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Social Inclusion Leads to Violence Reduction in Ecuador – Dr. David Brotherton
Since 2007, the Ecuadorian approach to crime control has emphasized policies of social inclusion and innovations in criminal justice and police reform. One notable part of Ecuador’s holistic approach to public security was the decision to legalize a number of street gangs in 2007. The government claimed this decision contributed to the reduction of homicide rates from 15.35 per 100,000 in 2011 to close to 5 per 100,000 in 2017. Professor of Sociology David Brotherton was commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank to spend six months evaluating these claims through a qualitative research project focusing on the impact on violence reduction had by street gangs involved in processes of social inclusion. The results were published in 2018, arguing that social inclusion policies helped to transform gang members’ social capital into a vehicle for behavioral change. In December 2018, Dr. Brotherton was awarded a grant by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to continue the work.
What did you learn during the initial phase of your research?
We learned a lot. These are very large groups, with over 1,000 members spread across Ecuador, and they managed to create a new kind of culture within their organizations that was pro-social, pro-community, with a strong element of conflict resolution and mediation, cultures where they were working as partners with the government and non-state actors like universities on progressive agendas. They were partners in pro-social activities, everything from creating new youth cultures to voting, job training, and strengthening local communities, all of which you don’t associate with street gangs. And in their ranks are the most marginalized youth of their country, so they can reach kids that are so marginal that other organizations don’t reach them, even indigenous kids from the Amazon, and it is so important to bring them in and work with them. This is all across Ecuador.
When we asked the members what had changed, they said they don’t get into the same level of conflict. Where there might have been a previous period where they were at war with one another, they were able to end it with the government playing a role.
Sometimes these interventions don’t last very long, once the money runs out, but here you had a government that constantly maintained a presence and lived up to its promises, so the trust level became really high.
The end result is not necessarily unique, we’ve seen this in other places like with the Latin Kings in New York and various places in Spain, but the outcome across ten years was quite remarkable. Homicide rates are so indicative of a country’s ability to resolve tension, so when you see the inarguable statistics of homicides going down every year for ten years — it’s related to different factors, they also reformed the police department, but when you see that kind of result it’s pretty impressive.
What key aspects of the inclusion policy allowed gangs to successfully transition from criminal to purely social organizations?
The government recognizes that they won’t change overnight, because the economic situation doesn’t allow that, but you make it such that whatever [gangs] are involved in doesn’t hurt the community, and there are other pathways they can move into and you are creating real opportunities. So what does that look like? It looks like being recruited into programs at the university to give you skills, diploma programs. And these kids become a kind of role model for their mates.
In addition to that, [all of the gangs] were incorporated as non-profit organizations, which allows them to get government grants to do things like community building. You’re not just rhetorically arguing for a new culture, you’re making a new culture and making it happen. Those joining the organization come in with a different set of expectations, and it has a tremendous ripple effect. They created a strata of professional workers.
Also, the police are told not to pick them up, or intervene in their meetings. And the kids don’t fear any kind of stigma, they’re not constantly being harassed. With the communitarian police force, they worked with the heads of the police. It’s a totally unique phenomenon, and flies directly in the face of what we’re pushing in the U.S., which is zero tolerance.
Where else might this social inclusion approach be effective in curbing violence?
I mean, it could be effective in the U.S. Social inclusion is the complete opposite of the repressive policy that nearly always leads to what we call deviant amplification. You need to stop the stigmatization and have meaningful relationships with street groups, with intermediaries from the government. In the U.S., the police are so strong that this is all very difficult.
To make this work anywhere, politically you need to make a decision about where to invest resources. [In Ecuador,] they didn’t invest in the military, they didn’t invest in massive tax breaks for corporations, in fact they did the opposite. They boosted money for culture and art. If you stick with these political decisions, they will pay dividends over time.
What is the next step in completing this research?
