The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. Leading the news this Monday, Turkey began moving thousands of Kurdish refugees into relief camps. U.S. troops withdrew from most of Southern Iraq, the European community called for the prosecution of Saddam Hussein for war crimes. We'll have details in our News Summary in a moment. Judy Woodruff's in Washington tonight. Judy.

MS. WOODRUFF: On the NewsHour tonight we start with a report on the tragic plight of Iraq's Kurdish refugees massed on the border with Iran. Then follow-up to Charlayne Hunter-Gault's series of conversations on murder in America. Tonight she talks with five experts about what can be done to reverse this violent trend. And finally Charles Krause looks at Mexico's campaign North of the border for a free trade agreement with the U.S. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: Turkey began moving thousands of Kurdish refugees from remote mountain areas today to camps with water, electricity, and medical supplies. But an international relief official said many refugees are dying and will continue to die until more aid arrives. We have a report on the situation on the Turkey-Iraq border from Geoffrey Archer of Independent Television News.

MR. ARCHER: This Turkish army base at Silopi is about to become the springboard into the mountains for the American relief effort. Hundreds of tons of food are already arriving here by road. Silopi's at the foot of the mountains where the Kurds have their refugee. Tents are here for the thousands of troops who run the airlift. Today helicopters were taking the food to the refugees, only a few aircraft so far. We flew with a U.S. Navy Sea Stallion helicopter packed with food, tents, and blankets. Ishik Veren Camp is one of the most desperate. Scattered along the snow line, hundreds have died from cold and disease. As the U.S. airmen tossed the food and blankets out just a few feet from the ground, Kurdish refugees ran across the rocky terrain to grab what they could. The helicopters can bring relief supplies quickly but not efficiently. It's the fittest who grab what's going, not the most needy. The Americans say they're putting all their military effort into the relief program, including mid-air refueling of their helicopters to keep them flying. How soon they can hand responsibility to the civil aid agencies depends heavily on how much help they get from the Turkish government.

MR. MacNeil: The State Department said up to a thousand Kurdish refugees are dying each day along the Turkish border. One of the more serious problems on the ground continues to be the organized distribution of food. In this area, a group of refugees overran a truck carrying a shipment of bread. The refugees were forced to fight over what supplies they could grab. Iran Radio today charged that Iraqi troops and tanks attacked Kurdish refugees at its border. It said an undetermined number of men, women, and children were killed. The plight of the refugees was the subject of a Senate hearing in Washington today. Lionel Rosenblatt of Refugees International has just returned from the area. He said the magnitude of the problem was far greater than others he's dealt with.

MR. ROSENBLATT: This is a worst case refugee disaster. In days more than a million people have gathered on steep, cold mountainsides without any infrastructure. To get food and supplies to them is a challenge which exceeds that of the Berlin airlift. Instead of one city, we must feed people scattered through some of the least accessible, most remote points on earth. Refugees are caught in a crossfire of rain and snow, lack of shelter and shortage of food, which are interacting brutally and swiftly to cut them down. Death rates are soaring and will spiral much higher. Overall, one estimate just received in by phone from Turkey is that now the death rate is approaching 400 to 1,000 refugees a day along the border.

MR. MacNeil: Rosenblatt urged Pres. Bush to appoint one person with the authority to coordinate and directthe U.S. refugee relief operation. He said the problem could become worse without such coordination. Judy.

MS. WOODRUFF: U.S. troops continued the final withdrawal from Iraq today. It began this weekend on orders from Pres. Bush after the United Nations Security Council declared a formal cease-fire. A U.N. peacekeeping force will replace the U.S. troops in a demilitarized zone along the Iraq-Kuwait border. In Washington today, Defense Sec. Dick Cheney was asked how long the U.S. pullout would take.

SEC. CHENEY: Just a few days. Of course they'll still be in the Southern part of Iraq where the buffer zone is, a 10 kilometer deep zone inside Iraq along the Iraq-Kuwait border, and they'll stay there until the U.N. forces are in place to replace them. We also have one refugee camp out to the West along the Iraq-Saudi border, and we want to make certain that they have adequate protection before we pull our forces out of there as well. But I think we'll have everybody out within a few days.

MS. WOODRUFF: The commander of the United Nations forces replacing U.S. troops in Southern Iraq arrived for talks in Baghdad today. Austrian Gen. Gunther Grindel said he was discussing the deployment of his 1400 man force on the Iraq-Kuwait border. Saddam Hussein, seen here touring an oil refinery being reconstructed, came under fire today from the European community. Foreign ministers from the 12 EC nations said that Saddam committed war crimes, including genocide and called for U.N. proceedings against him. Sec. of State James Baker will leave again for the Middle East tomorrow. He returned from the area just last Friday after talks about a regional peace conference. Israel's foreign minister called Baker's return trip a good sign.

