Examining the Legacy of Slavery and Racism In an effort to explore social justice issues and their relevance to students' future careers, the School of Public Affairs hosted a film viewing and discussion about the legacy of slavery and racism in the U.S.

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By Robin Heffler
As part of a School of Public Affairs effort to explore social justice issues and their relevance to students’ future careers, some 170 students, faculty, and community members recently viewed a film and engaged in a lively discussion about the legacy of slavery and racism in the U.S.

Hosted by Dean Franklin D. Gilliam, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, participants gathered on Jan. 19 in the screening room of the Acosta Training Complex to see an abridged version of the documentary film, Traces of the Trade.

In the film, which aired on PBS in 2008, producer and director Katrina Browne tells of her shocking discovery that the De Wolfs of Rhode Island, her prominent, Caucasian ancestors, were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Together with nine other De Wolf descendants, Browne retraces the slave-trade triangle — from Bristol, Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to a family plantation in Cuba and back to Bristol. Along the way, they struggle with the politics of race, how to “repair” the centuries-long damage of slavery, and their own Yankee culture and privilege.

After the screening, Browne reflected on one cousin’s insistence that he would have gone to Harvard even if he wasn’t from a privileged family. “When the wind is at your back you don’t notice it,” she said. “You don’t realize the forces supporting you as you move forward, but you do when you’re faced with obstacles to success.”

African-American co-producer Juanita Brown noted that “We must recognize that race is complex, and that black and white is only one element. We invite you to see this conversation as the jumping off point for conversations about other people and races.”

Program participants engaged in one-on-one discussions about the film, as well as a question-and-answer session.

“No one wants to associate with the oppressor because of the guilt and shame involved, but we need to acknowledge history and how it plays out in the present,” said Amy Smith, a first-year social welfare graduate student, who had just spent the day discussing white privilege in her class on “Cross-Cultural Awareness.” “And, since racism is a problem that affects everyone, everyone should be part of the solution.”

Associate Professor Laura Abrams, who along with Joy Crumpton and Gerardo Laviña leads the “Cross-Cultural Awareness” class in the Department of Social Welfare, saw the issues raised by the film as important for social workers. “In a helping profession, it’s easy to see clients as having made bad choices rather than seeing their lives as structured by disadvantages and inequalities related to race, class, and gender,” she said.

Gilliam, who served as an early advisor to the film, said the event was the second of a planned series of programs focused on social justice issues. Last year, the UCLA School of Public Affairs had an exchange with the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, with each school hosting conferences on how to talk about race in the context of graduate education in public affairs.

“We want to do a better job of giving students the analytical tools to examine issues of social justice, which they will need to deal with the people they will be helping when they graduate,” he said.

Gilliam said plans include developing a curriculum, research opportunities, and a summer institute related to social justice. Together with Student Affairs, he also would like to hold social-justice dialogues with undergraduates, who then would dialogue with Los Angeles-area high school students.

Heffler is a Los Angeles-based free-lance writer and former UCLA editor

Experts outline scope of nationwide project on climate change Albert Carnesale, chancellor emeritus and professor of public policy at UCLA, chaired the Committee on America's Climate Choices to guide the nation's response to climate change

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The country’s leading researchers on climate change came to Westwood recently to give the public a chance to learn and ask questions about the current science on climate change, options facing the United States and the work of the Committee on America’s Climate Choices, the group that sponsored the event Jan. 13 at the W Hotel.

The committee, which is chaired by Chancellor Emeritus and Professor of Public Policy Albert Carnesale, is leading a nationwide project launched by the National Academies and requested by Congress to provide policy-relevant advice, based on scientific evidence, to help guide the nation’s response to climate change. America’s Climate Choices involves four panels of experts in addition to the main committee, representing government, the private section and research institutions. They are evaluating strategies available to limit the magnitude of future climate change, to adapt to its impacts and advance climate change science, among other goals. The open session in Westwood was one of a series of town hall discussions held in Irvine; Boulder, CO; Washington, D.C.; and other cities.  A final report will be released sometime this summer.

Read the story at UCLA Today.

Public Policy Students Return from U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen Two public policy students were commended by the Los Angeles City Council for developing recommendations on how Los Angeles can face and minimize the impacts of climate change

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By Joe Luk

Recently returning from the international conference in Copenhagen on climate change, two public policy students, Alexa Engleman (JD/MPP) and Dustin Maghamfar (JD/MPP) along with four of their Law School classmates were commended by the Los Angeles City Council for their work in developing recommendations for the City of Los Angeles.  These recommendations will be used in the City’s advocacy initiatives for state and national legislation to reduce global warming.

