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MAKING CONTACT Transcript: #42-03 Breaking the Cycle: Juvenile Crime and Positive Solutions BABICH: This week on Making Contact... "You can do anything that you put your mind to and I know that they have a little cliché, but if you never heard that growing up it's just like a culture shock" Young people take a lot of heat when they commit crimes, particularly low-income African-American and Latino men. Conservative pundits and politicians say, that having young defendants stand trial as adults and giving them stiff sentences, if convicted, will make the streets safer and deter juvenile crime. But, other approaches are having success, raising fundamental questions about youth crime and violence: What role does society play in both creating juvenile offenders and rehabilitating them? On this edition of Making Contact, we report on community responses to youth crime in the California city of Oakland, which has one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the country. We also hear about YouthBuild USA, a network of community organizations that empower juvenile offenders by teaching them how to rebuild their neighborhoods. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact -- an international radio program, seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information. Juvenile crime is a widely discussed, and highly politicized issue. With so much media attention -- often sensational -- it's difficult to get an accurate picture of current trends. For a more precise look at youth crime, we spoke with Jason Ziedenberg. He's the director of policy and research for the Justice Policy Institute, a project seeking to enhance public discourse on the issue of juvenile crime and criminal justice. ZIEDENBERG: What we need to know is that, you know, pretty much—a little less than 20%of all the crime in this country, that is arrests, are young people, people under 18. It can range down to 14%, 12 % some years, as high as 18%, but you know generally as a rule about the same proportion of youth that are in society, that's the proportion of youth arrests. The last couple of years, it's been actually a little bit lower. BABICH: Why do you think that is? ZIEDENBERG: I think a number of things have changed. I think number one, in spite of the fact that we're building more prisons, we're building more juvenile justice institutions, there is a kind of left/right consensus around prevention. So even people like Arnold Schwarznegger are spending a lot of time doing initiatives to get some sort of prevention dollars down to people that need them. Whether or not those policies actually work, like the Schwarznegger initiative is very debatable. But that's out there and pretty much everyone's gotta be in that game to some degree. So you have had more targeted dollars drip down to a wider range of services all round the country and I think that's impacted the youth crime rate. I think another thing that's impacted the youth crime rate is what some people call “big brother syndrome.” There was and continues to be a serious youth crime problem in this country. But for the most part it's concentrated in a few cities, it's concentrated around a few clusters of crime and it bears no resemblance at all to the over-reaction we've had in this country in building juvenile detention centers left and right. So what I think has happened is that as crime has declined since the early ‘90s, the generation of youth coming up looked at the generation of youth coming before them and really said things like “not me.” And because of that, what some sociologists call “big brother syndrome”, we've seen a reduction in crime. Some people have pointed to the fact that in the aggregate we had the biggest economic boom in American history during the 1990's, and while there's significant debate about who was reached by that economic boom, some have argued that there was so much economic expansion, that the communities most likely to get caught up in crime had real jobs. And that even now, two years into a brutal recession, those communities are better off than they were. And again these are all alternative theories that are bounced back and forth, but those are some of the reasons why we think crime is so low now among youth. BABICH: You mentioned a couple of hot spots or a few hot spots around the country. Where are those? ZIEDENBERG: One study that was put out in the early 90's found that a third of the juvenile homicides occurred in Los Angeles, New York, Detroit and Dallas, that those four jurisdictions were responsible for a disproportionate number of the homicides that go on in this country. And you could look at that statistic, and you could look at another statistic, which I think is even more meaningful, that 93% of the counties in this country experience one or no juvenile homicides, okay? So, that's what people were most afraid of, particularly in the early 90's. The fact that kids were killing kids, kids were killing adults--93% of the counties in this country experience one or no juvenile homicides. Which kind of puts the