Preventing Crime, Saving Children:
Monitoring, Mentoring, & Ministering
Second
Report of The Council on Crime in America
The following
is a summary of the Second Report of the Council on Crime in America,
published February 1997. The Council on Crime in America is a bipartisan
national organization, established in November 1995 to examine violent
crime, crime prevention and law enforcement.
A major part of America's
crime prevention challenge is to reengineer the juvenile justice system,
and to reconnect it to responsible adult citizens in the communities most
affected by juvenile crime, in ways that keep minnows from becoming sharks.
Improving the connections
between responsible adults and young people is the core element of effective
crime prevention.
First,
no approach that does not build connections between responsible adults
and young people has worked.
Second,
there are in existence models of how to improve these adult/youth
connections, which only need replication and expansion to take their effectiveness
to scale.
Third,
strong relationships with caring adults are the bedrock of a young person's
civil behavior toward others, as well as the primary avenue for securing
other services and opportunities (such as jobs) that are key to a civil
and self-sufficient life. In short, the human factor is the linchpin to
effective youth crime prevention.
Monitoring
By "monitoring"
we mean community-based adult supervision of juveniles who have been in
trouble with the law-both formal or official monitoring by probation officers,
and informal or voluntary monitoring by responsible, neighborhood-level
adults.
An example of a successful,
innovative, community-rooted juvenile monitoring program is Philadelphia's
Youth Aid Panel. YAP is a no-nonsense community-based program that gives
certain categories of youth offenders a second (and often a final) chance.
Early data suggests that the vast majority of juveniles who participate
in YAP--perhaps as high as 80 percent--never commit a serious crime or
see the inside of a prison.
The goals of YAP are
two-fold: to unclog the city's courts by diverting first-time non-felony
offender cases away from the courts, and to reduce recidivism among youthful
offenders that may lead to chronic criminality in the absence of some
intervention.
Each YAP consists
of about ten adult residents of the police district who volunteer to spend
two evenings each month, two hours per evening, hearing two cases per
session. The Assistant DA in charge of the YAP program reviews the case
of each juvenile offender arrested in the city the previous day to determine
if the case and the youth are appropriate for YAP disposition. In order
to quality, the youth must have committed his first misdemeanor offense;
must admit his guilt; must be able to appear with a parent or other connected,
supervising adult; and must be enrolled in school.
Panel members review
the charges, then interview the offender. They may also interview his
parents, the victims or others as they see fit. Following a brief private
discussion, the panelists inform the offender of his punishment, which
typically includes a combination of community service, restitution, curfew,
essay-writing, counseling, letters of apology, a research project, or
other tasks.
The terms of punishment
are written up in contract form and signed by the offender and a monitor
selected from the panelists. If the contract is completed within three
months the file is closed and the record cleared. If the offender fails
to complete his contract in the time allowed, or he recants his guilty
plea, he returns to Family Court for adjudication.
- 90 percent of offenders
who are offered the YAP opportunity accept it and most complete their
contracts.
- YAPs are successful
because the adult volunteers live in the offender's neighborhood; know
the neighborhood norms and standards; know also who commits crime in
the area and where; and can act as the community's eyes and ears.
- The overall recidivism
rate among all offenders who have appeared before Yaps since 1987 is
about 20 percent, far below the recidivism rate among young people who
are adjudicated in a traditional, court setting for first-time offenses.
- The YAP program
costs significantly less than traditional Family Court proceedings because
it relies entirely on volunteers.
- Youth who complete
their contracts are discharged without ceremony or congratulation. The
Yaps provide "monitoring, not mentoring," and maintaining
that distinction is essential to the success of the program.
- The panelists are
intensely loyal to the program. Many volunteers have served since the
program's inception in the mid-80s. One shortcoming is that the program
does not attract many black male volunteers, a distinct problem in the
many districts where offenders are almost all young black men.
- The DA's Office
has consulted with more than 40 other localities about undertaking a
YAP-like effort, but few have been initiated. The most prominent reason
is that other jurisdictions cannot count on the kind of backing that
the DA's Office in Philadelphia gives to the Yaps, and which is essential
to their success.