MR. MacNeil: A Carter administration official today said the 1980 Reagan campaign negotiated a secret deal to delay the release of the hostages from Iran until after the Presidential election. In a New York Times article published today former National Security Council staff member Gary Sick said he repeatedly was told of the deal by reliable sources. It reportedly delayed release of the hostages until after Ronald Reagan took office. In return, Reagan campaign officials reportedly promised to free Iran's frozen assets and to help it obtain arms. Sick said the Reagan administration delivered on both promises after the election. The White House today denied an allegation by Sick that George Bush participated in negotiating the deal. White House Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said, "Our position on all that is that there's just nothing to it."

MS. WOODRUFF: Pres. Bush spoke out today on the possibility of a national rail strike. The shutdown of the country's freight railroads is scheduled to begin at 12:01 AM Eastern Time Wednesday. The disruption could also affect passenger service on Amtrak and commuter lines. Mr. Bush told a business group the strike could severely hurt the economy as it tries to recover from recession.

PRES. BUSH: A rail strike could potentially idle hundreds of thousands of workers and affect virtually all Americans one way or another. Because of the potential economy wide disruption it would be prudent that all efforts and actions be taken to avoid the strike. Now my administration is willing to work with the parties to help in any way possible.

MS. WOODRUFF: Today, as we all know, is the deadline for filing tax returns. An organization in Washington called The Tax Foundation held a news conference to announce that the average American will have to work until May 8th of this year to earn enough money to cover the federal, state and local tax bill for 1991. That is 23 days longer than last year.

MR. MacNeil: That's it for our summary of the day's news. Just ahead on the NewsHour, the Kurdish refugees fleeing to Iran, murder in America, a look at solutions and the President of Mexico campaigning in Texas for free trade. UPDATE - AGAINST ALL ODDS

MS. WOODRUFF: The Kurdish tragedy is our lead tonight and much of the World attention and news coverage has been focused on the flight of the Kurds from Iraq into Turkey. But hundreds of thousands of Kurds have also been trying to escape in to neighboring Iran. That story told by Charles Wheeler of the BBC.

MR. WHEELER: This is the mountain range that separates Iran from Iraq. The Kurds call these the Hawara Barza mountains which means natures old high place. But the kurds who have been fleeing to Iran in the past two has been very high and it is still cold enough at night to kill. Especially at risk are babies. Kurds have big families. Well over half of the refugees are children and in a from a few months to ten years old. These mountain people over burdened as they are by their babies and their baggage are nothing if not resilient. But by now they are hungry and foot sore, bewildered and frightened. What caused this exodus is simply not a civil war. But the slaughter no less of men women and children. The road from Kurdish Iraq to Kurdish Iran twists are turns at 6000 feet but this and two other major crossing points hundreds of thousands and people and vehicles of every description are inching their way along little more than a ledge. A narrow broken road with a cliff face on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Getting help to these people is a logistical nightmare. With barely room to pass and none to turn only an occasional Iranian truck can collect refugees and spare them the last two or three days of their journey. Life is a lottery. It favors the agile and the few lucky enough to be hoisted aboard. Journey's end for most of these people is a camp in the valley. The green tents are Iranian, the white ones the nations from the International Red Cross. An all to rare example of foreign help for the Kurds. We seem to have been the first Westerners here and helped the blast of much pent up bitterness.

REFUGEE: They killed my brother, my house is gone we don't want Saddam we don't want everything. We have to live man.

MR. WHEELER: Most of these Kurds are from Sulamania and Kirkuk. Two towns savaged by Saddam Hussein's troops. One of these women says 19 of her relations were killed. The other says the eyes of one of here children were gouged out by the soldiers. Although a 100,000 Kurds are now living in this camp many are sick. One small building has to serve as a clinic. In a room barely ten feet square Kurdish doctors themselves with disease are treating severely dehydrated babies with intravenous fluid. They told me that four babies had died the night before. Driving on towards the border we realized that the biggest refugee camp is the road itself. An endless line of stationary vehicles. Drivers have told us that is had taken them 9 days to travel 30 miles. The congestion perhaps a half a million people is strung out on this road alone rules out the orderly distribution of food. Because the que doesn't move what relief workers do is travel back and forth once a day throwing food too and at the people. It is well meant but the result is chaos. People who are too old or to tired to join the scramble get nothing and it is dangers. A small girl was cut in the forehead trying to catch a flying tin of tuna fish. To improve and increase the supply of food the Government is now using helicopters but because of bad weather half of the scheduled flights in this particular region have had to be canceled. Reducing the delivery of food by air. In this case bread and rice to an inadequate 30 tons a day. Some of the bread was handed out causing yet another skirmish. An old lady emerged with her whole bread intact. Iran's national flag marks the border with Iraq. Unlike the Turks the Iranian has not closed the frontier for more than a few hours at a time. The new arrivals feel they have reached a sanctuary. What they don't know is that it will be days, maybe weeks before they reach the end of the road. According to the Government a million Kurds have already crossed in to Iran. And there is the que still inside of Iraq. The Government says it consists of a half a million more people and stretches back some 40 miles. Among those who crossed while we were there is a young couple with a child who had walked a 100 miles. Both were exhausted physically and emotionally. How long have you been walking.

