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The Youth PROMISE Act
The
Youth
PROMISE Act
implements the best policy recommendations from crime policy makers,
researchers, practitioners, analysts, and law enforcement officials from
across the political spectrum concerning evidence- and research-based
strategies to reduce gang violence and crime. Under the Youth PROMISE
Act, communities facing the greatest youth gang and crime challenges
will each form a local council called a Promise Coordinating Council ("PCC").
The PCC will include representatives from law enforcement, court
services, schools, social service organizations, health and mental
health providers and community-based organizations, including
faith-based organizations. The PCC will then develop a comprehensive
plan for implementing evidence-based prevention and intervention
strategies. These strategies will target young people who are at risk of
becoming involved, or who are already involved in, gangs or the criminal
justice system to redirect them toward productive and law-abiding
alternatives.
"During my more
than 30 years of public service, I have learned that when it comes to
crime policy, we have a choice - we can reduce crime or we can play
politics," Mr. Scott said. "For far too long, Congress has chosen to
play politics by enacting 'tough on crime' slogans whose impacts range
from a negligible reduction in crime to an increase in crime. As a
result, the United States now has the highest average incarceration rate
of any nation in the world and the cost of incarceration in this country
has risen to over $65 billion a year. All the credible research and
evidence shows that a continuum of evidenced-based prevention and
intervention programs for at-risk youth will greatly reduce crime and
save much more than they cost. This is what the Youth PROMISE Act will
do," Scott added.
The bill also
provides for law enforcement support through "Youth Oriented Policing
Services" (YOPS), and a victim/witness assistance program. New
provisions of the Youth PROMISE Act this year provide additional grants
to high intensity gang localities to reduce or alleviate the effects of
gang violence, and grants to localities to fund police and community
collaborative programs to provide crime prevention, research, and
intervention services designed to prevent crime by at-risk youth and
youth gang members.
"I have long
believed that the best way to reduce violence in this country is through
prevention, and the Youth PROMISE Act does just that," said Rep. Castle.
"We must engage youth in positive ways through education, after school
programs, sports, as well as family and community support to keep kids
away from the dangers of gangs and other violent activities."
The Youth
PROMISE Act was supported last Congress by over 200 national and state
juvenile justice, civil rights, education and religious organizations,
including Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, the National Juvenile Defender
Center, the Justice Policy Institute, the NAACP Washington DC Office,
the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, and the Campaign for Youth Justice,
among others. We expect that list to continue to grow this Congress.
Write to your Senators and Representatives now and ask for their
support of S. 435 and H.R. 1064.
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"I cannot tell you with what weapons
mankind would fight WW3, but I can assure you that WW4 would be
fought with sticks and stones."
~
Albert Einstein
There
is currently a bill before the U.S. House of Representatives to
establish a United States Department of Peace. This historic measure
will augment our current problem-solving options, providing practical,
nonviolent solutions to the problems of domestic and international
conflict.
The legislation will pass from
bill to law under one condition: that a wave of citizen interest rise up
from the American people and make itself heard in the halls of Congress.
During the 20th Century, over 100 million people
lost their lives to war -- most of whom were non-combatants. Now, at the
dawn of the 21st century, the extent and current speed of nuclear
proliferation makes the achievement of non-violent alternatives to war
the most urgent need of the human race.
A Department of Peace will work to:
-- Provide much-needed assistance to
efforts by city, county, and state governments in coordinating
existing programs; as well as develop new programs based on best
practices nationally
-- Teach violence prevention and mediation to America's school
children
-- Effectively treat and dismantle gang psychology
-- Rehabilitate the prison population
-- Build peace-making efforts among conflicting cultures both here
and abroad
-- Support our military with complementary approaches to
peace-building.
-- Create and administer a U.S. Peace Academy, acting as a sister
organization to the U.S. Military Academy.
-- And more…
1792
Department of Peace Proposal
A PLAN OF A PEACE-OFFICE FOR THE UNITED STATES
Among the defects which have been pointed out in the Federal
Constitution by its antifederal enemies, it is much to be lamented that
no person has taken notice of its total silence upon the subject of an
office of the utmost importance to the welfare of the United States,
that is, an office for promoting and preserving perpetual peace in our
country.
It is to be hoped that no objection will be made to the establishment of
such an office, while we are engaged in a war with the Indians, for as
the War-Office of the United States was established in time of peace, it
is equally reasonable that a Peace-Office should be established in the
time of war.
The plan of this office is as follows:
1.
Let a Secretary of the Peace be appointed to preside in this office, who
shall be perfectly free from all the present absurd and vulgar European
prejudices upon the subject of government; let him be a genuine
republican and a sincere Christian, for the principles of republicanism
and Christianity are no less friendly to universal and perpetual peace,
than they are to universal and equal liberty.
2.
