process. It is easier and more politically feasible for SPA staff to plan and fund in a "conservative" way than to try to work for genuine changes within a struc ture which inhibits such activity. But the politics of LEAA simply compounds the difficulties imposed by the theoretical confusions of the

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Act itself. Ultimately it is not structural defects but the lack of specificity of the original legislation that produces confusion over innovation and insures that reform will be frustrated and that new ideas, when they emerge, will be the coincidental product of particular individuals, not planned activity. It is in this sense that the confusion over the meaning of innovation diminishes the ability of administrators to implement the Safe Streets Act and contributes to the policy dilemma in criminal justice.

5 Finding Out What Works: Evaluation and the Limits of the "Scientific" Paradigm By 1968 the Great Society had come under intense criticism for investing large amounts of federal money in programs and policies which did not work.1 Many of those programs and policies were enacted without designing or requiring regular and systematic assessments of their effectiveness and impact. Critics argued that this put policymakers in the position of "groping in the dark" and handicapped them in their efforts to adjust ongoing social programs incrementally or to terminate those which proved wasteful or ill-considered. The passage of the Safe Streets Act did not indicate any radical departure from the pattern of expenditure without evaluation. However, by 1972 Congress became convinced of the importance of evaluating the quality of activities undertaken with Safe Streets funds. Whether because of horror stories of mismanagement or a new appreciation of social science research, Congress amended the Act to require LEAA to conduct evaluation studies of programs supported by Part B action grant funds. Thus began the effort to find out what works in crime fighting and criminal justice reform. Given this congressional mandate, the Nixon Administration pressed LEAA to produce demonstrable results, and LEAA in turn pressed the SPAs to undertake research and evaluate their projects in order to demonstrate their effectiveness. These pressures took many forms. Initially, LEAA used its Guidelines as the major vehicle for insisting that each SPA have a special evaluation unit and that this unit be ca-

ns

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pable of evaluating SPA-funded projects. With the 1972 amendments to the Safe Streets Act, Congress increased the amount of money authorized to the SPAs to facilitate evaluation activities. LEAA followed up this legislative mandate with still more detailed guidelines and by allocating substantial portions of its discretionary funds for nationalbased evaluation research. The National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice was also drawn into the effort; its role was expanded to include the development of a criminal justice evaluation technology and the preparation of "model" evaluation reports, the development of easily understood evaluation training modules and the funding of numerous publications and conferences to teach the rudiments of evaluation methods and to promote their use and acceptance. On the surface these efforts have been successful. In 1972, O'Connell and White interviewed SPA staff in the New England states and found widespread hostility toward and little knowledge about "scientific" evaluation.2 They found that "most LEAA officials are either former practitioners in some field of law enforcement or professional bureaucrats [to whom] the idea that crime control programs are experimental interventions in social processes is alien . . . [or] plain nonsense."3 In only two of the six New England states did they find SPA staff members who were both trained in social science research methods and supportive of evaluation research. In contrast, in our interviews in a dozen states several years later, we found that most SPAs had staff trained in and knowledgeable about the rudiments of evaluation design and research. While we found widespread differences among SPA officials over the meaning of the concepts "innovation" and "planning," there were no significant differences over the term "evaluation." It was a notion about which there was considerable agreement. Despite this agreement in conception, few evaluation specialists reported that they were engaged in evaluation in any meaningful sense, or that they were supporting others who were conducting meaningful evaluation research. In contrast to planning and innovation, this failure was not a failure of clarity in the Act or in its intentions. SPA officials knew what the Act required. However, given the operational conditions of their programs, they were often unable to obtain systematic evaluations, and when they did, they could rarely put them to use.

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SPA AND RPU CONCEPTIONS OF EVALUATION "What is evaluation?" When we asked this question point-blank, we received two types of answers. A small group saw evaluation as a type of project auditing and monitoring, while the vast majority of those we interviewed understood it as a type of "scientific analysis and experimental testing." Evaluation as Project Auditing, Monitoring, and Description. Although the composition of the SPA staffs has changed dramatically within the past few years, a disproportionate number of them remain people with prior experience in law enforcement and criminal justice administration, and a number of these people occupy positions on the evaluation and planning units of the SPAs. When queried as to what evaluation is many of them described it as a type of auditing or monitoring. They understood evaluation to be the determination of whether those responsible for implementing LEAA-funded projects were in fact performing the tasks specified in their grant proposals—that is, spending the money for those items provided in its budget, operating according to procedures, and in general performing their tasks according to the speculations of the project's proposal. SPA evaluation staff holding this view saw their jobs as providing an up-to-date list of the hundreds of projects funded by the SPAs and RPUs in order to document their functions, their size, expense, recipient agencies, and basic aims and goals. Evaluation, in this perspective, serves two important functions. It provides the SPA director—often someone without any systemwide experience in the criminal justice system, or prior SPA experience— with a description of the projects supported by his agency. Second, it provides a basis for determining how the LEAA funds are distributed by region, agency, and program areas. Some of those holding this view also see their evaluation units functioning something like a public information office, whose task it was to present the inquiring public with brief—and favorable—descriptions of what the agency is doing and how its funds are being spent. Evaluation as Measurement of Impact and Consequences. The great majority of SPA and RPU officials held a much more sophisticated

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view of evaluation, one wh ich in its essence conforms to standard academic definitions of the term—that is, as research ideally conducted under experimental or quasi-experimental conditions to determine if a particular policy is or is not having its intended effect. This was not particularly surprising, since a great many of those we interviewed had advanced degrees in the social sciences or in public administration, and were familiar with the standard texts on experimental and quasiexperimental evaluation research. But while these officials could agree in the abstract over the meaning of the concept, there was no similar agreement as to whether in fact they ought to be conducting such evaluations. When responding to the questions, what are you doing and what would you like to be doing with respect to evaluation, we received widely varying responses. Some thought evaluation was an ideal toward which they were working against overwhelming odds, while others regarded scientific evaluation of the SPA-funded projects as a waste of time and effort. Reasons for these positions varied, as did the ways SPAs attempted to cope with their mandate to evaluate. OBSTACLES TO EVALUATION AND STRATEGIES FOR COPING Reasons for abandoning or rejecting the ideal of rigorous scientific evaluation can be classified under three headings: political, technical, and organizational. While these distinctions may seem too neat, they do emphasize quite different types of problems in implementing evaluation. Although the reasons presented below are listed in terms of a set of distinct problems, most interviewees cited several factors; none of them rested his or her case on only one factor alone. Political Obstacles to Evaluation. Perhaps the most frequently cited reason for the reluctance to spend funds to obtain evaluations which met minimum scientific standards was the belief that the results, whatever they might be, would not make any difference. What is most important in determining the utility of evaluation is its relation to the planning process in which decisions are made about funding projects. Many of those we interviewed argued that evaluation only makes sense if, in the words of one SPA planner, the "funding decisions ar based on freedom rather than necessity." Since grants are awarded on

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the basis of "politics" rather than real planning, evaluation is a waste of scarce resources because project consequences are not likely to be important in determining future funding. Only if a project is scandal ously ineffective would future funding be cut off. But if this extreme situation were the case, it would be evident without having to rely on an expensive and time-consuming evaluation. This view was expressed by another SPA planner who, while knowledgeable about evaluation techniques, was equally unenthusiastic about LEAA evaluation requirements. He told us that he was arranging to have only a small handful of his projects evaluated because the others were so locked in that it made no difference what the evaluation report would say. "They [the projects] will continue to be funded. Only outright scandal might stop them. Commissioner wants something and he sits on the SPA Board and has friends there [so he will get what he wants regardless of our findings or recommendation.]" This theme of the inefficacy of evaluation results was echoed by numerous other planners and evaluation specialists who, resigned to the political nature of the planning process, saw little value in evaluation. Their skepticism was reinforced by the hostility of members of the SPA supervisory boards to evaluation. Such boards have two interrelated sets of reasons for disregarding evaluations. Most members of SPA supervisory boards are themselves heads of criminal justice agencies, and assucharespokespeople for a "local" perspective, a position holding that it is the agencies themselves which know best how to cope with and assess the problems they face. These officials often have long-standing "wish lists" of things to do, view federal funds as theirs, and consequently tend to resist efforts to scrutinize how they spend these funds. Many of these officials are quite willing to characterize their projects in whatever language the SPA and LEAA wants to hear. To them, SPA-required project descriptions are little more than part of the "red tape" and "grantsmanship" required to obtain their share of "federal funds." One consequence is that normal project proposals may not accurately reflect the real intent of applicants, and, because of this, grantees are not enthusiastic about being held accountable to their formally stated goals. But this is not the sole reason that agency heads and SPA supervisory board members reject the idea of scientific evaluation. Many SPA staff members complain that the members of their supervisory boards are extremely busy people who quickly become bored by the