REFUGEE: More than two weeks.

MR. WHEELER: Two weeks you have been walking?

REFUGEE: Yes.

MS. WOODRUFF: Still ahead on the Newshour murder in America and campaigning for free trade. SERIES - MURDER IN AMERICA

MR. MacNeil: Our major focus tonight is again on murder in America. By all accounts, 1990s record murder rate in U.S. cities will be surpassed this year. Last week, Charlayne Hunter-Gault asked five people working in New York City's criminal justice system about the reasons for the increase in homicides. Tonight after a reprise of those conversations, Charlayne turns to the question of solutions, how can a murder epidemic be contained.

PAUL WEIDENBAUM, Homicide Detective: Years ago when somebody was going to shoot somebody with a gun, you pulled out a gun, you fired one shot at the individual or two shots at him. Today they spray the area. They have these weapons that fire multiple shots, and they just spray an area, disregard for anybody else in this area.

JANIE JEFFERS, Corrections Official: In the old days, if you will, they'd rob you and take your goods and let you go, but now they will hurt you for fun, just for entertainment value, because as I said before, if they don't care about themselves, what do you think they care about you?

ERNIE BOSTIC, Homicide Detective: There are too many guns out there. Where they're getting them, how they're getting them I don't know. They have money. The amount of money that the average kid is carrying in his pocket is more than I've had in years. You think back 20 years ago there was a zip gun. A zip gun was a pipe, a piece of rubber band, 22, that was it. Now a kid comes out with a 9 millimeter which is probably a better weapon than most detectives or police officers carry.

ANGEL RODRIGUEZ, Youth Counselor: These kids have been, you know, sexually abused. They've been physically abused to the degree that where they lose their own perspective on the morality, and right or wrong, and these kids come to me, a lot of them are 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18, with perhaps a charge of a murder charge, and in the process of an interview with this youngster, I discover, you know, all the excess baggage, as I call it, all that this person has gone through in his life. It's not a process of justifying his actions, but it's -- I think that we need to understand what really has gone on in the lives of somebody who can commit a horrendous crime like murder.

JAMES O'KANE, Criminologist: If we go back to New York City in the early '80s, the homicide rate began to decline. Around 1985, it starts going upward, and that's mainly because of the crack business. Crack cocaine enters the scene literally with a vengeance, and for the next four years we've seen a spectacular rise in what we call drug-related homicides. These are what I would call business related crimes. These would be crack dealers fighting over turf, fighting over quality of cocaine, fighting for who was going to have what corner to sell it, all sorts of altercations revolving around the business end of crack, itself.

DETECTIVE WEIDENBAUM: If somebody goes outside and gets an honest job and they're earning $5 an hour and they're bringing it home, it's really not much money. When they look at somebody that's 19 years old that's making thousands of dollars a day, driving brand new cars, money in their pocket, jewelry, that's a different feeling out there. This is what they want. How else would you get this money but through drugs?

JANIE JEFFERS: Not everyone belongs in jail. Many violent criminals who show no interest in changing their behavior probably do need that as an option, but there are other people who could do their time, serve their time in places other than in very expensive jail cells.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you think that we as a society have become just numb to murder?

MS. JEFFERS: I actually gave some thought to that the other day. I'm reading the headline and it said 2000 murder victims, and I skimmed it. And as I skimmed it, I said, you're skimming something that says there are 2000 persons murdered in this city. You have to enure yourself to the bombardment of that kind of information. Otherwise you just wouldn't be able to function. But in enuring yourself and buttressing yourself, then you don't get committed. I didn't get outraged and say this is it, I've got to get more personally involved. And of course, if you don't take that proactive stance and wait for the next guy to do it, it never gets done.

ANGEL RODRIGUEZ: We're limiting our resources. We're cutting down on budgets. We're, you know, we're padlocking schoolyards after 3 o'clock so that the child has no option but to play on the street or where incidents are going on and therefore, becoming closer, becoming involved in many different way, because it's almost the thing to do.

DETECTIVE WEIDENBAUM: I think what we have to do is educate, educate the young kids out there that there's nothing wrong with taking a job in a place such as McDonald's or Burger King, there's no disgrace in making only $5 an hour, and that it's not the proper thing to go out there and make $1000 in a day.

PROF. O'KANE: It really gets down to family, community, religion, schools, etc., to somehow inculcate those values again which are missing and if that were done, I think you would see more respect for life and limb we don't see in many many communities.

JUDGE: A crime occurs today, January 2, 1991, a homicide let's say. More than likely, more than likely, January 2, 1992, that case will still be pending.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Why is that?

JUDGE: The volume of work in the system, the volume of work that we have here. That case will still be pending a year from today. Now punishment should be swift. Justice should be swift. Not guilty, home. Guilty, then you're incarcerated. But it should not be a drag out, drag out, prolonged situation.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What are we in for as a society?

