Shaping Policy at the Highest Levels
The work we do is often better described as drip-drip-drip than bang! Our position on the MS13 street gang, for instance, has long been the outlier as we focused on the “social” rather than their “criminal” composition. They were not a “drug trafficking organization” or a “mafia,” we reported, but a loosely knit network that expressed itself with collective acts of violence. They would not be “defeated” so much as subdued, little by a little, with a “whole-of-government” approach. This view, it appears, is now taking hold, per our conversations with high level US justice officials battling gangs, one of which told us recently: “We can’t just keep doing the same thing and expect the same result...We need to be looking at the problem as a whole and what can we be doing...We all recognize we can’t prosecute our way out of this.”
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