Fighting crime by building moral communities - Cover Story

Christian Century, Oct 5, 1994 by Christopher Freeman Adams

The project will involve two sets of focus groups. The first set will consist of participants from the same institution (all educators, for example) to discuss the institution's central purposes, the resources it needs to accomplish those purposes and the resources it has to offer other institutions. The second set will include members of all the institutions and will focus on their interrelationships. The following is an example of what each institution might find regarding its role in one of our most pressing issues, crime:

Family: The family is best able to teach the values that prevent crime. In many instances, it is failing at this task because it has had to respond to the demands of other institutions or lacks their support: the economy requires that most families have two wage-earners; organized religion no longer provides the support it once did; and as some have noted, government is not "family friendly."

Business: One of the chief roles of business in crime prevention is to provide adequately paying jobs, both to youths who might see crime as a viable activity and to parents who need to have enough time for their families. Business is hampered in playing this role by the pressures it faces to be competitive. Furthermore, business requires well-trained employees who have enough family support to be productive.

Education: In the classical conception of education, its main purpose is to prepare students to be citizens of a democaracy. In modern society this task has been expanded to include preparing people to be economic actors. But as other institutions--especially the family--have crumbled, the schools have often become the first line of defense for the welfare state, relegating education to a secondary concern.

Religion: Organized religion is the primary social institution for articulating values in public. This nation's important founding principles were all based on religious values. And yet religion has been ascribed a negligible place in public discourse, especially in government, as Stephen Carter demonstrates in The Culture of Disbelief.

Institutional reform will certainly take place. The main question is what this reform will entail. Will it be only administrative? Or will it question the very purposes of institutions, demanding reforms that will make them more supportive of a moral community? Even with the best intentions, it is difficult for institutions to consciously respond to values.

When I asked Butler if his department engaged in teaching values through any of its activities, he told me that in some of their youth educationef forts they stressed that some things are morally wrong. For example: Smith and Wessons are not the way to solve problems. When I asked about the possibility of forming alliances with religious groups to teach values, he said it was a possibility. "Maybe it's one direction we would have to consider. It would have to be open, nondenominational, because we're a public agency... We're certainly willing to take a look at that. Do you think they're interested?"