problem in perspective. BABICH: Jason Ziedenberg of the Justice Policy Institute. In 2003, as of the end of September there were 93 murders in the city; many of the victims were young, African-American men. Numerous community activists say the drug trade is partially responsible for a climate of violence. They also point to inadequate responses from city officials and the Oakland Police Department. The homicide rate in Oakland for 2003 is expected to surpass the previous year's mark of 113. The majority of the murders are unsolved. Many residents and community-based organizations are struggling to find ways to intervene and save lives. Correspondent Stephanie Welch, who works with the LoveLife Foundation, a non-profit organization that seeks to end youth violence, prepared this report on a town hall meeting held in mid-September 2003. The story begins with an excerpt from a 1999 television news report on a commemoration for a young woman who was shot and killed in Oakland. TAPE: NEWS SEGMENT REPORTER 1:Deborah Villon was there and she has more tonight on that story. Deborah? REPORTER 1: Well Sam tonight's anti-violence event was held to honor Luitae Lacy whose Nigerian first name was translated to “love life” in English. By all accounts, she was a smart, outgoing girl. She counseled other teenagers at her high school and had a bright future ahead. But Luitae never made it past sixteen. WELCH:Oakland residents are familiar with news stories like this one, which aired in 1999. Thousands of people came out on the anniversary of this young woman's birthday, to join her father in his effort to change the conditions that have turned neighborhoods such as West Oakland into a war zone. TAPE: NEWS SEGMENT CONT'D REPORTER: Chatting with friends in a van near her high school, three gunmen opened fire on the van. They weren't even after Luitae. Her death launched her dad on a crusade. FATHER: No parent should have to outlive their child. So it's really up to us to come together to do whatever we can do, humanly possible to prevent these kinds of things from happening. REPORTER: Tonight, Lacy led marchers past… WELCH: Back then in 1999, at the beginning of his first term, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, introduced his “tough on crime” strategy. TAPE: BROWN: We're gonna take a very hostile attitude to people who carry guns and drive around like cowboys and we want them out of here… WELCH: More than four years after the 1999 commemoration for Luitae in Oakland, the death toll has increased and young black men are still the majority of those who are dying. News reports from Oakland sound the same. Another murder, another march, tough talk from the Mayor announcing a new police strategy and crack-down. Many residents are frustrated with the city's repeated emphasis on law enforcement solutions, to what they see as economic and social problems. The Mayor and police blame the drug trade, but residents say it's just a symptom of a larger problem—the city has failed to address the dire poverty that leads people to use and sell drugs. To make matters worse say residents, the law enforcement approach creates a vicious circle. Mayor Jerry Brown often complains that 3,000 parolees are released into Oakland annually. They arrive with $200 and little else, often with shattered personal lives after spending time in prison. They return to the street to make a living, and often end up right back in the hands of the police. The Mayor says he supports programs that will assist prisoners upon their release to begin to lead productive lives. But critics say Brown doesn't understand the value of crime prevention through positive social programs or the relationship between unemployment and crime. Instead it's often more tough talk to the press. TAPE: BROWN: We're gonna do everything we can to get the really bad guys off the street. And then we're gonna do whatever we can by way of social programs. But remember, social programs are only part of the deal. Not having an afterschool program is no justification for killing people in cold blood. REPORTER: Mayor Brown says the city will soon be offering rewards to people who provide police with any information about unsolved homicides. And on convicted felons, who are carrying guns. Reporting live in Oakland, Rob Rock, KTVU News… WELCH: That report followed a town hall meeting organized by Donald Lacey and his organization, the Love Life Foundation, in September 2003 at Oakland City Hall. The meeting aired live, during Lacey's regularly scheduled radio program and was simulcast over other local radio stations. Some taking part in the discussion, have experienced the trauma of losing loved ones to violence. And others who have spent time in prison for taking a life. Groups and individuals who have been working for years to create positive social change in Oakland, also attended. Normally, Love Life would have invited the Mayor and Chief-of-Police Richard Word to the meeting, but this time Lacey told participants, he chose not to. He encouraged community members to take part and to offer solutions that can help stop the