Outreach workers with Operation SNUG in New York City's Central Harlem talk to a young man in their programme. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, May 1 2014 (IPS)

It’s four o’clock on a sunny afternoon in Harlem and 19-year-old Solideen Rann is spread out on a plush hand-me-down couch inside an old glass-and-aluminum storefront on Malcolm X Boulevard.

His body language is making no effort to conceal he’s only reluctantly participating in a conversation with Dedric Hammond, 36, who’s taking up the other corner of a dream in bright orange velour. “If you build me a [sports] centre and I was shot yesterday – and the guy who shot me is at the centre today – you can bet I’ll come over there to shoot something. But it ain’t gonna be no basketball.” -- Dedric Hammond

“You do this one thing for me and I’ll leave you alone,” Hammond says, leaning into him.

“I’m not about that sh*t no more,” Rann pleads uncomfortably, trying to get the six-foot-four-inch man to leave him alone, which is proving futile.

“Just this one time. That’s it,” the elder continues his persuasion.

In a not-so-distant universe, this script of a conversation between two men intimately familiar with the darker side of Harlem’s bustling streets could spell a shady affair with a dangerous outcome.

Today, however, the conversation is about an upcoming panel discussion and Hammond, who’s known in the neighbourhood simply as “Beloved”, is pushing Rann to step up as a role model to other teens.

The office they sit in is that of Operation SNUG (“guns” spelled backwards), a team of “interrupters” charged with breaking the cycle of youth violence in this stretch of Central Harlem between 125th and 137th street.

Here, roughly one in three families live below the poverty line.

“That sh*t” Rann referred to is getting into street fights – fights that once landed him in jail and killed his best friend.

These streets and others like them funnel some 24,000 young people each year into New York State’s juvenile justice system – one of the harshest in the United States, where teens as young as 16 can serve time in adult prisons.

Half of those arrests are in New York City, where 52 percent of juvenile delinquent cases involve crimes against another person.

At all hours of the day, cell phones are buzzing in the SNUG office. They’re brimming with messages from community leaders, concerned parents and local youth providing tip-offs that a conflict between rival groups has reached boiling point. Within minutes, SNUG staff hit the streets to step in and mediate between the different sides.

They mediate on street corners and in public parks, in hospital waiting rooms and public housing hallways.

When a shooting or stabbing victim is submitted to Harlem Hospital, SNUG staff are the first to be called –ahead of the local police — to talk the victim, family and friends out of retaliating.

“I’d be over there talking to the whole hood,” Hammond tells IPS about the containment they do right after a violent event. “I’m talking to their people, I’m talking to their mother – whoever will make a tear come to their eyes, I’m talking to them too.

“Because the moment we know… what they have feelings for, that’s when we can start this conversation and begin the process of healing.”

It’s a process that Hammond and his team of 10 interrupters know first-hand. Each one of them is a former member of one of Harlem’s 60 some crews, each one with criminal convictions of their own.

“I’ve got people on my team who killed people,” says Hammond, surrounded by plastic flowers and props the team uses to stage “mock funerals” – one of many tactics to get “their kids” to see the devastation their actions can cause.

Hammond, who picked up his first gun to protect his little brother at age 13, spent eight years in jail and was shot twice after leaving gang life behind.

These experiences of having been on both sides of a gun are key to SNUG’s ability to connect with high-risk youth, says Beloved, whose reputation as a shooter once earned him the street name Bad News.

“Back when I would recruit a dude, I’m going to his church, I’m at his school, I’m at his mother’s house, I’m where he’s at on the basketball court.

“So the same strategies we used to do robberies and stick-ups and all that other stuff, are the strategies we use today to stay in these kids’ ears – we got to pacify them.”

Understanding the streets

“They innately understand the rhythm of the street, the rhythm of what happens when…” says Aarian Punter, project manager for Restorative Justice Services at the Harlem unit of the New York City Mission Society, a community cornerstone that provides educational services and after school programmes for youth.

“They know when to hit the streets, hit the blocks, call their caseload.”

Eighty-hour workweeks are not uncommon for SNUG’s outreach workers.

Apart from the 24-hour crisis interventions, there’s the regular heart-to-hearts on the bright-orange couch. There’s the monitoring of social media for signs of brewing disputes and there are the spontaneous field trip to the ice cream shop as a way to keep two rivaling groups out of each other’s hair.

It’s all part of the puzzle to stop the viral transmission of violence.

Containing the virus

Operation SNUG is an offshoot of the Cure Violence model created by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, who found that major outbreaks of violence like the Rwanda genocide followed the patterns of outbreaks of infectious diseases and who holds that violence can be contained and even eradicated when approached like a virus.

Key, according to Slutkin, is a shift from public shaming of “bad” people to identifying the transmitters of violence and changing personal behaviors and community norms.

In New York state the vast majority of juveniles in youth facilities – 83 percent in 2010 – are black and Latino. Eighty-nine percent of boys and 81 percent of girls relapse into crime by the age of 28.

Statistics like these hint at the devastation done to communities of colour by violence, drugs and chronic poverty.

Devastation reached a peak in the crack era of the 1980s and 90s when New York’s overly punitive Rockefeller Drug Laws sent a generation of men to prison, initiating a ripple effect that can be felt today, says Punter.

“You have no idea what these kids have seen. These kids have seen their fathers go to jail for 20 years, they’ve seen their mothers destroyed by the crack era… So you have a whole generation of kids whose issues were never really dealt with.”

