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The San Francisco Chronicle
HEADLINE: A Path for Troubled Youths: Successful Oakland program would grow if ballot measures pass

DATE: October 29, 2002
BYLINE: Janine DeFao

Oakland -- Terrell was arrested last month for driving a stolen car, stealing money and trying to break into a house. He is a chronic runaway who hangs out at a park during school. He has used drugs, and probably dealt them.

Terrell's story is not uncommon in Oakland's tough flatland neighborhoods, like the one in East Oakland where he lives.

But Terrell is only 11 years old.

Now the fifth-grader has an adult in his life whose job it is to get him back on track, in school and out of the criminal justice system before it is too late.

His mentor, Shawn Harris, is part of a new program that has had dramatic success in turning around young lawbreakers. It would double in size if Mayor Jerry Brown's anti-crime package is approved by voters.

"Someone has to be willing to give a kid that young a chance," said Harris, a case manager in the Pathways to Change program working with Terrell, whose name has been changed because he is on probation.

Harris knows it won't be easy, but he also knows the challenges. He was raised in the projects in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point and, at 26, still lives there. Friends who have been murdered and sent to prison outnumber those who have graduated from college.

Pathways to Change targets repeat juvenile offenders, the estimated 500 to 600 Oakland youths under 18 who regularly get in trouble with the law each year.

While the program plans to serve 280 youths a year, it has so far enrolled 30 since it started last spring. Of the 87 teens and preteens in its pilot program that ended last year, only nine were rearrested -- a 10 percent recidivism rate compared with 72 percent for repeat juvenile offenders in Alameda County.

"We're not just preventing them from getting arrested again, but stabilizing their lives and helping them move forward," said Laura Pinkney, executive director of the Oakland nonprofit Safe Passages, which runs Pathways to Change.

Pathways' seven case managers are each expected to work with 40 youths each year. The $300,000 a year from the tax measure would allow the program to hire six more case managers, reaching another 240 youths annually, bringing the number served close to the total estimate of juvenile repeat offenders in the city, Pinkney said.

The program steps in once a youth has been arrested and attempts to convince the juvenile court, not always successfully, that the youth should be released from juvenile hall on the condition that he or she will receive extensive services and supervision.

Case managers like Harris call their charges twice a day and meet with them twice a week. They make sure they are in school, and hook them up with services from anger management to family counseling to after-school programs.

The case managers work with no more than 10 kids at a time.By comparison, juvenile probation officers in Alameda County typically have caseloads of 50 to 60 youths, whom they see once a month, said Sheila Foster, director of juvenile services for the Alameda County Probation Department.

For Jessica Perdomo Holmes, 18, her case manager in the pilot program, Veronica Martinez, became more like a best friend.

Perdomo Holmes was arrested two years ago for breaking another girl's jaw in a fight. But with Martinez's help, she has set her sights on college and a career as a psychologist so she can help troubled youths and families.

Martinez "really understands. She's helped me through a lot of things," said Perdomo Holmes. "When I've had problems with my parents or things at school, she tells me not to get sidetracked, to just keep going."

The mentor-youth relationship is central to the program's success.

"The intensive supervision is key to what we're doing," said Andrea Shorter, Deputy Director of the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, who is advising the Oakland program.

Pathways is modeled on a program started by Shorter's organization in San Francisco in 1993. Since then, 1,800 youths have completed the program, and only 15 percent have reoffended, compared with a countywide average of 65 percent, she said. That program also has been copied in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Oakland officials, from prosecutors to case managers, are hopeful they'll see similar success.

But they realize there are no quick fixes for kids who are already too familiar with the criminal justice system at a young age. Many are failing in school, if attending at all. Difficult family lives are common.

Despite the program's successes, Terrell landed back in juvenile hall afew days after his release, by running away and violating his probation.

Another of Harris' cases, a 15-year-old boy arrested for joyriding in a stolen car, was re-enrolled in school, only to be suspended for fighting.

He is now back in school and in an anger-management class.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2002 SF Chronicle

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