Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
‘BETTER WAY FORWARD’
Lawmakers host hearing on preventing youth violence
Anyone who’s been paying attention to national headlines knows that youth violence is a problem in big cities across the country.
Just recently, Philadelphia saw a spat of violence that left five dead in a single weekend.
But it’s not just Philadelphia — or New York or Chicago — where concerns of young people committing violent crimes are growing. Officials in smaller cities, like Reading, have the issue on the front of their minds.
In hopes of quelling the plague of violence, a group of Pennsylvania legislators gathered Wednesday at Alvernia University’s Reading CollegeTowne to hold a frank discussion. The hearing of the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Policy Committee was organized by Sens. Judy Schwank and Art Haywood.
The goal of the hearing was to shine a light on issues that are important in their districts — Schwank represents parts of Berks County and Haywood represents parts of Philadelphia — and create awareness about legislation Democratic senators are trying to advance to address them.
“My hope is that we will come away with some real solutions,” Schwank said at the onset of the hearing.
Finding solutions to combat growing youth violence is something that Reading Mayor Eddie Moran is quite familiar with. He spoke at the hearing about his experience and the need for continued and additional support from the state.
“I have been on the frontlines of this issue advocating for the resources that our community needs to ensure that young people understand that there’s a better way forward,” he said. “This is the responsibility of everyone. We all have a part to play in solving this problem.
“We cannot just depend on
our police or our school districts, we need to come together as a community. We need our faith groups, our nonprofit organizations and, of course, our parents.”
Moran said resources are essential to combating the problem. He said funding is critical not only for the police departments that respond to the violent incidents, but for the multitude of nonprofit organizations working to address the root causes of the issue. Schwank agreed. “We all understand that while every community in Pennsylvania is different, we all deal with crime,” she said. “Too often I think we react to crime in our communities rather than the reasons why these things are happening. And that’s really what today’s hearing is all about.”
The hearing went on to look at the issue of youth violence through two different lenses: how it’s handled in the courts and efforts underway to prevent it.
The criminal justice system
Berks County Judge Scott Lash has served on the bench for nearly 25 years, and for all of that time his caseload has included handling juvenile cases.
“My role begins after crimes are alleged to have been committed, but what we focus on is lowering recidivism rates and practicing restorative justice,” he said. “Juvenile court is very interesting in the sense that you hear about the crimes, you hear about the background of the person and then you have to make a decision on what is best in a particular situation.”
Prior to 2009, Lash said those judgments were made mostly on intuition. But that changed when Berks was fortunate to be one of four counties in the country invited to Washington to learn and understand through data-driven analysis how recidivism rates are impacted by the decisions made in courtrooms.
“For example, we learned that harsh punishment is counterintuitive and that detention in most cases is counterproductive,” he said.
Barbara Dancy, a Berks County juvenile probation officer, said the research showed ways the criminal justice system could improve its relationship with juveniles. That included diverting them from formal court processing whenever appropriate, developing and maintaining strong partnerships with service providers and doing a better job of involving families.
She said the county’s inclusion in that program transformed the way the department operated by adopting new evidencebased practices and providing evidence-based interventions.
“Essentially, we became proactive rather than reactive,” she said.
So what has been the result?
Dancy said that from 2006 to 2022, Berks decreased its average daily population of secured detention from 50 to six, residential placements declined from 333 to 39, yearly spending for secured detention and placement services dropped from about $16 million to $4 million and the recidivism rate went from 21% to 11%.
Lash said the most common ages of those who come before him are 14 or 15. The most common crimes they commit are theft, criminal mischief and drug possession. But, he said, there is a substantial amount of assault and firearm charges.
Lash said that during his time as a judge he has found that most juvenile offenders are dealing with a lack of structure at home. He said he has actually seen young people thrive under the supervision of juvenile probation officers, showing that they will do well when they are held accountable for their actions.
He said another way to reduce crime is to focus on school attendance.
