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-T is currently looking to purchase a K-5 Blazer 1974 - 1978 and also a 1956 - 1964 station wagon. Please contact him at sidewalku@hotmail.com if you have any information.

-T has recently lost his twenty-five year old daughter to Sickle Cell disease. Please keep him and his family in your thoughts.

-T is also currently in need of and waiting for a type-O positive kidney transplant. If you have any information on a donor please email sidewalku@hotmail.com.

-Read about federal gang bills at www.finalcall.com and at www.streetgangs.com.

-SENATE BILL S.1735 - CRIMINAL STREET GANGS ABATEMENT ACT:
Boot camps and other “get tough” programs for adolescents do not succeed in preventing criminal behavior and may make the problem worse, an expert panel concluded Friday in a draft report.
Further, laws transferring juveniles into adults court system lead these teens to commit more violence and do not deter others from committing crime, the panel said.
More promising, it said, are programs that offer intensive counseling for families and young people at risk.
The 13-members panel of experts, convened by the National Institutes of Health, reviewed the available scientific evidence to look for consensus on causes of youth violence and ways to prevent it.
“Scare tactics’ don’t work,” the panel concluded in its draft report Friday morning. ‘‘Programs that seek to prevent violence through fear and tough treatment do not work.”
Youth violence has declined from its peak a decade ago but violent crime rates are still high, the panel said.
Violence can be traced to a variety of troublesome conditions. Among possible causes: inconsistent or harsh parenting, poor peer relations, gang involvement, lack of connection to school and living in a violent neighborhood.
The trouble with boot camps, group detention centers and other “get tough” programs is they bring together young people who are inclined toward violence and teach each other how to commit more crime, the panel said: “ The more sophisticated (teens) instruct the move naïve in precisely the behaviors that the intervener wishes to prevent.”
It also rejected programs that “consist largely of adults lecturing,” like DARE.
One barrier to implementing effective programs, the report said, is resistance from people operating ineffective programs who depend of them for their jobs.
The panel looked for programs that have been tested using rigorous research methods and concluded that “the good news is that there are a number of intervention programs that have been shown” effective.
The report cited two: a therapy program where youth and their families attend 12 one-hour sessions over three months, and a community based clinical treatment program that target violent and chronic offenders at risk of being removed from their families. This second program provided about 60 hours of counseling over about four months with therapists available at all hours.
Both Programs reduced arrest rates and out-of-home placements, with positives effects four years after treatment ended.
The report identified six other programs that seemed to work, but that hadn’t been studied as closely, including Big Brothers Big Sister, a nurse-family partnership program and Project Towards No Drugs Abuse.
Successful programs share a variety of characteristics, the panel said. Among them: treatments last year or longer, intensive clinical work with those at risk is included, they take place outside schools and other institutional settings.