JUDGE: A long road, we're in for a long, hard road, very uncertain, very uncertain,and we just don't have any idea of the depth, I don't think we have an idea as to the depth of this whole problem, because everyone believes that it's on the other fellah's block and not mine. That's the short-sightedness of all of us.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: We turn now to five overviews about murder in America, Elijah Anderson is a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Deborah Prothrow-Stith is the assistant dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, she's former Massachusetts commissioner for public health. James Q. Wilson is the Colins Professor of Management and Public Policy at the University of California-Los Angeles. Lawrence Sherman is a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland. He's president of the Crime Control Institute, a national research organization that works with police departments around the country, and Jack Katz is an associate professor of sociology at UCLA. And starting with you, Prof. Katz, I believe that you do not believe that the murder rate is so unusual today, is that right?

PROF. KATZ: There have been increases in recent years, but if you look back to 1980, we were at a high point at that time, and it's very tempting I think for the media to play on the up surges from year to year. My sense is we haven't had a fundamental change in the last 20/25 years. And attributing the high American rate of criminal violence or homicide to crack cocaine I think is superficial, but the higher rate before -- a higher rate than we had in some of the late 1980s and earlier in the 1980s the reference is to new forms of weapons being on the street, increasing the murder rate is also superficial. This is very deep problem. It's a distinctively American problem, and while there are waves from year to year and increases and decreases, the overall level remains over the last 20/25 years in this country many times what it is in comparable Western countries.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Lawrence Sherman, do you agree with that?

MR. SHERMAN: I fundamentally disagree. I think it's a superficial analysis to look at the national homicide rate which has not changed substantially over the last even 30 years, but beginning in mid 1980s, the homicide rates, victimization among young black men age 10 to 30 began to double, which it did in a five year period I think for reasons related to increased fire power, the arrest rate for all juveniles for homicide doubled from 1985 to 1989, and other forms of crime did not, robbery, aggravated assault. So I see very powerful evidence of a very specific and focused increase in the homicide rate in the poor areas of big cities for reasons related to more cash in the pocket to buy these very expensive guns, $1,000, $1500 for a 16 bullet semiautomatic weapon is not unusual.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: And is that related to the drugs, the drug culture?

MR. SHERMAN: It's the most obvious source of the cash, but I'm not sure that taking the cash away makes as much sense as taking the guns away.MNEIL

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. We'll get the solutions in just a minute. James Q. Wilson, let me get your view on this.

MR. WILSON: I agree fundamentally with Lawrence Sherman that there has been a rapid increase in the aid standardized rate of violent crime, that is to say, holding constant to changes in the age composition of the population which if other things hadn't occurred would have led us to expect a decline in the rate of crime during the 1980s. We see beginning in the mid 1980s that that crime rate began to go up, and I do associate it with gang activity and the ready availability of weapons and the breakdown of the criminal justice system in many inner-city neighborhoods.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Roger Anderson, you work in some of those, at least observing those inner-city neighborhoods. What's your view of it?

PROF. ANDERSON: Well, my feeling is that the rate in Washington, D.C., the rate in Philadelphia, the rate in New York City, these are astronomical right now. But I think one thing that points to and underscores it is, indeed, the drug trade. I think a major source of the violence that we see in the cities really has to do with drugs. Violence is among dealers, on the one hand, who fight over territory and turf and kill one another in order to establish themselves, and the users commit crimes to get the drug. And at the same time, many of the people they commit the crimes against are very poor, they don't have very much in to prevent it through public health strategies. We need to do at least three things, a comprehensive effort that reduces guns and their access to young adults, an effort that --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: That's a criminal justice strategy, isn't it?

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: It's partly criminal justice, but it's also partly public health. The second part of that -- and I did say comprehensive so this sort of fits in there -- the second part of that is stop promoting violence. We educate our youngsters to see violence as the hero's choice and the only option that the hero has. And the third is a real education on handling anger. If kids have good adult models around them, then they counter that movie hero and television hero that's always using violence. But if they don't, if they grow up in families that have violence, or in neighborhoods that have a lot of violence, they never really learn how to handle anger. Guns, stop promoting it and teach kids how to handle anger.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Let's take those one at a time. Larry Sherman, guns, because a lot of people in our tape piece also talked about guns being the problem. You just talked about guns being the problem, but one of our detectives said in the tape piece last week that New York City, for example, has one of the toughest gun control laws in the country, and still one of the highest rates of homicide.