I have a full-time field researcher, Rafael Gude, who has been working in Ecuador since April, focusing on the relationship between the Catholic University of Quito and the Latin Kings and Queens. I’m going down myself July 3-15 to do field work both with the Latin Kings and Queens and to attend a big national meeting in Cuenca, then I travel to Las Esmeraldas, on the Pacific coast of Ecuador, where we will interview members of the third major street organization in Ecuador, called Masters of the Street. We want to understand the changes in that group and the roles of social and political empowerment in the reduction in violence.
Las Esmeraldas had the highest rate of violence, with a really high homicide rate of around 70 per 100,000, which is now down to 20, and it’s on the border with Colombia so this is the biggest drug trafficking area and also very poor. This is a completely different socio-economic context, and mainly black Ecuadorians, so we want to see how the whole issue of race works itself out as they’re trying the same policy.
Also, things have changed; although the same party is in power, it’s not the same government. We thought they were going to completely reverse the policy, but a number of media organizations got into this report, and I gave this big talk in Medellín last year, and it’s become a real media story about this success. So this government has maintained the same policy, and embraced it as much or more than the last government.
Right now, we are also looking to do work in the prisons where the inmate population has increased substantially in recent years and many of the incarcerated have joined the groups.
Why is it important to continue this research?
The importance of this work is that it demonstrates a viable alternative to “zero tolerance” and other repressive policies that led to the highest homicide rates in the world — for example, in Central America’s Northern Triangle. The topic has been covered by the BBC and is out in English, Spanish and Portuguese, with multiple other Latin American nations now taking notice, including the president of Mexico.
How does your research dovetail with the HFG Foundation’s mission?
The research meshed with their general focus; they’ve always supported innovative anti-violence or violence prevention studies. For them to come on board, it’s a big deal.
You can learn more about the first stage of this research via the report on the Inter-American Development Bank’s website, or by listening to him talk about his research on the BBC program The Inquiry (starts at 13:43) or on the Peter Collins Show podcast.
Dr. David Brotherton is a Professor of Sociology at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate center. He is the author of a number of books on gangs and immigration, most recently co-authoring Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment: Detention, Deportation, and Border Control. He is a founding member of the Social Anatomy of a Deportation Regime research working group based at the Center on Social Change and Transgressive Studies at John Jay.
John Jay Featured Grant – Reducing Prison Overcrowding: Jeff Mellow + Deborah Koetzle
John Jay faculty and staff came together for a reception on May 14th to honor 76 of their own who received major and external grants and awards in 2018. The funded projects are a testament to the hard work John Jay’s community devotes to research and to honorees’ dedication to studies and creative work that strengthen the scholarly fabric of the institution. The awards funded projects of all types, from those with potential therapeutic implications to those that could change international policy, and more.
Among the honorees were Dr. Jeff Mellow and Dr. Deborah Koetzle. Their grant, from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, took them to El Salvador to work on alleviating the severely overcrowded conditions in many Salvadoran prisons.
Both Dr. Mellow and Dr. Koetzle have been working to apply evidence-based, empirically-verified practices to corrections for many years, so when the opportunity came to apply their knowledge gained from research in the United States to an international setting, they knew they had to take it. The project took place in cooperation with El Salvador’s National Criminological Council and Director of the General Office of Penal Centers.
Prison overcrowding
El Salvador’s rate of incarceration is among the highest in the world — second only to the United States, with more than 600 out of every 100,000 persons incarcerated. Although the overcrowding rate is slowly coming down thanks to the construction of new prison facilities, the researchers described unhealthy conditions in some prisons. Some facilities were at 800 or 900 percent capacity, with bunks overfilled with bodies, increased risk of infectious disease, and insufficient room for programming or recreation.
Dr. Koetzle described the severely overcrowded prisons as “strangely quiet” and very still, as inmates have little room for movement. “No one should have to live in those types of conditions,” said Koetzle. “But the other side of that is really seeing the government and the system putting forward meaningful, genuine efforts to address it.”
