Much has been in the news lately on the large number of black-on-black homicides. Houston is one of the cities with the highest ratio of young black men killing other young black men. The mayor of Houston, soon to be a cadidate for the U.S. Senate, has turned to the city's black ministers for the solution. Fat chance of that working.
A retired Texas parole officer has his own solution to this problem. Here are some parts of what he wrote in a letter to the Houston Chonicle:
"......All the years I have spent as a juvenile probation and parole officer have proven to me that these respective agencies (probation and parole) are nothing more than breeding grounds for future criminals. The same holds true for adult probation and parole agencies, which flood the probation and parole positions with graduates from instutions granting criminal justice degrees.
......It is not so much a problem of being able to decrease youth homicides as it is to alter those approaches that do not work. If I were in charge of hiring field officers for juvenile or adult supervision of deviants, they would all be psychology or sociology majors and/or successful sales people. They must succeed in altering anti-social behavior and must be able to 'sell' to the individual who is acting out in a negative way why it would be in his or her interests to avoid such negative behavior."
Psychology or sociology majors? Thank God this guy is retired. I've got news for him. California has already tried that. Back in the 1950's and 60s, when California's correctional philosophy favored the rehabilitation of criminals, the state hired mostly MSW (Master of Social Work) graduates as parole officers. The MSWs had lots and lots of psychology and sociology course work to their credit. Did they succeed at altering anti-social behavior? Not by a long shot.
The problem with sociology students is that they have been taught that people who end up in the correctional system are victims of society. And psychology majors have been taught that anti-social behavior is the sign of a troubled childhood, brought on when mommy looked backwards in the mirror while she was pregnant, or when daddy took away the rubber duckie he liked to play with in the bathtub.
I am not going to describe some of the ludicrous ways those MSWs tried to alter the anti-social ways of their probationers or parolees. It must have come as a shock to find they had to deal with members of an ingrained subculture far removed from their own middle class upbringing. The MSWs failed at dealing with people who were not the least bit eager or able lead an acceptable (by society) life style. More than half of all California parolees were returned to prison.
Sales people? Even a salesman who can sell refrigerators to the eskimos, would find it hard to sell a young man with his pocket full of money from selling dope on the idea of getting a minimum wage paying job.
That retired Texas parole officer missed the boat entirely. What about those black-on-black killers who have not yet entered the correctional system? There are plenty of those. They are the ones that are ingrained in the subcultrue of the "gangsta rap" life style. They are school dropouts. They have no father figure at home. Their families live in poverty or near-poverty. Their role models are the gold necklace wearing dope dealers or pimps who drive around in sporty cars.
The only way to stop all those killings is to take these young men out of that "gangsta rap" subculture and provide them with well paying jobs and a bright future. How do you do that with unskilled school dropouts? And even in good economic times, where will they find enough of those well paying jobs?
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