Crime: From gang life to college

Situation

Your administrative district intends to introduce more teen courts. Due to a chance scan you and your friend are approached by the authorities to take part in the scheme. Now you have to make up your minds if you feel up to that task. To do so, you inform yourself about teen courts and how they work.
Getting informed: Now please use the given materials to inform yourself.

Materials

Video: Watch this video and summarize the content while listening, use the questions.

Text: From Gang Life to College (Part of Finals in 2018)
Work through the text and reading comprehension tasks and compare your answers to the solution.

Vocabulary: To inform yourself on the relevant words and phrases you could use this link:

https://www.ldoceonline.com/

http://ieltsliz.com/crime-and-punishment-vocabulary/

Group discussion:
At the end you are going to discuss the issue in a group discussion.

Text: From gang life to college, one paycheck at a time

By Josh Kenworthy

(A) Tony Franklin was fresh off a 10-year prison sentence for assaulting a police officer. As he walked into court to see his probation officer he was “down and out,” he says. As a former gang member from Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, Mr. Franklin was standing at what experts identify as a crossroads: He could resort to his former means of making money on the streets, or he could walk in a new direction.

(B) With a son on the way and bills to pay, Franklin says there were times he would break down, not knowing what to do. But prison had been an eye-opener for Franklin, he says, and he wanted to do good. He needed a circuit breaker.

(C) It came in the form of Ismail Abdurrashid, a charismatic community figure and teacher at College Bound Dorchester (CBD), an organization designed to give at-risk youth the wraparound supports and education needed to go to college. “He just came out of nowhere like, ‘oh, excuse me, this college program is willing to help you with everything you need right now,’ ” Franklin says.

(D) Specifically, that program was CBD’s flagship, Boston Uncornered, which, after a brief pilot, recently had its hard launch. Over the next three years, it aims to serve 600 of Boston’s 2,600 gang members and to have 250 enroll in college. The program recruits the most influential gang members, gives them a $400 per week stipend to renounce gang life and focus exclusively on their education, and then mentors and assists them, guiding them through the maze of financial aid applications, and teaching them life lessons like how to shop and pay their bills – whatever it takes to get them into and through college.

(E) Given the long-running debate in the United States over the merits of prison education, Boston Uncornered’s approach is potentially controversial. CBD’s chief executive officer Mark Culliton says it’s a first-in-the-nation program because it demands a major shift in thinking: moving from seeing the most disruptive gang members – “core influencers” – as the central problem, to seeing them as part of the solution.

(F) “The Boston Uncornered Program is cutting edge; a fresh, welcomed approach to resolving the issue of gangs, poverty, crime, and hopelessness,” says Lisa Taylor-Austin, a national and international gang expert. “Of the myriad different intervention and suppression programs, I have not seen a program as comprehensive as Boston Uncornered since the founding of Homeboy Industries in the 1980s.” Homeboy offers mentoring, pays participants a stipend or hourly rate, and includes apprentice programs in silk screening, baking, and solar panel installation. But she says Uncornered is unique because it gets students to a college-level education, which allows them to build careers, not just get jobs. This, she says, should have a ripple effect as successful former gang members reach out to their communities, especially gang involved and at-risk youth.

(G) CBD has been building the concept over the last four years. A pilot program with 40 students, says CBD, has shown enough promise over the last six months for the organization to believe it’s worth expanding. Of the 40 students in the program, 85 percent have not been reincarcerated for a criminal sentence, 78 percent have persisted in the program, and 21 students – more than half – are currently enrolled in college.

(H) The vital ingredient in the success of this program, Taylor-Austin says, is a gang member’s desire to change. „In my work with gang involved youth I never met a gang member who didn’t want a job, a paycheck and legitimate career,“ Taylor-Austin says. „This program is unique in that it offers all of these options.” In Franklin’s case, at 31 years old, he says, he was raring to go. He says he had reached the point where he was no longer blaming all his bad actions on his childhood with his caring, but often neglectful, drug-addicted mother and grandmother.

(J) During his decade in prison he completed his GED*), read books, and wrote poetry. If he can pass one remedial math class, he will be ready to begin studies in sociology at Bunker Hill Community College in the fall. Eventually, he says, he’d like to work as a motivational speaker for kids. “We’re not supposed to make it, we’re going against all odds, but a lot of us, given the right opportunity we’ll grow,” he says, likening himself and his colleagues to Tupac Shakur’s song about the rose that grew from the concrete.

K) But while the $12-$15 an hour these former gang members are getting paid might sound steep, the economic rationale stacks up, according to Culliton. CBD figures suggest a “core influencer” costs Massachusetts around $53,000 per year, (the national average is $100,000 per year) for things like incarceration and probation, compared to roughly $30,000 a year for the program. CBD estimates the program will cost $18 million over three years, funded mostly by private philanthropy. So far program officials have raised about $4.8 million.

(L) Calculating costs can be “tricky,” according to Ben Struhl, a policy analyst from MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, which, along with a team from Northeastern University, will gather and analyze data to measure the effectiveness of the program. But Mr. Struhl says he’s excited because the research could be essential in proving the approach works.

(M) “We know in general things like these can work, but we don’t have a great sort of mapping of what specific types of programs are most impactful, and which ones are the most cost effective,” Struhl says. “If we can do that better, by looking at programs like College Bound Dorchester, we might actually be able to really establish a better way forward with some of these criminal justice debates.”

(963 words. Abridged from The Christian Science Monitor, May 24, 2017)