Let a power be given to this Secretary to establish and maintain
free-schools in every city, village and township of the United States;
and let him be made responsible for the talents, principles, and morals,
of all his schoolmasters. Let the youth of our country be carefully
instructed in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and in the doctrines of
a religion of some king: the Christian religion should be preferred to
all others; for it belongs to this religion exclusively to teach us not
only to cultivate peace with men, but to forgive, nay more – to love our
very enemies. It belongs to it further to teach us that the Supreme
Being alone possesses a power to take away human life, and that we rebel
against his laws, whenever we undertake to execute death in any way
whatever upon any of his creatures.
3.
Let every family in the United States be furnished at the public
expense, by the Secretary of this office, with a copy of an American
edition of the BIBLE. This measure has become the more necessary in our
country, since the banishment of the bible, as a school-book, from most
of the schools in the United States. Unless the price of this book be
paid for by the public, there is reason to fear that in a few years it
will be me with only in courts of justice or in magistrates’ offices;
and should the absurd mode of establishing truth by kissing this sacred
book fall into disuse, it may probably, in the course of the next
generation, be seen only as a curiosity on a shelf in a public museum.
4. Let the following sentence be inscribed in letters of gold over the
doors of every State and Court house in the United States.
THE SON OF MAN CAME INTO THE WORLD, NOT TO DESTROY MEN’S LIVES, BUT TO
SAVE THEM.
1.
To inspire a veneration for human life, and an horror at the shedding of
blood, let all those laws be repealed which authorize juries, judges,
sheriffs, or hangmen to assume the resentments of individuals and to
commit murder in cold blood in any case whatever. Until this reformation
in our code of penal jurisprudence takes place, it will be in vain to
attempt to introduce universal and perpetual peace in our country.
2.
To subdue that passion for war, which education, added to human
depravity, have made universal, a familiarity with the instruments of
death, as well as all military shows, should be carefully avoided. For
which reason, militia laws should every where be repealed, and military
dresses and military titles should be laid aside: reviews tend to lessen
the horrors of a battle by connecting them with the charms of order;
militia laws generate idleness and vice, and thereby produce the wars
they are said to prevent; military dresses fascinate the minds of young
men, and lead them from serious and useful professions; were there no
uniforms, there would probably be no armies; lastly, military titles
feed vanity, and keep up ideas in the mind which lessen a sense of the
folly and miseries of war.
3. In the last place, let a large room, adjoining the federal hall, be
appropriated for transacting the business and preserving all the records
of this office. Over the door of this room let there be a sign, on which
the figures of a LAMB, a DOVE and an OLIVE BRANCH should be painted,
together with the following inscriptions in letters of gold:
PEACE ON EARTH – GOOD-WILL TO MAN.
AH! WHY WILL MEN FORGET THAT THEY ARE BRETHREN?
Within this apartment let there be a collection of plough-shares and
pruning-hooks made out of swords and spears; and on each of the walls of
the apartment, the following pictures as large as the life:
1.
A lion eating straw with an ox, and an adder playing upon the lips of a
child.
2.
An Indian boiling his venison in the same pot with a citizen of
Kentucky.
3.
Lord Cornwallis and Tippoo Saib, under the shade of a sycamore-tree in
the East Indies, drinking Madeira wine together out of the same
decanter.
4.
A group of French and Austrian soldiers dancing arm and arm, under a
bower erected in the neighbourhood of Mons.
5.
A St. Domingo planter, a man of color, and a native of Africa,
legislating together in the same colonial assembly.
To complete the entertainment of this delightful apartment, let a group
of young ladies, clad in white robes, assemble every day at a certain
hour, in a gallery to be erected for the purpose, and sing odes, and
hymns, and anthems in praise of the blessings of peace.
One of these songs should consist of the following lines.
Peace o’er the world her olive want extends,
And white-rob’d innocence from heaven descends;
All crimes shall cease, and ancient frauds shall fail,
Returning justice lifts aloft her scale.
In order more deeply to affect the minds of the citizens of the United
States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils
of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign which is
placed over the door of the War Office.
1.
An office for butchering the human species.
2.
A Widow and Orphan making office.
3.
A broken bone making office.
4.
A Wooden leg making office.
5.
An office for the creating of public and private vices.
6.
An office for creating a public debt.
7.
An office for creating speculators, stock jobbers, and bankrupts.
8.
An office for creating famine.
9.
An office for creating pestilential diseases.
10.
An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty, and
national happiness.
In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all
the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken
bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick
and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating
the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed
with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any object,
but the ruins of deserted farm houses.
Above this group of woeful figures, – let the following words be
inserted, in red characters to represent human blood,
"NATIONAL GLORY."
[Benjamin Bannekers’s "Plan of a Peace-office" quoted in its entirety
from The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush ]
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