Nonprofits Leverage Goldman Sachs for Detention Programs

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A set of New York City nonprofits are working together to keep Rikers Island juvenile detention center residents from returning, and are using money from investment banker Goldman Sachs to do it. About half of the 16- to 18- year-old males who pass through Rikers Island will return within a year, according to David Butler, who’s heading the team working on the project at nonprofit social research organization MDRC.  “Anything we can do to change that is good,” he said. MDRC will oversee the ABLE program, which will be mandatory for the young men at Rikers by the time it is fully rolled out in January 2013 for a four-year run. The Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience is a method of teaching things like personal responsibility, anger management and impulse control with the aim of restructuring the student’s way of thinking. And it could not have been deployed on the Rikers scale, perhaps 3,400 students annually, without the cash Goldman Sachs agreed to provide.

UK Advocates Turning to NYC as Model for ‘Saner’ Criminal Justice System

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For decades, New York City was besieged by violent crime, peaking in 1990 when the city was ravaged by an estimated 2,245 murders. But then something remarkable happened, according to Greg Berman, author of the recent report “A Thousand Small Sanities: Crime Control Lessons from New York.” Over the last two decades, New York City experienced an unprecedented turnaround in violent crime. In 2009, there were 461 murders in the city, a 79 percent drop from 20 years earlier. Other crimes drastically declined as well, with the city seeing significant decreases in rapes, robberies and car thefts. Berman quotes Frank Zimring, author of the book “The City That Became Safe,” who called the crime rate reduction in New York City “the largest and longest sustained drop in street crime ever experienced by a big city in the developed world.”

The report, released by the Centre for Justice Innovation, explores the possibility of applying the policies and practices implemented in New York City to communities in the United Kingdom - where in the 2009-2010 fiscal year, London’s Metropolitan Police tallied more than 170,000 instances of violent crime, including 113 murders and more than 2,800 rapes.

New York Road Runners Offering Grants

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New York Road Runners (NYRR) seeks to make running a part of every child's school day by providing free running programs and resources to schools and communities in New York City and across the country. This school year, NYRR is excited to launch Events to Run, the latest resource from its suite of free youth running programs and teaching tools. To celebrate this launch, NYRR will award a total of $20,000 worth of grants to schools and non-profits to help support youth running and fitness events. There will be 40 grants of $500 each awarded to schools or organizations in the U.S. Award recipients will be selected by NYRR based upon its evaluation of the comparative merits of the applications submitted for the awards, and NYRR's decisions will be final. All applications must be submitted by 5 pm EST on Monday, February 13, 2012.