CLOSING KEYNOTE ADDRESS ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET RENO AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY</

CLOSING KEYNOTE ADDRESS

ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET RENO

AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Saturday, May 9, 1998

Harvard University

ARCO Forum of Public Affairs

P R O C E E D I N G S

ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET RENO: Thank

you very much. It is such an honor to be here. I

have such a great respect for the school and what

it has done to bring people of different

disciplines together, and so I think I will just

say I come as someone who was born and raised in a

wonderful city that has been changed by

immigration. I've lived there all of my life.

I've seen experience in the legislature and

private practice. I've been elected five times to

an office, and now I've had an opportunity to use

the law for all of the American people to try to

do things for the American people. I say that

just to give you the vantage point from which I

speak.

When I came to Washington, I had

seen violence and gangs and guns. I said that

youth violence was the single greatest crime

problem in America. It is still. That domestic

violence must be focused upon. I saw what drugs

and alcohol had done to end lives, to tear up

neighborhoods, and to give babies a dim and

bleak future. I saw the results of our failing

1 to invest in children, in abuse and failure to

provide child support, and the fact that 20

percents of Americans or more were living in

poverty, many of them children, that they were

dropping out. I saw squalid housing and I saw

downtown infrastructures just falling apart. I

saw people isolated, alone and with no roots. I

saw people in the elections that I participated

in only coming to vote -- with only 30 percent

of the people coming to vote, and I saw and

still see total confusion and mystification at

what Washington says and how it says it.

So, I came to Washington believing

that the responsibility of government at every

level is to ensure that every person has access

to the building blocks and the tools with which

each individual can build a strong and positive

and productive life.

I came convinced that what we must

do was to reweave the fabric of community around

children and families and people at risk. There

are nine points with which I think we must

approach this effort. First, and perhaps most

important of all, we must trust the people. We

must listen to them. Not many people in

government do that now. They may listen to

their faxes that they get from constituents in

an organized way, but for the person who is at

risk, for the youngster who is on the verge of

crime, we do not listen. We do not listen to

the lady who is behind closed doors that she's

afraid to come out from behind, but she has a

wealth of information. We design programs

thinking that we know best, when we are a

government of the people and the people have

such tremendous wisdom. The young man in a

detention facility who can tell me: You ask me

what I can do to stay -- could have done to stay

out of trouble, give me somebody strong,

positive to talk to, somebody who knows how hard

it is to grow up in America today, somebody that

can be a model for me, and give me something

positive to do in the afternoons and evenings.

We've got to believe in people and

believe that each one of them can make a

contribution. That youngster can be a mentor.

That person just getting out of the detention

facility does have a future if we give him the

tools to build. We've got to believe in

volunteers and understand that if we organize

them and provide transportation and deal with

the mechanics of volunteering so that all they

have to do is to think about what they're doing

as volunteers and not how to get there and what

to do and liability and the like, we're going to

have a tremendous force in this land, and we

have got to do everything we can to build in

each American -- every American the hope, the

strength, the courage, the spirit that is what a

productive life is all about.

The second point that I would like

to make as we approach this problem is how do we

communicate, how do we talk with people. Right

now, the federal government talks to people in

terms of Title Vs, OJJDPs, HHSs, DOJs, BO, Vern

grants, VAWAs, Title XVI and a lot of other

things. I still don't know what it all means

and I can assure you the American people don't

know what it all means. They don't know what it

means when they see a big headline in the Miami

Herald that says, Congress Authorizes Millions

of Dollars of Drugs. Six months later, I ask my

senator where the millions of dollars are and he

explains that was just authorized, it wasn't

appropriated.

If we are to -- when -- in my law

school days, we talked about implementing the

contract. If we were to make whatever contract

we develop work, we must know how to communicate

with our people and Winston Churchill said it

best. We must use the small old words and talk

in terms that everybody can understand, because

they have a far more compelling eloquence. We

must be comprehensive. You think we're going to

solve all the problems we've got on 30 second

sound bites on the six o'clock news. Television

has had a disastrous effect on good, solid,

comprehensive, problem-solving discussions that

are essential if we are going to deal with the

problems before us.

