By David L Kirp
Wrong place, wrong time — “I was shot nine times,” a teenager, whom I’ll call J.B. to protect his safety, told me. “I got shot because they had a gun and they wanted to do something.” Somehow he survived.
Drive-by shootings are commonplace in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, where the homicide rate rivals that of the world’s most murderous cities. One boy arrested for having a gun was asked why he carried it. “You need to be ready to defend yourself,” he said. “Two of my friends were shot. It was a drive-by, turf war.”
Violence often generates violence, but not in J.B.’s case. “I don’t think about the retaliation anymore,” he said.
J.B. is one of about 800 young people who, based on their history, have been assessed as at the greatest risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of violence. In a program called C2C, for Choose to Change, they get support, mentoring and therapy to disrupt this deadly cycle.
J.B. can count on always having a mentor in his corner — “a father figure” who “didn’t let me think myself down” — and the other adolescents I met said much the same.
“Raevon’s a smart guy,” said T.R., another program participant, referring to his mentor, Raevon Watkins. “He helped me grow a lot. Once I was really falling out with my sister and her boyfriend, and I called him. I felt like I learned something, versus ‘he’s against me too.’ He’s older and been through stuff.”
The mentors work for the Youth Advocate Programs, which for 40 years has helped high-risk youth stay out of prison. “I try to give them soft and hard reminders,” said another mentor, Tabresha Posey. She tells them: “You know I care about you, but your friend is dead. How are you going to change that?” and “Retaliation is just going to keep it going. That won’t solve the problem.”
Once a week, J.B. goes to a group-therapy session tailored for teenagers who have been traumatized so often that trauma is taken for granted. “It becomes so normal for a peer to die,” said Amanda Whitlock, the vice president of behavioral health services at Children’s Home and Aid, one of the largest social service providers in Illinois, which operates the therapy program. “The kids say, ‘I know X amount of people who have been shot.’” Someone dies, she said, the kids pull out their phones, get a shirt made for the funeral, tie balloons around the block and move on.
“My boys say they will be dead by 21,” said Mashaun Alston, who leads one of the groups. As Ms. Whitlock put it, “Why would I not do what I want to do if I’m not going to be alive by 21?”
The therapy sessions challenge this fatalism by showing these adolescents how their traumatic experiences are running their lives — how “emotional leftovers” can lead them to automatic behavior that makes things worse. The sessions give them tools they can use to slow down and think through their options in times of stress.
Does it work? The Crime Lab at the University of Chicago is conducting a random-control trial to evaluate this strategy. The lab, as its director, Jens Ludwig, explained, has a decade-long track record of “doing good science that is focused on solving the city’s problems, like reducing gun violence and reducing dropouts, rather than just publishing in journals, the usual orientation of academics.”
The lab has evaluated two similar programs, one based in schools and the other in a juvenile detention center, which are also intended to help young people make smarter decisions in high-stakes circumstances. Both worked well. The program for incarcerated juveniles cut recidivism by 21 percent. The school-based initiative reduced arrests for violent crimes by half while the students were in the program. The Crime Lab calculated that by reducing the societal cost of crime, every dollar spent on the program saved $5 to $30. Graduation rates also increased.
Eighteen months into the C2C experiment, preliminary results show that the arrest rate for violent crimes among the participants has been cut in half. Many of these teenagers had dropped out of school; nudged by their mentors, most have returned. As T.R. told me, “You can’t do school and the streets.” Going back to school gives them a shot at a decent career. As Chris Sutton at Youth Advocate Programs told me, “These are smart, creative kids.”
Perhaps most interesting, the impact of the program reached beyond the participants. “We were serving this young lady, who was pregnant, and the boyfriend didn’t want her doing X, Y, Z,” Mr. Sutton said. “I gave the boyfriend employment and she was able to see the project through.” And as Mr. Watkins pointed out, teenagers like J.B. “are leading by example.” Friends see “how the kids in the program are doing, and all of them want to be in the program.”
This is what psychologists have shown and parents have always understood: Peers influence teenagers to do things they might not do on their own.
“Crime is a choice” — that is the provocative assertion these studies are testing, and if the research proves it, it is headline-worthy news. We may dream of eradicating poverty, wiping out violence and converting all poor public schools into palaces of learning, but that’s a long way off. Meantime, the evidence from Chicago suggests that connecting adolescents who live in high-crime, high-poverty communities with stable, caring mentors and showing them how to reassess what are literally life-or-death decisions can turn their lives around.
Fuente del artículo: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/opinion/violence-chicago-teenagers.html
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