Mr. RUTH. In New York City, we have Mr. Beame as comptroller and Mr. Lindsay as mayor, and Mr. Beame is quite an independent man. I guess that is true in most cities. The comptroller might be independently elected. In a lot of cases, it is even nonpolitical or of the opposite party.

Mr. MONAGAN. You talked about a rather broad line. As I understand it, you have said you believe this program should go outside the actual criminal justice system itself. Of course, you do come to practical considerations of conflict of jurisdiction on the Federal level: Education, health, narcotics control, and so forth. Also, you have the problem of the commitment of resources among these different areas. Do you have any line of demarcation in your mind as to what ought to be the confines for this particular program?

Mr. RUTH. Because we are guessing, Mr. Chairman, as to the causal relationships, the formula does not work out exactly. In our council and staff, we try to have some idea of a pretty direct relationship between the amount of criminality or the ability of society to deal with that, and whatever program you are going to fund.

That is why I say narcotic addiction treatment is appropriate, because I think that does have such a direct relationship.

I must say, too, I disagreed with the GAO report when they said that if some other Federal agency is funding something, LEAA should not get into that. I think that is a reverse way of looking at it. I think if we are to have impact programs, we have to combine moneys. If we can get Department of Labor money, for instance, for job development for ex-offenders, I think it is quite appropriate to join Department of Labor money with LEAA money and model cities money so you can develop an impact program, which, again, directly relates to the criminal justice problem.

Mr. MONAGAN. You also made one other statement that I thought was interesting. You said the LEAA should avoid subsidizing existing systems, I asume just because they are in existence. Could you expand a little bit what you have in mind by this statement?

Mr. RUTH. I do not see any move toward this, but it was just an observation that sometimes when you go to agency heads, they will say, "We are doing things right, and if we only had more men, we could do the job." I have not seen any particular area of criminal justice where that would be the case, that just adding more men and doing it the same way would do the job. That is just the thought.

With the Federal money, you do get the leverage. For instance, speedier trials. It is difficult dealing with the court system, because they are a separate branch of government, but if you want to try a court calendar experiment, it is very useful to sit down with the judiciary and talk about their pretrial procedures or discovery procedures, or whatever, and ask if they want to build this kind of procedural change into this grant. I think that is the way to join Federal funds with creation of change, not just adding more assistant district attorneys. Mr. MONAGAN. Thank you very much.

Have you another question, Mr. St Germain?

Mr. ST GERMAIN. A few moments ago, the problem of rehabilitation of people was brought up. You train them and then do not have a job for them. You mentioned this happened to people on methadone treatment.

I would make one observation to bolster what you say. It has come to my attention that as a result of the enormous publicity which has been given to the high rate of drug addiction among the military in Vietnam, we are now finding a lot of employers who are shying away and attempting to avoid employing Vietnam veterans. Although the particular Vietnam veteran may never have been addicted, the mere fact that he is a Vietnam veteran works against him in his quest for employment.

Mr. Chairman, I too, want to state that I found Mr. Ruth's testimony very persuasive. None of us agree with everything he says, but I feel for the most part we do. He made an excellent contribution.

In view of the fact that at today's hearings and other hearings where we have had directors of State agencies and we looked into their background and it was essentially, oftentimes, a political appointment, based on politics rather than on capability and background and ability, I wonder if we might do this. Although in his statement he gave a little of his background, I feel that he was a little humble, and it would be helpful for people reading the hearings to see that a man does not acquire the knowledge necessary for the type of work involved here overnight or in a 1-year course, but it requires a great deal of training and background.

We have this article which was appended to our folder. If we were to begin, striking out the first part, which is also very interesting, but I do not think it is pertinent to the hearings-if we were to begin with the paragraph which starts: "The primary job of Mr. Ruth's (criminal justice coordinating) council, which he has headed since its beginning in May 1970," and follow through until we get to the paragraph which ends, "He got his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School," and strike the last paragraph in that column and the first full paragraph in the second column, and begin again at this point: "In 2 years in the Army, he rose from private to specialist 4 in the counterintelligence corps," at the end of that paragraph we would strike the phrase: "In that time his politics changed from Republican to Democratic." Don't put that in.

