Blame the Block, Blame the Mama

Claire Brooks

Let's Talk About Juvenile Delinquency with Professor A

Claire Brooks

Blame the Block, Blame the Mama. Welcome back to Let's Talk About Juvenile Delinquency. I'm Claire Brooks and I am sitting in for Professor A this week. She has not been feeling well this week. So let's jump right in. In Week 1, you built a list. Social media. Weak supervision. Poverty. Low collective efficacy. That was the list of causes, and this week we take that list and do something with it that does not usually get done in public.

Claire Brooks

We test each item against the actual evidence. Some of it holds. Some of it does not. And the parts that do not hold are still in circulation, still being repeated from podiums and in comment sections and on the news, which means they are surviving on something other than evidence. When an explanation survives without evidence behind it, it survives because it is useful. Somebody benefits from it being the explanation. That is what this episode is about. Here is the definition we need, because nothing today makes sense without it.

Claire Brooks

Collective efficacy, as Lee and colleagues define it in your first reading, is social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good. That definition traces back to Sampson and colleagues, and it is the only validated measure of this construct in the literature. It has two parts, and this is where most people go wrong. The first is social cohesion and trust, do neighbors trust one another, would they help each other out.

Claire Brooks

The second is informal social control, could neighbors be counted on to intervene for the good of the neighborhood. Not police. Not cameras. Informal. Trust and willingness to act. You need both. Trust without willingness to intervene is just being neighborly. Willingness to intervene without trust is surveillance. Collective efficacy is what exists when both are present at once. And here is the distinction that is the hinge of the entire week. Collective efficacy is a neighborhood social process. It is not a neighborhood structural condition.

Claire Brooks

Structural conditions are the built and economic facts of a place. Concentrated poverty. Housing quality. Vacancy. Whether there is a grocery store. Social processes are what happens between the people living inside those conditions. If you collapse those two, if you let "low collective efficacy" quietly become another way of saying "poor Black neighborhood," you have converted a structural argument into a cultural one. You have taken a finding about what disinvestment does to social ties and turned it into a story about people who do not care about their own block. That conversion happens constantly in American crime talk. Once you can hear it, you will not be able to stop hearing it. A word about the two reviews this week, so you know how they fit together.

Claire Brooks

Lee and colleagues synthesize seventeen studies on collective efficacy and children's behavior, organized by developmental stage, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. The evidence is not equally strong across all three, and where it is strongest cuts against the way we usually talk about neighborhoods and crime. They are candid about the studies that came out mixed and about the limits of their own review. There is also a study in there tracing a pathway from the neighborhood through parenting and forward into adolescence, and that pathway runs in a direction worth taking slowly. Aazami and colleagues review twenty-eight studies on risk factors, protective factors, and interventions, organized into four themes, two of which they identify as primary predictors.

Claire Brooks

The discussion section is where the authors step back and name what sits underneath those predictors. That passage is the most important thing in the article, and it is the part most often left out by people citing this literature. Both are open access, and the links are in the module. The question sitting underneath this whole week is not really whether collective efficacy matters. It is this: if collective efficacy can be built, what happens when somebody builds it and somebody else takes it away? Neither of your articles answers that. So I went looking. There is a study published in 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ross, Ochoa, and Papachristos, evaluating a street outreach program in Chicago called CRED. Community violence intervention.

Claire Brooks

Credible messengers working with people at the highest risk of shooting or being shot. Three hundred twenty-four men in the treatment group, measured against a balanced comparison sample of twenty-five hundred. Listen to the structure of what they found, not just the headline. They looked at three levels. Everyone who enrolled. The subset who made it through the initial phase. And the people who completed the program. For the completers, the effect was large. After twenty-four months, program alumni showed what the authors describe as a 73.4 percent reduction in violent crime arrests relative to their comparison group. For the other two groups, everyone enrolled, and everyone partway through, the declines were real but did not reach statistical significance.

Claire Brooks

The benefit attaches to finishing. Which means the benefit requires the program to still exist when you get to the end of it. A violence intervention program that gets a young person halfway is not half as good. In the statistics, it is not distinguishable from nothing. Hold that. I am coming back to it. But I am not going to give you only the research that agrees with me, because that is not how this course works and it is not how any of us should approach evidence. There is a study published this year in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Niknam, Desjardins, Stuart, Richardson, and Webster, examining two community violence interruption programs in Washington, D.C. Cure the Streets, and the Violence Intervention Initiative. Firearm assaults and homicides from 2016 through 2025. They divided the city into roughly fifteen hundred hexagons and compared treated areas against synthetic and matched controls.