Mentoring
A three year control
group study by Public/Private Ventures (P/PV) found that mentoring done
by Big Brothers/Big Sisters (BB/BS) positively affects at-risk youth.
P/PV conducted a comparative
study on 10- to 16-year olds who applied to BB/BS programs in eight cities
during 1992 and 1993. Half of these youth were randomly assigned to a
treatment group, for which BB/BS mentoring matches were made or attempted;
the other half were assigned to BB/BS waiting lists.
The results were positive:
- Little Brothers
and Little Sisters were 46 percent less likely than controls to initiate
drug use during the 18 month study period. An even stronger effect was
found for minority Little Brothers and Little Sisters, who were 70
percent less likely to initiate drug use than other similar
minority youth.
- Little Brothers
and Little Sisters were 27 percent less likely than controls to initiate
alcohol use during the study period; minority Little Sisters were only
about one-half as likely to initiate alcohol use.
- Little Brothers
and Little Sisters were almost one-third less likely than controls to
hit someone.
- Little Brothers
and Little Sisters skipped half as many days of school as did control
youth, felt more competent about doing schoolwork, skipped one-third
fewer classes and showed modest gains in their grade point averages-all
in an 18 month period. These gains were strongest among Little Sisters,
particularly minority Little Sisters.
- The quality of
relationships with parents was better for Little Brothers and Little
Sisters than for controls at the end of the study period; lying to parents
was about one-third less among youth who had Big Brothers or Sisters.
This effect was strongest for white Little Brothers.
P/PV did not find
statistically significant improvements in self-concept, nor in the number
of social and cultural activities in which Little Brothers and Little
Sisters participated. In short, it was the relationship that mattered.
By becoming a friend and providing support to these youth, the mentors
positively influenced young lives in many ways.
Of the three types
of prevention initiatives reviewed in this report, mentoring for at-risk
adolescents has the most substantial evidence behind it in terms of effectiveness
and good practice.
Ministering
The Partnership for
Research on Religion and At-Risk Youth (PRRAY), together with the Manhattan
Institute, the Brookings Institution, a number of major research universities,
several major foundations, and other national organizations have begun
to coordinate their efforts around the need to support and strengthen
the street-level, children-saving, and community-building work of churchmen
like Reverend Eugene Rivers, III, Pastor Benjamin Smith, and Reverend
Hillary Gaston.
Reverend Rivers has
established an inner-city youth ministry in Boston, that goes beyond the
most ambitious monitoring and mentoring programs. His "10 Point Plan
to Mobilize the Churches," was featured in a column by George Will
entitled "Restoring A Sense of the Sacred," Washington Post,
September 5, 1996, p. A23.
The Deliverance Evangelistic
Church in Philadelphia, ministered by Reverend Smith, is successfully
battling youth violence by organizing classes in youth literacy, adult
literacy, prison fellowship, one-on-one attention to drug addicts, and
much more. (See The Washington Post, September 5, 1996, p. A23.)
Reverend Gaston, a
former police officer, and pastor of Parchester Baptist Church in the
Bronx, NY, operates the "Latch-key Ministry," an after-school
program to provide help with homework, a nutritious meal and recreation
for children ranging in age from 5 to 12.
As stated in the Washington
Post article, "African American churches may be saving more than
their communities souls. By preaching--and demonstrating that the solutions
of most social problems begin with spiritual rather than material betterment,
they may be saving the nation's soul as well."
The first report,
The State of Violent Crime in America, January 1996, is available online
at http://legal.firn.edu/documents/crime/.
For more information, contact The Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue,
New York, NY 10017. Telephone (212) 599-7000. E-mail: mi@manhattan-institute.org
This summary is provided by the Texas Youth Commission. For more information about programs and research relating to children, youth, and family issues, contact us by e-mail at prevention@tyc.state.tx.us or by telephone at (512) 424-6336.
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Prevention Summary
Texas Youth Commission