Following are descriptions of the initial policy task forces organized by the International Leadership Forum. ILF Fellows may join any or all of them, as their interests dictate.

As we begin the new millenium, the state of criminal justice in America is hardly one we can be proud of. The news is not all bad: since the early 1990s, there has been a significant (though sometimes overstated) decline in street crime in the United States, which has surely improved the quality of life in our cities. But we still suffer levels of violent crime that are far higher than those of every other advanced industrial society. Even more troubling, this remains true despite a thirty-year experiment in "getting tough" on crime, an approach that has no counterpart in our history or that of any other developed country. The number of Americans behind bars has jumped sevenfold in twenty-five years, but our citizens still face risks of being a victim of violence that are unmatched outside parts of the Third World. Our rate of imprisonment is six times that of England, but the homicide death rate among our young men is 25 times greater. We put our citizens (and occasionally the citizens of other countries) to death with a frequency that is matched only by a handful of authoritarian countries, including the Peoples’ Republic of China and Iran. But our homicide rate is several times higher than that of any other Western industrial nation--and all of them have abolished the death penalty.

We have created a criminal justice system that stands out as an anomaly in the rest of the developed world, and we have done so without much serious reflection about the consequences. But the consequences are profound, and they ripple out across every realm of American life. Economically, the sums we have spent on warehousing offenders in a swollen prison system have been siphoned away from more constructive public purposes, notably education, child welfare, and health care. Internationally, the United States is increasingly criticized as a recurrent human rights violator because of the conditions of its jails and prisons and its sweeping use of the death penalty. At home, the stunningly high levels of incarceration have devastated whole communities and spawned what some have called a "prison generation" among young people of color (twenty-eight percent of black men in America will, at current rates, spend some time in a state or federal prison). As women have become the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, we have created a looming crisis of parentless children of inmates, the effects of which will be felt for many years to come. The prison system has become in many ways our social agency of first resort in an era of sharp cutbacks in services for the poor; it is now our largest public housing program and our largest mental health facility.

These realities cry out for creative solutions, of a kind that have been largely suppressed in a time when simplistic sloganeering about crime has too often replaced hard thinking and fostered a climate of timidity when boldness and innovation are urgently needed. Fortunately, there are encouraging signs on several fronts. There are promising community-based crime prevention programs around the country, many of them unknown to the public; there are effective strategies for rehabilitating offenders which could save both lives and dollars. Several states, including Arizona and California, have moved to mandate treatment rather than imprisonment for minor drug offenders. Perhaps most encouragingly, there are signs that public opinion is shifting toward an awareness that the approaches of the past have failed, and that more humane and hopeful strategies are both necessary and possible. But in order for these stirrings to generate better public awareness and better public policies, we will need better forums for tough-minded discussion of these and other emerging issues in crime and justice, and much better ways of disseminating the results of that discussion to a wider public. The central question guiding our own discussions will be how we can build a justice system for the twenty-first century that both protects society from crime and violence, and also embodies a genuine commitment to maximizing human rights. There is a tension between those principles, but we can do a much better job of balancing them than we have done so far: many other countries, after all, have done just that. Throughout those discussions, we will strive to move beyond ideology and instead look carefully at "best practices"--innovative strategies of prevention, rehabilitation, and community safety from around the world.

Policy Forum Leader: Elliott Currie is a Visiting Professor, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University; Lecturer in Legal Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Senior Research Scientist, Public Health Institute, Berkeley, and one of the most distinguished figures in the field of criminal justice.

New technological developments are occurring at an even faster pace than the fast pace we've gotten used to--witness the recent announcement that an Italian team is actively pursuing human cloning, and may succeed within a year. Such developments, especially in the life sciences, indicate that we may be about to cross whole new thresholds, towards futures that some thinkers describe (often with enthusiasm) as "post-human." Whether we want to go those places is one question. Perhaps as important a question, though, is how we make the decision, and how fast. At the moment, it's left to a few scientists and venture capitalists, deciding on behalf of a species. Is
there any alternative, and is there any point in trying to slow down this process a little so that we can come to grips with its real meanings?

