Working Against Violence

Think back to your childhood. What are the memories that have stayed with you?

Did you have a favorite toy? Did you have a best friend to play with?

Or maybe this: Did you ever see someone get killed?

That direct question is one that researchers in Boston asked of 122 men and women they were following in a study of prisoners who had served their sentences. The answers, The Times’s Emily Badger wrote, shocked even the researchers: 42 percent had seen someone killed when they were children.

“I’ve never seen anyone be killed,” said Bruce Western, a sociologist who has written about the study. “I’m 54 years old, and I think I will probably not see that in my life.”

Such a finding may be less surprising to Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist whose work with contagious diseases includes a 23-yearold program called Cure Violence, which started in Chicago and has expanded to cities in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

As Tina Rosenberg explained in The Times: “A disease is a condition with identifiable symptoms that causes sickness or death. That describes violence. And we know it spreads itself. There is overwhelming evidence that hurt people hurt other people.”

Dr. Slutkin learned from working with diseases like cholera and H.I.V. that stopping an epidemic means changing human behavior. And the best way to change behavior, he believes, is to change the community norm.

“The best predictor of condom use is whether people think their friends use condoms,” he said.

That is one of the guiding philosophies of Cure Violence. The staff includes “violence interrupters” — people in the community who are tuned in to trouble and help mediate disputes, talking people out of shootings that can lead to more shootings, in the way diseases spread themselves.

John Hardy, once a violence interrupter in the program, said most people want to avoid violence if they can avoid embarrassment in front of their peers. “Consciously or unconsciously, they want someone to talk them down,” he said.

Interruption is only part of the program’s work. Cure Violence also tries to inoculate potential victims with a program offering jobs like cleaning trash out of parks — work that will steer them away from the violent street corners. This defies the conventional wisdom that young men in gang culture would scoff at such jobs. While the expectation had been that 25 to 30 percent of the people contacted would join the program, 60 percent have signed up.

“The reasons the young man stays on the corner might be completely different from what we imagine,” Ms. Rosenberg wrote. “He might, after all, want that park job, and want to get off the corner, but not know how.”

For those who don’t get off the corner in time, there are other jobs to help them avoid going back. In East Oakland, California, a nonprofit called Planting Justice hires former prisoners to tend 30,000 fruit and nut trees.

Five days after being released from prison on a sentence of 25 years for armed robbery, 56-yearold Anthony Forrest started work at Planting Justice. He makes $25 an hour, with health benefits that reach beyond the insurance.

“Working in the garden,” he told The Times, “calms me down.”