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technical details of lengthy evaluation reports and impatient with the extended discussion they generate. It is a desire to save time, a number of SPA officials felt, that leads many SPA board members to prefer to allocate by fixed formula. Deferring to agency judgments and dividing funds by formula dispenses altogether with questions of effectiveness and the results of scientific evaluations.4 Methodological and Technological Obstacles to Evaluation. While the politics of SPA decision making goes a long way in explaining the perceived lack of need for evaluation, it alone cannot account for the pervasive lack of enthusiasm for evaluation among SPA officials themselves. SPA and RPU planning and evaluation specialists point to othe obstacles which further blunt the production of sound evaluations and further weaken their belief in the value of evaluations. Many of the projects funded are "one-shot" efforts, projects designed to ameliorate singular problems. Evaluating such efforts, they argued, is not helpful because there is no chance of repeating them. An example of a one-shot project whose evaluation would make little, if any, difference is a state's shift to a unified court system, a plan for judicial organization which places all courts within a single statewide structure. Fostered by several national organizations, including the prestigious American Bar Association, court unification has become a major objective in many states, and SPAs have spent considerable effort and funds in behalf of such a goal. While many court specialists within the SPAs are skeptical of the claims of proponents of unification, few of them appear interested in supporting evaluations of unification. They argue that unification is an irresistible idea whose "time has come," and that it makes little sense to invest substantial amounts to trace the impact—or in their views, lack of impact—of such a change. At best, such an evaluation would only be useful to other states who were still considering the change, and there is little, if any, incentive for one state to absorb the cost of evaluating something whose only value would be to benefit another state.5 While the lack of incentive to evaluate single-shot projects is compel I ing at least from a state perspective, many SPA evaluators stretched this perspective to an extreme. Even when a particular program might be repeated a number of times within the state, many SPA and RPU officials were still skeptical of the benefits of evaluation.

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Carried to its logical conclusion, this attitude is hostile to all evaluation efforts; ultimately, it rests on the premise that each project is "unique," and therefore cannot provide answers for other projects or even the same project repeated in the future. While some SPA planners and evaluators had developed such a deep skepticism about "social science" research, most were somewhat less pessimistic. Many felt however, that "personalities" play an important and perhaps crucial role in determining a program's success or failure, that often the success of a project depends on the enthusiasm, experience, interests, and capabilities of those charged with administering it. Such factors, they argued, are not easily incorporated into standard, quantitative research designs. There are other obstacles to meaningful evaluation which cause many to be less than enthusiastic about supporting evaluation research. Because of the nature of the process by which projects are selected projects rarely identify clear and measurable objectives against which subsequent performance can be measured. Instead, projects are likely to haveamutliplicity of goals, couched in exaggerated and ambiguous language designed to appeal to as broad a spectrum of interests as possible. Projects also often tackle problems through a variety of interrelated efforts, so that even if each goal is clearly specified it is impossible to identify which of the several new efforts is responsible for any observed change. As one frustrated police planner recalled: The evaluation showed that the total of $750,000 spent in [city] was effective. But the program did a lot of things, and all we know is that overall, the three-quarters of a million dollar project had some success, but we can't pinpoint which parts of it were successful and unsuccessful. We can't go around replicating this expensive a program in lots of other cities.

When pressed as to why they did not exert greater control over the design and execution of an SPA-funded evaluation, SPA administrators agreed that although this is a good idea in principle, it is rarely possible in practice. Evaluation is not welcomed by the agencies requesting money, is not regarded as a high priority by the SPA board, and is viewed as a nuisance by the planners themselves, immersed as they are in the practical problems of grant administration. While many SPA officials—and particularly evaluation specialistsare irritated by such attitudes, many others regard the SPA awards

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process as an inevitable "fact," and rely on means other than formal evaluation to assess the effectiveness of projects. Invariably this involves them in the "political process," a process in which the findings of empirical research are likely to be viewed instrumentally if they are to be used at all. As an example: We had been funding [a project] for a very long time and it didn't seem to be very productive, but we had a difficult time trying to terminate the funding. In this situation we had a need for an evaluation and we got it quickly. It was negative and we were able to cut off the funds for the program.

Organizational Obstacles to Evaluation. While the political nature of the planning process and the lack of an effective technology to cope with it is enough to discourage evaluation, there is still one more set of factors which has contributed to the general lack of enthusiasm for evaluation among even those whose formal training and professional interests would incline them to be predisposed to "experimental" research. This set of obstacles is organizational. These factors include the internal structure of the SPAs, the SPAs' relationships with the agencies whose projects they fund, and the relations of both of these units to still a third group, contract evaluators. These factors work against both the production of formal evaluations as well as their use. The lack of structure within the SPAs and RPUs works against the production of scientifically acceptable evaluations. The most frequently cited problem is the lack of coordination between planning and evaluation staffs. Both planners and evaluators acknowledge that the SPAs and RPUs fund most projects for a period of three to five years, and this in itself lessens the need for evaluation. During this period, most states impose an assumption-of-cost provision, which means that each year the agency receiving LEAA funds must assume an increasing share of the cost of the project. (A typical assumptionof-cost scale is 10 percent for the first year, 20 percent for the second year, and 30-50 percent the third year.) The "real" test of a project's success, SPA officials maintain, is not what an evaluation would say, but whether the project is picked up by local tax funds after this short pilot project. While the assumption-of-cost requirement is one device that imposes some measure of fiscal restraint and caution on local officials, Congress did not mean for it to do away with the need for evaluations. Still, SPAs are reluctant to engage in and use evaluation. Theoretically

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evaluations could benefit SPA and RPU planners in several ways: evaluation could lead to (1) termination of an LEAA-funded project and reallocation of the resources elsewhere; (2) redesign and reorganization of a project to overcome obstacles retarding its effectiveness; or (3) a decision not to spend more money in the program area because of a general lack of success. Alternatively, a. positive evaluation could show that (1) a project is sound and should be continued; (2) a project idea is sound and the SPA should press the state or local governments to institutionalize it; (3) the idea is sound and it should be expanded into other localities and jurisdictions. In short, the primary function of evaluation is to tell planners what works, what does not, and why; in turn, this information is to be used to shape future funding and planning. While this is the theory, the practice, according to our respondents, is wholly different. At the time of our study, SPAs were tied to an annual budget. SPAs accommodated to this by creating an annual cycle for applications and awards. Presumably the results of the first or second year of operation of a project influence the decision to fund for a second or third year. However, this rarely if ever occurred. Consideration for second-year funding began midway during the first year of a project's life, so that there is neither time nor data to make a meaningful assessment of the project's effectiveness. In their first few months, most projects are preoccupied with staffing and start-up problems, so there is little of substance and still less of measurable impact to evaluate by the time the staff has to make recommendations for second-year funding. Rarely if ever do second-yea applications benefit from findings of evaluation research, and as a result the requirement to evaluate is frequently regarded as an obstruction. One planner stated the problem as follows: "Evaluations are rarely there when decisions are made. They come too late to play a decisive role in planning." Another observed: "As it now stands, evaluations tend to come in after the planning phase [is complete] so that it doesn't help to establish priorities and goals in an objective way. . . . There are further constraints by the twelve month [funding] limit, which is ridiculous since it takes six months for a Project to get underway." A second set of factors which minimizes the value and quality of evaluations stems from the SPAs' lack of control over projects funded. Our respondents reported that only rarely did any research approaching

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a controlled experiment take place and even when it did those charged with analyzing the results were not usually in a position to see that their design was faithfully executed. For instance, random assignment into experimental (project) and control groups is fiercely resisted by most program administrators and agency officials, and even when it is obtained, it is often subverted by people charged with administering the experimental program.6 These are well-known, built-in liabilities of policy research and evaluation, and experienced evaluation researchers have learned to cope with them.7 One way to do this is to carefully limit and circumscrib one's findings, pointing out weaknesses and carefully qualifying results pending additional research. The findings of professionally competent evaluation research therefore are likely to be surrounded by hesitations, qualifications, and pleas for more and better data. But what is sound professionalism to evaluators often causes frustration for planners.8 Good evaluators are reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions from extremely limited data, and their conclusions are likely to be tentative, equivocal, and if anything, erring on the side of caution. On the other hand, planners are interested in the "bottom line": should the project be refunded or not? While evaluators speak about the marginal effects of a host of variables, planners want a simple yes/no answer. This tension is keenly felt by most of the SPA officials we interviewed, and in one way or another leads most of them to discount the utility of the evaluation research supported by their own organizations. One planner who had impressive educational credentials in public policy analysis admitted that, after wrestling with this problem for a long time, he had finally come to the conclusion that formal evaluations were not worthwhile. At one time, he reported, his office had invested heavily in contracting for prestigious university-based evaluation research, but had since given it up. While his office had obtained first-rate research studies, he found that they were produced only after a heavy investment of money, time, and energy, and that they were rarely helpful for planning purposes. He summarized the lessons he had learned as follows: "evaluators tend to be equivocal, so they are not very helpful in making a yes/no decision. They [evaluators] keep wanting better data and more detailed information." This experience led him to develop a rule of thumb which, while not stated so eloquently by planners in other states, was nevertheless frequently

