The Stuff that Didn’t Happen
By Albert B. Kelly
Over the past several years, I’ve taken a great deal of
satisfaction in being part of the Cumberland County Positive Youth Development
Coalition or CCPYDC.
If you’re not familiar with the CCPYDC, it’s a group of 85
organizations in Cumberland County that includes law enforcement, education, social
service, faith-based, youth, government, and health care to name a few.
The objective of these groups working under the CCPYDC
banner in Cumberland County is a focus on reducing the number of kids becoming
part of the juvenile system in the first place and helping kids already in the
system from getting absorbed into a life that lands them in adult prison.
The CCPYDC effort is a county-wide collaboration and it’s
the first one in the state of NJ. The funding for this group effort comes from
the Attorney General’s Office ($125k) with a portion coming from our County
Freeholders ($60k). To date, the coalition is seeing success.
To give you an idea, consider that Juvenile arrests are down
44% since 2012- no small thing. Part of that comes from Station House
Adjustments which is a strategy focused on holding young first-time offenders
accountable while keeping them out of “the system”. The number of repeat
offenders among this group was only 13%.
In addition to the impact on these kids personally- which is
significant, these early interventions benefit the community in untold ways.
Sometimes that fact gets lost because when it comes to news coverage and juvenile
crime; coverage is understandably on the thing that happened, not on things
that didn’t.
Such is the nature of prevention, whether juvenile crime or
disease or accidents. It’s not really possible to know how many crimes were
prevented, illnesses that never materialized or accidents that didn’t happen
because of prevention programs.
There will be no headlines announcing how much
juvenile-related crime didn’t happen because of CCPYDC’s interventions, but the
benefits to the community are there. So we’re left with what those
interventions look like and whatever stats we can measure.
The County Youth Detention Center was closed in 2015 and the
$1.5 million saved there was able to be used in other areas. I have no doubt that
that CCPYDC was a decent part why that shifting of resources was possible-
because juvenile arrests were down 44% which means a lot of juvenile crime that
didn’t take place.
But now, the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General is
proposing a roughly $460,000 reduction in technical assistance funding in the
2017-18 budget year. Cumberland County
receives $125k of this total each year to do juvenile delinquency prevention.
Looked at another way, the $125k they want to cut is roughly
equal to housing 2 state inmates in an NJ prison for a year. For me and a lot
of others, this money is better spent on touching many lives early on rather than
housing a couple of lives in adult prison down the line.
June is Gun Safety and Violence Awareness Month in
Cumberland County and through the CCPYDC’s efforts, 12 of the County’s 14
communities will be participating through various programs and activities-
including the Gun Safety and Violence Awareness video produced by the Boys and
Girls Club.
You can see the video and hear the message, but how do you
measure the gun violence that didn’t happen and the headlines that weren’t
made? Yet these efforts are part of a culture change just as anti-smoking
messages have resulted in some of the lowest numbers we’ve seen in terms of
smoking.
The collaborative work of the CCPYDC was behind securing 21
new Summer Food Service locations around the county and providing meals to
hundreds of kids. You can count the number of mouths fed, but there’s really no
way to measure the bad things that were avoided and the misbehavior that didn’t
occur because of an empty stomach.
So please consider reaching out to your state representatives
to let them know that the Cumberland County Positive Youth Development
Coalition (CCPYDC) is critical to preventing future crime. It’s cheaper to
invest now when its youth prevention than latter when its adult detention.
Sen. Steve Sweeney, Assemblymen John Burzichelli and Adam
Taliaferro can be reached at (856) 251-9801 or at Kingsway Commons, 935 Kings
Highway, Suite 400, West Deptford NJ 08085.
Sen Jeff Van Drew, Assemblymen Bob Andrzejczak and Bruce
Land are at (609) 465-0700 or Schoolhouse Office Park, 211 S. Main St, #104,
Cape May Court House, 08210.