As reported in the Daily Bruin:

Dustin Maghamfar, a fourth-year law and public policy student, was one of the six students who attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and he said the delegation of students was very fortunate to have taken the trip. “It’s an incredible honor and immensely flattering,” Maghamfar said of the recognition given to the group.

Read the complete article here.

Escaping the prison trap: UCLA professors, criminal justice experts tackle prison crisis at DC forum UCLA participates in first Rosenfield Forum in Washington D.C., bringing together top researchers from across the country.

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UCLA brought together top researchers in the criminal justice field, congressional staff, a high-ranking official in the Obama administration and a California congressman for its first Rosenfield Forum in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 8.
More than 70 people participated in the half-day event, titled “Escaping the Prison Trap: How to Have Less Crime and Less Incarceration,” which included three panels and presentations by premiere scholars from UCLA and other institutions.
“We’re fortunate that within the walls of our school we had a diversity of approaches to the issues” that helped UCLA in hosting this forum, Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs, said in his opening remarks. “At the risk of sounding immodest, this diversity of approaches and viewpoints is a hallmark of our school and one of its great strengths.”
U.S. Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the third-highest ranking official in the Justice Department, led off the forum with a discussion of the Obama administration’s approach to crime prevention and reduction. His comments underscored Gilliam’s point about the wealth of expertise at UCLA.
“Everyone always talks about being ‘tough’ on crime, but our focus is being ‘smart’ on crime,” said Perrelli, who also worked under former Attorney General Janet Reno during the Clinton administration. “Research in this area is not research for its own sake; it is the kind of thing we really do hope to examine, implement and, frankly, learn more from. There really are people, particularly in this Justice Department, who are listening to the outcomes of your conversations and the research that you develop. We’re excited to hear more.”
“Escaping the Prison Trap” sought to address some of the major issues confronting the U.S. justice system today, including the country’s unprecedented incarceration rate; the role of communities in reducing crime, especially among juveniles; and the development of innovative programs for deterring crime and reducing prison crowding.
Two additional Rosenfield Forums will bring together UCLA scholars with national and local leaders this academic year; the next addresses transportation issues, and the final forum will explore issues related to youth in the foster care system.
“We’re excited, we’re thrilled to be here in Washington,” Gilliam said at the outset of the forum, which helped broaden UCLA’s influence as an institution committed to helping solve some of the nation’s most pressing problems. “We want to promote UCLA faculty and inform — and hopefully influence — the national debate.”
Throughout the four-hour discussion, scholars laid out the problems with our current prison system and ways to fix it.
“You have to figure out what works,” Perrelli said. “Nothing, really, should be off the table, and if you’re going to figure out what works, you need evidence and research to do that.”
He asked for the academics’ help on that front.
“Help us think outside the box about the next generation of promising approaches,” he said. “I think we’re asking the right questions about how to really make communities safer, how to reduce crime.”
Using evidence-based approaches and research and determining how to use governments’ limited resources more effectively is the path U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department will follow, he added.
U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) repeated Perrelli’s request for assistance as he wrapped up the forum.
“We desperately need the expertise and insight of the people in this room,” he told the eight panelists and the experts assembled in the audience. “It’s always a fight in Congress” to try to change policy when crime is the issue.
Anyone who attempts to implement programs similar to the ones discussed during the three panels gets tagged as being “soft on crime,” Schiff said, making such programs a tough sell to legislators.
“But look at the crisis in California, where one-fourth of the prison population may have to be released by court order,” he said. “I don’t want to wait until we’re in a situation like that. We need to be more proactive, more thoughtful.”
Perrelli also addressed the issue’s political sensitivity and the implications of reform efforts.
“The easier course politically might simply be to take the ‘tough on crime’ approach, to announce the tough on crime mantra and put more people in jail,” Perrelli said.
But that won’t solve the problem, reduce crime or save money, he added.
“It shouldn’t surprise us that the system that we have now isn’t working particularly well,” Perrelli said. “You think about the amount of money that you’re spending on prisons, particularly in this era of budget cuts, and you ask yourself, ‘If I could make the community as safe or safer than it is today but reduce the level of incarceration and have those funds to do a host of other things, what could we do with that?'”
Panelists discussed a wide range of topics, from the effect of maximum-minimum sentencing guidelines to the perils of treating juvenile offenders as adults and the correlation between prison sentences and unemployment.
“The phrase ‘crime doesn’t pay’ is oft-repeated by those who are ‘tough on crime,’ yet statistics bear out that crime already doesn’t pay, literally,” said panelist Mark Kleiman, a UCLA professor of public policy. “A burglar makes about $8 for every day he’s in prison.”
All the panelists criticized fixes that represent mere “tinkering” and recommended wholesale changes to the system.
“I don’t believe we can fix this with business as usual, but we can fix this — it is real,” said David Kennedy, director of the Center on Crime Prevention and Control at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
David F. Weiman, an economics professor at Columbia University and Barnard College, offered just one reason why fundamentally changing the system would be so challenging.
“The status quo is deeply entrenched,” he said. “It’s an uphill battle because there’s a system already in place.” Weiman likened the potential need to close prisons to the extremely politically sensitive process of military base closures.
“Imagine closing prisons,” Weiman said. “Each prison has constituency,” just like the bases.
As the forum wrapped up, Gilliam said that Associate Attorney General Perrelli had laid out the theme in his opening remarks.
“Maybe the theme of the whole forum is being ‘smart’ on crime,” Gilliam said. “It’s not a matter of whether we are ‘tough’ on crime, but are we ‘smart’ on crime?”
Gilliam also encouraged academics, when returning to their research, to focus even more on solutions.
“One of the things that plagues this field is a ‘crisis’ focus,” he said. “There aren’t enough solutions.”

