Tackling Mass Incarceration

Take a look at this week’s FIXES column from the NYT, addressing Molly Baldwin’s Roca program and how rethinking and “pruning” it lead to beneficial results:

Nine years ago Molly Baldwin found herself in a curious position. Roca, the teenage pregnancy and violence prevention program she’d founded in her 20s, had a multimillion-dollar budget, a two-story building in downtown Chelsea, Mass., a portfolio of programs addressing everything from poverty to immigrant rights and a measure of fame for using Native American peacemaking circles to heal gang-impacted youth. The only problem was, those cathartic conversations weren’t translating to change.

“They would come to Roca and we were all into development, growth and self esteem, and they would feel good,” said Baldwin. “Then they’d go and shoot people and deal drugs.”

Once she faced reality, Baldwin was able to pinpoint Roca’s weaknesses. First, it was providing services and space for practically anyone who walked through its doors. Second, its young people’s lives constantly intersected with agencies like the police, probation and schools, yet, too often, Roca fought with those institutions. Roca’s third flaw was that it didn’t know how or whether its programs created positive change among at-risk youth.

“There had to be some honesty and accountability in what we were doing,” she said. “Why should we be in the middle of people’s lives winging it?”

Baldwin did the unthinkable. She brought all of Roca’s programming to a halt and began an agonizing pruning process. During the dormancy, she and her team asked themselves where the program could have the greatest impact. They decided to focus Roca’s energies on tackling mass incarceration by engaging and transforming young men between ages 17 and 24 who were at the “deep end” of the criminal justice system. These young people had already demonstrated a strong propensity toward violent crime and were either aging out of juvenile justice or beginning a revolving-door relationship with adult corrections departments. Statistically, 55 percent of this population returned to crime within three years of release, costing taxpayers between $47,000 and $71,000 to imprison per person over an average of 12 to 18months and robbing their communities of a generation of human potential.