Graffiti vandals brush up on good citizenship : Youths are put to work on murals, other projects in the program. Officials say it helps stop the problem.

When 17-year-old high school senior John Burbus was arrested for spray-painting his name on a vacant building on trendy South Street, he was given a punishment to fit his crime: He was ordered to wield a paint brush.

Juvenile authorities assigned Burbus to work on one of the seven brightly colored murals being painted by Philadelphia’s Anti-Graffiti Network, a nonprofit, city-run program created in 1984 to clean up and stop the spread of graffiti.

The program has been an undisputed success for outgoing Mayor W. Wilson Goode, whose Administration is generally remembered for its fiscal woes and a bungled police operation that brought death and destruction to an entire neighborhood in 1985.

Last month, the network was awarded $100,000 by the Ford Foundation and Harvard University for being one of the country’s 10 most innovative social programs.

According to director Tim Spencer, the program this year has involved more than 900 children who have cleaned and repainted graffiti-littered schools, cemeteries, parks and neighborhoods. Since 1984, kids have helped design and paint more than 1,000 murals throughout the city, giving the community a much-needed face lift.

Many of the youngsters also have attended classes in art, computers, college preparation and job counseling. Over 100 participants this year were youths like Burbus, sent by the juvenile courts for vandalizing with paint.

Since winning the Harvard grant, Spencer has been contacted by more than 20 cities, including Los Angeles, interested in starting similar programs.

But despite the enthusiasm, the $800,000-a-year program may be an extravagance that the City of Brotherly Love can no longer afford. Facing a record $250-million deficit, Philadelphia is thinking of dropping or sharply cutting the program in 1992.

According to an aide for incoming Mayor Ed Rendell, the network is certain to lose at least some city funding. Even Goode has said that his pet project should be dropped.

But Jane Golden, a transplanted Californian who is the chief muralist, hopes that won’t happen. “Philadelphia will lose a great deal if it kills this,” Golden said. “There is nothing like it.”

Golden, who moved here in 1983 after painting public walls for the city of Santa Monica in the ‘70s, says more than 2,000 citizens, enthused with the effects that murals have had on neighborhoods, are on a waiting list to have their walls adorned.

“Suddenly, lots turn into gardens. People want to sweep their streets,” said Golden, moments before a motorist passing her group’s current wall scene, the signing of William Penn’s first treaty with the Lanape Indians, shouted: “Looks great.”

Another mural completed this year, titled “Stop the Violence,” is a tribute to young people killed in the cross-fire of drug- and gang-related violence. Still another, designed by Golden and two former graffiti painters, is a colorful abstraction featured on the recent top-10 album by Philadelphia rap artists DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.

Officials say graffiti painters tend to respect the larger-than-life, colorful murals that often obliterate the work of spray-can vandals. “The reason for graffiti is recognition and competition,” Spencer said. “We try to build (graffiti vandals’) self-esteem through other activities.”

One of Philadelphia’s most prolific graffiti painters from the early ‘80s--now an occasional network volunteer--agreed.

Rocco Albano, 24, said painting graffiti “is like throwing your ego onto a wall to say, ‘Hey, look at me.’ ” Albano said he and his friends would fantasize about a post-apocalyptic scene in which nuclear war survivors stumble upon their neon-colored names shining through the rubble.

Albano said today’s graffiti writer is younger and is more likely to slap his name or “tag” on “public statues, art museums, cemeteries and churches,” areas traditionally untouched by his generation.

According to Philadelphia police, this new breed includes those who use walls to communicate with drug dealers and to memorialize arrested or murdered drug dealers.

Spencer argues that these kids will unleash a new cloud of paint if his program is killed. “Graffiti will reappear very loud. These kids will feel like they can do it without fear,” he said.

Burbus is also someone who hopes the network will survive.

“I feel like I am changing something, making society look better,” he said as he worked on finishing his first mural.

The city should clean graffiti, he added, because “if they fix the little things first, maybe they can fix the big things.”