How would you feel about paying gang members to stay out of the criminal lifestyle?

RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA (NEWS 1130) – Dolling out taxpayer dollars to hardened criminals may seem like a tough sell. But a program that does just that in a California city is having success, more than five years after it was started.

Richmond, which is nestled in the San Francisco Bay area north of Oakland and the university-centred City of Berkeley, started the program in 2010. The city uses cash incentives to keep young men out of the criminal lifestyle.

Richmond needed to try something after 47 murders back in 2007 in a population of just 100,000 people.

Dr. Barry Krisberg with the Institute for the Study of Societal Problems at UC Berkeley consulted on the program. He says well-known gang members were brought in by police and given a choice.

“If they could stay clean and not get arrested or involved in criminal activity, and if they would participate in an individualized treatment plan that each one of them was going to develop, they would get financial incentives for that.”

The program is designed with everything needed to keep someone out of gang life.

“Everything we know about why people stop committing crime is embedded in this program. You need to have somebody to talk to who is a positive person. You need to have some income so that you’re not financially desperate. And these are all elements of this program. It’s beginning to gain some national credibility and recognition,” says Krisberg.

He says the money is more than most street-level gangsters actually make — a figure which is actually quite low, which many people may not realize.

Convincing voters and politicians to fork over cash to violent criminals didn’t go over smoothly, but Krisberg says there is strong evidence to suggest the program is working.

Three years ago, the city saw its lowest homicide rate in more than 30 years.

Violent crime on the rise in BC

The latest numbers from Statistics Canada suggest violent crime is up by about seven per cent across the province, which some police departments attribute to an ongoing fight between low-level street gangs.

“It’s perfectly feasible that some of the increase in violent crime is related to the illegal drug trade,” says SFU Criminologist Dr. Rob Gordon. “In the past, we’ve seen that with respect to the homicide rate… there’s no reason to think that this is not also a product of that particular business.”

“There’s also a lot of inter-personal disagreements among people in this business. And they tend to settle those fairly violently and abruptly… It’s a range of issues causing disagreements and it’s those disagreements that produce the violence,” he adds.

Gordon says BC’s crime rate has been declining in recent years and we may have bottomed out before the numbers started to going up.

Statistics Canada says says Abbotsford and Victoria had some of the highest increases in their Crime Severity Index for all of Canada.