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heard: in essence, the more sophisticated the evaluation, the less value it is to the planner.9 Since 1968, SPAs have been charged with the mission to plan; evaluation did not become an explicit mandate until 1972, four years later. At that time, the SPAs responded to this new charge in different ways. Some expanded the functions of their planning divisions, while others established separate and distinct evaluation units. In the latter case, some SPAs attempted to develop their own in-house evaluation capacities, while others became evaluation-research administrators, whose function was to help grant recipients select an independent contractor to undertake an evaluation. However they are organized, the results have not been favorable to the production of scientifically sound evaluations. If planners are also responsible for overseeing evaluations (either by directing or contracting for them), the evaluation functions are relegated to a position of secondary importance.10 Not only do the more practical and immediate tasks of grant administration rob the planners of the time needed to engage in planning (or grant administration), those tasks also deprive them of time to think about evaluation. By and by planners come to accept this situation as normal. Planners who saw themselves largely as grant-administrators view the evaluation requirements as a nuisance, and one which they usually leave to project administrators themselves to meet. Even those planners who take a more activist view of their positions often view evaluations instrumentally. Evaluations, we were often told, are devices to be used to help "axe programs we don't like," or to bolster support for favorite projects. In either case, few if any of the planners who were charged with evaluation duties see this job in terms of designing and administering experimental research. Their close proximity to projects minimizes a sense of distance and disinterestedness which may be a necessary condition for conducting evaluation research. A number of SPAs recognized the tensions inherent in a combined planning/evaluation unit, and as a result established separate evaluation offices whose sole function was to oversee evaluation of those projects recommended to them by the planners. However, this insulation was usually purchased at a high price. Evaluation specialists in these units complained that the SPAs and RPUs funded projects which had not adequately specified their goals, and by the time they, the evaluation specialists, entered the scene, it was often too late for the project to be redesigned.

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This problem is, in turn, exacerbated by complex funding requirements. Provisions in the Safe Streets Act provided that 60 percent of all LEAA funds received by a state must be "passed through" the SPAs and spent at the local level. This often means that an SPA-based evaluation unit has responsibility for overseeing the evaluation of projects and programs which have been planned and awarded entirely at the local level by RPUs. Here problems of control and coordination are even greater. The SPA-based evaluation unit has virtually no authority and may not be aware of a project's existence until after an award is made and operations begun, much too late to try to shape a project's objectives, press for an adequate data collection system, or collect preproject data—let alone design a controlled experiment. Evaluators' efforts to execute acceptable evaluation designs are frustrated at still another level and by an entirely different set of actors. While the SPAs and RPUs are mandated to secure evaluations of their major projects, there are no specific provisions in the Safe Streets Act which empower the SPAs to conduct their own evaluations nor are funds earmarked for this purpose, aside from providing a small amount of funds to hire a small staff. LEAA requires that a fixed percentage of action grant funds be spent on evaluations, and SPAs tend to require that grantees designate a fixed portion of their budget for evaluation. Whatever the particular arrangements, the manner in which evaluations are funded severely strains the capacities of the SPAs. In a very real sense, SPAs and RPUs do not control the evaluations. Given the ways they are financed, evaluators are usually contractors employed by the project being evaluated, not the SPA or RPU. While SPAs and RPUs can and often do insist that they approve the project's plan for evaluation as a condition of receiving the award, once the award has been made they tend to lose their ability to oversee the execution of the evaluation. With a relatively small evaluation-administration staff, SPAs and RPUs are hard pressed to maintain more than casual oversight of the evaluation. In effect this means that in most states the organization responsible for selecting an evaluator is the agency or project which is itself under assessment. This affects the nature of evaluations in several different ways. Often, it means that the organization which has the greatest responsibility in shaping the evaluation (by selection, access, and data collection) has the least incentive to invest in an evaluation. As dis-

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cussed earlier, local agencies often see LEAA funds as "free" federal money to be used as they, the agencies, see fit. From the agency perspective, evaluation—and especially evaluation imposed from a source outside the agency—is undesirable and unnecessary. Evaluation conditions imposed by LEAA and the SPAs are regarded as unwanted and unwarranted intrusions, to be coped with as perfunctorily as possible To this end, agencies tend to resist evaluation altogether and, when this is impossible, to reduce the budget for evaluation to a minimum and to assign to the evaluator standard functions of record maintenance. If rigorous evaluation is imposed upon them, project personnel have a number of devices to assure that an evaluation does not embarrass them. One such device is to produce an "in-house" evaluation. Here the agency convinces its SPA or RPU project monitors that they, the agency staff, can best produce the evaluation. The benefits of this type of evaluation are obvious: the project controls the product. In addition, it means that the funds earmarked for evaluation can easil be diverted to support tasks that the project would otherwise have to pay for out of its regular budget—that is, the development of a rudimentary filing and record-keeping system, and the preparation of periodic reports to the SPA or RPU. Because they involve necessary "data collection," it is relatively easy for a creative project director to take advantage of and divert evaluators' energies to their own uses.11 Even when such problems are overcome, there is another obstacle to the production of adequate evaluation research. An oft-heard complaint among SPA and RPU officials is that evaluation reports often reflect close and continuing ties between the evaluator and the projects. In commenting on this problem, one RPU evaluation specialist in a large metropolitan area observed: I would like to have the contract come directly from us [the RPU or SPA evaluation] because now there's a built-in bias where evaluators are getting paid by the project. The evaluators know that they can be continued if the project likes them, and this blunts their forcefulness.

Another official summarized his experiences as follows: Historically, all our grants have had some evaluation component, but they have not been good. Either the evaluations were incestuous because they were done by people on the project themselves, or consultants with a selfinterest for continuing the relationships. . . . I have yet to meet a private

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consultant whose evaluations have closed projects. If he does this, he does himself out of a job. This is crazy because after monitoring, I have closed many projects.

While these quotations argue that self-interest "corrupts" the evaluators, we found another more subtle process which led to much the same consequence. The fluid nature of many projects means that there is great temptation for evaluators to be transformed into management consultants, whose emphasis shifts from assessment of the impact of a project to helping the project cope with its daily organizational and personnel problems. Whoever the evaluators are—whether methodologically sophisticated or not—they are likely to be drawn into a project which is faced with a multiplicity of overlapping and conflicting goals and confronted with the task of putting together a staff overnight. In such situations it is easy for evaluators to adjust their services to the felt needs of the project staff by offering advice on the project's institutional structure and administration. Such help is extremely valuable and deeply appreciated by overworked project administrators; however, it has the effect of diverting evaluators from their original objectives—measurement of the impact of projects—and preoccupying them with immediate operational problems.12 Repeated Congressional and LEAA admonitions to engage in evaluations notwithstanding, SPA and RPU efforts to support scientifically acceptable evaluations are subverted and compromised at both ends of the process. At the initiating end—in both SPAs and RPUs— planners are skeptical of the value of evaluations. They feel that they are too expensive, too equivocal, too late to be helpful, and too often tainted by self-interest. Many of those who felt a strong need to foster evaluation often gave up in frustration, finding that all too often they lacked the necessary authority to secure an acceptable research design and oversee an acceptable study. At the other end of the process—from the perspective of the agencies receiving the LEAA funds—insistence upon evaluation is usually regarded as an unwelcome intrusion, to be ignored if possible and minimally complied with if not. These problems are compounded by an especially rapid turnover within the evaluation units of the SPAs and RPUs. While the SPAsand RPUs are as a whole highly unstable, their evaluation units are particularly susceptible to rapid turnover and frequent reorganization. This problem is cited time and time again as one of the SPAs' most pressing problems, as is evidenced by the following remarks of one SPA official:

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"We have had six or eight evaluation chiefs here within the past three years. This is one of the most difficult problems with the SPAs. No one seems to know what to do with them, and evaluators feel at loose ends." The problem is, of course, that turnover leads to a pattern of constantly beginning anew: "The staff kept reviewing and monitoring reports, designing self-report [evaluation] forms, and thinking up grand evaluation schemes. What kept the evaluation staff busy was thinking up ways to approach evaluation and nothing of use was ever produced." New personnel have to learn jobs anew, the result being that policies cannot be firmly established and traditions developed. In most of our interviews with evaluation specialists we got the impression that the evaluation unit was brand new, that it was preparing for the first time to undertake an evaluation effort. However, as we probed into the structure and history of the SPAs, it often became apparent that our initial impression of newness was not due to the unit's newness but to the newness of its staff, people who were likely to have been on the job for just a few months and not familiar with their unit's history. Rapid turnover should not be surprising. Put simply, the job confronting the evaluation specialist in the SPAs and RPUs is quite frustrating. These people are typically hired because they possess advanced training in the social sciences or public policy analysis, and quickly become frustrated about the possibility of "doing what I was hired for." Not surprisingly, when opportunities arise many take positions in other areas where they think their skills will be put to better use. Those who remain often do not possess this professional training, or a professional frame of reference, and as a consequence often have little commitment to evaluation research per se. Many of these people see their chances of advancement within the SPA or RPU in terms of becoming a planner, and as such they adopt planners' attitudes and perspectives, which downplay the value of systematic evaluation. While there were certain exceptions to this pattern (e.g., for a tenyear period the Minnesota SPA had a strong and stable evaluation unit), the following example typifies the problems confronting most SPA evaluation units at the time of this study. In our research in Washington, D.C., we learned that the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice had invested several million dollars in supporting the evaluation units in a handful of SPAs which the Institute

