Safety

Think about what the word “safety” means to you. Not the dictionary version — the version that lives in your body. The one that decides, before your conscious mind gets involved, whether you can relax. Whether you can think clearly. Whether you can sleep.

For a lot of Americans, that word means police. Locks. Cameras. A system that shows up after something goes wrong and tries to assign blame. We’ve spent fifty years and trillions of dollars building that version of safety — the largest prison system in human history, militarized police departments, surveillance networks that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. And the result is this: 24 people per minute still experience intimate partner violence. A child is abused or neglected every 47 seconds. And the communities with the most police presence are often the communities that feel the least safe.

Something has gone wrong. And it isn’t that we haven’t punished enough people.

Daniel is not one person. He is a pattern. He’s 19, grew up in northeast Oklahoma City. He’s watched two friends die before they could vote — one to a stray bullet outside a gas station, one to an overdose nobody saw coming because nobody was looking. Daniel’s not in a gang. He works at a tire shop. But he carries a calculation with him everywhere: which streets, which hours, which eye contact is safe and which isn’t. He’s been stopped by police six times in two years. Never charged. Always watched. The system designed to protect him treats him as a suspect. The system designed to help him doesn’t exist.

Daniel doesn’t need more policing. He needs a neighborhood where the conditions that produce violence have been addressed — where people have work, where mental health support exists, where conflict has somewhere to go before it becomes a gun. He needs safety, not surveillance.

Foundation is built on a simple premise: there is a minimum set of conditions people need to thrive, and a society wealthy enough to provide them has no excuse not to. Safety is the first of sixteen components — not because it’s the most complex, but because everything else rests on it. You can’t learn if you’re afraid. You can’t create if you’re surviving. You can’t participate in your own democracy if your daily life is organized around avoiding harm.

The System We Built Instead

We built prisons. More than anyone else on earth.

Oklahoma incarcerates more people per capita than any other state — and any other country. Not per capita among countries with comparable crime rates. Per capita, period. More than Mississippi. More than Louisiana. More than El Salvador. Oklahoma’s incarceration rate is approximately 1,079 per 100,000 people. The national average is roughly 664. The state has been at or near the top of this ranking for over a decade, and the reforms that briefly bent the curve — like SQ 780 in 2016, which reclassified some drug and property offenses — have been systematically undermined by subsequent legislation that restored mandatory minimums and expanded prosecutorial reach.

What has this produced? Not safety. Oklahoma’s violent crime rate remains above the national average. Property crime remains above the national average. Recidivism runs around 75 percent — three out of four people released from Oklahoma prisons are rearrested within five years. We’re spending roughly $34,000 per year to incarcerate each person, and three-quarters of them come back. That’s not a safety system. That’s a revolving door with a $34,000 turnstile.

Nationally, the numbers are just as damning. The United States has about 4 percent of the world’s population and 20 percent of its prisoners. We spend over $80 billion a year on incarceration — more than the GDP of most countries. And the communities that bear the heaviest burden of this system are the same communities with the highest rates of poverty, the fewest resources, and the least political power. Mass incarceration doesn’t make those communities safer. It removes parents, destabilizes families, eliminates earners, and creates a cycle where the absence of safety produces the desperation that produces the behavior we then punish. And we call that justice.

Gun Violence Is a Design Choice

In 2023, firearms killed more than 43,000 Americans. That includes suicides — about 27,000 — which is not a reason to dismiss the number but a reason to take it more seriously, because a firearm in the home increases suicide completion risk dramatically. It includes roughly 19,000 homicides. It includes roughly 500 children under 14. Firearms are the leading cause of death for American children and adolescents — ahead of car accidents, ahead of disease, ahead of everything.

Oklahoma’s firearm death rate is among the highest in the nation — consistently in the top ten. The state has loosened gun regulations steadily over the past decade: permitless carry, stand-your-ground expansion, preemption of local ordinances. The theory was that more guns in more hands would produce more safety. The data says otherwise. States with weaker gun laws consistently have higher rates of gun death.

This is not an argument about the Second Amendment. It’s an observation about infrastructure. We have chosen — through specific policy decisions made by specific people — to treat firearms as a consumer product rather than a public health variable. The result is 43,000 deaths a year in the richest country on earth. Other wealthy nations have mental illness. They have poverty. They have angry young men. They don’t have this. The variable is the policy.

The Alternative That Already Works

Here’s what makes the incarceration-and-punishment model especially indefensible: the alternative isn’t theoretical. It’s been tested. It works. It costs less.

Community violence intervention programs — trained local mediators who identify conflicts before they become shootings and intervene with relationships, not badges — have produced dramatic results everywhere they’ve been seriously funded. Richmond, California cut gun homicides by 70 percent. Oakland’s Ceasefire strategy reduced shootings by 50 percent. New York City’s Cure Violence sites saw gun injuries drop 63 percent in target areas. These aren’t pilot programs anymore. They’re proven models with years of data.

