Word: reno
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years as a prosecutor, Reno saw firsthand the link between a miserable child and a vicious adult. She fought for better children's services, from health care to day care to preschool education, all on the grounds of crime prevention. She set up a one-stop child-support center, with everything from counselors and law-enforcement officials to medical personnel for drawing blood to confirm paternity. She was one of the first prosecutors around to come down hard on scofflaw spouses who skipped out on child support, prompting a disgruntled father to scrawl threatening graffiti on a sign near...
...Reno's prescriptions go well beyond the legal realm. She has advocated workdays that end at 3 p.m. so that parents can be home when their children get out of school. "There are children who, after school and in the evenings, are unsupervised and adrift and alone and fearful," she said last May in a speech to the Women's Bar Association. "And they are getting into trouble, and they are being hurt." Reno draws freely on the lessons of her own family. "It was my mother, who worked in the home, who taught us to bake cakes, to play...
...Reno's alternative is a carrot and a stick: offer nonviolent addicts treatment and rehabilitation, and save the jails for the most unsalvageable thugs. The laboratory for her experiments in crime and punishment was Miami's long, hot "crack summer" in 1986, when police were bringing in hundreds of pushers and addicts a night. She later fought to get the local judges, police and public defenders to agree to special drug courts that would "sentence" nonviolent offenders to a yearlong drug-rehab and -education program. After the first year, 9 out of 10 graduates were still clean, and cities around...
...treating drug addicts in hopes they wouldn't come back to court was pretty radical -- especially for a prosecutor," notes John Goldkamp, a Temple University criminal-justice professor who has been studying the drug court. "She has launched a mini-movement in the courts across the United States." But Reno is no dewy-eyed optimist about such tactics. Goldkamp recalls an early meeting: "Reno said she was skeptical of fairy tales about the miraculous efficacy of the program on public safety, but she said if it delayed seeing drug addicts again in court, that was a real contribution...
None of this makes her sound much like a bleeding heart, but it was enough to raise alarms at the White House, which plans to ask Congress for 100,000 new cops. Reno's priorities, they complain, are too liberal and social-service oriented -- particularly at a time when the President is trying to restore his centrist reputation. Her assault on mandatory-sentencing laws horrified White House aides, who may agree that the laws don't work very well but are more concerned about what message they send. "There is some question about how ideologically in synch she is with...