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thought were in a position to produce first-rate evaluations. This Institute effort was termed the National Evaluations Project (NEP), and its purpose was to use the evaluation research studies of these "demonstration states" receiving special funding as models to be emulated by other states. While this may have been the understanding between the Institute and the SPA officials at the time these awards were made, turnover and distance quickly blurred memory. In one NEP-designate state, the SPA evaluation head was only vaguely aware of the program, despite the fact that his unit was continuing to receive funds under this program. While he was aware that some of his section's funds came from a "special grant from LEAA," he was not certain they came from the National Institute (as distinct from LEAA's discretionary grant program), was wholly unfamiliar with the acronym NEP, and had no knowledge of the special responsibilities the NEP-funded positions were supposed to entail. At the time the NEP award was first made, this SPA had a chief evaluator with strong training in social science research and close ties to a university-based research organization. But shortly after the NEP grant was awarded, a new governor appointed a new director to head the SPA. The new director reorganized the SPA, which in turn precip itated the resignation of the chief of the evaluation unit, thereby severing the SPA's ties to the university-based researchers. His eventual replacement (apparently the position remained vacant for a time) was someone with no background in evaluation research. As we talked to him, it became evident that he was largely oblivious to the prior history of his office and the special obligations which LEAA had expected of the NEP-designated SPAs. This lack of institutional memory also undercuts the authority of the SPA and RPU evaluation units vis-a-vis the projects which they funded directly. Rather than holding the projects accountable to their goals and vigorously pressing their evaluators to produce quality research, SPA evaluation units are dependent upon project administrators and evaluators to supply them with the most basic type of information about projects. As neophytes learning for the first time, they are often hard pressed to identify the broad purposes and rudimentary features of the projects which they are overseeing. The effect is to increase their dependence upon those whom they should be controlling, and further erode their meager amount of authority.13

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Summary. We have considered a number of obstacles which frustrate the effective development and utilization of project evaluations. By themselves, any one of these factors might be tolerable. All these factors tend to come in clusters, and consequently despite relative agreement on the concept and theory of evaluation, the presence of trained staff, and funds to support them, evaluation is nevertheless frustrated. Few scientifically acceptable evaluations have been produced by SPA funds, and still fewer have been put to productive use. THE REALITIES OF THE EVALUATION PROCESS By and large the evaluation and planning specialists we interviewed could be characterized as pragmatists. Most of them—even those with substantial academic backgrounds in policy analysis—take a "real world" perspective; they accept as "givens,"—that is, realities over which they had little, if any control—the political, technological, and organizational obstacles we have outlined. Many of them, and especially those with stronger ties to the academic research community, are openly scornful of a "pure" or "academic" approach to evaluation. As interviewers, we were repeatedly informed that "you don't understand the real world," or "your theory is spun out of your imagination and has little bearing on what really goes on." What these evaluators were saying was that their formal training had not prepared them for the problems they confronted on the job, and rarely if ever would the standards for research set in the academy serve as useful guides in practice.14 In short, most evaluators saw little value in fighting to secure firstrate evaluations which meet even the minimum standards of scientific acceptability. Instead, they develop other sources of information to provide feedback on programs they fund. Typically, the primary responsibility for "watching" a program is delegated to one staff person who then immerses him/herself in a project's operations by periodically visiting its sites, keeping in touch with its personnel, reading about similar projects elsewhere, and scrutinizing its reports and records. The intuition and impressions of a sophisticated observer, we were informed, produce sound and adequate judgments at a small fraction of the cost of formal evaluations.

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Furthermore, the types of soluble problems which are uncovered by an examination of a project's operations are most likely to be found by an impressionistic and subjective investigation rather than formal evaluation. Formal evaluations, they argued, tend to focus on the structure and theory of programs, and ignore the personal skills of those charged with administering them. In contrast, informal impressions identify these personal factors. Most projects can be beneficial if they are properly administered by people who "really want to do something." Thus many SPA evaluation-administrators seek to help projects develop an adequate administrative base. For instance, we were often told by evaluation staffs that one of their goals was to help project administrators with creative potential develop rudimentary administrative skills or to convince conservative administrators to be more daring. This is not to say that more quantitative, evaluation-like reports are not prepared. They are. Many such reports are not, in fact, true evaluations. The vast majority of the so-called evaluation reports we reviewed did not adopt an experimental or quasi-experimental design. Instead, most of them went to great lengths to catalog long lists of activities, for example, the numbers of people interviewed, accepted, and graduated from programs, counselor/client ratios, etc. Such material is only descriptive; it shows that the projects are busy, and it ignores the question of effectiveness. In effect such reports serve as compliance documents for the SPAs which are under pressure from LEAA to "produce" evaluations. THE NATIONAL RESPONSE TO THE PROBLEMS OF EVALUATION The problems with evaluation that we have identified do not arise due to the negligence or heavy-handedness of Congress and the national LEAA staff, as some have claimed. Indeed, LEAA was probably the most evaluation-conscious of all the social programs initiated in the 1960s and 1970s. The theory of New Federalism envisioned the states as "laboratories," and in this spirit the Act established a National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice to stimulate research, underwrite evaluations, and disseminate new ideas. The Act also sought to assure that federal money would not be used to supplant state or local funds, but would instead be used to stimulate ex-

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perimentation with innovative ideas. In response to congressional hearings which uncovered widespread waste and mismanagement in the expenditure of the LEAA funds, Congress amended the Act in 1972, making the mandate of evaluation even more explicit. These amendments also enlarged the SPA evaluation functions and budget and charged the National Institute (NILECJ) with still more functions relating to evaluation. From the outset national LEAA officials sought to give voice to the evaluation aims of the Act, and this concern continued and expanded over the years. LEAA's initial set of Guidelines for preparing state plans required the SPAs to pay considerable attention to evaluation, and as they have been rewritten, the Guidelines have shown an increased concern for evaluation. The most recent (as of this writing) Guidelines required the SPAs to prepare elaborate plans for obtaining evaluations of the major programs funded by the SPAs and RPUs, and specified that the SPAs had to use results of evaluations as feedbac in their subsequent planning processes. While some of LEAA's campaigns to implement these goals were either heavy-handed and simplistic (e.g., translating all program results into their crime-reduction capabilities) or overly rigid (e.g., various LEAA pronouncements about the percentage of Part B action grant funds which should be earmarked exclusively for evaluation), the general thrust of these efforts was to force reluctant SPAs and even more reluctant recipient agencies to give attention to measuring the impact of their projects. There have been other LEAA efforts as well. Not optimistic that it could induce SPAs and recipient agencies to produce evaluations on their own, LEAA has used substantial portions of its own discretionary grant funds to support evaluations. Although politically motivated and poorly administered, both the Pilot Cities and High Crime Impact Cities Programs were efforts in this direction. Similarly, the National Institute has had as one of its major objectives the improvement and increased use of evaluation. It contracted with the Urban Institute to prepare model plans for conducting evaluations; it has sponsored innumerable national and regional conferences to train and upgrade SPA and RPU evaluation staff capabilities; and it has made substantial sums of money available to especially receptive states for the purpose of expanding their evaluation staffs. One of the Institute's major divisions, the Office of Evaluation, has been charged with fostering a "model evaluation program" and with

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evaluating the effectiveness of current LEAA-approved programs. According to NILECJ's Annual Report for 1975, NILECJ's evaluatio program areas accounted for almost 20 percent of the total NILECJ budget, and the figure would be much higher if indirect support for evaluations were included (e.g., much of the technology transfer and technical assistance rendered by the Institute staff is evaluationresearch related).15 The lesson to be drawn from this review of the problems of implementing evaluation and the largely unsuccessful efforts of LEAA officials to improve evaluations is that the problems do not stem from a lack of national effort. Rather they are rooted in structural incompatibilities within the SPAs themselves and in differences in perspectives between many SPA administrators and national-level administrators. CONCLUSION Like planning and innovation, evaluation is an abstract goal. However, unlike either planning or innovation, it is one which administrators of the Safe Streets Act clearly understand and are, at least i theory, equipped to handle. Yet we found little systematic and rigorous evaluation occurring in the implementation of the Act, and little prospect for change. This chapter described a number of obstacles to evaluation, any one of which by itself would pose a serious impediment to the successful implementation and use of evaluation, and in concert appear to be almost insurmountable obstacles. What distinguished the problems of evaluation from the other two mandates of the Safe Streets Act, planning and innovation, is a known and accepted technology. At first glance, then, it appears that LEAA's failure here is one of policy implementation rather than one of policy conception. Ultimately, however, these two concerns merge. While the proximate cause of the failure to develop and implement an evaluation capacity can be located in the failure to coordinate planning and granting functions and to insulate evaluators from "politics," ultimately the failure rests in the shortcomings of the Act itself. Despite its insistence on evaluation, Congress did not provide the SPAs with authority necessary to do so. To this extent, the twin prongs of the policy dilemma merge into one. A failure of practice becomes a failure of conception.

