TO BE EQUAL COLUMN 24 Reducing Juvenile Crime: What Works and What Doesn't By Hugh B. Price President National Urban League For two decades Americans have been bombarded with super-heated rhetoric about the "epidemic" of juvenile crime, either already upon us, or coming soon to our very neighborhoods. Those warnings all too often seem to be justified by incidents of violence by juveniles-random acts of mass killings at schools, brazen robberies, and assaults and murders that are cold-blooded and often sadistic-that have left us at times shocked into silence. And anger. The result all across the country has been a floodtide of so-called get tough laws and policies that are filling juvenile detention centers and, increasingly, adult jails and prisons, with the nation's youth. Some think this approach of meeting brute force with greater brute force is the answer to juvenile crime. Instead, it's part of the problem-in fact, after a sharp increase in the 1980s and early 1990s, juvenile crimes in all significant categories has fallen substantially-and if it continues, it will only make the problem worse. So says, Richard A. Mendel, the author of a new comprehensive report on juvenile justice just released by the American Youth Policy Forum. The report is titled, "Less Hype, More Help: Reducing Juvenile Crime, What Works-and What Doesn't." AYPF is a non-profit professional development organization which provides information on a nonpartisan basis on youth policy issues. Its goal is to foster a more reasoned national discussion about the complex and significant challenges of juvenile crime in America, and, most important, to bring to public notice the many promising approaches to youth crime that currently receive too little attention and too few resources. The National Urban League is a co-sponsor of the report, along with the Child Welfare League of America, the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, the National Collaboration for Youth, the National Crime Prevention Council, and the Institute for Youth, Education, and Families of the National League of Cities. Mendel, an experienced, independent researcher on youth development and community economic development, says the best way to attack juvenile crime is, first, through deterring young people from committing crime in the first place. That means funneling resources to effective programs that inspire children to do well in school and provide them with positive after-school experiences. But when young people do break the law, Mendel writes, then our responsibility as adults is to help them step away from the path of delinquent behavior even as they are punished for their offense. In fact, except for truly violent juvenile offenders, that should most often mean something other than a "hard" lock-down in a juvenile-or, increasingly, adult-jail or prison. It should most often involve treatment that addresses the root causes of most juvenile delinquency, carried out in a group-home or residential-treatment facility, or even through specially validated community organizations. And, critically, that treatment must involve mobilizing neighborhoods and communities to play significant roles in both attacking the problems that contribute to delinquent behavior among juveniles and being part of the solution for individual young offenders. The AYPF study is the latest of several recent reports from several different organizations that together have sounded alarm bells about a juvenile justice system that is sagging badly under a crushing load of ill-conceived policies and mis-allocated resources. The get-tough approach to juvenile crime is futile as a measure of either prevention or rehabilitation. It's a sham to think that simply warehousing huge numbers of youthful offenders is going to solve the problem-especially since the correctional facilities are notorious for simply making those incarcerated more alienated and more hardened. Furthermore, as several other recent studies have shown conclusively, the juvenile justice system is beset with a pervasive racism: African-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American youth are dealt with far more harshly than with white juveniles charged with and convicted of the same offense at every stage of the process. Mendel's words of warning in this report filled with specific recommendations for change are blunt. "America has both the knowledge and the money ... to substantially reduce adolescent crime and youth violence," he writes. "We have the know-how to reduce the number of young people likely to join the next generation of adult criminals. Better yet, we can likely achieve this goal at a cost no greater (and perhaps, considerably less) than what we will spend if current juvenile justice policies and programs remain in place." But, he warns us, "the bad news is that-at all levels of government-the changes necessary to win the battle against juvenile crime are not being enacted. Even worse, many local, state and federal leaders have instead been passing laws and funding programs that simply don't work-including some very expensive efforts that may actually increase juvenile crime." America, are you listening? After all, these are our young people we're talking about. 24 TBE 6/12/2000 TO BE EQUAL 120 Wall Street, NY, NY 10005