The 'Worthiness Constraint'

As I woke up on the morning of March 24 and prepared to join the hundreds of thousands of marchers at the March for Our Lives rally in downtown Washington, D.C., I couldn’t stop thinking about DeVone Boggan and Richmond, Calif. I had last spoken with Boggan, the founder of an organization called Advance Peace, about a month prior to the march. That day, as so many people prepared to take to the streets to demand legislation and greater investment by lawmakers in programs to reduce gun violence, I couldn’t shake our conversation and what it might mean for the solutions we, as a country, consider viable (or valid) around not just gun violence reduction, but also policymaking and government service delivery more broadly.

In particular, I thought about the controversial notion of worthiness: how the public’s view of who is and isn’t worthy of investment limits the solutions we think about when we attempt to tackle some of our country’s most difficult challenges.

Let me explain. Before Richmond became known as the city that “pays kids not to kill,” it was known as one of America’s most dangerous cities. In 2007, Richmond had a homicide rate that was 45.9 per 100,000 residents, compared to an average of 4.7 per 100,000 in similarly-sized cities. The number of homicides in the city had reached its highest mark since 1994, and in the preceding year it saw the number of firearm cases reach a similarly high point. None of the city’s investments in programming to reduce gun violence seemed to be paying off, and it had gotten to the point where Richmond was even considering calling in the National Guard to help stem the violence.

Before actually turning to that last resort, however, the city turned to a team of consultants, including Boggan, to see if they could find a better solution. The team ultimately proposed creating a non-law enforcement entity called the Office of Neighborhood Safety, with an explicit focus on reducing firearm assaults associated with injury and death. Boggan was tapped to run the agency, and was given a little over $600,000 to run it the first year. With that money, he hired former gang members and ex-felons with prior gun charges to help him launch the Operation Peacemaker Fellowship. Over the course of the 18-month fellowship, the team works directly with the people in the community most likely to commit gun violence (many of whom have already committed violent acts in the past), providing them with mentors, counseling and life-skills development, international travel opportunities, and a stipend. It’s that last piece that’s been especially controversial, and what’s led to the “city that pays kids not to kill” moniker.

Controversy aside, the results have spoken for themselves: over a seven-year period, from 2007 to 2014, Richmond saw a 76 percent reduction in homicides. And even with an uptick in 2015 and 2016, compared to 2009, there was still a decrease of more than 50 percent, according to the city.

It’s the stuff of dreams for those of us in the government-innovation and evidence-based policy arenas—and should be, too, for the residents of Richmond and, truly, of any community interested in making cities safer. Given the initial results, foundation grant money should’ve started flowing in for replication and evaluation, and city leaders from around the country should’ve been beating a path to Boggan’s door to figure out how they can make his approach work for their own communities, too. Right? However, while that has happened to an extent, the enthusiasm for this model has been tempered by concerns over the type of individuals whom cities must engage with through the program, as well as the amount of resources those individuals would receive. Remember that even in Richmond, there’s been some discontent with the model, despite its results.

This brings me back to what I mentioned above, the phenomenon I call the “worthiness constraint” on innovation: a view that no matter how effective a solution is, there’s a certain level of “worthiness” that must be associated with those who’d benefit from a program or policy in order for it to be considered “legitimate.”

Sound familiar? This situation isn’t unique. The gun violence-reduction program CeaseFire has met similar pushback from law enforcement officials in Chicago, citing concerns over the ex-felons employed through the program. Similarly, this concern not with the impact of a program but with the “worthiness” of the individuals involved with (i.e., who can be at the table to help fix the problem) or benefiting from it spans numerous policy areas. For instance, despite the well-documented positive outcomes around social safety net programs (e.g., TANF, SNAP, Medicaid), the persistent push for more stringent work requirements is largely rooted in the view that those people who aren’t working aren’t worthy of support (the whole notion of the “deserving poor”). And even as reducing opioid-related deaths and overdoses has become a national priority, many states still refuse to invest in needle-exchange programs because of a belief that someone should seek treatment first, despite evidence showing that those who benefit from such a program are more likely to seek treatment in the long run. In all these cases, federal and state intervention hinges on a variety of factors, like race and gender and income, and the innumerable ways in which they overlap.

As someone who works with cities to help them think about new ways to solve their most difficult challenges, it’s difficult to watch promising solutions be cast aside because we aren’t comfortable with who receives the investment. One need look no further than America’s prison system to understand how this constraint has severely capped the types of positive outcomes we should expect for the money we pour into the system every year. In contrast to America, where we largely focus on punishment first, with a little bit of rehabilitation sprinkled in later, Norway has designed a prison system that has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, in large part by focusing on three core values: normality, humanity, and rehabilitation. In other words, the country had to toss aside the notion that prisoners aren’t worthy and focus on making and then bolstering the types of investments it knew would work.

Boggan did the same, and so far it’s paying off. However, as he attempts to spread his model to other cities, he still has an uphill battle ahead of him in convincing the public that the young men he’s working with are worthy. It shouldn’t have to be that way, and we’re all worse off because it is. It’s key that those of us in the government-innovation space stand alongside people like Boggan to help them tear down that constraint. And we can make moves in that direction by rooting our work in the needs of residents, sharing their stories, measuring impact, and showing results.