Counties can help troubled youth thrive

The onus is on county governments to build the programming and infrastructure needed to help youth thrive and combat their involvement with crime, panelists said July 13 at a County Innovations in Youth Justice session at NACo’s Annual Conference.

While youth crime overall is down across the country, serious crimes and those involving firearms are on the rise. Evidence-based work to combat crime among youth include providing them with enriched education environments and mentorships, access to green spaces and opportunities for social connection and skill strengthening — all things that local governments can build and invest in, according to Bernadette Hohl, Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s senior research investigator. 

Establishing a local tax credit dedicated to youth programming is one way to fund programming. “We’re ignoring what we know because maybe it’s a little harder, or maybe we can’t get the people to be on our side or maybe the people that look like us are avoiding it because it’s not an ‘us’ problem,” Hohl said. 

“Proven strategies to address some of these things are that folks have economic security – those are policy moves. Those are not things like [saying], ‘Go out and get a job.’ Well, if there are no jobs there, there is nothing available. That’s a policy move — that’s not an individual move … Our environments physically drive your ability to be healthy and safe.”

Through NACo’s County Juvenile Justice Innovation Network, Boone County, Mo. is working to develop strategic action plans that highlight youth well-being, improve data-sharing and build stronger community partnerships. The first thing the county did was create sequential intercept mapping to track resources and gaps in the community related to its justice-involved population, according to Boone County Commissioner Janet Thompson.

“The upstream mapping process is specifically designed for kids, and I ask you to visualize that whole notion of the bodies in the stream, coming past you,” Thompson said. “And if you’re looking at the bodies in the stream, you’re looking at something that’s already happening. When we look upstream, when we say, ‘Why are those bodies in the stream?’ And we go upstream, that’s when we’re asking, ‘Are these kids being pushed into the stream? Are they jumping into the stream or is the stream giving out from under their feet?’”

As a result of the work, the county implemented a re-entry peer support specialist program in its juvenile detention center and is working to create one specifically for the families, “because kids don’t grow up in petri dishes. They grow up in some kind of environment, and we’re trying to help that to improve so that they can thrive,” Thompson said.

When a young person has a connection to another person who positively influence them, it reduces their likelihood to be involved in violence and provides them with someone to intervene when smaller offenses begin to occur, Hohl said. Building out mentoring and peer support programming is important, she noted. 

The hospital and community-based violence intervention program, Healing Hurt People, provides peer support services (in addition to evidence-based therapy and supportive case management) to survivors of, or witnesses of, violent injuries. All peers have lived experience with violence, according to Jermaine McCorey, who serves as a community health worker peer through Drexel University’s Center for Non-Violence and Social Justice.

“The difference of when someone with lived experience interacts with someone, what happens is the wall of distrust is broken down,” McCorey said. “We have a shared language, a shared experience… you’re able to engage the person and become in tune to their feelings and make them feel valued. That’s what peers bring to the table, as far as an ability that would trump a normal professional or clinician.”