Claire Brooks

They did not find that these programs worked. Areas covered by the Violence Intervention Initiative had significantly higher rates of firearm homicides than their synthetic controls. Cure the Streets areas were somewhat elevated but not significantly. Site by site, no individual location showed a significant protective effect. Their conclusion is that more research is needed to identify the resources and staffing required to support successful community violence intervention. So let me say plainly what an honest reading of both studies gives you. Community violence intervention is not magic. It is not automatically effective because it is community-based, or because the workers have lived experience, or because it is the humane-sounding option.

Claire Brooks

In Chicago, a program moved a hard outcome for the people who finished it. In Washington, two programs did not move the outcome at all, and one looked worse than its controls. That is what a real evidence base looks like. Mixed. Contingent on implementation. Dependent on resources and staffing, which is the D.C. authors' own language, not mine. And those two findings fit together rather than canceling out. Chicago says the effect lives at completion. Washington says we need to understand what resources and staffing make these programs work. Both of those are findings about sustained investment. Now, I want to slow down, because we have been talking about this construct at a very particular altitude, and that is not the only altitude available. Everything we have discussed so far measures collective efficacy with a scale. Ten items. Five about trust, five about willingness to intervene. Somebody knocks on a door, a caregiver answers questions, the answers become a number, and the number goes into a model. That is legitimate research and I am not knocking it.

Claire Brooks

But a number is a compression. And I want to tell you about a scholar who went and sat with what the number compresses. Her name is Jody Miller. She is a sociologist, and when she did this work she was in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Some of you may know her first book, One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender. The one I want to talk about is her 2008 ethnography from NYU Press, Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence. It won the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the Race, Gender, and Class section, and it was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award.

Claire Brooks

Miller interviewed adolescent girls and boys in disadvantaged St. Louis neighborhoods. And she does something a systematic review structurally cannot do. She shows you what limited collective efficacy actually is when you are living inside it at fifteen years old. Here is one number from her work to hold next to those scale items. In her sample, over sixty percent of the girls and roughly seventy percent of the boys had witnessed someone being shot. Now go back to the survey question. Could your neighbors be counted on to intervene for the good of the neighborhood? Somebody answers that low, and it becomes a data point about social cohesion. Miller shows you what generates that answer. And this is why Professor A wanted to discuss what Miller has done, even though her book centers girls and the case we are discussing centers a boy accused of shooting a girl. Miller does not treat limited collective efficacy as a freestanding problem. She treats it as one strand braided together with several others, unresponsive policing, the dominance of street masculinity, and a set of ideologies about women and girls that teach young people to read violence as something a girl brought on herself through her own flawed character, rather than as a product of broader social inequality.

Claire Brooks

That braiding is the insight. It is why the environment she describes cannot be reduced to any single variable, and it is why "the neighborhood lacked collective efficacy" is a wildly insufficient sentence for what is actually happening in the places we are talking about. She also writes, and this is the line I want you to carry out of this episode, that urban disadvantage is the result of deliberate policy decisions. Deliberate. Decisions. Made by people. In rooms. On the record. That is an ethnographer in St. Louis in 2008 saying the same thing we have been circling all episode from the direction of the statistics. And this is what Professor A. leans on constantly in her op-eds and her commentary. So much of what happens in a neighborhood, in a city, in a state, in a country comes down to policy decisions. Somebody made a decision. A group of people made a decision. And the collective either benefits from those decisions or suffers under them. Two more things about Miller before I move on. Her final chapter is about solutions, which is rarer in this genre than it should be. Among them: rehabilitating existing housing, instituting community programs, increasing institutional accountability, challenging gender inequality, and stabilizing community agencies. Hold onto that last one. Stabilizing community agencies. I will come back to it in a few minutes. And second, because this is how we approach every source in this course, including me,

Claire Brooks

Miller's book drew serious critique. A reviewer named Portia Adams argued that the sampling and framing risked producing a portrait of Black girls as victims without family, kin, history, or community care, and Black boys as potential predators, and pushed back specifically on the repeated characterization of these communities as lacking collective efficacy. Miller anticipates part of that inside the book itself; she states early on that her intent is not to perpetuate the myth of the Black rapist. I am not going to settle that disagreement for you in a podcast. But consider what it is a disagreement about. It is about who gets described as lacking collective efficacy, who does the describing, and what that description licenses once it is out in the world. That is not a detour from this week's material.