6 Conclusions: Incoherence, Implementation, and the Dilemma of National Crime Policy

There are times in which social problems, including crime, seem overwhelming in their complexity and intractability. We are in such a time now. This pessimism is largely a function of the combined progress of our understanding of problems like crime and the ambition of governmental efforts to resolve them. American politics and public policy run in cycles,1 and we cannot and should not ignore the fact that confrontation with problems breeds exaggerated expectations which also lead to pessimism. This in turn can easily lead to the abandonment of a willingness even to address and tackle complex social issues on the assumption that they are "insoluable." But there is something to be said for tackling problems even if no quick results can be produced. This is not an apology for ineffectiveness or inefficiency; it is an acknowledgment that neither is the be-all and end-all of public policy. Crime seems more troubling because we now know more about its causes and effects than ever before. Yet in spite of the great increase in knowledge, we seem far away from developing a workable strategy for crime reduction or criminal justice improvement. Indeed the problem of crime seems more troubling because of the experience of ten years of federal involvement and massive infusions of federal funds. To acknowledge, as we have, that the Safe Streets Act was a major breakthrough in crime policy makes the problems, difficulties, and waste that have accompanied its implementation more disturbing than they would otherwise have been. It is certainly too early to say whether 133

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the Act has kept crime from becoming an even more pressing problem than it presently is. While we doubt that it can be given such credit, we have no doubt that the Act has failed to accomplish the more moderate goal of efficiently and effectively delivering federal aid to state and local law enforcement. The problems of the Safe Streets Act are not unique. What we have observed in its operation and implementation is common to many public policies. In the area of crime, as in other areas, government has been too ambitious in its goals and too careless in its designs. This divergence is at the heart of the policy dilemma which arises out of the imbalance between what government attempts to do and what it knows how to do. It arises because the form in which demands for government services are made undercuts the ability of government to make good on its promises. The dominant public philosophy, interest group liberalism, encourages officials to respond to demands for services by expanding participation—that is, it encourages a continuing openness in the policy process rather than authoritative choices. One way in which such openness is encouraged is through delegation of responsibility through multiple layers of government. The experience of the Safe Streets Act clearly exemplifies the politics of delegation, a process in which the authority necessary to diagnose and act upon social problems is squandered or distributed in such a way as to hinder concerted action. At the time of the passage of the Safe Streets Act, there was widespread concern about the problem of crime. Congress and the president responded by developing a program which enlisted the federal government in aid of state and local law enforcement but assigned the major responsibility for deciding how to use that aid to officials at the state and local levels. The Act tried to take advantage of federalism to establish a partnership among government agencies, some new and some ongoing, at three levels. Congress established procedures through which programs could be developed without specifying the precise details of those programs. As a result, the Act had built into it unusual complexity, complexity which made efficient and effective implementation almost impossible. By leaving so much open and by inviting, or rather requiring, the joint action of officials responsible to many different constituencies, the Act promoted conceptual confusion and did not provide a clearly legitimate device for resolving it. Since the Act promised a genuinely federal program, LEAA's efforts to provide

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administrative leadership have been resisted and resented. National leadership of a national effort in the area of crime has given way to a system of state and local pluralism. The policy dilemma includes both the refusal or inability of political institutions to make policy choices and to limit their activities to areas in which there are available technologies for managing social problems and their inability to design efficient policy delivery systems. Although contemporary policy analysis is mostly concerned with policy delivery, the core of the policy dilemma actually resides in the weakness of public sector institutions and their reluctance or incapacity to lead. One cannot successfully implement without first having a policy. Yet, as in the case of the Safe Streets Act, government frequently presents no policy as policy.2 This is more than a refusal to act. The Safe Streets Act presented a broad but essentially rhetorical vision which substituted expenditure for goals. The result is an administrative structure without the ability or authority to translate vision and money into a coherent program. Whatever success LEAA and the SPAs have had in coping with crime and improving criminal justice, it cannot be attributed to the clear intention of the authors of the Act. In Chapter 1 we presented two views of the policy dilemma. One, identified with Theodore Lowi, stressed the failure of Congress to act decisively in making policy choices. The other, illustrated by the work of Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, stressed the difficulty of administration even in the presence of clear choices. We have found evidence to support both views in our review of the Safe Streets Act. We have identified problems in the Act more basic than the kind of issues on which Pressman and Wildavsky focus. As Lowi suggests, implementation is clearly secondary to policy choice, yet choice is absent in the Safe Streets Act. The result was a failure to specify substantive objectives, specific goals, and a strategy for achieving them. The goals of the Safe Streets Act are almost purely procedural; the Act establishes a complex process for making decisions about reform in criminal justice without identifying what reform means. The result is a crisis of conception, one that is typical of public policy under interest group liberalism. The cycle of policymaking in the liberal state is reinforced by how legislation is formulated and is expressed in the implementation process. This cycle begins with a vaguely stated, generally framed policy,

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is carried on through a contest of interests in the process of implementation, and results in an inability to address social ills effectively. The government acts in response to demands made upon it, but, given the philosophy of interest group liberalism, that action is rarely definitive and seldom final. What is important is that the government acts, that something be done, and that what is done appear to have some relationship to the magnitude of the problem addressed. If this is the case, Pressman and Wildavsky, who locate the heart of the policy problem in the implementation process, are optimistic—perhaps because their view is derived from a study of programs which are, in the liberal state, atypical.3 They conclude with an argument for improved technology, better linkages, and simpler and more direct approaches in the development of implementation strategies. This is sound advice but it is premised upon the belief that common objectives can be identified in most public policies and communicated at all the relevant decision points governing the implementation process. In the absence of such clarity, improvements in technology and directness in the implementation process will not serve to improve the ability of government to cope with social problems. Concern for the process through which public policy is implemented is an important part of the liberal concern for the concentration of power in the hands of government. There is a nice fit between the liberal suspicion of power and the tendency of contemporary policy analysis to dismiss purpose and substance. Both accept, if they do not celebrate, the inevitability of policy incoherence; both accept, if not celebrate, the cycle of incremental action and reaction which marks public policy and contributes to public cynicism about the efficacy of government action. Neither the Safe Streets Act, nor LEAA's Guidelines and directives, nor the restructuring of LEAA by Congress has clarified ends. The result is confusion, the proliferation of goals and strategies, and perpetual struggle, not the struggle to overcome bureaucratic inertia or to conquer unforeseen obstacles or to compete for political rewards, but a more fundamental struggle over the very objectives of the program. Our pessimistic assessment of the LEAA is a function of the combination of problems of federalism and problems of crime. The program which we have studied adds the complex issues of federalism to the general problem of the policy dilemma. Any national policy that requires state and local administration is likely to be complex, cum-

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bersome, and inefficient. This is a fact of our national political life, a fact inbred in our federal system, a fact magnified in importance by the growth of the welfare state. In addition, what we have studied is one of the most complex of social problems, namely, the problem of crime. Crime is an irreducible fact of social life; it cannot, despite the fear that it generates and continuing campaigns against it, be "conquered" in the same way that some other social problem, for example, illiteracy, can be.4 To point out that federalism frames program administration and that the crime problem may be an intractable one does not mean that all approaches to a national crime policy are doomed to failure or that they are all equally problematic. These factors are givens; they are not explanations. A successful national crime policy, to the extent that one is necessary, must be formulated to take these factors into account. They are not excuses for continued incoherence in this area of public policy. THE SAFE STREETS ACT: CRITIQUES AND REFORMS The Safe Streets Act and LEAA have been subject to a continuous stream of criticism almost from the start. At the outset, liberal critics saw it as a repressive component of the Nixon Administration's law and order campaign whose purpose was to supply police with powerful and provocative weaponry to quell the legitimate grievances of civil rights activists and antiwar demonstrators.5 Those critics argued that the bulk of the money made available to the states through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was spent for police equipment, much of which wasoutlandishly expensive to say nothing of lethal. With the benefit of hindsight, however, these "hardware" purchases appear more ridiculous than repressive (e.g., antiriot tanks for small towns), and, at any rate, such extravagant equipment purchasing did not last long. Instead, it spurred the Congress to insist that LEAA pay careful attention to the rudiments of fiscal and administrative accountability. While inventive officials still find ways of circumventing tight fiscal requirements and while state planning officials overlook a goodly number of technical violations of the Safe Streets Act and LEAA Guidelines, a close analysis of state and local expenditures of Safe Streets funds over the past few years reveals a pronounced

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shift away from hardware approaches and a decline in the proportion of money going to police.6 Despite this shift, LEAA remains the subject of much criticism, criticism which continues to focus on expensive and ill-conceived projects. One solution, often suggested, is to improve personnel in order to improve management. While it is difficult to take issue with such advice, there is a danger that such a diagnosis and solution will be accepted as all-encompassing. Peter Drucker has written that every organization can benefit from better personnel and better management, and consequently the problem of personnel and management is almost always overstressed as a reason for program or policy failure; improvement in personnel and management is almost always offered as "the solution."7 Jerome Murphy encountered similar explanations for failures in implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, but warned that "to blame the problem on timidity, incompetence or 'selling out' is to beg the question."8 Murphy went on to identify factors which he believed to be more important in explaining program failure than problems of personnel or management. Among the factors that he identified were the following: The reformers were not the implementors; inadequate staff; a disinclination to monitor; a law and tradition favoring local control. . . . The primary cause, however, is political. The federal system—with its dispersion of power and control—not only permits but encourages the evasion and dilution of federal reform, making it nearly impossible for the federal administrator to impose program priorities; those not diluted by Congressional intervention can be ignored during state and local implementation.

