State Bid to Curb Youth Violence Criticized

California’s effort to prevent its young from becoming criminals or crime victims is haphazard and underfunded and often fails to help those most in need, a state oversight panel concludes in a report released Tuesday.

Despite a steady decline in juvenile crime, the report calls youth violence a crisis and says prevention programs must no longer be viewed as a luxury by lawmakers and taxpayers.

“Alienated and disaffected young people are escaping the attention of families, friends and teachers until they explode into violence,” such as the March shootings that left two dead and 20 wounded at two San Diego County high schools, the report says.

Produced by a bipartisan panel, the Little Hoover Commission study says a growing body of research shows violence to be a learned behavior that can be curbed through tutoring, mentoring, counseling and other interventions.

The state runs more than 50 programs designed to help communities assist the young and their families. But they are scattered across a dozen departments, operate “in near isolation” from each other and often duplicate efforts, the report says.

The state has also failed to manage its spending on youth violence prevention--estimated at about $300 million--to get the most mileage for its dollars. Grants for local programs are “fragmented and uncoordinated” and tend to reward communities with the best grant writers, rather than those with the greatest need, the commission concludes.

As a result, “it’s very spotty. You’ll see a marvelous program doing wonders in one community and then go one city over and find big problems” getting no attention, said Sean Walsh, vice chairman of the commission.

The 107-page report--one of a series of policy missives regularly dispatched by the commission--also faults the state for failing to incorporate into policy the latest research on brain development, violence and prevention measures that work.

“Absent factual information, public policy is often driven by myth, bias and the ability of a particular proposal to garner support,” the report says. Some programs--such as the boot camps favored by Gov. Gray Davis--have even been shown to be ineffective, yet continue to receive funding, it says.

To improve the odds of success, the state should sponsor a nonprofit Youth Violence Prevention Institute to monitor research and train community leaders who can spread the gospel at the grass-roots level, the commission suggests.

Assisting those leaders--and acting as head cheerleader for the movement--should be a secretary of youth development and violence prevention, the report says.

Byron Tucker, spokesman for the governor, said administration officials were still reviewing the report and could not yet comment.

He added that Davis is “very supportive of efforts in the juvenile crime prevention arena and has allocated more dollars toward the effort than any administration in history.”

Last year, Tucker said, Davis signed a bill providing $121 million to counties for youth crime prevention programs.

Los Angeles County received $35 million of that sum just last month.

After a significant rise in the late 1980s, juvenile violent crime declined steadily during the late 1990s. The arrest rate for homicides, for example, peaked in 1991 then fell 70% from 1994 to 1999.

Those statistics, however, are just one dimension of what the U.S. surgeon general called “an ongoing, startlingly pervasive problem” in a January report. Among its findings: 30% to 40% of boys and 15% to 30% of girls say they have committed a serious violent offense by age 17.

In California, moreover, homicide is the second leading cause of death for those ages 15 to 24, and the third leading cause of death for those 10 to 14.

In March, the statistics were vividly underscored when a 15-year-old boy armed with a pistol killed two students and wounded 13 others at Santana High School in Santee. Seventeen days later, another young gunman--who was taking antidepressants and seeing a psychiatrist--shot and wounded five classmates and two staff members at a high school in nearby El Cajon.

For Californians, the shootings added urgency to a violence-prevention campaign that has been building over the last decade as science has documented the payoff of early intervention.

From after-school sports leagues to anti-truancy programs, mentoring and tutoring, efforts to steer children away from a life of crime are spreading. The independent California Wellness Foundation, for example, is in the ninth year of an initiative that has awarded grants totaling $70 million to anti-violence programs for young people.

Although crime prevention advocates welcomed the commission’s report, some questioned whether it would prod the Legislature and governor into making youth violence a priority--and shake loose more funding.

“These recommendations look great on paper, but it’s been obvious for years that our child welfare system is overwhelmed and underfunded,” said Dan Macallair of the nonprofit Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “The problem is: It’s not a powerful political constituency, so it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.”

The report seems to confirm that analysis. In 1996, it notes, a task force on juvenile crime criticized the state for many of the same faults cited by the commission. Of its 16 recommendations, only one has been put in place.