Claire Brooks

Which brings me to Louisiana. In 2024, a Baton Rouge teenager named Markel Lee sat in front of a news camera. He was sixteen. He was enrolled in the Baton Rouge Community Street Team, a violence prevention program working in zip codes 70802 and 70805. The reporter asked him about his music. He told her music became his therapy after his mother was shot, after his aunt was incarcerated, and after, in his own words, a lot of people died. That is a child describing, on camera, adverse childhood experiences and exposure to community violence. And describing a structure holding him. A program. Credible messengers. A connection. Then the program was defunded. The Street Team, designed to deploy credible messengers as high-risk interventionists in exactly those zip codes, was shuttered following budget reductions under Mayor-President Sid Edwards' administration. Jobs. Housing assistance. Counseling. Conflict mediation. Zeroed out. Stabilizing community agencies.

Claire Brooks

That was Miller's recommendation in 2008. Baton Rouge did the opposite, in the most literal way available. In April 2026, Markel Lee surrendered to Baton Rouge police, charged with first-degree murder, five counts of attempted first-degree murder, and illegal use of a weapon in the April 23 shooting at the Mall of Louisiana food court. He is being held without bond on the murder charge. The young woman killed in that shooting was Martha Elizabeth Odom. Also seventeen. A senior at Ascension Episcopal in Lafayette, captain of her soccer team, editor of her school newspaper, three weeks from graduation, on senior skip day with her friends. Two children. One dead. One accused of a death. Now go back to Chicago. The effect attaches to completion. Not enrollment. Not partial participation. Completion. Markel Lee was sixteen and enrolled. He was, in the language of that study, somewhere in the middle, the level where declines were real but did not reach significance. He never became an alum of anything, because the thing he was enrolled in stopped existing.

Claire Brooks

I want to be careful here, and I want you careful too, because this is where this kind of argument gets made badly. I am not telling you the Street Team would have prevented that shooting. Nobody can tell you that. That is not a claim the research supports and it is not one I am making. These studies measure populations, not individuals. What I am telling you is narrower and harder to argue with. We have evidence that this type of program produces its benefit at completion. Louisiana ended the program before completion was possible for the young people inside it. And then, when one of those young people was charged with a homicide, the state explained the outcome by pointing at his home. Now, because one case is an anecdote and two cases is a pattern worth examining, let me take you to Connecticut.

Claire Brooks

This past June, Leonard Jahad, executive director of the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program in New Haven, told reporters he was being forced to eliminate positions for lack of funding. He tied it to federal reductions in 2025 that eliminated hundreds of Department of Justice grants affecting violence prevention organizations nationally. And he said something at the time that I want you to hear as a prediction, because that is what it was. He said the work was effective, and he pointed out that New Haven had seen zero homicides so far that year. By the end of June, five people were laid off. In early August, there was a fatal shooting in New Haven.

Claire Brooks

Jahad told FOX61 he had known one of the victims, Lorenzo Foreman, and had previously tried to connect him with intervention services. He said the people he lost had been working with kids, and that now those kids were not being reached. Set the two side by side, because the differences are as instructive as the similarities. Different state. Different politics. In Louisiana the cut came from a municipal budget; in Connecticut it came down from federal grant terminations. Connecticut has not reversed Raise the Age. Louisiana has. These are not the same jurisdiction and not the same mechanism. But the sequence is identical. A program using credible messengers to reach the highest-risk young people. A funding decision made somewhere upstream.

Claire Brooks

A reduction in the adults available to intervene. And then a death, followed by a public conversation that mostly does not mention the funding decision. The difference in the New Haven case is that somebody said it out loud in advance. In June, on the record, the director of that program told the press what the loss of staff was likely to mean. Six weeks later a young man he had tried to reach was dead. That is the thing about this sequence. It is not mysterious. It is not hindsight. It is predictable enough that the people doing the work predict it, publicly, before it happens, and it happens anyway. So when the explanation arrives afterward, pay attention to what it points at. In Louisiana, in the days after the shooting, Governor Jeff Landry blamed failures at home and judges who follow what he called hug a thug policies. A Louisiana opinion writer reached further back and used the word super predator.