We have a challenge. How do we use

the marvel of television, the opportunity it

gives to us to know so much about so many things

that we might not know about? How can we use

the extraordinary opportunities that the

Internet will provide us for the future without

becoming a servant of TV and the Internet. That

will be one of our challenges if we are to

really forge a strong and vigorous contract with

the people we serve.

The third point is that we must make

an investment in people from the beginning. We

must not wait till we put them in prison to make

an investment. We must not wait to make a

special investment in remedial education 15

years down the line. We must make an investment

from the beginning. As the prosecutor in Miami,

I had to be -- I had to determine what to do

about crack involved infants and their mothers.

The doctors took me to our public hospital. The

child development experts talked to me. They

explained to me that 50 percent of all learned

human response is learned in the first year of

life. That the concept of reward, punishment

and conscience is developed in the first three

years.

And I can remember standing there

and saying, what good are all the prisons going

to be 18 years from now if this child does not

understand the concept of punishment? What good

are all the great educational opportunities that

we provide down the road going to mean to this

child, unless we provide him with the foundation

in this first year that can make a difference?

I suddenly realized that I had a

responsibility to start talking not just about

the criminal justice system or the juvenile

justice system, but the whole continuum. To

explain to a business man that he wasn't going

to have workers with the skills necessary to

fill the jobs for his company to maintain his

company as a first-rate company in this nation's

economic engine as a first rate engine; that the

medical institutions would be brought to their

knees if we didn't start investing up front in

preventative medical care that would save us

vast dollars in terms of tertiary crisis care

down the line; that the educational system could

put its moneys spent in remediation into

building opportunities for children to deal with

the issues of cyber -- of the cyber world in the

next century. We weren't going to get the

diversity that was going to make this country

strong, because we weren't providing

opportunities up front, and we were going to

have an economy that was slow and stuck because

we weren't giving every American the chance to

participate. So, I decided that everything that

I did with respect to the issues I talked about

was going to be couched in prevention. What can

we do to invest up front to make a difference?

But then it became clear to me that

even if we made a solid investment in the

foundation, it wouldn't make a particle's worth

of difference if that child walked out of the

second grade in the afternoon at three o'clock,

walked out to the streets where guns were

blazing, walked to a home where there was no

supervision; and it seemed to me that if we were

going to focus and build something that made a

difference for our people, we had to build it as

a continuum and put the blocks in piece by

piece, or otherwise it would literally fall

apart; and we watch too many children's lives

fall apart. We have to identify the key points

along the way, where we can place a building

block that can make a difference.

The next point that I think is

critical is that we must focus on our families.

And people say how do you do that? I'll talk

about that in a minute, but the family is the

best social worker, the best caregiver, the best

teacher, and how we strengthen the family is

going to be a measure of our success.

Now, there were -- I've been here

since five minutes past 12:00 and the word I

have heard most since I've been here is

community. What is a community? How do you

build it? Well, part of building a community is

building people strong enough to participate in

that community, but at the same time, the

community can be an extraordinary force. And

let us look for a moment at history to

understand community. Up until the Depression,

people seemed to look most to community to solve

their problems. With the Depression, people

began to look to Washington to solve problems

with the war that became more confirmed that

Washington was the place of power and authority.

With the '50s and '60s, they looked to

Washington for civil rights. In the '70s, they

looked to Washington for model cities, dollars

and LEAA dollars. And then in the '80s,

Washington started shifting the programs to the

states, without the dollars. And in

Tallahassee, I watched the state shift the

programs to communities, without the dollars.

And suddenly there was something exciting

happening in communities that I was involved

with and now I see across the nation. With

their backs up against the wall, without having

to compete for grants, communities were coming

together and bringing churches and police

officers and teachers and doctors and lawyers

and business people, and 84-year-old

grandmothers together to figure out how to solve

the problems of their community.

Communities understand their needs

and resources far better than we do in

Washington. I never liked the feds coming to

town telling us what to do. And the feds have a

great ability to do that. We're trying to

change that. But what does change, too, is a

community. I have watched a sleepy little city

grow into a major international city. I have

watched it become a city in which Univision is

the number one on the Nielsen ratings. It is

Miami. But it still, to me, has sense of

community, frayed at the edges, sometimes ripped

apart, but worth fighting for and far enhanced

by the people who have come to its shores in

these last 30 years.

How do we deal with the issue of the

international impact of the world on us all?