They work because they address what policing can’t: the upstream conditions. A police officer arrives after someone has been shot. A violence interrupter arrives before the decision is made. The interrupter knows the people, knows the dynamics, knows the block. They’re credible because they’re from the community — not assigned to it.

And they cost a fraction. A comprehensive community violence intervention program costs roughly $5,000 to $10,000 per participant per year. Incarceration costs $34,000 to $60,000 per person per year, depending on the state. The math is not complicated. We’re choosing the expensive option that doesn’t work over the cheap option that does. And the reason is not evidence — it’s politics. Punishment is an easier sell than prevention, even when prevention saves more lives and costs less money.

What This Does to a Person

Here’s what connects Daniel carrying his mental map of safe streets, the three out of four Oklahomans who cycle back through prison, and the families in every state who’ve lost someone to a bullet that didn’t have to be fired.

When you live without safety — when the background frequency of your existence is threat — it reorganizes everything. Your brain allocates its resources to survival. Cortisol stays elevated. Decision-making narrows to the immediate. The future shrinks to the next hour, the next block, the next interaction you have to read correctly to stay alive. Long-term thinking becomes physically impossible — not because you lack intelligence or will, but because your nervous system has correctly identified that right now, the only thing that matters is not getting hurt.

This connects directly to mental health — chronic exposure to violence and the threat of violence produces PTSD, anxiety, depression, and substance use at rates that dwarf the general population. A kid who grows up hearing gunshots at night has the same stress markers as a kid in a war zone. We know this. We’ve studied it. We just haven’t built anything in response.

It connects to safe spaces — the absence of physical safety in a community eliminates every other kind of safe space. You can’t build a community center that works when people are afraid to walk to it. You can’t run an after-school program when parents are afraid to let their kids stay.

And it connects to housing — the neighborhoods with the highest violence are the neighborhoods with the most disinvestment. Abandoned buildings become staging grounds. Lack of street lighting creates opportunities. The physical infrastructure of neglect produces the conditions for harm. You can’t police your way out of a housing crisis. You can’t arrest your way out of disinvestment. You can only rebuild — and that requires treating safety as what it actually is: infrastructure, not enforcement.

What We’re Building

Foundation removes the lowest tier of desperation from society. That’s the starting point. When people have shelter, healthcare, food, education — when the floor is solid — the conditions that produce most violence begin to dissolve. Not overnight. Not perfectly. But measurably, and in ways that compound over time.

The question this system asks is not how do we punish people for being desperate? It’s how do we make desperation rare?

Safety through community investment means funding violence intervention at scale — not as a pilot, not as a line item that gets cut every budget cycle, but as permanent infrastructure the way we fund fire departments. It means treating gun violence as a public health crisis and applying the same evidence-based approach we’d apply to any epidemic. It means ending the mass incarceration experiment that has cost trillions, destroyed millions of families, and failed to produce the safety it promised.

And it means being honest about what AI changes. AI introduces real threats — deepfake harassment, algorithmic bias in predictive policing, autonomous surveillance that concentrates power without accountability. But it also offers real possibilities: early warning systems that identify domestic violence escalation before it becomes homicide, environmental monitoring that catches the chemical leak before it poisons the water, communication tools that reduce the friction and misunderstanding that lead to conflict. The question is whether these tools serve communities or control them. And right now, the people making that choice are mostly not the communities who’ll live with the consequences.

What We Need From You

Those who say we need more police and more prisons have had fifty years and trillions of dollars to prove their case. The incarceration capital of the world is not the safest place in it. It’s one of the most violent. The experiment ran. The results are in.

We have a framework. We don’t have all the answers — and that’s deliberate. Here are directions we think matter. Push back on them, extend them, or bring your own:

• Community violence intervention as permanent infrastructure. Trained local mediators, embedded in the neighborhoods they serve, funded the way we fund fire departments — not as a grant that expires, but as a civic institution. Richmond cut gun homicides 70 percent. What would it look like to build this in every community in Oklahoma? What does your neighborhood need that no one in a policy office has thought to ask?

• Safety as economic independence. Desperation produces most violence. When people have stable housing, healthcare, food, and income — when the floor holds — the conditions that breed harm begin to dissolve. Foundation’s broader framework provides that floor. What changes in your community when no one is desperate enough to break?

• Restorative justice at scale. Structured alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenses that repair harm and keep communities intact, funded at even a fraction of what we currently spend on cages. Oklahoma spends roughly $34,000 per year per incarcerated person with a 75 percent recidivism rate. What would we get if we invested that same money in repairing the conditions that produce crime instead of warehousing the people caught in them?

What does safety actually look like where you live? Not the brochure version — the real version. What’s working? What’s been tried and failed? What would you build if the budget currently spent on punishment were available for prevention?

This is citizen-developed work. This is one of sixteen components. Explore the full framework →

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