Life-Skills Programs Combat Juvie Crime, Baca’s Legal Issues, and “Breaking Bad”

LIFE-SKILLS PROGRAMS GREATLY REDUCE JUVIE ARREST RATES

Enrolling disadvantaged teens in life-skills programs may bring down juvenile arrests for violent crime by as much as 44%, according to a report released Friday by the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

The Crime Report has the story. Here’s a clip:

Researchers analyzed the impact of enrolling 2,740 disadvantaged seventh through 10th grade boys in Becoming A Man (BAM)—Sports Edition, a Chicago program which focuses on developing cognitive skills related to emotional regulation and other social behaviors. In addition to the reduction in violent-crime arrests, the study found an increase in schooling outcomes that could translate to a 10 to 23 percent increase in graduation rates among participants.

The report itself is worth reading. Here’s a clip:

Our findings show that program participation significantly increased school engagement and performance by 0.14 standard deviations during the program year and by 0.19 standard deviations in the follow-up year, impacts that imply future graduation rate increases of about 10 to 23 percent of the control group’s graduation rate. Program participation also reduced violent crime arrests by 44 percent (8 fewer arrests per 100 participants) and arrests in the ‘other’ (miscellaneous) category, which includes vandalism and weapons crime, by 36 percent (11.5 fewer arrests per 100 participants) during the program year. These findings are particularly noteworthy given the challenging settings in which the intervention took place. (In fact, our study is closer to what evaluation researchers would call an effectiveness trial of how a program would operate at scale than it is to the sort of smaller-scale efficacy trials carried out under ideal conditions by program developers and researchers.) The positive program effects provide the most rigorous, large-scale evidence to date that a social-cognitive skill intervention can improve both schooling and delinquency outcomes for disadvantaged youth.

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THE SHERIFF’S MOUNTING LEGAL TROUBLES

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a long story over the weekend about LA County Sheriff Lee Baca’s expanding list of serious legal challenges, including the ACLU’s most recent lawsuits against the department (that WitnessLA reported here and here), the issues raised at the jails commission hearings, the 200 newly recalled department badges that had been passed out unwisely to civilians—and a lot more.

SF Gate’s Greg Risling has the detailed story. Here’s a clip:

“We could call for his resignation daily, but it’s not going to do any good,” said Peter Eliasberg, the ACLU Southern California legal director, who called for Baca to step down late last year. “If he stays on, he’s got to fix these problems. There are some glimmers of hope, but it’s far from what we’d like to see.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, a constant critic of the sheriff and a court-appointed monitor of jail conditions, sued Tuesday, alleging that inmates charged with assaulting deputies have been unable to get evidence that could help exonerate them.

At the core of the problems facing the department is how its deputies treat some of the estimated 15,000 inmates in county jails. The ACLU has filed another lawsuit accusing Baca and some other department officials of condoning violence against inmates.

Last year the civil rights group released a report that documented more than 70 cases of alleged abuse and other misconduct by deputies, many of which occurred at Men’s Central Jail. The FBI has launched its own investigation and asked for internal department records dealing with inmate abuse.

On July 6, Capt. Michael Bornman testified before a county commission looking into deputy abuse in the jails that the former head of the jail, Capt. Daniel Cruz, resisted efforts to investigate employees who were accused of excessive force. Bornman described a culture of brutality where Cruz allegedly joked about not hitting inmates in their face so marks wouldn’t be visible. Cruz has denied the accusations.

However, Bornman said his boss has been addressing and correcting the problems in the jails.

Baca, 70, who has said he’s to blame for deputy misconduct against inmates and wasn’t available for comment Friday, pointed out in a letter to the Los Angeles Times that some of the media coverage has been unfair.

“Criticism is necessary; so are all the facts,” Baca wrote to the paper’s editor on Friday regarding Bornman’s testimony. “I simply ask you to present both.”

You can read the rest of Baca’s letter to the LA Times here.

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“BREAKING BAD” A GOOD REPRESENTATION OF DRUG INDUSTRY

AMC’s “Breaking Bad”, whose fifth (and final) season premiered Sunday, is actually a pretty accurate depiction of the meth business–from the drug production to the Mexican cartels.

The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe has the story. Here’s a clip:

…“Breaking Bad” is a chamber piece, relying on the shifting alliances and betrayals of the same handful of players. The show presents a challenge, for Gilligan and his writers, to configure and reconfigure, like playing an endless game of Scrabble using only the same eight letters.

So it’s somewhat surprising that in depicting the mechanics of the meth business, “Breaking Bad” is so notably realistic. I spent the past six months interviewing drug traffickers and D.E.A. agents for an article about the business side of a Mexican drug cartel, and, having been an ardent fan of “Breaking Bad,” I was startled by how much the show gets right. On one level, the show is a parable about the impossibility of running a mom-and-pop business in a world of rapacious multinational conglomerates. In this sense, it shares a basic template with Oliver Stone’s lurid “Savages”—or, for that matter, with “You’ve Got Mail.” The difference in the case of Walter White, the show’s protagonist, is that Pop ends up waging bloody war on the conglomerate. And winning.

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Photo by WitnessLA