Crime will become international in its scope and

consequence by the next century. Borders will

mean nothing in terms of pornography on the

Internet, gambling in a place that has outlawed

gambling will be available on the Internet. How

do we deal with that? What is the glue? How do

we bring us together?

It is imperative if we are to deal

in this issue that the federal, state and local

governments form partnerships, balanced

partnerships, respectful partnerships, and two-

way partnerships for exchange of information.

The federal government can be so effective in

terms of providing seed dollars to show people

what for example community policing has done, to

provide moneys to change the culture -- cultural

attitudes towards domestic violence. They can

serve as clearing houses and let us encourage

research as to what works and what doesn't work.

And federal agencies can be a mighty force if

they come together.

One of the most frustrating aspects

of my time in Washington has been to deal with

so many federal agencies, to watch the mayor and

the chief of police say, well, I've been to see

Secretary so-and-so and I'm going to see

Secretary so-and-so, and I keep thinking what

would happen if we just had a Boston desk where

they could come to one person who was a Boston

advocate, with Boston's plan laid out on the

computer, where people could talk back and forth

and Boston would say, I need something over

here, Reverend Rivers wants a prevention program

in a church in Dorchester. How can we do this?

How can we come together? How can the federal,

state and local governments deal in an effective

way, in a cooperative way, in a collegial way,

with the communities across the nation? But the

federal government also has a responsibility for

some ultimate protections, protections of our

civil rights, protections against terrorism, and

we must focus on that, as well.

One of the most wonderful things

that I have seen happen relates to my point

number eight, and that is the need for research,

the need for the academic community to be

involved on these day-to-day issues. Now, some

articles that I read, I have to read ten times

to understand what they said. The lawyers are

worst at that, but social workers are sometimes

not too far behind. But when I can pick up at

least a summary, beautifully written, of

research done by an academic institution that is

well-written, that is persuasive, and that has

solid research to show that some prevention

program is working and that it is having an

impact, I practically wrap my arms around it,

put it on the desk and keep it there for three

days until I've memorized it, because it can be

so effective in showing a Congressman or

somebody else that prevention can work.

Now, in addition to some of the

material not being too persuasive, some of it is

not very current, and in the whole issue of

social policy, what is absolutely essential is

the development of information, evaluations and

research that has a time sensitive impact. I

remember in Miami in the early '80s, I thought

we were beginning to make a difference. And

then suddenly the murder rate went up and I

heard about this substance called crack. Times

change, and by the time we were dealing with

crack, the research we were getting was five

years behind. We have got to form alliances

between those of us who are responsible for

operations and academic institutions to ensure

that we have information that can be really

useful in persuading city commissions,

legislatures and Congress as to what the right

public policy should be.

And then the next point and last

point is that we must bring the disciplines and

institutions and religious institutions together

as one, to plan together what a community needs,

design a plan that says you can do this, we'll

do this, we'll work on this, you provide this

building block, we can do this.

Now, I've been talking to Dean Nye,

and I don't think the American Universities, the

Kennedy School being one of the great

exceptions, does very much about bringing

disciplines together. And you are not going to

solve the problem of America's unraveled

communities, America's neglected children,

America's youth violence, America's teen

pregnancy, or any of the other major issues that

we face unless doctors and lawyers and teachers

and police officers start talking together and

learning together and looking at the whole

picture.

I'm not going to solve the problem

as Attorney General by just putting people in

jail. An early childhood specialist is not

going to solve the problem just by getting child

care for every zero to three-year-old child.

We're going to have to look at the big picture

and the long continuum and we're going to have

to look at it together in thoughtful, collegial

discussion.

Dean says it's going the other way

and that the universities of America are

becoming more specialized. Frankly, Dean, I

don't see how they could become more

specialized.

If you will give me some hints as to

what I can do to start getting them to talk

together, I think this is one of the great

deficiencies that we face in terms of knowledge

in America, somebody who knows the whole picture

and understands that it's all a bunch sometimes

of fragile blocks that build the whole.