This list of factors is useful in understanding the experience of LEAA, but only to a point. The central problem—and one certainly exacerbated by federalism—is the lack of conceptual clarity, the failure of vision at the outset. Without identifying purposes and without granting authority commensurate with those purposes, "politics" dominates and process replaces the quest for purpose altogether. At its best, it can probably be resolved in successful symbolic policy, and at its worst in public disillusionment. Evidence of problems and difficulties in the LEAA have led to several significant analyses and proposals for improving federal efforts to deal with crime and criminal justice. These analyses and proposals take as a given that the federal role should continue to be secondary

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to state and local efforts. They advocate the continuation of federal aid as the cornerstone of that role. Analysis and prescription have, in the past, pointed in two directions. On the one hand, some critics have tried to identify particular areas in which states neglected important interests in criminal justice or important areas of criminal activity. They argue that states have abused their discretion in allocating federal funds and seek to protect those interests from such abuse. Their strategy has been to advocate increased, but selective, categorization of the Safe Streets Act. A second kind of criticism identifies administrative red tape as the key problem. It suggests that procedures need to be simplified and administrative structures reorganized. This second line of criticism identifies simplification as the preferred strategy for improving the Safe Streets program. Limitation of discretion as a response to the problems of the Safe Streets Act is clearly visible in a succession of congressionally imposed amendments since 1970, which culminated in a restructuring of LEAA under the Justice System Improvement Act of 1979.9 Amendments in 1970, 1973, and 1976 guaranteed that fixed proportions of federal funds would be earmarked for corrections, juvenile justice, and courts. These amendments seemed to some a movement away from the block grant concept as the basis for federal efforts. But to others they were justifiable as a way of giving some form to those efforts. The substance of the debate about categorization is illustrated in an exchange between John Conyers and Elizabeth Holtzman of the Subcommittee on Crime of the House Judiciary Committee and Richard Wertz, then director of the Maryland SPA and former president of the National State Planning Agency Directors' Conference. Mr. Conyers. We've got an argument now going on between block grant funding, revenue sharing and categorization. . . . Could you speak to these considerations, please? Mr. Wertz. Obviously, I am a supporter of the block grant concept. I feel that it has been effective. . . . I believe that the block grant program wit its problems, which I think by and large have been resolved, has been an effective delivery mechanism. I think that over the years one of the major problems has been that Congress has attached too many strings and restricted the flexibility of the states and the localities in terms of fund expenditures. It seems to me that the best of all possible worlds would be to decategorize the block grant portion, give the states and localities more flexibility so that we can identify

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our own priorities that are peculiar to each of our individual states and jurisdictions. . . . Mr. Conyers. But corrections wouldn't have gotten a dime anywhere in the country unless we had done it. We were forced to categorize. The prison systems in each state aren't sitting on those SPA organizations being considered. We were virtually forced into that. The judges finally started pointing out that many of the problems emanate from inadequate courtroom activities that could be helped and they began asking us to give them some help. This is a demonstration of a system that was reacting to those who have the most muscle and the people with the real power were the police organizations. . . . You tell me how we shouldn't categorize it and that the prisons would have been taken care of; it seems to me a look at the record indicates otherwise. Ms. Holtzman. Do you have a consistent evaluation of all the LEAA programs? Mr. Wertz. We do indeed. Ms. Holtzman. Have you had such evaluations from the outset? Mr. Wertz. No. I established my evaluation unit on March 23, 1973. . . . [It was in 1973 that Congress required SPAs to develop evaluations and authorized the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to press states to undertake evaluations of projects funded with LEAA discretionary money.] Ms. Holtzman. I am interested in your suggestion LEAA just hand out funds to the states without any safeguards with respect to evaluation of programs, without any safeguards with respect to the planned use of the funds, without any safeguards with respect to priorities. . . . In my judgment the greatest failure of LEAA took place from 1968 to 1976 when most of the states took most of the money and bought shiny new police cars, helicopters, mace and a variety of other pieces of equipment. . . . I'm concerned that if we eliminate the safeguard enacted in 1976, we are going to find more shiny new police cars, more helicopters, more mace and we are going to find the criminal justice system still not functioning in most of the states in this country the way it should. Mr. Wertz. What I am suggesting is: reduce the artificial restrictions, reduce the red tape that is not absolutely germane to the function that I have just described and redirect LEAA's role toward the review of plans to determine whether or not they are comprehensive. Ms. Holtzman. With all due respect, I don't think you have answered my question.10

In light of this exchange, it is tempting to make Congress the hero and the SPAs the villain, but this too would be an error. The implied criticism of state planning agencies, in the comments of Representatives Conyers and Holtzman, is at bottom little more than a complaint that the SPAs once spent too much money on hardware and not

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enough on other programs. But while they make this argument, they offer neither a theory of allocation nor criteria for balancing priorities and producing a more equitable distribution of LEAA funds. The criticisms do not rise from an appreciation of the objectives of the Act, but rather they stem from an implicit understanding of the operations of interest group liberalism in the political process. Representative Conyers put it bluntly: "This is a demonstration of a system that was reacting to those who had the most muscle. . . ." Seen in this light, categorization was not a clarification of conception but simply a means for those without local political power to pursue their goals through a direct appeal to Congress. Congress and the gradual categorization of the Act provided another arena and another device by which those left out of the state planning process could be taken care of. Categorization simply extends the network of interests guaranteed recognition in the Safe Streets program. It did not and does not address the question of whether guaranteeing such recognition contributes to crime reduction or improvement in the criminal justice system. An opposite argument for improvement takes seriously the original process established by the Act and argues that categorization and the introduction of various administrative requirements, especially LEAA's Guidelines, has produced an overly complex, cumbersome, and bureaucratic program. It calls for more, not less, discretion at the state and local levels. It calls for more federal money and less federal control. The Advisory Council on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) has been perhaps the foremost advocate for this position. It has undertaken an extensive study of the structure and operation of the Safe Streets program.11 While the ACIR report is thorough and extremely useful, it fails to examine the problems of coherence and meaning that are built into the Act itself. Although it reports on the process of planning, it does not explore the nature of the planning. Although it details how each state has distributed LEAA funds and who has received them, it does not make any serious effort to assess the capacities of state planning agencies and regional planning units to foster innovation and promote evaluation. When these issues are discussed at all, they are treated formally in terms of the allocation of responsibility for evaluation or the percentage of funds which, according to criminal justice officials, are spent on "new" programs.

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In short, while the ACIR study offers an extremely useful report on the structure of LEAA both at the national and the state levels and on the mechanics of its operations, it does not probe beneath the surface to explore LEAA'ssubstantive functions. Its report concludes that state planning procedures for reviewing or awarding, as well as administrating, grants are too complex and goes on to blame Congress for this problem. It claims that provisions of the Act dealing with courts, corrections, community crime, and juvenile justice, added over the years, have resulted in needless red tape and restricted the options available to the states. It criticizes LEAA for issuing lengthy and detailed Guidelines which required state planning officials to spend a considerable part of their time preparing annual statewide comprehensive plans that, in many instances, have become little more than compliance documents submitted in order to obtain federal funds. It is principally these organizational and procedural factors that the ACIR report concludes have weakened the ability of state planning agencies to administer the Safe Streets Act effectively. No doubt, this argument is to be credited; complex administrative tasks can always profitably be simplified. But the ACIR report means much more; it seems to be saying that "but for" the complexity of administrative tasks state planning agencies and regional planning units would be running smoothly and performing effectively as planners, innovators, and evaluators. Thus, the emergence of categorization in the Act and the red tape associated with the promulgation of Guidelines by LEAA are elevated to the level of causes of LEAA's problems. The Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations is not alone in attributing disproportionate blame for problems in the administration of the Safe Streets Acton excessive red tape and creeping categorization. The Task Force on the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration of the prestigious Twentieth Century Fund drew similar conclusions and recommended "the elimination of all specifically earmarked funds."12 Similarly, a task force appointed by Attorney General Griffin Bell suggested that the requirement that state planning agencies submit annual plans be abandoned in favor of a more streamlined five-year plan which would not require prior federal approval before the states could receive funds.13 Following the recommendation of his task force, Bell abolished, by administrative action, LEAA's regional offices in an attempt to further streamline LEAA's structure and procedure. Amendments to the Safe Streets

