Continued...

Policymakers in Trenton seem to agree with Carter’s analysis. In 2007, New Jersey did away with its “crime czar” housed in the attorney general’s office and turned to a $36-million anti-crime plan rooted in local initiatives after a state police report found gang activity in 43 percent of New Jersey communities and all but one county. While the plan includes standard methods of prevention—modern data collection and analysis-based policing for less sophisticated police departments; more vigorous investigative responses to shootings, with findings reported to Trenton within eight hours; and increasing efforts to curb illegal gun traffic—it also involves community members in developing their own anti-violence strategies and implementing re-entry programs for released prisoners.

Creighton Drury, newly appointed New Jersey assistant attorney general and the statewide director for the crime prevention initiative, says this move has been a long time coming: “We know that we need to talk about prevention and getting to the root causes of issues if we really want to make a difference in crime and neighborhood revitalization, bringing cities back, and helping to improve the school systems.”

The program was designed as a comprehensive approach to thinking about crime prevention statewide, but also as a means to clean out some of the bureaucratic clutter, expanding on and combining initiatives spearheaded by the state’s Department of Children and Families, Department of Vocation, Department of Labor, Department of Health, and the Juvenile Justice Commission. “The challenge heretofore is that decision makers in those departments had not been coordinating their efforts, so we’re also connecting the dots here,” Drury says, adding that in the grants-management process “decisions about what we’re funding across departments will not continue to be made in vacuums.”

Drury, who worked for seven years for the Paterson-based New Jersey Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit community development and social services organization, and was a private-practice attorney for four years, echoes Clark in saying that creating viable alternatives to crime is essential in youth outreach and crime prevention. He believes that states need to work more closely with community grass-roots, nonprofit, faith-based, and school groups that can connect with at-risk children. “The question is how you’re going to engage them. If you give kids something they can feel good about, that’s a better attraction than the alternatives and the pressures you’re seeing on the streets,” he says.

The New Jersey plan identifies 20 communities that will be addressed first, but six cities—Camden, Vineland, Asbury Park, Trenton, Newark, and Paterson—have been selected for pilot programs involving local coordinating councils.

Drury points to the New York-based Harlem Children’s Zone as a successful model for re-establishing community fabric—helping to fuse family engagement, intervention in childhood development, employment and affordable-housing opportunities, activities for adolescents, and a full education. “The work that’s being done by the Harlem Children’s Zone and Geoffrey Canada—a community developer—was a real inspiration for us. He realized that if people wanted to have a meaningful impact in their community, they needed to make sure that there was the right opportunity at every point from childhood, to young adulthood, and beyond.”

Canada’s ultimate objective for the kids in his program is college, which he calls the “ultimate measurement” of success. If more young people are not headed to college, he told the PBS host Charlie Rose during an interview in January, “we will create the next generation of poor New Yorkers.”

Canada has also called for an overhaul of public school systems. He says that while he is not anti-union, “teachers unions are creating obstacles to progress,” adding that “it should not be impossible to fire” teachers. He sees education as on par with national security and has called for a longer school year (“180 days doesn’t cut it anymore.”).

The Community Guide, an organization sponsored by the CDC’s National Center for Health Marketing and the Community Guide Partners, indicates that over the past 25 years, youth aged 10 to 17, comprising less than 12 percent of the population, have been involved as offenders in roughly one-quarter of reported serious acts of violence. The Community Guide points to violent and aggressive behavior in childhood as a principal contributor to violence later in adolescence. In 2007, the Community Guide’s Task Force on Community Preventive Services concluded that universal, school-based programs are effective in “preventing or reducing violent behavior,” going on to endorse implementation of these types of programs on “the basis of strong evidence of effectiveness.”

Harlem Children’s Zone, recognizing that these school-based assets were lacking in Harlem, in 1991 opened its first Beacon Center, serving youth and young adults ages 5 through 21. The centers offer education and recreation resources, as well as an alternative to the street, which Canada views as a pathway to higher education.

“Delinquent peers are major socializing forces in kids going in the wrong direction,” says Dr. Robert Hahn, a coordinating scientist in the CDC’s Violence Prevention Review. Hahn also points to more specific programs, including highly structured foster care, where youths are monitored at home, school, and during their free time, and rewarded or punished based on their social behavior.