Then we begin again: "In 1961 he got a job in the Justice Department."

Mr. MONAGAN. He changed from Republican to Democrtic, but he did not change the name of his law firm from Saul to Paul.

Mr. ST GERMAIN. Then we go to the end. I think we could eliminate the final paragraph which, again, is a personal observation. Mr. MONAGAN. You would eliminate tennis playing and piano playing? Why don't we put the whole article in?

Mr. ST GERMAIN. It might be an invasion of his privacy. Although it has been published before, he might not want it in the context of these hearings. That is why I was trying to cut it down to the essentials, to give his background and training, all the elements that have gone into equipping him so well for the type of work he is doing. Mr. MONAGAN. Any portion of it may be included in the record at this point.

Mr. ST GERMAIN. I think I have outlined it for the record. (The article follows:)

[New York Times, Feb. 22, 1971]

A JUDICIOUS OFFICIAL

The primary job of Mr. Ruth's council, which he has headed since its beginning in May 1970, is to determine priorities for dispensing Federal criminal justice aid. The aid is expected to be about $17 million this year.

When he came to New York from the Justice Department in Washington, Mr. Ruth was struck by the pervasiveness of the narcotics problem in his field. "No matter what you look at-the courts, the jails, rehabilitation, crime you run into narcotics," he says. "If you want to do something about criminal justice in New York City, you've got to do something about narcotics."

A MAIN LINE PHILADELPHIAN

Mr. Ruth's boyhood was spent far from the welter of urban problems. He was born in Philadelphia on April 16, 1931, and went to proper main line schools-the Cynwyd and the Episcopal Academy in Overbrook. His father was an anesthesiologist, one of the first doctors to specialize in that field.

Mr. Ruth got his B.A. in 1952, from Yale, where he studied European history and broadcast basketball games on the campus radio station. He got his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

In 2 years in the Army, he rose from private to Specialist 4 in the counterintelligence corps, then spent 4 years, which he recalls as not particularly lively, with the Philadelphia law firm of Saul, Ewing, Remick & Saul. * * * In 1961 *** he got a job in the Justice Department.

Mr. Ruth's specialty was organized crime in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He also participated in the department's civil rights conciliation effort in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, and helped in the planning of the new concept of Federal aid to local law enforcement agencies.

After a 2-year stint from 1967 to 1969 as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, he went back to the Justice Department in the Nixon administration as head of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, which is the research arm of the Federal assistance effort. A year later, he got the job offer from Mayor Lindsay, whom he had not previously met, and accepted at a commissioner's salary of $35,000 a year. Mr. ST GERMAIN. That is all, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted that for the record.

Mr. RUTH. Thank you.

Mr. MONAGAN. Could I ask you what role you feel that the Institute could play in attempting to make real or set out in specific terms the sort of course that the block grant program should take?

Mr. RUTH. As I said earlier, Mr. Chairman, I really do not think it can be done on an in-house Government basis. As I look back on my year at the Institute, the first thing I had to do when I came to the Institute was make a civil service organization chart, with description of positions and grades. I said to myself, how can I do this until there is a program, because until you have a program you do not know what kind of people you want and how you want to organize.

However, I could not put a program together without putting down this big chart with grades and everything else. Once you hire people in those grades, you lose flexibility. It is hard to change an organization chart more than once every 2 years or so. LEAA has just gone through that. In research it has to be privately based although publicly funded. I think you must be able to have people come for a year or so and maybe go back and come back. You have to be able to put people on different kinds of assignments with different levels of responsibility.

I think you have to pay people what they are worth at a particular time.

I do not think there is the kind of free thinking and flow of ideas in Government-confined research. I cannot think of any really successful breakthrough research project that occurred on a public basis without going out to the private arena or creating private laboratories the way NASA did. The prior history of research demonstrates. the need for a privately based concept. Otherwise, I am fearful that even $21 million, which I believe the Institute received this year, cannot really produce any major breakthroughs which will carry thinking beyond where a lot of the people in the field already are, with some exceptions, unless they take their $21 million and pick out three or four things that they really want to discover or find out about and put all that money into those three or four things.

