Budget Cuts Imperil Youth Crime Programs

FOX BUTTERFIELD / NY Times 9mar03

PORTLAND, OR — At 15, Karl had dropped out of school, had a small-time drug habit and was hanging out on the streets with friends who were supporting themselves by shoplifting.

When Karl himself was picked up by the police for possession of marijuana, he would normally have been taken to the Multnomah County Juvenile Detention Center here, the juvenile jail.

But two years ago, with a $200,000 federal grant, the county started a program under which Karl and other teenagers like him who would have been charged with minor offenses are now taken to a privately run center where they receive a clinical assessment, drug treatment and the chance to remake their lives.

Karl, whose last name is not public because he is a juvenile, has become drug free, officials say, and is about to earn his high school equivalency degree. In fact, since the program began, the number of young people being taken to the regular juvenile jail has fallen 73 percent, said Joanne Fuller, the director of the county Department of Community Justice.

But the Portland program, known as New Avenues for Youth, is in danger of being eliminated because of $250 million in proposed cuts in juvenile justice programs in President Bush's budget for next year, along with $400 million in cuts in after-school programs for children at risk of falling into delinquency.

"If the cuts go through, all our work goes away," Ms. Fuller said.

In his State of the Union address, Mr. Bush said he would "apply the compassion of America to the deepest problems of America" by introducing a $150-million-a-year program to provide mentors for children with parents in prison and disadvantaged middle school students.

But when the president's budget was made public, it also called for eliminating $250 million in juvenile justice programs under what are known as juvenile accountability incentive block grants.

The president's budget also proposed reducing after-school programs by $400 million. This would mean ending after-school programs for 500,000 students, according to Department of Education figures.

Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman, said a reason for the cuts in the after-school and juvenile justice programs was that new evaluations ordered by the Office of Management and Budget found either that they were ineffective or that there was no way to measure their effectiveness.

Mr. McClellan said it was important to focus on results, not just on the size of the programs or their dollar amounts. A smaller, more well-run afterschool program can improve children's lives more significantly than a larger, less effective program, he said.

But law enforcement officials, child welfare advocates, school administrators and even some conservative Republicans in Congress who were sponsors of the program say they are worried about the proposals, particularly when, after a decade of decline, juvenile crime has started to rise again.

"The administration is offering a needed service, mentoring, with one hand, while snatching away after-school programs with the other," said Sanford Newman, the president of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, an anticrime organization made up of police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors and victims of violence.

Local officials and advocates say they are particularly troubled by the cuts in the after-school programs because the hours between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. are the peak hours for teenagers to commit crimes, use drugs and have sex.

In Portland, Terry Herrera, a seventh grader at the Harriet Tubman Middle School, says her school's after-school program made a difference for her. "Before I didn't do my homework because there were so many distractions at home," Ms. Herrera, 13, said. She said the television was usually on, and people were talking and shouting.

"But now there is a teacher right here to help me if I don't understand," Ms. Herrera said.

After only two years, it is too early to measure success with precision, acknowledged Dunya Minoo, the coordinator for the 21st Century Learning Centers in north Portland, which were created under President Bush's No Child Left Behind education program. But at the Tubman School attendance is up, classroom suspensions are down, and the proportion of eighth graders passing Oregon's statewide writing test has soared to 75 percent, up from only 3 percent two years ago, she said.

Although Mr. Bush's budget for next year would trim after-school programs for 500,000 students, Daniel Langan, a spokesman for the Department of Education, said the president's new program to link disadvantaged middle school students with adult mentors would serve one million students over the next three years. Some students would have mentors for one year, some for two years and some for the full three years, Mr. Langan said.

But, with a budget of $100 million a year, that would mean the administration is providing an average of $100 a year per student.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, which operates a highly regarded mentoring program, says that the national average cost for finding a good adult mentor and sustaining the relationship is $1,000 annually.

In Mr. Bush's budget, there is also $50 million a year for mentors for 100,000 children with parents in prison, out of an estimated two million children with incarcerated fathers and mothers.

In Portland, the endangered federal money from the Juvenile Accountability Incentive Block Grants goes to several other programs in addition to New Avenues for Youth.

The county has also used it to hire a neighborhood district attorney who spends her time working in selected poor areas of the city targeting drug houses and illegal gun sales, and to employ eight social workers who try to prevent violence by establishing relationships with young gang members and their families.

One recent afternoon, several of the gang workers rushed to the front of a high school when they heard nine shots fired. It turned out to be young men in two cars shooting at each other. Two people were shot, one in the stomach, the other hit twice in the leg; both were drug dealers and gang members, said Tanya Dickens, a gang worker who knew them.

The reason for the shooting was that the victims were Bloods driving in territory claimed by the Crips, said Ms. Dickens, who has visited them regularly in their homes in recent months.

At the hospital, Ms. Dickens and the other gang workers moved quickly to try to prevent violence from escalating, calming the victims' relatives and making sure rival gang members did not sneak into the building to continue shooting.

Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, who was one of the authors of the juvenile block grant program, said he planned to fight to try to keep it intact. "I don't think we should reduce funding for these programs," Mr. Sessions said. "We should be increasing funding."

With young people in poor and high-crime neighborhoods, "You can't save them all," Senator Sessions said. "We are working at the margins." So if 10 percent can be saved by one program and 10 percent by another, he added, "we are making progress."