MR. SHERMAN: It has tough laws. The question for me is enforcement. I'd like to shift the national gun control debate out of Washington and into the streets of the high homicide areas to ask the question of what we can do to take the guns out of those areas in a three step way. One is to interdict gun dealers the way we've been interdicting drug dealers. We know how to do that. We know that some of those people are bringing in lots of guns. We know that, for example, there's a thousand people with federal gun dealer licenses in New York and only 30 people with a local license which suggests that a lot of those people are illegal dealers. The second thing we can do is to expand on the programs in the Chicago and Virginia Public Housing Authorities, which have been upheld as constitutional which involve taking guns away without arresting people. We've got to get away, I think, from the criminal justice notion of punishing people for gun ownership or even gun use or possession and focus on the question of reducing the gun density, because all the research says just getting the guns out of circulation can make a difference in the homicide rate. So going around and seizing guns can make a big difference. The third thing is to expand on the expertise of some of the street officers in New York who can spot somebody who's carrying a gun. There's one guy who's taking a thousand guns away from people. He can tell how they walk that they're carrying a gun, which gives you articulable suspicion for a constitutional stop and frisk.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: James Q. Wilson, does that sound realistic to you?

MR. WILSON: I think it does, but I would have to add two things to what Larry said. The first is that we cannot rely on interdicting the supply because the average dealer of guns deals in so few guns that it would be a monumental effort to track them all down. We have to think of many inner-city neighborhoods as a kind of Beirut where it's important to seize, regain control of the territory on a house by house, block by block, street by street basis. The way to do that in my view is for the police and other agencies in consultation with the affected people in the community to establish effective perimeter controls in the blighted areas blighted by crime that is, so that people going in and out of public housing projects, or even in and out of neighborhoods, have to stop and identify themselves so that the police expertise in detecting the presence of a gun, perhaps expertise amplified by the use of non-intrusive technologies of the sort we find at airports, could be used to reduce the number of guns that are available at a given time when anger is being expressed. I'm in favor of reducing anger, but I think we will have to wait two generations for that program to work.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, we'll find out if Dr. Prothrow-Stith agrees with that in a minute, but let me just ask Dr. Anderson, do you -- how would that work, that kind of approach that Dr. Wilson just outlined? How would that work?

PROF. ANDERSON: Well, it's really quite provocative. And I think basically we have to pay attention to some of the structural things that are going on in the -- how some of the structural things are impacting upon these communities.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But I'm talking specifically about Dr. Wilson's proposals. You know, he said you have to treat it -- these areas kind of like Beirut.

PROF. ANDERSON: Yeah. Well, I think that's fitting into the idea that these places should be treated as reservations. One of the things that's beginning to happen is that so many urban areas are being left to fend for themselves. And I think what we see is a very active disinvestment by major corporations in so many urban areas right now. Right now in North Philadelphia, great numbers of factories and companies have left the city. They've moved to King of Prussia, which is the satellite city on the outskirts of the city. At the same time, many of these companies are going to foreign lands, where they can get cheap labor. When they do that, they leave a profound employment vacuum. And that vacuum is all too often filled by the underground economy, so the structural situation has --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You mean by selling drugs and things like that.

PROF. ANDERSON: Selling drugs and crime and all of that. So I think it's very important to attack these structural factors. I think what we have to do is reinvest in the cities and we have to educate people. We have to train people and we have to encourage through the government the reinvestment by these companies. I think we have to deal with that. I think we have to take this problem very seriously.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Mr. Katz, how do you feel about these proposals that you've heard on the table so far, starting with the discussion about guns and limiting the guns, and then --

PROF. KATZ: Okay, the guns. It's a positive idea. If JamesWilson thinks it'll take two generations to limit anger, I know that some people think there are so many guns out there it would take a generation to get a large number of them off the street. That's not to say we shouldn't try. We should also keep in mind that if you take away the gun homicides and you just look at homicides committed without the use of guns by other means, you still have a much higher homicide rate in this country than you do in comparable nations. So there really is -- there is a problem.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But I thought the --

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: -- increase -- they account for almost all of the increase in homicides, firearms, handguns and other firearms, so it's hard not to say -- for young men up to 75 percent of the homicides are committed with firearms, and I at this point would interject public health strategies here, because the same way we've reduced smoking, the same way we've started car seat use for children, seat belts, that's an approach to guns. Let people know that they are unsafe with a gun, that they are more likely to have a family member of friend killed or have the gun stolen, not protect themselves.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Mr. Katz.

PROF. KATZ: I don't think that responds to the realities of where guns are kept and who's keeping them and their accessibility to young people in inner-city neighborhoods. It's not a matter of education. The education isn't impacting as we're currently delivering it. It's not a matter of changing the message. I think we should keep in mind something that hasn't been brought up here, but in the '60s and through the '70s in part, we tried social policies, employment, job training, crime rates didn't go down the way we wanted them to. In the '80s, we doubled the national prison population in California. We've quadrupled it, and we're talking now about a new high level of criminal violence and homicides. Something is fundamentally wrong.

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: With all due respect, I live in one of those neighborhoods. It's not Beirut. People buy guns for the same reasons that people in other neighborhoods buy guns, which is to protect themselves, and kids get access to guns the same way. It's usually a parent's gun or a friend's gun. And I think we need to stop talking about urban neighborhoods as if the people in them are animals. These are kids and families struggling with the same issue. Violence in America is not just an urban problem, and until we interject some other strategies, prevention strategy, not just putting people in jail, not just incarceration, some real prevention strategies, we're not going to get anywhere with this. And education is a big part of this. It is a huge part of this.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right.