Now, applying these points, how do

we build the tools? How -- what tools do we

use? How do we build the blocks? The first

block is a strong family. We've got to enhance

our teaching and parenting skills. Domestic

violence can be eliminated, at least

substantially reduced in this country, and we

have a golden opportunity. With budget

surpluses, Congress has continued to be willing

to fund the Violence Against Women Act. That's

going to dry up someday. But in this time, let

us use it with prosecutors and emergency room

physicians and social workers and teachers and

community advocates and the minister working

together to say, we will use this money to

ensure shelters, to ensure court services, to

ensure centers that can make a difference. We

have the opportunity to change a culture with

respect to domestic violence and eliminate it in

anybody's mind as something that somebody might

find acceptable.

The impact on our children, we have

enough research now to indicate that the child

that watches his father beat his mother comes to

accept violence as a way of life. We've got to

intervene when that child sees the violence so

that we do not see it repeated 10 and 15 years

down the line. Child support enforcement should

be as effective as other government mechanisms,

but trying to force this change across the

nation has been difficult. Teen pregnancy is

being reduced, but we cannot rest on our

laurels.

We have done a lot. The first bill

the President signed was the Family and Medical

Leave Act. But we have got to do more in terms

of child care, and his child care proposals will

begin to address it.

But I have a suggestion yet. None

of that will make any difference in the long run

unless we can provide more family time for

parents to spend with their children. We have

gotten so we work so hard, where lawyers for

example, worry so about their billable hours,

that we are not spending time with our children.

I remember my afternoons after school and in the

evening. My mother worked in the home. She

taught me to play baseball, to bake a cake, to

appreciate Beethoven's symphony. She punished

us and she loved us with all her heart and soul,

and there is no child care in the world that

will ever be the substitute for what she was.

If we have the Internet, if we know

as much about the Cyber world as we do, we ought

to be able to create work places in this nation

that give parents, both parents, more quality

time with their children, and this is a

challenge I think that we should all undertake.

The next building block is health.

Every child in America should have been assured

of appropriate prenatal care. Every child in

America should have available preventative

medical care. We are engaged in a challenge

with United Way and other children's agencies to

focus on getting children registered, those who

are eligible, for health insurance. But then we

need to link systems and transportation systems

to get those children to that clinic. These are

the bits and pieces that make a difference. It

seems so funny to be talking about

transportation at the Kennedy School, but

clearly when I go to a community meeting, the

big gripe is I can't get to the service. I

can't get to that doctor who's willing to

volunteer. How can we link communities?

The next block is a roof over your

head. The mother who sleeps in the car with the

children, who's been the victim of domestic

violence, the increasing number of children who

are homeless, or the children who are living in

squalor. To walk into a public housing project

financed by this nation, as I did in Miami, and

see people living in squalor is not right. If

the community, however, joins with the federal

authorities in policing these housing units, we

can make a difference, but we have got to start

with us, or otherwise the private landlord will

do exactly what one did to me and say: What are

you talking about me for? Why don't you go talk

about what government does? We can make a

difference.

Education. First, we've got to

ensure the foundation of zero to three. We have

got to stop calling it child care and start

calling it educare if 50 percent of all learned

human response is learned in the first year of

life. We've got to start making sure that we

have teachers who are trained in teaching

children zero to three, and then we have got to

make the wonders of K through 12 real for all

Americans. I can still name every one of my

teachers. Some I liked and some I didn't like.

But most every one of them challenged me. We

can make a difference if we provide support for

our school systems.

But after school and in the evenings

are as much a formative time in a child's life.

And it's estimated that as many as seven million

children go home alone after school. The

Carnegie Foundation has pointed out that

children are more alone and unsupervised except

for contact with peers than at any time in

history and more exposed to dangerous

influences. How do we organize? A community

can again sit down and figure out how to do it

and the development of a plan that can truly

make a difference. That plan can be put on

record at the Boston desk in Washington. We can

work together, seeing what the State of

Massachusetts has, finding this foundation

grant, plugging this whole with some training,

providing technical expertise on another matter.

But working together in a collegial way, looking

to the blocks that go to building a community.

We have a challenge, though. We are

currently faced with one of the most

extraordinary problems that I have had to deal

with at the Department of Justice. How do I

find agents and lawyers who are cyber

sophisticated, who know what they're talking

about in terms of cyber issues and cyber crime,

in terms of automation? Can't compete with the

private sector, and even the private sector has

trouble getting them. Can we somehow or another

speed up the manner in which we train our young

people, in which we identify our young people

who have the aptitude and make a difference?