Policy Forum Leader: Bill McKibben. Author of seven books including The End of Nature (now in 20 languages) the first book for a general audience on global warming and other large-scale environmental challenges, McKibben is currently a Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of Values in Public Life.

Fewer and fewer of us enjoy the social connections that once constituted community. In part these connections are victims of technological progress. Elevators made huge high-rise apartment buildings possible. Cars encouraged suburban sprawl. Highways sundered neighborhoods. Buses took children farther and farther away to larger and larger schools. Computers facilitated megamarts, and anonymous online commerce. Social isolation followed—on an epidemic scale. As community declines, indices of social collapse rise—crime, mental and physical illness, substance abuse, child abuse, divorce, suicide. The cost to society is immense.

Few question the importance of community. It's a genuinely bipartisan issue. At the same time, this issue is poorly understood. What exactly does community mean? Which elements of modern life have contributed to its breakdown? What policy initiatives can counter those elements, and encourage a stronger sense of community? Are there elements of old-style communities that we can revive, or new ones we can develop? Can institutions be developed, environments designed, and new technologies utilized that foster rather than destroy social connections? How can leaders encourage a re-birth of community in ways that enhance the vitality of their organizations, and society as a whole? What wisdom and experience can each one of us bring to bear on this issue?

This policy forum will be led by Ralph Keyes , who has written ten books on contemporary society, including the seminal work, We, The Lonely People.

No one today disputes the idea that intelligent use of information technology is critical for good business, education, and government. But, by the same token, all will agree that implementation of this technology has not been as successful as it could be. A central reason may be its continuing failure to connect with leaders at the very top. Lack of understanding and direction from the executive suite, a lack that characterizes the entire history of information technology development, could help explain why its implementation has faltered, and even more important, why it fails to serve the crucial strategic interests of organizations, and of society at large.

There is considerable evidence for these failures. For example, the debate over the "productivity paradox" (which suggested that productivity was flat during heavy investment in computers in the 1980s and early 1990s); the mixed record with computers in schools; and the recent dampening of enthusiasm for dot-coms, all suggest that we still have room to improve our IT strategies and policies. This ILF task force’s goal is to design new policies, new strategies, new practices, and a new role that top leaders might play to overcome this disconnect between themselves and the massive technology for which they have long signed the checks, but have seldom embraced.

The leader of this policy forum will be Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, historian of technology at the Stanford University Library, and a leading authority on information technology and society.

In the mid-eighties, some fifty conglomerates controlled more than half of all broadcast and other media in the United States. That figure now seems positively quaint. As the 21st century begins, most news, books, entertainment and (increasingly) infotainment is disseminated by fewer than ten corporate behemoths, among them Viacom, GE, Disney, AT&T, Bertelsmann, the News Corporation and the newest giant on the block, AOL Time Warner. The reach of this media oligarchy is no longer primarily domestic but global, and growing more so with every passing day. At the same time, the fragmented, sometimes anarchic discourse on the internet offers a
counter-trend to the worldwide concentration of media power in the hands of a few companies that put the bottom line first. The battle between these two forces will play out over the next few years, with the outcome still hard to see. At stake, however, is nothing less than how-and even whether-a broad spectrum of ideas makes its way into the public debate that is essential to the survival of democratic societies.

Richard Pollak, author, journalist, Editor-at-Large, The Nation; former Associate Editor, Newsweek; founder, publisher and editor of More, will lead this policy forum..

In coming months the International Leadership Forum will undertake additional task forces dealing with the massive problems of global migration, the dangers of commodification and other policy-sensitive subjects such as education, environment, health, and race. Additionally, the ILF will organize online conferences that respond almost immediately to issues of current topical concern, that host interviews with newsmakers, and that meet the agenda of issues developed by the ILF Fellows themselves.

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