killing and heal the trauma that so many families have to deal with on a daily basis in Oakland. TAPE: LACEY: Our feeling was, that every time you see a murder on the news, you hear from Jerry Brown or you hear from Richard Word. Well, we didn't invite them. No offense, we didn't invite them. We want to hear from you. CARTER: Good afternoon. My name is Dionne Carter. I was born and raised in Oakland. I graduated from Castlemont in 1990. And because of the violence that I experienced right in front of my school--running from bullets, my friends, my family members dying--I told myself that I was gonna go to school, that I was going to work in violence prevention. So here I am, thirteen years later. People are tired hearing about what's wrong with them all the time. They need to hear what their strengths are, so that you can build on them. So if you have a drug-dealer that's out there turning over dollars, it takes a lot of intelligence, believe me, to get out there, don't know who you selling to, turning your money over, using your math skills, cookin', you know whatever you need to do. So we need to start looking at our people and our culture, looking for their strengths and not always telling them what's wrong. The second one is, to look at violence in an historical context. Because, we always talk about the civil rights movement on up, but the violence that happened to black people as a race, started way before the civil rights movement. So in order for us to really get to a point where we're able to understand why our tolerance for grief and pain is so high, we need to think about the historical context of our enslavement. WELCH: Angela Davenport is a young actress who's had her own traumatic experiences growing up, and says that attending funerals has become a regular part of her life. She's only nineteen. She commented on the tendency of many people to follow the media's morbid countdown of the murders in Oakland, as if it were a sports statistic. TAPE: DAVENPORT: I get speechless sometimes because I was just talking to a friend of mine the other day and he said, “You know, Oakland's not at the 90 something homicide,” I'm like “yeah, we're at 91. He was like, “you guys aren't at 91, it hasn't been in the news, I have'nt seen it.” And that's because it's like sometimes the media, just like other people, they get immune to this stuff happening. He's like “who's gets immune to death? Who get's immune to people dying?” It happens. That's why there's not as many people as there were before who are actually trying to do something. You get immune to it. Once it starts happening so much, you just start letting go. You throw your hands up.” Wouldn't it be interesting if there was a way that we can keep track of the death toll of people who lose their spiritual lives every day. That are still walking around physically alive but they're dead spiritually. WELCH: Gayland Logan, Director of Infusion One, a youth advocacy group in San Francisco. TAPE: LOGAN: I mean, because I think the death toll would be something that we couldn't even imagine. And what I'm speaking on is that really when we talk about respect and responsibility and we start talking about the individual who decides that it's not important to educate themselves anymore. When it's more important to have a crack pipe, than have some self-dignity. For those of us who have been in the game for a while now and we've seen how the system works, I believe, as opposed to blaming the churches, as opposed to blaming the city, let's start teaching these young folks how the system works. Let them begin to form their own organizations and let them teach us how it's supposed to be done and put it down in the right way. WELCH: Joshua Haynes is fourteen and lives in West Oakland. He's a very active leader in his school and a positive influence on other young people. TAPE: HAYNES: The topic of violence for me, is touching, because just a few days ago, one of my friends from a place I used to stay at, named Mike, had got killed, or whatever. And um, some people know who did it and some people don't. And a lot of people asked how come the police don't want to do nothing about it. Well it's because in the hood, or like out there, people don't really—don't want to tell because they're trying to protect theyself and they know he just got shot, so if I go running to the police and run my mouth, somewhere or another it's gonna get found out that I snitched. And they worrying about protecting theyself and that's the problem. Everybody worried about protecting theyself, but if we say we're gonna stand up as a community, then why are we not going out there and protecting each other? And then, it's like—everybody's just—I don't know just challenged, and it's just something that's bothering me, ‘cause it don't make no sense to people my age dying and stuff. NOEL: Over the years, I've been listening to the young adults (unclear). I listen to my sons, I listen to kids around the schools. WELCH: Ora Noel is a long time West Oakland resident who lost her son Chris in 1996. And then her son Daniel, in 2002. Neither of her sons were