Releasing the bottleneck
The counterpart to overcrowded higher security institutions are the granjas, or minimum security prisons, to which incarcerated individuals can transition as part of their rehabilitative journey toward release. Their gradual reintegration and movement through the system requires a protracted process of repeated assessments. “Inmates have to both finish a minimum of a third of their sentence, and also engage in very extensive programming to move from closed prisons to open prisons,” said Mellow. “But the problem is there’s a bottleneck, and only about 6% of the inmates, out of 40,000, are in the open prisons.”
As part of the government’s effort to ameliorate prison conditions and move people through the system more quickly, the researchers were engaged to hire, train and manage criminological teams — composed of one lawyer, one educator, one psychologist and one social worker — that helped to build capacity to assess inmate progress toward rehabilitation while drafting more than 2,000 proposals to improve the process based on empirical data collected throughout.
“Our goal was to improve the correctional system and policies, to maintain our relationships down there, and help [the government] to introduce additional evidence-based practice and risk assessments that we think can really help them open up bottlenecks and be more efficient and effective in identifying low-risk individuals to move them through the rehabilitative phases,” said Mellow.
They brought to the process many collective years of experience in working to introduce standardized, evidence-based practice to the U.S. correctional system. Both professors also brought back lessons learned from their time in El Salvador that could translate to better practice in the United States, emphasizing the ways Salvadorans involved in the justice system are still encouraged to feel a part of their community on the outside. “They have families much more engaged, and they are really trying to provide for employment opportunities,” remarked Koetzle. “I think on those two fronts in particular, we could learn.”
Mellow also outlined elements of the rehabilitation program, broadly called “Yo Cambio,” that he felt were exceptional, including “conjugal visits, which we rarely do in the United States, and focus on vocational education. They also have a Fair Day where inmates will go out to sell all the wares they’ve made inside the prison, and the national Olympic game day. You can see that they are really trying to show that inmates are part of the community. They’re people.”
The life of a PI
Working on a large international grant was both a challenge and a source of immense satisfaction. “You’re wearing 100 different hats,” said Mellow, who was Primary Investigator on the grant. “Everything from drafting subcontracts to thinking about lunch for the trainings, to dealing with messages every day, getting everybody paid, and dealing with the funder. Plus doing the actual work, and writing the quarterly and final reports and analyzing the evaluation. If you think about it, you’re managing 40-something people.”
It was “not typical to have so many staff in institutions for this length of time,” added Koetzle, the project’s Senior Advisor. “[And] engaging in international work stretches you a little bit differently.” They took seven trips to El Salvador during the two-plus years of their grant work, and talked about the greater investment of resources, time and flexibility needed to pull off a successful overseas project.But the challenges created by managing a large grant from so far away were paired with a huge pay-off. Both Mellow and Koetzle agreed this was one of the most rewarding projects they’d ever undertaken, and talked about the valuable insights they had learned from working in a different context and system. They also had only positive things to say about their team of local staff, both about their capabilities and their constant enthusiasm and dedication.
“That’s something that really stood out — the number of times they thanked us for giving them the opportunity to help their country,” said Koetzle.
Next steps
Now that the grant has ended, as of February 2019, Dr. Mellow and Dr. Koetzle, along with co-PI and Senior International Officer in John Jay’s Office of International Studies and Programs Mayra Nieves and their program coordinator, PhD candidate and Salvadoran native Lidia Vásquez, are looking ahead. They are working on publishing their results with a Salvadoran university, in Spanish, and would like to see some of their recommendations translated to national policy. Their greatest hope, though, is to find continuing funding to keep doing the work to which they’ve dedicated so much time over the last two years, and perhaps even extend its scope to other nations in Central and South America with similar overcrowding and assessment challenges in their own criminal justice systems.
“We are hoping for the project to come back, “said Mellow. “That is our goal.”
Dr. Jeff Mellow is a Professor in John Jay College’s Criminal Justice Department, Director of the Criminal Justice MA Program, and a member of the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Grad Center. His research focuses on correctional policy and practice, program evaluation, reentry, and critical incident analysis in corrections.