Claire Brooks

Let us PEDLIGS that word, because this is exactly what the framework is for. People. John DiIulio, the political scientist who coined it. And DiIulio again, who by 2001 had signed an amicus brief in Miller v. Alabama calling the theory a myth. The author retracted it. Events. November 1995. Its publication in The Weekly Standard. Documents. That 1995 article. The 2001 amicus brief. Louisiana Senate Bill 3. Laws. Senate Bill 3, signed by Governor Landry in March 2024, effective that April. Every seventeen-year-old in Louisiana now processed as an adult from arrest through sentencing. Louisiana is the only state in the country to have passed Raise the Age legislation and then fully reversed it. Markel Lee is being prosecuted under that statute. Ideology. The claim that some children are a categorically different kind of thing than a child. Ideology is what makes a policy feel like common sense instead of a choice. Groups. Who organized for Senate Bill 3. Who organized against it. Who funded the Street Team, and who was in the room when that line was cut. Supreme Court cases. Roper v. Simmons. Graham v. Florida. Miller v. Alabama. Three rulings affirming that juveniles are categorically different from adults under the Constitution.

Claire Brooks

That is the map. A theory coined in 1995. Retracted by its own author by 2001. Rejected by the Supreme Court across three separate decisions. Still in active circulation in Louisiana in 2026, doing the work of justifying a statute that routes seventeen-year-olds into adult court. That is not the survival of evidence. That is the survival of usefulness. Now run the same test on the family explanation. Blame the mama. And here I need you honest rather than comfortable, because the family explanation is not simply false. Your second reading found real things about families, and we do not get to wave them away because we dislike where they get used. But put those findings next to that discussion section, what the research found about families, and what the authors say sits underneath it. And then the question worth asking is why the explanation that stops at the household is the one that makes it onto television, while the part naming what is underneath the household does not.

Claire Brooks

If Professor A was here, she would say it plainly, "The answer is not complicated. Family blame is cheap. It requires no appropriation, no legislation, no line item. It locates the problem inside a home, where public policy has no obligations. You cannot be voted out of office over a mother's parenting. You can be voted out of office over a budget. The last thing. The same dollar that could have interrupted Markel Lee could have protected Martha Odom. Prevention is not charity for some other people's children." She would say, "Prevention is the structural condition under which malls are safe, food courts are safe, and soccer captains on senior skip day come home. When a boy in 70802 does not get the support the state promised him, a girl from Lafayette does not get to graduate. The boy in the prevention video and the girl in the food court are not two separate stories. They are the same budget line read from two ends. We rise and fall as a community. Not separately, but equally."

Claire Brooks

So, back to the Week 1 list, and then I will end this week's podcast lecture. Poverty and structural disadvantage holds. Strongly. And it operates partly through the other items on the list, which is exactly why it keeps getting hidden behind them. Low collective efficacy holds, with conditions, and the conditions are more interesting than "the neighborhood matters." The Lee review lays them out well. Weak supervision holds partially, and it is the item most often severed from its own causes.

Claire Brooks

That pathway I mentioned earlier shows you what the public conversation cuts off. And social media, which did not surface as a factor in either review, and is in every news segment anyway. Sit with the distance between those two facts. Here is your discussion forum prompt for the week. Both reviews find that family and neighborhood matter, but not in the simple way public debate assumes.

Claire Brooks

So, using both articles, the documentary, the hip-hop track, and this podcast: when a public official blames "parents" or "the community" for youth crime, what does the evidence support, and what does it not? And what is the political function of the parts that are not supported? Your initial post is three hundred to four hundred words, due Thursday, September 3, at 11:59 PM Central. Then at least two substantive peer responses, a hundred to a hundred fifty words each, due Sunday, September 6, at 11:59 PM Central. You need to cite all five sources, the articles and the op-ed by Professor A, the documentary, the Hip Hop track, and the podcast transcript. Your Field Note is also due Sunday, September 6.

Claire Brooks

Well you made it through this episode. I have to say that I enjoyed sitting in for Professor A. Remember, keep asking questions, keep searching for answers and if you ever get stuck, reach out to Professor A., asap. Have a great one!