L.I.V.E. Program
The L.I.V.E. Program (Learning Integrity and Values through Education) is a multi-pronged community-based program designed to prevent crime, reduce violence in the schools, clean up neighborhoods and help improve the overall efficiency of police officers in reducing crime.
Society tends to turn over complete responsibility for handling crime to the police departments. They blame the government for "allowing" criminal acts in the environment and for being ineffective in reducing crime. This puts the government and the police departments in an impossible situation.
It is our belief that widespread public security cannot be achieved in this way. Only by the public sector retaking a high level of responsibility for what goes on in the community, raising the general moral level of their area and working with the police to assist the officers in their jobs, can this be achieved.
Force generally only changes people's actions and has never done a good job in changing people's minds. Police effectively use force as a tool to change behavior. Unfortunately when they are not present, people tend to revert back to their previous actions. Their minds were not changed.
The L.I.V.E. Program has two parts. The first provides an effective low-cost tool designed to help the police department get the public to raise their responsibility level and change their minds regarding their own ethical conduct and the conduct of those around them. It gives the police a tool to use that is based on logic and appeals through reason.
Officers or other staff of the department are trained to deliver this program in the schools or in other groups, such as gang intervention programs. It consists of 27 one-hour classes that can be done one hour a week or on a more intensive basis. The teachers and administrators in the schools that piloted this program have noted a significant change in the social behavior of the youth who did the Program. High crime areas were targeted for the pilots and the officers in those areas noted an improvement in the general attitude of the youth toward crime and moral conduct. This resulted in a decrease in criminal behavior as well as a sharp decrease in school violence.
The second part of the L.I.V.E. Program is for training the officers themselves. The Program helps increase the personal integrity of the officers as well as helps them, through the use of extensive drilling, improve their communication skills and their ability to use the correct amount of force for any given situation. If an officer uses less physical force than he should, he can potentially be at personal risk. If he uses more physical force than is actually appropriate, the public and the government is at risk.
This part goes a step further. By participating in the Program, officers improve their ability to use communication and personal intention instead of as heavily relying on physical force to control situations. It has been observed that some officers, just through their presence and intention can control those around them better than can others. Some officers who have less personal presence and intention often need to use more physical force to control a situation. The officer training modules of the L.I.V.E. Program help each trainee improve his personal skills for more effective community interaction and control.
To complete this training, cadets are required to go into the roughest areas and handle what they encounter only with communication and personal intention. Without this training, they would have almost certainly had to resort to some physical force. This does a lot to improve an officer's sense of personal security as well.
The L.I.V.E. Program has been piloted in Mexicali, the State Capital of Baja California, Mexico and in Tijuana, Mexico. They have some very rough areas. There the Program is called V.I.V.E. (which means LIVE in Spanish), and stands for Values, Integrity, and Virtues through Education. Over 50,000 school children there went through the program, which was run by the local police. In the Police Academies of Tijuana and Mexicali, over 1200 police officers and employees of the police department went through the officer-training part of this program.
The L.I.V.E./V.I.V.E. Program was developed from the very successful prison-based rehabilitation system, called the Second Chance Program. This program was developed over a five-year period in the infamous Ensenada Prison, in Ensenada, Mexico. When it was started over 90% of the inmate population shot heroin daily. The violence was so great only fully armed guard units of 12 at a time dared enter the prison courtyard. Inside those walls were some of the worst criminals in the state. To make matters worse, the criminal recidivism rate was over 70%.
The Second Chance Program has reduced the drug use in the prison by over 90% and has reduced the violence notably. Now unarmed guards, alone, walk through the prison yard and mingle with the inmates. The guns and most of the knives are now gone. Even the prison inmate "boss", who ran the inside of the prison has done the Program, and instead of extorting money and dealing drugs as he once did, he spends most of the day teaching other inmates to read.
These changes were brought about without increasing traditional security measures but only working with the inmates, getting them to change their minds. In joint government and university studies, for up to four and a half years after release, the Second Chance Program has reduced the criminal recidivism rate for those participating from the usual 70% to less than 10%. This was achieved with no follow-up or support activities for the inmates once they were released from incarceration.
To successfully rehabilitate a large number of hardened criminals, there must be an understanding of what makes a person become criminal in the first place. The L.I.V.E. Program grew from this understanding.