Dr. Deborah Koetzle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Management at John Jay College and the Executive Officer of the Doctoral Program in Criminal Justice. Her research interests center around effective interventions for offenders, problem-solving courts, risk/need assessment, and cross-cultural comparisons of prison-based treatments.
Maria J. D’Agostino — Negotiating Bias in the Workplace
If gender inequity is baked into today’s workplace, what can John Jay students and other Master in Public Administration (MPA) candidates do to fix the problem? Dr. Maria D’Agostino, with co-authors Helisse Levine (LIU-Brooklyn) and Meghna Sabharwal (UT-Dallas), published an article in the Journal of Public Affairs Education in March that represents the first step toward answering that question.
Dr. D’Agostino, an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Management, has focused her recent research on women in public administration. Not only are women — along with other persons whose gender presentation isn’t traditionally male — underrepresented in leadership and management roles but, according to the theory of Second Generation Gender Bias, the workplace isn’t even built to accommodate the needs of anyone but men.
Longstanding cultural beliefs and biases, formed over many decades, put up invisible barriers to women’s advancement, and workplace structures and practices can inadvertently favor men. One such practice is negotiation, which figures prominently in 21st century workplaces. When negotiating for starting salaries and other benefits, studies show that men see better negotiation outcomes than women, and that these differences are more due to stereotyping and structural bias than to behavioral differences. Negotiated Order theory, which has also heavily influenced D’Agostino’s work, suggests that the results of biased negotiations build up over time, meaning that when women or people of marginalized genders start out behind, they usually stay behind.D’Agostino believes that MPA programs are a great place to take on these challenges. “A lot of experimentation goes on in the public sector,” she said, giving examples of vital pieces of legislation that have trickled down from government policy to private sector workplaces, including Title IX, Paid Family Leave, and New York City’s 2017 law barring employers from asking about applicants’ salary history.
According to D’Agostino, MPA graduates are often perfectly placed to address inequality. “[Graduates] work in city, state, and federal government, they work in nonprofits, and in the private sector. The essence of public administration is serving the public and the common good, and they are the face of that; they are the decision-makers in terms of creating policy that becomes city, state, and federal law, which can even spread to the private sector. They are both creating and implementing policy, so they have a big impact on the future.”
It is therefore a concern for D’Agostino and her colleagues that more MPA programs aren’t tackling issues of workplace inequality head on. In her study, researchers surveyed MPA administrators to find out how many programs around the country offer courses in negotiation, let alone courses that incorporate elements of gender bias into coursework. They found that “none of the programs offered a standalone course on gendered negotiation, and those that offered courses on negotiation generally only focused on transactional portions,” said D’Agostino.
Her suggestion? Incorporate second generation gender bias into curricula as a core competency for all MPA programs. Raising awareness among students in the field could lead to big changes inside workplaces, but also in the ivory tower. “Academics could do more research, which could inform practice, which would affect training, which would impact the field in terms of gender equity.”
These are big dreams for sweeping change in MPA programs and in offices across the U.S. For now, D’Agostino and her colleagues are developing a conceptual framework for talking about the issue. Her next step is to interview both men and women in various positions in seven states, to try to understand the implications of second generation gender bias as they play out in real workplaces and to hear about real workers’ experience with bias.
You can find the full article, “Gender in negotiation: Preparing public administrators for the 21st century workplace,” online at the Journal for Public Affairs Education’s website.
Maria D’Agostino is an Associate Professor in John Jay College’s Department of Public Management. She is also the co-founder of Women in the Public Sector at John Jay, a program which educates, engages, and fosters a consortium of students, faculty, public service practitioners, and community members interested in women in public service. It promotes gender equality and provides opportunities to address gender issues in public service.
Dr. D’Agostino is the co-recipient, with WPS co-founder Dr. Nicole Elias, of the 2018-19 Inaugural Presidential Student-Faculty Research Collaboration Award from John Jay’s Office of Student Research and Creativity, for the examination of gender equity in municipalities. Her recent research has focused on women in public administration, including a 2018 co-edited book, Governing in a Global World: Women in Public Service.
Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff – Data Science for Justice
On April 16, 2019, John Jay College’s Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff spoke at Session 4 of TED2019 in Vancouver. The program featured eight speakers representing eight projects that are receiving funding from The Audacious Project in 2019. Dr. Goff spoke on behalf of his independent non-profit organization, the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), which was one of this year’s Audacious Projects.
CPE focuses on addressing racism in the United States. According to Dr. Goff, “When we change the definition of racism from attitudes to behaviors, we transform that problem from impossible to solvable.” CPE’s project, COMPSTAT for Justice, is a database leveraging data collected from police departments and cities on police behavior in an effort to identify problem areas where specific police behaviors can change.
With the support of The Audacious Project, CPE wants to extend the results it’s already seen with partners adopting COMPSTAT for Justice, by delivering the project to police departments serving 100 million people across the United States over the next five years.
To hear Dr. Goff’s TED Talk, visit the @TEDTalks Twitter page, where the link to the livestream is still up. You can read more about Session 4 of TED2019 on the TEDBlog.
John Jay Scholars on the News – Vaccines and the Flu
It’s winter, which we sometimes call “flu season.” In fact, “you can catch influenza at any time during the year if exposed to the virus, and its severity is the same regardless of when you get sick,” says Edgardo Sanabria-Valentín. We don’t fully know the answer to why influenza is more common during the colder months. According to Nathan Lents, “The virus is viable for a longer time in cold air, and spreads more readily in dry air. Another reason that may contribute is that winter air dries our mucus membranes, which makes them less effective at preventing viral entry. We also tend to spend more time indoors with closed windows and recirculated air.”
A somber anniversary
The 2018 flu season was also the 100th anniversary of the infamous global influenza pandemic, a year when more
than 500 million people around the world are estimated to have died from flu. Of that number, 675,000 fatalities came from the United States, with roughly 20,000 from New York City alone. According to Mike Wallace, in his 2018 book Greater Gotham, more Gothamites died of disease in the city than died during World War I; the ongoing war effort actually impaired New York’s efforts to fight the flu, by concentrating soldiers in training camps where disease could spread and by taking much-needed medical personnel away from home to establish medical camps near the battlefields in Europe.
Despite the high numbers of fatalities at home, New York of 1918 had a lower death rate than other major cities (4.7 deaths per 1,000 residents, as compared to Boston’s rate of 6.5 and Philadelphia’s of 7.3). This was attributed by Health Commissioner Royal Copeland to New York’s long history of public health work, and particularly the alleviation of unhealthy conditions around the city at the turn of the 20th century.
Vaccines and you
Today, scientific and public health efforts have brought some protection from a repeat of 1918 in the form of vaccines. In the case of the flu, explains Dr. Lents, “Each year’s vaccine is targeted toward the three to four strains that appear to be spreading the most rapidly. The injected vaccine contains killed viruses [from those strains], while the nasal spray contains live but weakened viruses. In both cases, the large dose of viral particles elicits a strong immune reaction from our bodies, including the production of antibodies that can stick around for years or even decades. The second time we are exposed to the same virus, it only takes a day or two to mount the same level of immune response. This ‘priming’ gives the immune system enough of a head start that it usually prevents the infection from ever taking hold.”
Because the influenza virus is so good at mutating from year to year, “no vaccine is 100% perfect, and getting the flu shot will never protect you against 100% of all flu strains,” says Dr. Sanabria-Valentín. But the vaccine will “significantly decrease the risk of getting sick, and will decrease the severity and length of infection, and decrease the chance that you get other people sick” if you do contract the virus.
Vaccinating also helps to protect those around you in other ways, namely by contributing to “herd immunity.” “Some people cannot be vaccinated because they are too young, too old, immune-compromised, or battling other kinds of infections,” says Dr. Lents. When the percentage of people in a population are effectively immunized, it helps to prevent the spread of disease to those who were unable to receive the vaccine. But when the percentage of vaccinated people falls because individuals who otherwise could be immunized choose not to be, it puts vulnerable populations at risk.