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: We've changed attitudes about smoking. We've changed behavior around smoking and we can do it with violence.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: She's right about that, isn't she?

PROF. KATZ: I think you have a lot more success in smoking in the middle class than you have in the high crime areas with the educational campaign.

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: We've had success in those neighborhoods as well --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right --

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: -- and with strategies we could have more.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Let's bring somebody else into this discussion. What do you think -- who is that trying to get in? Is that --

PROF. ANDERSON: Prof. Anderson.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right.

PROF. ANDERSON: One of the things that I think should be pointed out is that one of the reasons that so many people in the underclass or poor black, working class communities arm themselves I think is the degree of alienation they feel. There's a profound lack of trust in the police and the formal agencies of social control in so many of these neighborhoods. In fact, many people take the resolution of problems, they try to deal with these themselves, and sometimes violence is, indeed, the outcome. People arm themselves in part because they don't trust the police.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What about that? Because Judge Warner made the point that tougher law enforcement is one of the answers, and as he put it, swifter punishment. Mr. Sherman.

MR. SHERMAN: Well, I think there's a lot more problems in speeding up the criminal justice system in New York City than there would be in trying to either increase the availability of good jobs in these highly impacted neighborhoods, and I absolutely agree with Prof. Anderson on that point, or with trying to reduce the gun density in those areas. I think the criminal justice system is far more hopeless than those other areas, and I would be reluctant to invest there. Of course, we have not invested as much as we should and maybe we should triple the number of judges certainly if we're going to increase cops as we're trying to do in New York and elsewhere we should, but I think that Al Hunt said well in the Wall Street Journal today, he said liberals like to focus on systemic issues, conservatives like to blame the animals in these high crime neighborhoods. It's their own fault for being so shiftless. And I think that if you read books like "There Are No Children Here," a description of life for two young boys in the Henry Horner Projects.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Alex --

MR. SHERMAN: Yes. An excellent piece that I think revealed for the first time that there are places in America with daily gunfire. And those places have got to get the gunfire to stop before you have a decent life in which to educate people, in which those kids can study for their spelling bees.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Mr. Katz, you have a proposal though, don't you, that involves taking some of these people out of these neighborhoods, as I understand it?

PROF. KATZ: Well, I think a constructive thing we can do is look for other ways of putting a sanction behind the drug markets other than imprisonment. If we would confiscate property and not imprison people for participating non-violently in drug markets and dedicate that money not to law enforcement but back to the inner-city neighborhoods, that might be constructive.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But I thought your proposal specifically was in relocating neighborhoods, entire neighborhoods.

PROF. KATZ: Well, I think we need to start thinking not about trying to adapt people to the current economy or trying to improve the quality of education, but in creating sectors of the economy that create and nourish job possibilities for the long run. But I think that's so far off the political spectrum, and we're talking about something really impressive, that no society has ever had this problem, no society has ever tried to tackle it, the way the Western European countries have managed to have a lower crime rate is not because they've come up with better school programs or better employment programs or longer prison terms or capital punishment. We really face a very unique problem, and I think it takes some political leadership -- I don't know that I'm the person to provide it -- for some very innovative thinking about a way of getting people so that they have some sense of dignity and respect from being members of their local and national communities.

MR. SHERMAN: Charlayne, 40 percent of the inner-city residents of Milwaukee have no access to cars. All the job growth in Milwaukee that they could get access to is out in the suburbs, where they have to have a car to get there. So I think we've got to think in terms of jobs and dignity and somehow matching the people who need the jobs in terms of transportation systems, you know, they're sending people from the suburbs in Washington, the hotel jobs, they're bussing people out from the center city to get to those jobs. We need to have a federal policy to support much more of that matching people where the jobs are.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What was that -- James Q. Wilson, you were about to get in.

MR. WILSON: Thank you. Almost all of the long-term proposals we've heard, relocating people, relocating jobs, ending alienation, teaching people not to smoke and not to shoot, all depend crucially upon one central fact. There first must be established enough peace and order where people now live so that those whom you wish to reach have a fighting chance of participating in these programs.

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: There is enough --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: And by --

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: -- in the high schools, we have a community based program, there are public health officials across the country beginning to do this. Right now we have put all our eggs in the criminal justice basket and not put any in this kind of prevention effort. We need to stop building more jails and build more drug treatment efforts and in a very realistic timeframe. This is not, you know, 1999 we're waiting on here, now we can do this.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: We could go on with this all night and I'm sure it would be really interesting, but we're going to run out of time, and I want to ask you because Judge Warner said that the solution doesn't require all of the money, that what it really requires is a burning desire on the part of people to do something about this. Starting with you, Mr. Sherman, and very briefly, do you think that society regards this problem as a serious crisis --

MR. SHERMAN: Absolutely not.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: -- and that there is this burning desire to do something about it, and if not, how do you change it?