In recent years, New York City police responded by overpolicing black and Latino youth through its controversial Stop and Frisk policy, which further criminalised low-income communities of colour.

Working with referrals from SNUG and others, Punter and her colleagues aim to change young people’s relationship with the criminal justice system, away from one that’s “normal”, and provide educational opportunities that allow them to envision a life beyond the streets.

Operation SNUG found a home under the umbrella of the Mission Society after many other organisations found the programme too risky to take on. But without violence interruption, few other services have a chance to flourish, says Hammond.

“If you build me a [sports] centre and I was shot yesterday – and the guy who shot me is at the centre today – you can bet I’ll come over there to shoot something. But it ain’t gonna be no basketball.”

According to a 2013 study by the NYC Department of Health, gunshot wounds decreased from 52 to 26 in a one-year period in SNUG’s target demographic. While it’s hard to attribute decreases in crime to one factor only, Rann has no doubt that “Without SNUG, a lot of [guys] would have died.”

Today, Rann works two jobs to support his baby son and is considering college.

After a solid hour of persuasion by his mentor of three years, he never did step up to speak on the public panel. But Hammond doesn’t see it as a defeat.

“It’s like working with clay,” he says. “You push and mold and when you get it to where you want it then you continue to work on it like that.”

A draft law that would create a new juvenile justice system in Mexico has not yet been passed. Credit: Mónica González/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Nov 30 2012 (IPS)

In a country like Mexico, identified with soaring crime rates, impunity, police corruption and a largely dysfunctional justice system, reports of judicial efficiency are rare, especially in the case of juvenile justice.

But a success story in the central state of Morelos, next to the capital, is drawing attention and has started to be replicated elsewhere.

The Unidad de Medidas Cautelares para Adolescentes of Morelos (Unit of Protective Measures for Adolescents – UMECA), has been working since 2011, administered by the state government’s public security ministry, although it was designed by a civil society organisation, the Institute of Penal Justice (IJPP).

“Our aim was to rationalise the use of preventive detention, because of the large proportion of people in prison who have not yet been tried and convicted,” Ana Aguilar, IJPP projects director, told IPS.

“It was important to seek limits on the use of preventive detention, because of the social and economic costs, and the human rights component,” she said.

When an adolescent is accused of a crime, UMECA gets involved in the pretrial stage. A team examines the youngster and issues a technical opinion on whether or not the suspect should be held in preventive detention.

After studying the adolescent’s family and social life, the team recommends alternatives to detention, when appropriate. Another team is in charge of monitoring compliance with the conditions of probation.

Since February 2011, 175 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 have been conditionally released under this system. Of that total, only five escaped.

Between 2006 and 2011, 7,539 minors under the age of 18 were arrested in Mexico and accused of federal crimes like drug trafficking, homicide or rape, according to the attorney-general’s office.

Against a backdrop of a rise in teen pregnancy, drug consumption and school dropout rates, “one of the biggest concerns is the stigmatisation and criminalisation of young people,” Jennifer Haza, the director of the non-governmental organisation Melel Xojobal, told IPS.

A constitutional reform approved in 2005 established that adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 have the right to be dealt with by a separate juvenile justice system, and that children under 12 are only subject to rehabilitation and social work, not punishment.

Since 2009, Congress has been debating a federal law on justice for adolescents, which provides for specialised judges, the creation of juvenile detention centres as well as alternatives to detention, such as written warnings, probation, community service, and reparation of damage.

But while the bill is still pending, adolescent offenders are held in detention centres where abuse is rife, or in prisons where they often share cells with adults.

Many juvenile offenders have been caught up in the world of drug trafficking. NGOs estimate that between 30,000 and 50,000 youngsters under the age of 18 work for the drug cartels.

According to the Mexican Network for Children’s Rights, 2,900 adolescents were murdered in the country from 2006 to 2011, including 54 in Morelos.

The model used in Morelos “is replicable,” said Aguilar. “And it can be improved with more information, to generate statistics regarding its performance. It can also provide feedback for institutions and the entire justice system.”

The initiative was conceived of by the Presumption of Innocence Project of Mexico, which now forms part of the IJPP. It was financed by the Open Society Justice Initiative.

In April, the IJPP was granted a U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) prize for the rights of children and adolescents in Mexico, in the Best Practices category, and in October it won the International Corrections and Prisons Association’s (ICPA) Management and Staff Training Award.

Early this month, UMECA was a finalist for the “Successful innovations” award granted by Innovating Justice.

The new system in Morelos has also cut costs. The cost of holding an adolescent offender in pretrial detention is 11 dollars a day in Morelos. The state public security ministry estimates that some 330,000 dollars were saved in just over a year, thanks to UMECA.

And the state of Morelos is adopting a similar system for adults.

In the northern state of Baja California, an UMECA for adults has been operating since 2010. As of July, 2,200 adults had been granted alternatives to pretrial detention, and only 100 had failed to comply with the probation conditions.

The IJPP is also beginning to help organise a similar programme in the southern state of Puebla.

The programme has drawn attention from other countries, as well. Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Peru have all expressed interest in establishing similar systems.

“The penal system reform has had a positive impact on juvenile justice, but conditions for youngsters have to be different than the ones that apply to adults,” Haza said, referring to the need for the law on the new juvenile justice system to go into effect.