Conquering vaccine hesitancy
“Controversies about vaccinations have been out there since we adopted this preventative measure almost 100 years ago,” says Dr. Sanabria-Valentín. “There are a lot of myths about vaccinations which are peddled by conspiracy theorists trying to sell you something or by people who might have good intentions but got swindled by ill-intentioned people trying to make a fast buck. One of the most popular ones is that vaccines can cause autism in children. This claim was first made in a study that was demonstrated (by many groups) to be fraudulent; no direct relationship between receiving vaccinations and autism has been found. There is overwhelming consensus among scientists and physicians that vaccines are safe and effective even though, like most medical treatments, in very rare cases they can cause side effects and in even rarer instances can cause serious unintended health problems. There is overwhelming evidence that vaccination has helped not just individuals, but humankind.” Although diseases like smallpox, polio and the measles were all but eliminated by vaccine technology, skepticism about immunization–which many attribute to the rise of social media–has caused some long-gone diseases to stage a comeback.
Dr. Lents stated that “in 2017, 80,000 people died of influenza, the highest number in 40 years. If more healthy people had been vaccinated, that number could have been much less. Each person that decides not to vaccinate adds a little bit of risk to the entire population.” This dynamic played out in October 2018, when measles–which was declared eliminated in the US in 2000–broke out in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The New York City Department of Health confirmed 42 cases in Williamsburg and Bensonhurst as of mid-December, and is currently barring un-immunized students from attending local schools. And according to The Guardian, Europe is also experiencing a surge in vaccine hesitancy and a corresponding growth in the numbers of new measles cases; Europe will see more than 60,000 new cases this year and 72 deaths, the highest number this century.
It is generally agreed that fears about vaccine side-effects are overblown, and contradicted by scientific consensus. “Vaccines are constantly monitored and modified as circumstances dictate. The FDA does not approve a vaccine unless initial trials indicate the benefits clearly outweigh the risks. In response to vaccine safety concerns today, healthcare providers have to give vaccine information sheets to recipients clearly describing the risks and benefits of the vaccine. And finally, vaccines are subject to particularly high safety standards because, unlike other health treatments, they are given as preventive measures to protect healthy people,” explains Dr. Evelyn Aranda Jaque. “Although vaccination is not 100% effective, studies on flu vaccination programs have shown that people who get vaccinated are less likely to be seriously ill or die in comparison with those who do not vaccinate. We must consider that the widespread use of vaccines for life-threatening diseases in the United States has led to a dramatic decrease in their incidence.”
Evelyn Aranda Jaque is a substitute Associate Professor at John Jay College, where she teaches classes including Immunology and Microbiology. She received her Ph.D. from the Physiology Department at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Dr. Aranda Jaque’s research since her doctorate days has largely focused on the role of angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels) in tumor progression.
Nathan Lents is a Professor of Biology and Director of the Honors Program and Macaulay Honors College at John Jay College. He holds a Ph.D. in human physiology and postdoctoral training in computational biology from NYU. In addition to his laboratory research, Dr. Lents writes popular science articles, blog and books. His most recent book is Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes.
Edgardo Sanabria-Valentín is the Associate Program Director of John Jay College’s Program for Research Initiatives in Science and Math (PRISM) as well as the college’s Pre-Health Careers Advisor. He holds a Ph.D. from NYU-School of Medicine, and spent three years working in the biotechnology industry. Dr. Sanabria-Valentín is the recipient of the ESCMID Young Scientist Award (2007), a Leadership-Alliance Schering Plough Graduate Fellowship (2006), and the NBHS-Frank G. Brooks Award for Excellence in Student Research (2001).
Mike Wallace is a Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College and author of Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919. Dr. Wallace is also the co-author of Pulitzer Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 and the founder of the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate School. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia University.
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