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Act adopted in late 1979 sought to trim further LEAA's role in supervising state planning by allowing for three-year planning cycles at the state level. That legislation also created a new level of organization — the Office of Justice Assistance, Research, and Statistics—to coordinate the work of LEAA, the newly named National Institute of Justice, and a new Bureau of Justice Statistics. It did not fundamentally alter the block grant approach or provide a new strategy for reforming and improving criminal justice. If anything, it had the effect of further fragmenting an already dispersed decision-making process. Under the new provisions, SPAs have even less power over grant applicants and grantees, diminishing still further what little authority to plan and innovate they once had. Criticisms of excessive bureaucratization and defense of the block grant approach were frequently heard during testimony before House and Senate committees considering reauthorization and restructuring of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration between 1977 and 1979. Many witnesses were state planning officials or criminal justice agency personnel who complained that the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration was "red taping" them to death or that congressional categorical requirements were tying their hands. Both requirements, they continued, forced them to spend inordinate amounts of time preparing meaningless documents and therefore detracted from their ability to accomplish their primary mission.14 However, Congress and the administration listened most attentively to grantees, who wanted money with still fewer controls attached to the awards from the SPAs. Arguments for simplification of the administrative structure of the Safe Streets Act ignore the reasons why categorization and administrative restrictions were themselves developed. They confuse responses to policy problems with the causes of those problems. Categorization and guidelines are themselves attempts to cope with defects in the original Act and in its early implementation. Congress and LEAA have moved incrementally to try to close loopholes in the Act and to insure responsible administration. Furthermore, having charged national-level officials with the task of reviewing the annual plans of the state as a condition for the receipt of federal funds, Congress continues to turn to these officials, not to those at the state level, to answer charges that the states are mismanaging federal funds or are not doing enough to reduce crime, or that they are allowing criminal

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justice facilities to deteriorate. Both its mandate and its location in Washington make the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration a prime target of criticism by Congress, the president, and the media. In response, LEAA has developed increasingly detailed guidelines for the administration of Safe Streets funds. This response is by no means mindless and certainly not one that had the effect of choking out the life of a creative and flourishing program at the state level. Indeed, it was just the reverse; an effort, perhaps a desperate effort, to try to impose a minimum of administrative order on fifty state agencies who, by all accounts, were having difficulty controlling and ordering themselves. Despite the 1979 amendments which further weaken LEAA's and the SPAs' control over the expenditure of federal funds, we would expect to see a continuing national effort to control the use of these funds, brought about largely because of continuing questioning by the Congress. While one can dispute the wisdom of guidelines and categorization and suggest the failure of either to come to terms with the policy dilemma, it is clear that they were developed in response to real shortcomings in the Act and its administration. One example is provided by the 1970 amendments. Prior to the passage of the amendments mandating funds for correctional programs, 79 percent of the Safe Streets funds provided to the states had been spent for police-related programs and only 14 percent on prisons.15 Similarly, in 1976 it was a history of a lack of support for courts that led Congress to make special funding provisions for court programs. In short, creeping categorization grew out of a widely perceived and deeply felt belief that, despite the mandate to be comprehensive, state planning agencies were failing to adequately address significant problems in law enforcement and criminal justice administration. THE POLICY DILEMMA AND THE SAFE STREETS ACT The argument between supporters and critics of "creeping" categorization and of the role of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in monitoring the performance of the Safe Streets Act is, we believe, not based upon a well-worked-out conception of the fundamental purpose of the Safe Streets Act or federal involvement in the area of criminal justice. The call for more or less federal involvement

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within a block grant approach derives from the same general perspective, one which refuses to take seriously the responsibility of policymakers to define purposes, and to identify strategies for dealing with social problems. Furthermore, the call for more or less involvement derives from and is part of the general political struggle over who gets what in an area in which there are limited resources and seemingly infinite needs. The tendency in the policy process in the United States is to avoid questions of basic purpose and concentrate on questions involving the distribution of resources.16 As the exchange quoted above suggests, the language of discourse on public policy is concerned with the process of distributing goods in the public sector. Questions of purpose and strategy are rarely addressed. The key question remains who will get how much federal money. The philosophy of interest group liberalism so permeates contemporary thinking about public policy that substantial change is not likely to occur. Those who write about public policy, those concerned with the policy dilemma in America, differ in their conception of the proper scope of government activity. Some defend the welfare state, some attack it. Some call for more government, some for less. Yet, they seem to agree that when government acts it must be able to act decisively and with strength. They agree that policy without authority is itself a major contributor to the policy dilemma. When Pressman and Wildavsky write about the complexity of joint action as a barrier to effective administration, they may be read to be calling for direction and strength in policy implementation. When Lowi writes about the failings of interest group liberalism, he is clearly calling for the exercise of authority and for closure and finality in the policy process. The policy dilemma arises from the way we think about public policy and what we expect of government. We want government to act to deal with social problems, and to insure that its actions do not threaten or harm our interests. Both Pressman and Wildavsky and Lowi suggest that we cannot have it both ways. Unless and until we develop new expectations about public policy or government develops new technologies for dealing with social problems, then problems like those which have plagued the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration are likely to continue to hinder the government in its policymaking activities. But, such changes will not be soon realized. In the short run, federal authorities seeking to make a contribution to the management of crime have a choice to

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make, one which they did not face in the 1979 restructuring of the LEAA. Special Revenue Sharing. State planning agencies have been in the past and are likely to continue to be weak in relationship to the agencies and problems with which they must deal. As organs of state government, they must function within an established criminal justice system that is overwhelmingly local in structure, funding, and orientation. As dispensers of funds, they control less than 5 percent of the total criminal justice budget in any state and thus have no real clout especially with respect to larger agencies or in large cities, where the problems of crime are most apparent. As a consequence, they have become and are likely to remain creatures controlled by entrenched and politically powerful interests in the criminal justice system. Despite pretentions that they are more and despite wishful thinking about what they could become, state planning agencies are, in essence, small twigs grafted onto a large and thriving tree; there is little prospect that they will evolve into the taproot of the criminal justice system. They are kept alive only by the infusion of federal funds; if this money were to be withdrawn, few, if any, would survive. Given this reality, the ambitious but vague visions of state planning agencies becoming important agents of change in the criminal justice system are unlikely to be realized; indeed, the rhetoric of heightened responsibilities disguises the increasingly modest functions of state planning agencies. It is important, we think, that this be recognized and acknowledged. If the goal of federal policy is to help hard-pressed state and local units of government cope with the crime problem by supplementing their resources from the federal treasury, then there is a more cost-effective way of achieving that goal. Instead of a block grant approach, such funds could be made available to state and local units of government through special revenue sharing on a formula basis. Such a proposal was advanced by the Nixon Administration in 1973, but met with stiff opposition from urban interests because the proposed formula appeared to favor suburban and rural interests at the expense of central cities.17 While any formula is likely to result in disappointment and allegations of bias, this approach has the advantage of acknowledging that LEAA has, in fact, served primarily as a "transfer" unit and reducing the cost of administering this federal program. It would not resolve the policy dilemma or necessarily lead

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to more effective crime policy. It would, however, end the fiction of federal control and simplify significant administrative problems. Discretionary Grants and Research and Development. On the other hand, the goal of federal criminal justice policy might be to foster a research and development capacity to experiment with, test, and develop new and innovative ideas. If so, then there is a need for a federal agency to exercise firm control over the expenditure of federal dollars. Given the absence of a technology for fighting crime, experimentation is clearly necessary. To foster such experimentation, Congress might expand and enrich the discretionary grant program located within LEAA. Recall that at present Congress earmarks 15 percent of all action grant funds for discretionary distribution by LEAA, which in turn uses them to sponspor demonstration projects in jurisdictions presumably selected because of their ability and willingness to develop and test their own innovations. A smaller, regrouped LEAA could offer financial support to a few jurisdictions, jurisdictions which propose to develop and implement genuinely new or improved programs in law enforcement and criminal justice. Those jurisdictions would have to evaluate them carefully. Once a demonstration project had proven itself, it would then be left to sink or swim on its own in the marketplace of ideas and in the political competition for resources at the state level. Such a reformulated federal effort is consistent with the concept that states are appropriate laboratories in the federal system. In fact, such a program might better utilize state agencies as laboratories. Under the present block grant formula, neither state planning agencies nor criminal justice institutions receiving action grant funds have much of an incentive to invest in careful testing and evaluation of new programs.18 Mandating the expenditure of large sums of federal funds through an elaborate administrative structure may serve the political need for a clear demonstration of commitment. Yet, in the absence of a technology for dealing with crime, such expenditure does not seem justified. The block grant formula, the planning and action grant programs through which state planning agencies and regional planning units have operated, has not functioned in an efficient and effective way. However hard they try, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the Congress are unable to correct the problems incrementally.

