Law Enforcement Administration Act Initiatives

History and Initiatives

The roots of the OCCSSA, and hence of the LEAA, lay in the bitter presidential campaign of 1964, during which George Wallace and Barry Goldwater attacked Lyndon Johnson as soft on crime. Once elected, Johnson created the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. This commission then successfully recommended OCCSSA to Congress. As a result, in 1968, LEAA was born. Although LEAA lasted little more than a decade, it undertook an impressive number of initiatives, some of which continue to the present. Others have evolved and some have been disbanded. In the last category is the Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP). Between 1968 and 1976, LEEP introduced significant funding for criminal justice higher education and eventually provided aid for more than 100,000 students of criminology, criminal justice, and law enforcement at more than 1,000 colleges and universities.

LEAA also focused more on state-level initiatives than had its predecessors. It encouraged the establishment of state planning agencies (SPAs) intended to allow states to target crime control strategies to their own needs. There was a perceived need to allow states to focus on particular types of offenders, or on social and structural factors particular to a given state. At the same time, LEAA played a role in developing standards for U.S. criminal justice institutions. For instance, with the financial support of the LEAA, the U.S. criminal justice system witnessed systemwide technological improvements in forensic science, DNA technology, and police officer tools and equipment.

Some LEAA initiatives were highly successful. For example, the Career Criminal Program, which encouraged prosecutors' offices to focus resources on major repeat offenders, still exists in cities across the United States. The associated Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS) streamlined and automated case tracking [Page 230]and scheduling, and its technological infrastructure continues to be developed. A third example is the Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime (TASC). When the first TASC programs started in 1972, they focused on the pretrial diversion of first-time offenders with addiction problems to community facilities. Since then, TASC has expanded to cover a wide range of offenders, returning those who fail to comply with drug treatment programs to the legal system. Cost-benefit analyses suggest that TASC programs reduce recidivism rates at a lower cost than those associated with processing offenders through the traditional criminal justice system.

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