involved in drug-dealing. And no arrests have been made in either of their cases. Noel commented on the fear people in the neighborhood have, of coming forward with information, or getting involved as witnesses. TAPE: NOEL: There are youth who are speaking up and let me tell you, those youth who speak up, do get murdered. And it's not always as it seems to be—black youth murdering other black youth. Nobody is looking when there's a driveby. And some of the things that I've been told by youth it's not all about what it seems to be about. And it's true that we do need to stick together, we do need to speak up when there's a violation against our human or civil rights. But so many of us are afraid to speak up because they are afraid to go to police. Because there is abuse and power in higher places that keeps the drugs coming in here and keeps our youth on the streets selling drugs and not able to get a decent job. REPORTER 1: The meeting aired live on community radio uniting a variety of voices all seeking solutions… REPORTER 1: .Mayor Jerry Brown didn't attend today's meeting. Brown said he didn't want to get into a shouting match with some community members who are trying to politicize the issue of violence. RAP POEM WELCH: .For Making Contact, I'm Stephanie Welch. MUSIC BREAK BABICH: We'll have more on youth violence, root causes and positive solutions in a few moments. You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you would like more information about the subject of this week's program, or you would like to contact any of our guests, please give us a call. It's toll free: 800-529-5736. That's 800-529-5736. You can also visit our web site at radioproject.org. That's radioproject.org. Dorothy Stoneman helped found YouthBuild USA in East Harlem, New York, in 1978. She asked young people what THEY wanted to do to improve their lives...and their neighborhood. They said they would rebuild all the abandoned buildings to create homes for the homeless and jobs for the unemployed youth. It's had some success and now the program has been replicated across the country. There are more than 200 YouthBuild programs in more than 40 states, with about 6,000 participants. Stoneman says that 80% of the young people who enter a YouthBuild program don't have a high school diploma, and almost all of them have no job skills. STONEMAN There are 5.4 million such young people in the United States between 16 to 24. And that does not include the ones who are in prison. Although 65% of the young people who are in prison or jail are high school drop-outs. So the young people coming into YouthBuild meet those kind of statistical descriptions, but really what they are are young people who have been through hard times, have fallen off-track and are searching for some kind of way to rebuild their life and get a future. BABICH: Does YouthBuild USA go out and find these young people or do they find you? How do you attract these young people to your organization? STONEMANWe had long waiting lists. Their friends and relatives tell them “Go to YouthBuild because you can get an education, and you can get a job and you can get paid for it at the same time and that's what you need.” So they come and they ask if they can join and then you meet with them and they say “I want a job or a GED” and then you say, “Well, if you could belong to a great movement for justice and opportunity for all, would you like to join that?” And they all raise their hands and say they would. And if you offer them sufficient respect and caring and a positive peer group to belong to, they seize the opportunity and they become a very positive force. It's kind of amazing to me. I mean, there's not a week goes by in my life when a young person calls me and says “I want to thank you for Youth Build. It saved my life. I would be dead or I would be in prison. If somebody hadn't pointed me to the door where I could find the opportunity and the skills and the caring and the friends and the people who are gonna support me in reaching my goals. So thank you.” BENNETT: I was with a friend who at that time was dealing in drugs, although I never dealt in drugs and I was working at the time, but it was my day off and I had around this time just decided that I wasn't gonna finish school at least not for that year anyway, I was an (unclear) at the time. BABICH: Antoine Bennett graduated from YouthBuild in 1996. BENNETT: It was one of my day offs, like I said and a friend of mine came to get me and he said that he had some trouble around the corner, so when I followed him around the corner, there was a gentleman, an older guy--we was 18 at the time so the guy had to be about 25, 2--and he started threatening us. And at that time, I was carrying a handgun on me. And a few words were exchanged and before I knew it I had drawn my weapon and I had fired, striking him in his like, abdomen. BABICH: What is it about your organization's philosophy that enables you all to really turn these lives around? STONEMANIt's a profound commitment on the part of all the adults involved to respect the intelligence of the young people walking