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While we think that these problems are linked to more general problems of government, our inclination is not to take that as an excuse to do nothing, but to make changes drawing on the lessons of the Safe Streets experience, changes which recognize the complexities of federalism and the reality of the crime problem. Congress needs to make a choice between more of the same, more incoherence and chaotic implementation, and simplification. The federal government needs either to get out of or get directly into the business of reforming criminal justice. Changes of the sort enacted by Congress in 1979 do not, we believe, deal with the fundamental problems of the Safe Streets Act and LEAA. To do so would require that Congress clearly establish and identify or abandon a federal role in law enforcement and criminal justice. Although there is a widespread feeling that LEAA has not been an efficient or effective mechanism for federal efforts in the area of crime, the most recent actions of Congress will not substantially alter its operations. As a result, we are inclined toward pessimism and agree with the observation of one official in the Department of Justice who, after reviewing recommendations for changes in the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, concluded that they "represented the victory of hope over experience."19 Congressional restructuring of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in 1979 reflects the force and power of traditional ways of thinking about public policy. Even the modest changes which we outlined above were not seriously considered. The policy dilemma is alive and well.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 2. The one major effort at developing a policy on crime has been a clearinghouse function in the FBI's collection, compilation, and distribution of its semiannual Uniform Crime Reports. 3. The 1968 Act was preceded by the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 (P. L. 89-197), which created an Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (OLEA) within the Department of Justice; this was a much smaller-scale effort than the LEAA, and allocated funds on a categorical grant basis. Also in 1965, President Johnson created, by executive order, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice which in 1967 produced voluminous reports, including The Challenge of Crime In a Free Society.

CHAPTER 1 1. There are numerous studies documenting the problems of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Among the more thoughtful are: Twentieth Century Fund, Law Enforcement: The Federal Role (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1976); Sarah C. Carey, Law and Disorder, vol. 4 (Washington: Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, 1973); Susan O. White and Samuel Krislov, eds., Understanding Crime: An Evaluation of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1977); and Safe Streets Reconsidered: The Block Grant Experience 1968-1975 (Washington: Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1977). 2. Richard Rose and Guy Peters, Can Government Go Bankrupt? (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 3. See Morris Janowitz, The Last Half-Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), chap. 5. 4. James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), chap. 6. See also Alan Wolfe, The Limits of Legitimacy (New York: Free Press, 1977); and Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977), part 4. 5. See Nathan Glazer, "The Limits of Social Policy," Commentary (September 1971): 151

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51-57; and Martin Rein and Sheldon White, "Can Policy Research Help Policy," Public Interest 49 (Fall 1977): 119-36. 6. See Robert Martinson, "What Works? Questions and Answers about Prison Reform," Public Interest 35 (Spring 1974): 22-54. 7. Sar Levitan and Robert Taggart, The Promise of Greatness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). 8. John Donovan, The Politics of Poverty, 2d ed. (New York: Pegasus, 1973). 9. See, e.g., Wilson, Thinking About Crime, ch. 1. 10. Herbert Kaufman, Are Government Organizations Immortal? (Washington, Brookings Institution, 1976). 11. Mancur Olson and Hans Landsberg, eds., The No-Growth Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973); also Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). 12. Rose and Peters, Can Government Go Bankrupt?, chap. 3. 1 3. Daniel P. Moynihan, "An Imperial Presidency Leads to an Imperial Congress Leads to an Imperial Judiciary," Herbert Lehman Lecture, New York, 1978. 14. See, e.g., David Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 15. See Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes (New York: New American Library, 1969), part 4, and Confessions of a Conservative (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1979), chaps. 9 and 10. 16. Murray Edelman, Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail (New York: Academic Press, 1977), Politics as Symbolic Action (Chicago: Markham Publishing Co., 1971), and The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), chap. 4. 17. Roger Cobb and Charles Elder, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda Building (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964). 18. See, e.g., Arthur Miller et al., "A Majority Party in Disarray," American Political Science Review 70 (September 1976): 753-78. 19. See, e.g., Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). For a detailed case study of one such relationship, see Peter Self and Herbert Storing, The State and the Farmer (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962). 20. For two important studies examining this phenomenon, see David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969); and Robert Alford, Health Care Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 21. For a discussion of the meaning of policy effectiveness, see Joyce Mitchell and William Mitchell, Political Analysis and Public Policy (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1969). See also Michael Levine, "Is Regulation Necessary?" Yale Law journal 74 (1965): 1416; and Peter Rossi and W. Williams, eds., Evaluating Social Programs (New York; Seminar Press, 1972). 22. The classic statement is, of course, Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (New York: Mentor Books, 1955). The contemporary version is Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969). See also Richard Rose, "On the Priorities of Government," European Journal of Political Research 4 (1976): 247-89; and Samuel Huntington, "The Democratic Distemper," Public Interest 41 (Fall 1975): 9-38. 23. Glazer, "The Limits of Social Policy." See also Albert Nicholas and Richard Zeckhauser, "Government Comes to the Workplace: An Assessment of O.S.H.A.," Public Interest 49 (Fall 1977): 39-69; and Aaron Wildavsky, "Government and the People," Commentary 56 (August 1973): 25-32. More generally, see Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 24. For development on this theme, see William Kelso, American Democratic Theory (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978).

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25. See, e.g., David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951); and Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 26. Low, End of Liberalism, chap. 5. 27. For a discussion of this process, see Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964); and Marilyn Gittell, Participants and Participation: A Study of School Policy In New York City (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1967). 28. See Dahl, Who Governs? 29. Lowi, End of Liberalism, p. 288. 30. Robert Paul Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 31. Elmer E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America, rev. ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart «& Winston, 1975). 32. The classic statement on this is Marver Bernstein, Regulating Business by Independent Commission (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955). 33. See Robert Dahl, After the Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 34. Wolfe, Limits of Legitimacy, chap. 8. 35. Lindblom, Politics and Markets, chaps. 5, 9, and 10. 36. See, e.g., Pressman and Wildavsky, Implementation. See also Herbert Simon et al., Public Administration (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), chap. 21. 37. For an extended study of this problem, see Stephen Bailey and Edith Mosher, ESEA, The Office of Education Administers a Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968). 38. For a critique of the command model,see Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960. 39. Ira Sharkansky,/>f/W/c Administration (Chicago: Markham Publishing Co., 1970). 40. See, e.g., Peter Drucker, "The Sickness of Government," Public Interest 29 (Winter 1969): 3-23. 41. Implementation, p. 36. 42. See,e.g., Martha Derthick, The Influence of Federal Grants (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). See also Edelman, Words that Succeed. 43. One of the clearest cases we examine in this book deals with SPA efforts to avoid the national mandate to "evaluate." In the view of many SPA officials, evaluation is a total waste of resources. What might appear eminently rational and reasonable from a collective or national perspective can nevertheless be wholly irrational and unreasonable from the perspective of one agency or unit. See Chapter 5 below. 44. Pressman and Wildavsky, Implementation p. 109. 45.1 bid., p. 143. 46. Ibid., p. 93. 47. Ibid., chap. 5. See also Don Van Meter and Carl Van Horn, "The Policy Implementation Process: A Conceptual Framework," Administration and Society 6 (February 1975): 445-88. 48. Pressman and Wildavsky, Implementation, chap. 5. 49. See Sheldon Wolin, "The New Conservatives," New York Review of Books, vol. 23 (February 5,1976);and Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979). 50. Rose and Peters, Can Government Go Bankrupt? 51. See Richard Scammon and Ben Wallenberg, The Real Majority (New York: Coward, McCann, 1970); and Yankelovich, Skelly, and While, The Public Image of the Courts (Williamsburg: National Center for State Courls, 1978). 52. For an excellent summary of this view, see Charles Silberman, Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice (New York: Random House, 1978), chap. 4; and Robert Merton, "Social Slructure and Anomie," in Merton, ed., Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Frre Press, 1968).

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

53. See Karl Menninger, The Crime of Punishment (New York: Viking Press, 1968). 54. See Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). See also Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti, The Subculture of Violence (London: Social Science Paperbacks, 1967). 55. See Marvin Wolfgang et al., Delinquency in a Birth Cohort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); and Jay Williams and Martin Gold, "From Delinquent Behavior to Juvenile Delinquency," Social Problems 20 (1972): 209-29. 56. See Andrew von Hirsch, Doing Justice (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976). 57. See, e.g., Ted Robert Gurr, Rogues, Rebels and Reformers (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1976). 58. Wilson, Thinking About Crime, chap. 3. 59. Ibid., pp. 53-54. 60. See, e.g., Kai Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). 61. See Jerome Skolnick, Justice without Trial (New York: John Wiley