Recently we have had a lot of news about knife crime with some really sad deaths. Now Gordon Brown wants to target 110,000 families with "disruptive" youngsters. Other commentators wring their hands and say that fixing some of these issues will take a long time. David Cameron makes a big deal out of family values as well.
At the same time I have been reading The Tipping Poing by Malcolm Gladwell. A couple of quotes from a much longer discussion. "Peer influence and community influence are more inportant than family influence in determining how children turn out. ... A child is better off in a good neighbourhood and a troubled family than be or she is in a troubled neighbourhood and a good family. ...children are powerbully shaped by their external environment...It isn't just serious criminal behaviour, in the end, that is sensitive to environmental cues, it is all behaviour."
It's pretty tough to intervene directly in families and get results, as well as being hugely expensive for the state. Instead, lets put all those CCTV cameras and other resources to having a zero tolerance for litter, graffitti, and poor maintenance of all buildings in target neighbourhoods. Repair and keep clean the lifts. Make sure that parks are clean, safe, well maintained. Remove abandoned cars and enforce parking regulations. Focus on teen unemployment by incentivising specific job creation. Make it attractive for Tesco or Asda to open a supermarket with lots of part time jobs. Do the little things to make sure that deprived neigbourhoods don't look and feel deprived. Then they will come around, and remarkably quickly as well.
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