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The primary focus of this chapter is the relationship between group interests and the legislative policy process in Pennsylvania. In striking similarity to the situation in Congress, criminal justice agencies and a few prolific groups representing professional and single-issue citizen interests generally dominate. The citizen groups that appear are ones that specialize in the crime issue du jour—guns, sex offenses, crimes against children, or the death penalty. The share of hearings that includes citizen groups has increased, but a closer examination reveals that this is due to a dramatic increase in single-issue groups and a decline in groups with more diffuse interests. This picture of legislative crime hearings is confirmed by extensive interviews with state legislators, whose contact with citizen organizations is limited to a handful of high-profile, single-issue, and civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and several statewide women's organizations. The ubiquity of prosecutors, law enforcement, and single-issue groups focused on women, children, and civil liberties leaves a glaring hole in policy debates about crime: the omission of the interests of the poor and urban minorities, many of whom face serious crime on a regular basis. This chapter also discusses the limitations of the American Civil Liberties Union as a group representing the broad interests of citizens at risk of crime and violence.

This chapter explores in more detail the nature and quality of interaction citizen groups have with the policy process in the two urban locales studied. In particular, the chapter addresses the two major questions left unanswered by the empirical analyses of the previous chapters: First, are the broad citizen groups that are active at the local level participating meaningfully in the policy process? Second, are they contributing anything substantially different from other groups? This chapter offers a more in-depth analysis of the local data in an effort to answer these complicated and underexplored questions and argues that the groups mobilized locally around urban crime problems frequently present policy frames that are substantially different from those promulgated by criminal justice agencies, professional associations, and highly active single-issue groups. Indeed, the deep connection urban dwellers have to crime, its causes, and its consequences makes their perspective unique and highly practical. Most notably, the policy environment for responding to crime at the local level is considerably more focused on victims—specifically on harm reduction—than is the environment at the state and national levels, where criminal justice agencies and narrow victims' groups dominate and focus much attention on punishing offenders.