MR. SHERMAN: I agree we need some leadership, but we've got to stop writing this off as a poor, black problem, and middle class black people don't have this problem, just the poor blacks, they're worthless, and it doesn't matter, and it's away from my neighborhood so who cares? I think we need to have a sense of moral outrage. We've got to really rouse people's awareness that this is one of our worst forms of national disgrace.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But how do you do that, James Wilson?

MR. WILSON: I think that you have to persuade through political leadership people to regard the murder epidemic as an unconscionable affront on all of American society. We cannot reduce our murder rate to that of Luxembourg for all the reasons Jack Katz has indicated and more, but we can stop acting as if the inner-city was an area where we can -- that we can avoid. Rich people protect themselves with doormen and gated communities. Poor people can't afford doormen and gated communities. My solution, my recommendation is not to put more people in jail, simply to supply with more resources the equivalent of gated communities and doormen to poor people, so that they can organize their own lives and end or at least postpone this talk about alienation when people are concerned about preservation.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Elijah Anderson, how do you get society interested in having a passionate desire to do something about this?

PROF. ANDERSON: Well, I think first of all, I think you have to support Prof. Wilson's comments with the idea of providing opportunity to people. Without opportunity, there's this profound alienation in which you see in so many of these inner-city communities, this profound alienation. What we haven't talked about is this transformation that we're moving through as a society. We're moving from manufacturing to service.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But who --

PROF. ANDERSON: Great numbers of people have not made an effective adjustment to that change and they feel incredibly alienated as they work in these jobs that don't pay enough money to live and they have to travel two hours to get to jobs in suburbs in order to make a living.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Who should take the lead on that, Mr. Anderson?

PROF. ANDERSON: Well, I think that we need some leadership from Washington. I think that over the past 10 years, the Bush and the Reagan-Bush administration have not shown effective leadership on the domestic scene, and I think that with respect to cities, we have to invest in cities. We get just what we pay for.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Mr. Katz, in a quick word, who do you think should take responsibility in the lead on this?

PROF. KATZ: I think the single most constructive thing we can do is confiscate the property of people participating in drug markets, don't send them to jail, and turn that money into incentives to kids in high crime areas to attend school and perform well in school.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Ms. Prothrow-Stith, I think we know where you're coming from on that. Sorry we can't get back to you this time.

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: I need to say though that we are focusing on stranger violence, which is why we've all looked to criminal justice. Half of the homicides occur between friends and family members. 30 percent --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, we're going to have to --

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: -- of the deaths to women are by husbands. This is not that stranger, bad guy. I understand the time, but we've got to look at prevention strategies --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right.

DR. PROTHROW-STITH: -- and it's family and friend violence that predominate.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Thank you very much, all of you, for joining us. FOCUS - LET'S MAKE A DEAL

MS. WOODRUFF: We turn next to an international issue that is among the top items on Pres. Bush's post war agenda. It is the passage of the free trade pact with Mexico. Two years ago the U.S. and Canada agreed to drop tariffs and other trade barriers on each other's imported goods and services. Mexico's president, Carlos Salinas DeGotari, wants the same treatment. He spent last week touring the United States and Canada. Correspondent Charles Krause caught up with him in Texas.

MR. KRAUSE: By the time he reached San Antonio last Friday, Mexico's Pres. Salinas had already spent the better part of a week cris-crossing the United States and Canada. In Houston, he met with Pres. Bush, in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mulroney. In Texas, he was accompanied by Gov. Anne Richards and San Antonio Mayor Lila Cockrell. Without question, the trip was unprecedented, the sign of the great importance Salinas attaches to obtaining a free trade pact between his country, the United States, and Canada. The idea has its critics. But in the Southwest, free trade with Mexico is popular. Mayor Cockrell went all out to give Salinas a warm welcome to San Antonio.

MAYOR COCKRELL: Viva Mexico! Viva! Viva Senior Presidente! Viva!

MR. KRAUSE: For over an hour Friday, Salinas sat through a homespun cultural program organized in his honor with the Guadalupe Art Center. Most of it was in Spanish, designed to demonstrate the strong historic and cultural ties that exist between San Antonio and Mexico. At a luncheon, he told members of the city's business elite that free trade would mean more economic growth and more jobs on both sides of the border. But he also warned them that without free trade, the number of Mexicans crossing illegally into the United States looking for work would continue to increase.

CARLOS SALINAS DE GOTARI, President, Mexico: My responsibility is to provide for opportunities of Mexicans in Mexico. That is why I emphasize that we want to export goods and not people. It is trade that we want, not aid. It is the possibility of integrating the biggest free trade area in the world, not as a closed region, but open to competition, to efficiency, to new technologies. A free trade agreement is not what you might call a zero sum negotiation in which what one country wins the other loses. On the contrary. This can be a win-win negotiation in which jobs would be created in the U.S. as well as in Mexico. We know it is very well understood in this state. And that's why I feel so welcome in this land and for that I want to say, muchos gratias.