in the door and their value as human beings. And to help them fulfill their potential. That feeling and commitment on the part of the adults, coupled with the conditions where they can fulfill it. For example, I used to be a public school teacher and I could not, regardless of my convictions and desire, meet the needs of the children who walked into my classroom, because there were too many of them and I was too few and the resources were inadequate and the pressures on them too great. In a YouthBuild program you've got 30 to 80 young people and you have 10 to 15 staff all of whom are focused on the young people in a way that creates a mini community and an internal culture, which the young people experience as family and they always say it. They say “I came looking for a job and I found a family and no one has ever cared about me in the way that the YouthBuild staff care about me, and so now, I can care about myself and I can care about my family because I've discovered that it's safe to care. BENNETT: For the youth that are out there that again, still feel disenfranchised and separated and isolated and frustrated about their situation whatever that might be, it might be a drug addiction at an early age, it might be making a crazy decision such as dropping out of school, or maybe a crazy situation where they might have, like I did, pulled the trigger and have to go to the penitentiary and now come back to their community only to be faced with maladjustment, only to be faced with a more deeper sense of disconnection. I'm glad that YouthBuild is in existence to grab hold of those type of folks. They are going into the cracks and crevices of our communities. They embrace you and they teach you and help you to reconnect with your community and reconnect back, more importantly with your life and with your family. And I'm just glad that YouthBuild is around. I'm just living testimony that the program works. BABICH: Before these young people arrive at YouthBuild USA and want to turn their lives around, what is it about our society, or our cities, or our governmental policies that create the milieu where young people are committing violent acts of crime? STONEMAN:It's the cumulative legacy of poverty and racism and the fact that young people are growing up under conditions which are extremely difficult. And although I say racism, I'm not just talking about African American youth. It's also true for rural white youth, the conditions that they grow up in. If they grow up with parents who are unemployed, or surrounded by alcoholism, and with a sense of no future, no jobs for them available. These five million young people are growing up under conditions of hardship, with parents who can't consistently care about them, who can't open the doors for them, in communities which are ridden with violence and with gangs and with opportunities to use and deal drugs, but no opportunities to get the job training they need. And with schools that aren't working for them because the schools—because the teachers are over-extended and the schools don't know how to create a positive peer culture. BABICH: What was it about YouthBuild that helped you save—further your life? BENNETT: I think the leadership development piece was sort of the glue that kept me stuck through the program, that really stuck to me actually. So that was appealing to me. But the thing that really set YouthBuild apart for me, versus other programs that I heard about, is that—the family environment. And just the heavy emphasis on “You can do anything that you put your mind to.” And I know that probably sounds a little cliché but if you never heard that growing up in your lifetime, until you were twenty-two I mean, it's just like a—it's equal to a culture shock. I can really be—you know, imagine if someone woulda told me that or showed me that—not to paint a grim picture here but imagine if someone told me that and showed me that—proud of me pulling that trigger or proud of me going to Merlin State Penitentiary BABICH: Antoine Bennett who graduated from YouthBuild in 1996 now works for Eden Job Services, a job placement center in the neighborhood of Sand Town in Baltimore, Maryland. You also heard from Dorothy Stoneman, President and founder of YouthBuild USA. And that's it for this edition of Making Contact: A look at youth violence, root causes and positive solutions. Thanks for listening. And special thanks to Jimmy Durschlag in the Mainstream Media Project for editorial assistance. If you would like more information about the subject of this week's program, or if you would like to get in touch with any of our guests, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. That's 800-529-5736. You can also visit our website at radioproject.org (repeat). Lisa Rudman is our executive director. Peggy Law, founding director. Associate Producer, Aimee Pomerleau. Office manager, Rosalyn Fay. Associate manager, Susanna Hines, Senior advisor, Norman Solomon. National advisor, David Barsamian. And, I'm Managing Producer, Phillip Babich. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter trio. Until next time. |