And then we need to turn to the next

building block, safety. We've approached it all

wrong. The Republicans and the Democrats holler

at each other, whereas public safety should be

just like raising a child the right way. It

should be a matter of common sense. And we

should work together in developing plans. A

community should identify its crime problem.

What is best handled by the feds? What's best

handled by local government? How can we work

together? How can we provide support?

Community policing, a new initiative. Let the

feds provide the money to get the program off

the ground. Let's show that it can work. Let's

see how we work together to address it. Is this

a drug gang that cuts across district lines?

Then let the feds do it. If this is a local

crime, let the local police do it. But work

together to achieve a partnership and look at

the crime problem as a whole. Not just in terms

of enforcement, but what can be done to prevent

it in the first place.

Again, the academic community can be

a vital force. In our strategic local planning,

we have suggested to every U.S. attorney

involved that they participate with an academic

institution in providing for the evaluation and

the analysis of what the problem is and what's

working and what's not working.

The next building block is a job

with a living wage. You can do so much if you

link it all together. If you start looking at

schools and if we, instead of having just

general academic requirements, said that

everyone had to graduate from high school with a

skill that can enable them to earn a living

wage. Somebody says, but I'm going to Harvard.

How many of you know somebody who is going to

Harvard and sat out for two years or dropped out

for two years because they didn't know what life

was for and they were trying to find themselves?

Let's make sure that everyone has a skill that

can enable them to earn a living wage.

Someone spoke earlier in the day

about the knowledge of a work ethic and an

appreciation for a work ethic. That can be

taught. That can be taught, and it is being

taught in good programs across this country.

Let's find out how the best work and transplant

them, and let us make sure we have retraining

available, as we move along.

But the final point is how do you

create a community glue? There are some

communities that work and some that don't.

Boston is a classic example of a community that

has begun to put the pieces together, to bring

the disciplines together, to bring the academic

community and the medical community and law

enforcement community together.

I can go to Dorchester or Roxbury

and just feel an energy and a strength and an

excitement and a sense of hope amongst the young

people because of what government, the church,

the private sector, have done to bring

communities together.

I've been in office a little over

five years now. I am absolutely convinced, as I

have traveled across this nation, that we can

truly make a difference if we start with

community, if we consider the nuts and bolts, if

we bring all the people together, and if we

listen to the people.

My mother taught me that I should

get into public service because it was the right

thing to do to try to make the world a better

place. When I was 13, I saw Dachau and I talked

to German friends with whom I lived when I

visited in Germany, I asked them how it

happened. And they said it just happened. We

cannot stand by and let it just happen. There

is so much to do in this nation and it is

possible. Never have I so strongly believed

that we can reverse the problems we see as I do

after these five years. Much of it is because

of work done in this institution to show us

what's working and what's not working. But most

of it is due to the extraordinary capacity of so

many people in America, in the church, in

government, in the private sector, to say, I'm

not going to stand by, I am going to make a

difference. Thank you.

(Applause.)

Dean Nye: That was a very moving

speech, as well as a thoughtful one. Attorney

General Reno has agreed to take a few questions.

And it would be nice if we kept them on the

topic of renegotiating the social contract.

UNIDENTIFIED: You mentioned

government, religion, private sector. What

about the media?

ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET RENO: Well,

my mother and father were both newspaper

reporters, my brother's a columnist, my

grandfather was the chief photographer for the

Herald and my aunt was the music critic, and I

leave them alone.

I will say this, though. If you

pick up the average American paper today, if you

did an analysis -- and it would be very

interesting to do an analysis, I would dare say

that most of them have run a major thoughtful

series on children's issues within the last two

years. Even small community newspapers. I

think most of them, in terms of their editorial

policies, are doing some very thoughtful things.

In their coverage of youth violence, I think

they're pointing out so many of the problems.

In many respects, they're doing a good job.

With respect to television violence,

I still think we have a long way to go, but I

think the American people have got to speak out

to advertisers and others in that regard, and

make sure that their voice is heard there, as

well.

Let me go back to the point that I

made. We can let television master us. We can

let information technology master us. Or we can

master it. And I think it's one of the

important steps that we've got to take to make

sure that we retain the spirit, the human

spirit, the way people reach out and touch each

other, both by tone of voice and manner, that

you never see on television and that you never

see on the Internet.