Crime Forum Opens in Washington DC: Judge Alm Delivers on HOPE Rosenfield Forum brings together researchers to discuss methods of crime reduction

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WASHINGTON, DC—Addressing the record incarceration rates across the U.S. and the boom in the prison population, the UCLA School of Public Affairs launched the first in a series of public discussions on critical national issues with the opening dinner of the Rosenfield Forums at the National Press Club in Washington DC.

“The Rosenfield Forums are an opportunity to bring together some of the country’s best thinkers, practitioners, advocates, policy makers, and other stakeholders,” says Dean Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., “This week’s particular event focuses on encouraging all of us to think a little differently about how we reduce crime in the United States. This is an important and deeply corrosive phenomenon: it corrodes the public space, it corrodes our young people, and it crowds our prisons. Much of the worlds of crime and punishment are artificially constructed around these two poles—too much crime and too much incarceration. What you’ll see in this event is scholars grappling with the complexities of these issues, and presenting some elegant solutions—elegant in both simplicity and power.”

The inaugural forum, “Escaping the Prison Trap: How to Have Less Crime and Less Incarceration,” featured a keynote address on October 7 by the Honorable Steve S. Alm of the Hawaii State Judiciary. Alm is the creator of Project HOPE (Hawaii’s Opportunity and Probation and Enforcement), an innovative crime reduction program for drug offenses that has had dramatic success rates. Judge Alm described a frustrating sentencing and incarceration system that amounted to little more than a revolving door for minor drug offenders to move in and out of the judicial system.

“I can send them to the beach, or send them to prison—it’s crazy that these were the only options.” After gaining cooperation from several agencies, including the probation department, the sheriffs and U.S. marshals, Judge Alm created a systematic approach in which offenders were given instructions for calling a telephone hotline to see if they were selected that day for random drug testing. If they tested positive for drugs, they are arrested on the spot and brought up for a hearing within two days. “Swift and certain consequence is the key.” Says Alm, “If probationers know there will be caught and punished, they will not violate. Probation officers are pleased with the results, because clients were showing up to their appointments, and showing up sober.”

The program has had remarkable success in Hawaii (up to a 50% drop in repeat offenses among drug probationers); has been replicated by other judges; and has become the focus of research by UCLA Public Policy Professor Mark Kleiman and Pepperdine University Public Policy Professor Angela Hawken. The Department of Justice has funded a program to introduce the program to other jurisdictions across the country.

The Rosenfield Forums continue on October 8 at the Rayburn Building on Capital Hill with panel discussions on: reducing juvenile crime and incarceration, led by Associate Professor Laura Abrams of the Department of Social Welfare; the consequences of mass incarceration, led by Professor Michael Stoll of the Department of Public Policy; and getting more crime control with less punishment, led by Professor Mark Kleiman of the Department of Public Policy.