My starting point would be to say that if we're willing to do mandatory minimums, that means we have money on the table to deal with crime. Let's talk about that money.
It seems to me that if we're talking about an extra 1,000 prisoners in this country, we're talking about $80 million. Where are we going to put $80 million? That's the question that I think you should be asking yourselves. My answer to that would be that there are lots of places, and previous speakers have mentioned these. One of them would be schools. A school is not something just in terms of learning. The school is an institution in which people can thrive and can move on to other things. I'd look at it in terms of housing. One of the things that we know is that instability of housing in young kids and in adolescent kids is likely to lead to increased offending. And I would look at it in terms of various kinds of very fundamental public health issues that would deal with this.
The problem is that we tend to look for quick fixes, something that's going to fix the problem by tomorrow. I was recently reading an overview of the American experience in gangs, because a lot of what's driving the discussion at this table today is gangs. What this pair of authors, who are really experts in this area, were saying is that the United States, with all of the problems of gangs historically, has squandered the opportunity, because both the programs and the evaluations have focused on quick-fix kinds of things, where essentially the model is to suppress rather than to deal with the problems.
There are some areas that are very difficult. I don't have the answers on what to do, for example, in the area of gangs. But things like housing, like the communities, like schools, like public health, like opportunities and real jobs are the kinds of things that have benefits in addition to the crime prevention benefits.
So my answer on the $80 million is that I would want to have those folks sitting at the table, perhaps including the police, for example, because there are things they can do. I would ask them where we are going to get the most effect. One of the things that we know from the research is that we would almost certainly get the least effect from programs such as mandatory minimum sentences.