UNIDENTIFIED: Attorney General

Reno, of all the points that you talked about,

could you perhaps select one or two that you

would assign the highest priority or where we

should focus our efforts to try and regenerate

our communities?

ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET RENO: Zero

to three and education. But I will point out to

you that if you go that route, you run into the

problem that people run into, because your

building will fall because it didn't have health

care right there as part of it. And even if you

build this great wall, soundly put together,

unless you focus on job skills, you're going to

have people sitting around with nothing to do,

or -- it is -- I think -- if I have one key

point to make, it's start early and provide a

continuum, because it's -- you also have another

frustrating problem. You may have a perfectly

great program for six to nine-year-olds who are

from families at risk. Then there's nothing for

the 10 to 13-year-old; and three years later,

people are saying, see, the program didn't work

there's been a high incidence of recidivism.

Well, yes, because the kid still went home to

the empty house, still went home unsupervised

after school, and so I guess my major point is

to build this life, to give this kid the

opportunity, he's got to have all the building

blocks. Some can overcome pieces missing here

and there, but it's that solid foundation and

that solid wall that makes the difference.

UNIDENTIFIED: I'm just wondering,

you know, considering one of the frustrations of

it is that we have legislators and governors who

basically want to give back the money to

taxpayers rather than to build kind of the

infrastructure you're talking about and reduce

the size of classrooms and that type of thing.

What do you think can be done by Americans who

want to see a better life in the risk area where

we have so much of the -- you know, give the tax

dollars back rather than invest in the future?

ATTORNEY GENERAL JANET RENO: When I

first started out talking about zero to three at

home in about 1989, people kind of looked at me

like I was crazy, and by the time I left, they

knew generally what I was talking about and we

were beginning to make some progress. When I

came to Washington, Senator Simpson was

wonderful to me. He didn't call me a social

worker, but some of his colleagues call me a

social worker, and they wondered why an Attorney

General was talking like this. Now, nobody

laughs at me anymore, or if they do, they laugh

behind my back. And as I travel around the

country, more and more states are adopting

healthy children by six, or healthy start by

six, or programs for zero to three. They

understand the mathematics involved if they

don't have the compassion necessary to generate

the programs. And this, again, is a classic

example of the research that's been done, of the

medical community working with the social

workers and lawyers to try to develop the best

possible approach. And it is an example of what

happens when you have solid data to support a

return on the dollar.

I can't tell you how helpful it was

to me with the legislature to talk about for

three dollars invested, you can get so much of a

return in terms of prenatal care. There just --

you've just got to keep after it. And I think

you can make a difference. But you've got to

talk in terms of investment to some of these

business people who think otherwise that they're

going to return the dollars. I think it can be

done.

It's slow and let me give you an

example. In 1978, we applied for a domestic

violence grant. We got it, based on statistics

that we had obtained from the medical examiners

office that showed that 40 percent of the

homicides in Dade County in the previous 20

years had been related to domestic violence. It

was judged one of the best programs in the

nation, but the state wouldn't take it over

after the grant ended, and the county finally

took it over.

I couldn't get anybody interested.

The court sneered at the cases and said it's a

domestic. The police said, it's a domestic, she

doesn't want to prosecute, we're not going to be

involved. Finally, by the time I left, 15 years

later, we had a domestic violence court, the

police were sensitive to it, and now almost

everywhere I go, people are sensitive to it and

are trying to respond to it. You simply can't

give up.

DEAN NYE: Well, let me thank the

Attorney General for a wonderful cap to our

extraordinary symposium. As I said, we've

touched a number of subjects. We have far from

solved the problems which we've raised, but I

think if people are willing to spend their

weekends thinking about things as important and

difficult as this, it's probably a healthy sign

that perhaps there is the incipient parts of

community with which work we can construct and

reconstruct, and we're deeply grateful to

Attorney General Janet Reno for bringing that to

our attention, for capping our weekend so

perfectly with her speech, and please join me in

thanking her. And also I should say that in a

year from now, we will have another symposium,

where we'll report on the work done in the next

stage of the Visions of Governance project, and

I hope we'll have some more progress to report.

But please, now, join me in thanking Attorney

General Reno.