MR. KRAUSE: Among those listening to Salinas was Joe Krier, president of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber, he says, is 100 percent behind free trade with Mexico.

JOE KRIER, Chamber of Commerce: We've taken a group to Washington to lobby the House and Senate Committees that will pass on this issue. We took a group to Mexico City to meet with Mexican governmental and Mexican Chamber officials to sort of coordinate our strategies. We'll be taking another group back to Washington in May on the same issue. We think it's critical for the long-term health of our economy and that of Texas as a whole.

MR. KRAUSE: Why?

MR. KRIER: Well, Texas, No. 1, is a state that sells to Mexico 35 percent of everything it buys in the United States. So anything that improves the amount of that trade benefits this state. California is in a similar situation.

MR. KRAUSE: What's your reaction to his lobbying, in effect, for free trade in this country?

MR. KRIER: I think that the Mexican government is using their strongest asset. Pres. Salinas is an enormously charismatic individual. We've had Mexican presidents here for the last several decades. I've heard them. This man clearly stands head and shoulders above them, even though he doesn't in height. His speaking in English to this audience is the first time that's ever happened. He's got a charisma that reaches out. For the President to look at this audience and say, we can say you our people or we can send you our goods and services, you decide what you want, is a powerful statement.

MR. KRAUSE: But the AFL-CIO and other unions are dead set against free trade. They fear that U.S. corporations will close factories in the United States to take advantage of cheaper wages in Mexico. That's already begun to happen, even here in Texas. And Salinas was confronted by demonstrators at least twice over the weekend in San Antonio. Why are you against free trade?

IRENE REYNA, Unemployed Worker: I am against free trade personally because I am a dislocated worker from Levi Strauss which closed their plant down, leaving one thousand, eleven hundred people without jobs, and the free trade agreement was not into effect yet. Can you imagine what it's going to do to the rest of the people here, the blue collar workers, the poor workers that don't have anything beyond a high school education? All these corporations are going to get even richer by taking the jobs from San Antonio into Mexico territory.

MR. KRAUSE: But the president of Mexico said yesterday that there'll be jobs created both in Mexico and in the United States.

REUBEN SOLIS, Unemployed Worker: There might be some jobs created. There'll be a hundred jobs to a thousand jobs lost, so that those jobs created are labor intensive jobs. They are jobs that they're going to be paying low wages. We're going to have to compete with Mexican workers who get paid 30 cents an hour and who are forced to live in shanty towns made of carton houses and here we are losing our homes, our cars, our jobs, our livelihood. We've been ruined by the layoffs.

MR. KRAUSE: But Mayor Cockrell says she thinks free trade will strengthen the economy in Mexico and in the United States.

LILA COCKRELL, Mayor, San Antonio: There are many, many jobs in the U.S. that are dependent upon the purchases made in the republic of Mexico. I think that free trade will increase that kind of an exchange. I think it will help build a stronger Mexico. I think the economy of our country in the long-term will improve. Any new direction there may be some temporary dislocations, but I think some of the jobs that could temporarily be relocated would probably be gone anyway.

MR. KRAUSE: But it's not just unions that are concerned about free trade. Environmental groups are also worried that more factories along the border in Mexico will create more air and water pollution in the United States. Peter Emerson is a senior economist with the Environmental Defense Fund based in Texas.

PETER EMERSON, Environmental Defense Fund: You have situations where major U.S. corporations have gone over the border into Mexico, they have produced, they have plants and facilities that are modern industrial part type facilities, as you would expect to see in the United States, and leaving those facilities as a pipe where raw waste materials, toxic chemicals run directly into the Rio Grande or into the groundwater. That is very scary to us and it's a problem that affects our citizens as well as people in Mexico.

MR. KRAUSE: But Salinas is gambling that ultimately the economic benefits of free trade will be seen to outweigh its other potential problems.

PRES. SALINAS DE GOTARI: You know that we can benefit from a stronger economic relationship because it's already there, because the world is demanding precisely that kind of association, and because there is a warm relationship. And I know the precise role for that attitude. We want to be amigos.

MR. KRAUSE: The success of the Salinas visit will be measured sometime during the next six weeks. Before June 1st, Congress must vote on whether to give Pres. Bush fast track authority to negotiate a free trade pact with Mexico. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again, the main stories of this Monday, Turkey began moving thousand of Kurdish refugees to relief camps with water, electricity, and medical supplies, the State Department said up to a thousand refugees are dying each day. U.S. troops withdrew from most of Southern Iraq, and the European community said Saddam Hussein committed war crimes, including genocide, and called for U.N. proceedings against him. Good night, Judy.

MS. WOODRUFF: Good night, Robin. That's our NewsHour for tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night with a look at a problem faced by many American families, finding affordable housing. I'm Judy Woodruff. Thank you and good night.