We have stood at gravesites together. We have held weeping mothers together. We have marched through these streets, prayed over these blocks and watched \u2014 together \u2014 as yet another child\u2019s name gets added to a list that should not exist.<\/p>\n
So when the U.S. attorney and special agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives\u2019 Chicago Field Division wrote in these pages<\/a> last month that the answer to Chicago\u2019s gun violence is longer federal sentences, more prosecutions and a harder hammer swung by the federal government, we feel compelled \u2014 as people of faith, as Chicagoans, as neighbors \u2014 to respond with both love and truth.<\/p>\n We do not dispute that prosecuting violent offenders matters. We do not dismiss the real courage of law enforcement officers who work dangerous streets. What we dispute \u2014 loudly, and with the weight of evidence behind us \u2014 is the idea that the carceral approach alone will save this city. It has not. It will not. And the research is unambiguous.<\/p>\n Consider what Loyola University Chicago\u2019s Center for Criminal Justice Research has shown: In Illinois, 72% of all firearm-related arrests<\/a> and convictions from 2009 to 2019 were for illegal possession \u2014 not for use of a gun in a violent crime. Despite a 62% increase<\/a> in the number of people imprisoned for gun possession between 2010 to 2023, violence persisted. Loyola\u2019s researchers found no meaningful difference in violent crime rearrest rates between those sent to prison and those sentenced to probation. We are filling cells and leaving the conditions that produce violence completely untouched.<\/p>\n We have stood outside gun shops and marched on gun shows for decades and can tell you plainly: Chicago is not on an island. As long as someone can drive for as little as 15 minutes to Indiana and buy a weapon without a background check, every \u201ctough on crime\u201d news conference in this city is a Band-Aid on a wound that requires surgery. The problem is a national failure of political will, not a local deficit of prosecution.<\/p>\n The University of Chicago Crime Lab\u2019s landmark READI Chicago study<\/a> \u2014 the largest randomized controlled trial of a community violence intervention ever conducted in this country \u2014 found that pairing at-risk men with transitional employment and cognitive behavioral therapy cut shooting and homicide arrests by 65%, generating social savings of up to nearly $1 million per participant. The Chicago CRED street outreach program<\/a> showed a 73% reduction in violent crime arrests among those who completed the program. These numbers don\u2019t come from wishful thinking. They come from rigorous, peer-reviewed science published in the nation\u2019s leading academic journals.<\/p>\n The data is telling us something our hearts already know: People pick up guns not because they lack the fear of a federal sentence. They pick up guns because they lack hope, income, safety and any other means of protection or status in a community that has been systematically abandoned. Northwestern University legal scholars<\/a> have documented for decades that the certainty of punishment deters crime far more than its severity \u2014 yet we continue to escalate severity while the certainty of opportunity in Black and brown neighborhoods remains nearly zero.<\/p>\n We have organized in these communities, trained these clergy, built these coalitions. We know that the neighborhoods generating the highest numbers of gun possession arrests are the same neighborhoods with the highest rates of child poverty,\u00a0 unemployment and disinvestment. University of Chicago public health researchers<\/a> found that Chicago had 851 \u201cmillion dollar blocks\u201d \u2014 census blocks where the cost of incarcerating residents exceeded $1 million \u2014 between 2005 and 2009 alone. That money did not come back as jobs, schools or mental health clinics. It came back as broken families and deeper poverty.<\/p>\n America\u2019s \u201coriginal sin\u201d lives not just in individual hearts but in institutions \u2014 in the housing policies that packed poverty into particular ZIP codes, in the school defunding that robbed children of futures, in the economic apartheid that left whole communities without legitimate pathways forward. Mass incarceration did not solve that. It deepened it.<\/p>\n We are not asking the U.S. attorney and the ATF to stop their efforts in mitigating crime in Chicago. But they have already been distracted from actual law enforcement through redirecting their agents<\/a> to support U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Instead, in giving two examples, the ATF should work on stemming the trafficking of guns<\/a> into Chicago, while the U.S. attorney can help with the homicide clearance rate, moving to close cases through convictions and not the seeming legal fiction<\/a> of \u201cexceptional clearance\u201d.<\/p>\n We are not asking the U.S. attorney to stop prosecuting. We are asking this city, this state and this nation to match every dollar spent on prosecution with a dollar spent on prevention. We are asking for community violence intervention programs to be funded at the scale the evidence demands. We are asking for jobs, for mental health resources, for restorative practices in schools, for a real gun accountability law that holds dealers and manufacturers responsible.<\/p>\n We have buried too many children to accept the same answer that has failed us for 50 years. The solution to violence is not more violence \u2014 even the state-sanctioned kind. It is investment, relationship and the radical, stubborn, evidence-backed belief that every person on these streets is worth saving before they become either a perpetrator or a victim.<\/p>\n That is not a soft position. That is the hardest work any of us has ever done.<\/p>\n Chicago faith leaders Rabbi Seth Limmer, the Rev. Otis Moss III, the Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain and the Rev. Michael Pfleger joined the Tribune\u2019s opinion section in summer 2022 for\u00a0a series of columns<\/a>\u00a0on potential solutions to Chicago\u2019s chronic gun violence problem. The column continues on an occasional basis.<\/p>\n Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here<\/a> or email letters@chicagotribune.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We have stood at gravesites together. We have held weeping mothers together. 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