W ith all the media hand-wringing over Hartford's problems with violent youth, no one seems to be discussing that first, youth violence has decreased during the past 25 to 30 years, and second, the common sense solution is full funding for a complete range of youth programs.

Of course, we can't spend money on literacy training, violence prevention, job readiness, or civic action primers. That would coddle thuggish teenagers. Yet the FBI's Uniform Crime report states that between 1993 and 2003, youth homicide arrests declined by 75 percent, and in that same period, youth violent crime fell by 46 percent .

But those hard numbers contradict the youth violence narrative constructed by politician, perpetuated by the media, profited on by the prison system and advertised by 50 Cent.

In 1997, Connecticut had a minority youth population of 26 percent, yet according to Buildingblocksforyouth.org, "minority youth comprised 83 percent of commitments to public facilities and 77 percent of detention placements."

So, racism is alive and well in the juvenile justice system, and newspapers across the state mourn the murder rate among under-21s in the capital city, no one notes that this deadly spate seems an anomaly against 30-year trends, nor do the papers wonder why or examine root causes (grinding poverty, violent society, etc).

Only Colin Poitras' gem in Monday, June 20's Hartford Courant even pokes in that area. Poitras reported about the state Department of Children and Families' tiny prevention budget Ð roughly one-tenth of one percent of $726 million. If prevention were the disease, that sum represents a vaccination against it.

A cure of crisis management surprises me not, nor does the failure of newspapers to connect the dots. The same week the Courant runs stories about a fatal punch in the head, it runs a story about the Hartford school system struggling to pay for summer school for 1,000 young people.

This is the same Courant that can't find money to pay for MetroBridge, its own attempt to address the fact that Hartford secondary schools lack school newspapers.

Literacy funding is a crime prevention strategy. A google of "literacy training crime prevention" spits out 469,000 results.

"Violent offenders have significantly lower literacy skills than the general population," according to one such website, LiteracyBC, a provincial organization that promotes and supports literacy in British Columbia, Canada.

To Hartford Police Chief Patrick Harnett, the answer is computer analysis of crime waves. When Chief Harnett leaves soon (as he assured us he will do), I want a police chief who pounds their fist saying that not all youth are bad, that federal Department of Justice Weed and Seed grant monies are insufficient, that we need to spend more building youth assets than constructing jails, that the war on drugs dooms our youth, that their behavior reflects the society we live in.

Weed and Seed funds are paltry, another vaccine. On Friday, June 17, the Hartford Police Department announced that the DOJ granted Hartford eligibility for Weed and Seed monies.

Hartford can apply for $175,000 a year for Upper Albany and Clay-Arsenal for the next five years, according to George Jones, the HPD grant coordinator.

With an additional $50,000 bonus, Hartford could have a windfall on its hands. Or not. The DOJ requires that half of that money be spent on "weeding" - aggressive law enforcement of specified neighborhoods. How many youth who rely on drug dealing to eat will that send to jail?

So, we can spend a maximum of $112,500 on youth development in those troubled neighborhoods, or, roughly, 120 youth annually. Figure $12 pays for one child's daily tuition in a two-hour after school program. 20 children in a room for four days a week for 20 weeks would cost us $19,200.

Considering that the last Weed and Seed grant was so poorly administered that Jones, in a forensic accounting, couldn't figure out how many youth benefited from the program, I don't place much faith in this effort.

Compounding all this problem is Hartford's lack of a cohesive strategy around violence prevention or even one addressing youth-police relationships, said youth advocate Fahd Vahidy.

Vahidy, who used to work with me at Our Piece of the Pie, now serves as treasurer of the Hartford Youth Network, a collaboration of the city's 30 main youth services providers.

The funding for youth is decreasing all around, if we use job training as an example, Vahidy said. Federal, state and local funds in 1998 provided summer jobs for 2,600 young people.

"This summer the city will be lucky to train 1,000 youth," Vahidy said. "Last year it was 1,200 students. Every year there have been significant drops in funding."

While Vahidy can't find empirical evidence linking job training to violence prevention, the money that we need to fully fund our youth programs doesn't equal what we spend in Iraq every month.

6/22/05

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Literacy funding is a crime prevention strategy

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Literacy funding is a crime prevention strategy

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