Lash highlighted the work of the Berks County Advancing School Attendance Program as a model that could and should be replicated in other counties across the commonwealth. The program, working off referrals of chronically absent students from school districts or other organizations, works directly with students and parents in an attempt to clear the hurdles.
Starting in 2012, officials from the initiative began meeting with districts to talk about truancy remediation, eventually creating the Berks County Attendance Protocol, a document aimed at standardizing how schools handle chronic absenteeism.
“This is important because if education is emphasized — all else being equal — will result in children being in school rather than being on the street committing crimes,” he said. “My question is why isn’t the Department of Education more heavily involved in this attendance issue.”
Lash said the biggest challenge he sees with the system is the lack of space for the young people who need a place to go. He said the state needs more detention beds and more placement beds.
“We’re arresting kids with gun charges and we have no place to put them,” he said. “We have to put them on electronic monitoring — that’s all we can do. Some of these kids are violent and we need to get them off the street, and some of these kids are in danger so we need to get them off the street for their own benefit.”
The organizations on the ground
This year, both the Village of Reading and the Berks Youth Violence Interruption and Intervention Program received grant money through the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency to help curb youth violence.
Radarra McLendon is the founder and executive director of the Village of Reading, which seeks to create a safe place for young people between the ages of 13 and 18. She said her organization focuses on education and outreach, trying to discover what’s going on behind the scenes to lead kids toward violence.
“We know there are many factors of gun violence and this is not a one-answer problem,” she said. “But during our time building our relationships with young people we found many of them have experienced emotional and psychological trauma. The effects of trauma have placed a heavy burden on individuals, families and communities like Reading.”
She said research has shown these traumatic experiences are associated both behavioral and financial health, especially if those experiences occurred during their childhood.
“And locking people up is not going to solve the problem,” she said. “It’s time that we start treating violence as a public health epidemic and focus on prevention, intervention, reentry, transformation and healing.”
She said services like free counseling are a critical need among those who her organization works with. They recently partnered with West Chester University to provide counseling once a week at its cafe in the first block of North 11th Street.
McLendon said that many times violence is caused by a personal dispute and perpetrated by people who know each other.
“These encounters become deadly because a gun is present,” she said. “I would like gun laws that help to keep weapons out of the hands of those who should not have them, and more programming to help build emotional intelligence.”
She said that Village of Reading tries to be a link between the services that exist in the community and those who need those resources the most.
Ebonie Cunningham Stringer is executive director of the Berks Youth Violence Interruption and Intervention Program, a new initiative that will employ strategies to serve youth ages 14 to 21 in Berks. She said the youths, particularly those growing up in poverty, need as much support as they can get.
“We have to have a safety net for our young people,” she said. “They can be resilient, they can recover, but we have to be in place as their community to catch them when they fall or, dare I say, before they fall.”
Stringer said a spotlight needs to be shown on family dynamics as it relates to youth violence. She said there are several factors that can lead to problems in behavior like observing parental violence, being a victim of parental violence, low parental support and poor communication within the household.
“All these factors lead to aggression in youth,” she said. “Aggression is something we need to take better note of because it can often precede violence. So we need to disrupt that behavior before it happens and invest in diversion programs earlier in their lives.”
Stringer said that many of these young people are victims themselves who often become perpetrators of violence because they have not had the resources they need to deal with the trauma they experienced.
“We have to find ways to interrupt these cycles before they erupt into violence,” she said.
Michael Pennington, executive director of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, said during the hearing that Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration is dedicated to providing continued support to organizations like the Berks Youth Violence Interruption and Intervention Program and Village of Reading.
“One of our central responsibilities is the administration of federal and state funding programs,” he said. “Our agency initiates, validates and makes financial investments in programs that demonstrate promise in improving outcomes related to our mission and strategic priorities.”
Pennington said the agency supports a wide range of approaches, understanding the needs of each community are different and that the services available can vary greatly from one county to another.
“We really need to make sure that the playbook, so to speak, that we’re using to guide our decisions about how the state allocates its resources is relevant and that we’re balancing our need for rigorous research with the urgency of meeting the challenges that we face today,” he said.