For instance, in narcotics, the research for narcotics antagonists would take a lot of money. That would be a useful way of using the Institute money. But it is hard to get people to agree on those kinds of research priorities.

Mr. MONAGAN. On behalf of the committee I certainly want to commend you on your statement. You isolated some important areas. You contributed very greatly to our thinking and I think it will materially aid the purposes of these hearings.

Mr. Steiger has a question.

Mr. STEIGER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Ruth, we heard from the first witness this morning, and by inference from other witnesses we have had in the course of this hearing, that the expenditure of LEAA funds for hardware is somehow inappropriate. Do you feel that there ought to be a blanket prohibition against hardware?

Mr. RUTH. No blanket prohibition; no, sir; that really goes back to the first year or so, I suppose.

You recall the climate at the time of the act was a riot kind of climate. Indeed, in the act riot control is supposed to come first in LEAA funding. The first series of funding by LEAA was riot grants and some equipment. I believe the danger in the emphasis on equipment is in the police area where we feel that the computers and other things will help us solve more crimes. I believe in some areas of the country where I have seen some of the grants there has been an overemphasis on the computer-type and systems-type hardware. But with part E mandating a lot of money into community corrections, and as people have had a couple of years to think about the problem, I feel in my own mind that there will be less and less emphasis on hardware. After all, once the police department gets the computer and their helicopter, hopefully each of those will last 10 years, and you can go on to something else.

Mr. ST GERMAIN. If the Governor does not use the helicopter.

Mr. STEIGER. I have one other question. In job training there has been some minor success in the contract predicated upon performance. The contractor is not paid until the trainee is on the job for a specific length of time. Obviously that specific problem lends itself to that specific solution. From your own experience with criminal justice, are there areas in the criminal justice study-research arena in which private contracts could be issued on the same production basis.

Mr. RUTH. I think they could be issued for education programs in correctional institutions with the mandated achievement of a certain level of education. It would be hard to issue such criteria for narcotic treatment, because the programs have no capital to begin with.

I think it would be hard for corporations to come into a community and run a narcotics treatment program. On job training we have been talking to a couple of private companies on a job training and job delivery basis, with maintenance of a certain number of months in that position. I think it would be useful to try that if companies are willing to take that capital risk.

Unfortunately, to run a decent sized program, you are talking about $3,000 a year per offender for training and placement. If you want a decent assessment whether that is a good program you really should have 200 or 300 people in that. That is a fairly major investment contingent on complete success. But I think it is very well worth exploring. I am fascinated about that educational experiment that I read about, a private company coming in and taking part of a school system. Mr. STEIGER. We had some experience in Arizona and it is quite successful. For example, under some specifics such as communications, if the local agency, such as yours, would establish a criteria, and rather than say here, "Build me this and charge me for it," you say if you can build this and produce it, you will receive this price for it. Do you feel that the private sector would be responsive and that you would get more for your money?

Mr. RUTH. I am not an expert on communications. We have problems on requests for proposals in communications study grants about defining the real criteria we are looking for. The study is partially for that purpose.

In New York we do not have to use Federal money for general communications such as Sprint and the 911 system because that comes out of city moneys. When we talk about automated systems, again we would have a problem getting a company to make that kind of major investment in an area where there is such a spotty level of performance so far because they are still experimenting. Basically we call them action grants. Some are research grants. Particularly in a volume city like New York City where you have hundreds of thousands of calls coming to the police every week, I think that kind of contract might be more feasible in a smaller community where the problem is more definable and it is reasonable to ask the contractor to take that risk because you know the potential for delivery if his being good is high and you are betting on his quality rather than he is immersed in a problem which none of us know the answer to. Perhaps it is worth trying in the smaller community. It would scare me in New York because of the volume problem.

Mr. MONAGAN. Mr. Ruth, do you believe there is potential benefit in the section of the law that concerns the construction of correctional facilities?

Mr. RUTH. You mean to use LEAA money for construction? Mr. MONAGAN. Not for construction, but I mean for continued research and recommendations on improvements, and so forth.

Mr. RUTH. I think the Crime Commission standards should be periodically updated. That effort, I think, is underway in one way or

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