On Tuesday morning, The LA County Board of Supervisors voted to okay a $1.3 million grant for Homeboy Industries, which was very welcome news.
Although it has been in the works for a while, amazingly not all the supervisors were willing to sign on to the notion in the beginning. But in the end, although only 3 sups were present at the meeting for vote, they were all reportedly in favor.
The grant is scheduled to run for a nine-and-a-half month period— from now until June 30, 2011.
In return for the money, Homeboy is required to provide certain services, which are spelled out in detail in a 35-page contract. Basically, the contract dictates that Homeboy is required to keep doing what it’s doing—namely to provide tattoo removal, job counseling, psychological services, legal services, GED and computer training and a bunch of other programs for gang-affected kids and adults between the ages of 14 and 30, who are released from the county’s probation camps, juvenile halls, and jails, and are hoping to turn their lives around.
Since that’s what Homeboy has been providing to the county’s juvenile probationers and parolees anyway—without getting paid for it—-these are not exactly an onerous requirements.
In addition, Homeboy has to provide paid job training for 20 extra kids coming out of lock-up during that same 9 months.
Again, this is precisely what Homeboy does every day.. Moreover, it is these very kinds of services—and trainee jobs— that were badly threatened when Homeboy’s money crisis required that they lay off more than 300 of their workers. (More than 100 have been hired back now that the organization has been getting a few more donations.)
So it’s nice that the county has seen fit to pay actual $$ for the reentry services it has been getting for free.
BUT HERE’S WHERE IT STARTS TO GET INTERESTING….
The contract also requires that a specified portion of the county’s $1.3 million be spent on an evaluation of how effective the Homeboy program is for the county kids and adults who receive it. Do such clients improve or do they recidivate? (The protocol for the evaluation is spelled out in 7 single-spaced, typed pages.)
In addition, the evaluators—who happen to be the excellent Drs. Jorja Leap and Todd Franke, both from the UCLA School of Public Affairs—are required to compare Homeboy’s outcomes to retention and recidivism rates of those who go through the county’s own $1.1 million gang program, The Regional Gang Violence Reduction Initiative, in order to determine how well each of the two strategies are working.
What a good idea! Both programs are to be held accountable for their effectiveness!
(Would that more country programs were held to such a standard. LA County’s probation camps spring to mind as a random example. Ah, but I digress.)
AND NOW THE MATTER GETS EVEN MORE INTERESTING
The Homeboy contract is—in my understanding—a one shot grant. Unlike the county’s re-entry program, it will not be up for renewal when the 9 months are finished.
So, here’s my question, if the evaluators find that Homeboy’s re-entry program is equally or more effective than the county’s personal (and thus far entirely unproven) gang re-entry program, what then?
Will the Sups still decline to renew Homeboy’s grant and keep going with its own program? And, if so, will they expect Homeboy to keep providing essential services for probationers coming out of camp, prison and jail, just as they have always done? Except that, after next June—once again—they will no longer be paid for it?
I’m just askin’.
PS: Did I mention that the recidivism rate for all kids coming out of LA County’s juvenile probation camps is a whopping 70 percent—meaning 7 out of every 10 kids who get out of camp will soon be reincarcerated. (This is, by the way, according to the county’s own figures. And Sam Slovic of the LA Weekly did a terrific article on that issue this past July. )
You should also know that it costs around $50 grand a year to keep a kid in probation camp—more if they are old enough to land in prison.
Okay, so do you want to do the math? Or shall I?
That means if Homeboy kept just 26 kids—out of the thousands of kids and young adults who walk through its doors each year— from going back to any kind of county lock-up, and directed them toward productive lives instead, that would save the county the amount of money it has just granted to Homeboy, exactly to the penny.
A FRIENDLY NOTE TO THE SUPERVISORS WHO DRAGGED THEIR FEET ON THE HOMEBOY GRANT (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE): Not to be mean, but perhaps at the next Sups meeting you could vote yourselves the funds for calculators. Awfully analog, I know. But sometimes they honestly come in handy.
(Both the LA Times and Zach Behrens at LAist wrote about Tuesday’s vote. So check their reports too.)
Tell me again about how LA county’s politicians are “liberal”?
The L.A. county politicians are “liberal” spenders.
Yeh, they really showed it with their stinginess to this proposal, didn’t they? Glen Beck and Michelle Bachmann would have written a more liberal grant than this.