OP-ED: Its About Scarcity, Stupid: Youth Development Needs Bigger Public Investment We all bring our own unique perspectives to the work we do. I grew up in a community where we took for granted that there was a role for a public sector in universal health care, quality education, public transit, social planning. There is one simple truth for me, having lived and worked in communities that have struggled with deindustrialization, the loss of jobs and the loss of a tax base and having worked with juvenile departments that closed programs, shut down services and closed facilities because of the budgetary pressures. Misery, quite simply, doesn’t love company. Misery doesn’t love company in the communities of color who have always experienced high levels of justice system involvement and whose most significant experience with government can be a police car, the courts, juvenile detention and a youth prison. For the communities most impacted by incarceration and crime, the public sector in the form of the justice system can be a negative force in their lives. Misery also doesn’t love company among the millions of public-sector employees who have managed through budgetary shortfalls, downsizing and the waves of cutbacks that have closed facilities, cut funding to nonprofits and reduced services for youth with the same pen stroke. The Great Recession that saw more than one million-public sector jobs vanish since 2008 has been a double-edged sword for juvenile justice reformers. The field made some gains closing facilities and shifting reliance to more effective youth development practices because the same fiscal pressures affecting all levels of government have been at play in juvenile justice. We have had the wind at our backs, as policymakers were forced to choose between raising taxes or closing expensive buildings. The field has forged a potent partnership with conservatives around the issues we can agree on: Get youth out of big, expensive buildings that generate poor outcomes. Our conservatives allies have been pretty clear with us: “This is a limited partnership” around a narrow set of goals. Rather than be obsessed with conservatives, progressives need to focus on some questions about our vision: What is the appropriate role of the public sector and government in youth justice policy, and how do we support the public infrastructure that serves these goals? Most progressives I know support making sound investments in the kinds of services any young person or family might need: school, work, the ability to actually receive professionally delivered public services and support for nonprofits that can meet human needs in a way government can’t. And yet we keep struggling over issues in juvenile justice reform that really shouldn’t be divisive issues amongst ourselves. To paraphrase a line from President Bill Clinton’s political strategist, James Carville, what is driving these divides? “It’s about scarcity, stupid.” The scarcity of public dollars to solve public problems is the cause of many fights within the juvenile justice reform constituency right now. These fights are preventing the field from being more effective because we are trapped in arguments bounded by scarcity — perceived or real. read more at:
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 23:40:53 +0000
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