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	Related stories Violent crime: Teenage wasteland. By David S. Bernstein. Fedz in the 'hood: Ten years after Boston's gang-violence problem dissipated, the federal government is prosecuting more of the city's street criminals than ever. Now it wants to start killing them. By David S. Bernstein.

"When we were 15, 17, we had places to go," says Jay, a 23-year-old from Dorchester, standing with friends at the Puerto Rican festival in Franklin Park last weekend. His 22-year-old pal, who calls himself "Mr. Dizmo," can’t find a job. "Jobs for kids were there too, from BYCC [Boston Youth Clean-Up Crew], and ABCD," Jay says. Other state-funded programs that employed teens, such as the Tobacco Prevention Program, have been defunded, says Mike Kozu, program coordinator at Project Right, in Dorchester. Even volunteer work is unavailable, Knight says, as the slots are taken by people performing court-ordered community-service obligations.

"There has been a tremendous amount of cutbacks," Kozu says, particularly in services that put at-risk youths in contact with potentially helpful adults. He points to cuts in funding for probation officers in the court system, and for police and other city programs due to local-aid reductions, all of which translates into less adult support for kids on the edge. Cuts in after-school programs, day care, and summer-jobs programs have further reduced the "positive opportunities for young people at risk," says the BPD outreach officer. "We need to get them into job slots that help give them a sense of why they want to choose one path over another."

"There’s a lack of opportunity to participate in organized sports or other programs," says the Vine Street Center’s Hinton. "This center has the capacity to hold 350 kids. In a one-mile radius there are probably 3000, 4000 kids. And we’re full. Our center is just a drop in the bucket."

MAYOR TOM MENINO has called out the cops and the clergy to ease the violence among teens, but during an August 5 photo-op in Brighton, he lashed out at the Romney and Bush administrations for policies and budget cuts that have exacerbated these problems without offering solutions. "You know, we have a report coming out of the state which says after-school programs don’t work, summer jobs don’t work, DARE [Drug Abuse Resistance Education] doesn’t work, enrichment programs don’t work," Menino said, referring to an April 2004 report issued by Governor Mitt Romney’s gubernatorial Commission on Criminal Justice Innovation. "What works? Treatment works. Outreach works. That’s what we try to do in the city of Boston. But the federal government’s walked away from us, and the state government’s walked away from us. It comes back to the city, and we have to deal with these issues."

Three days later — in an afternoon press conference at the South End’s Carter Playground, where young Jenry Gonzalez was struck by a stray bullet — City Councilors Chuck Turner and Charles Yancey expanded on Menino’s theme of malevolent neglect. "The city of Boston, I believe, has tried to do its best," Turner told a small crowd massed in the right field of the Carter Playground baseball field. "But the reality is, the state is not cooperating, and the federal government is not cooperating.... When you deprive communities of the resources to enable youth to move forward into productive economic circumstances, when you deprive the city of the resources necessary to have youth workers out on the streets, when you cut back resources needed for youth services and summer jobs and programs to productively employ the energy of our youth, then the reality is that you are warring on our youth. Youth across this city who are in poor communities are under assault by our government, and it has to stop."

Those are compelling words, but don’t expect anything to change. A year and a half into his gubernatorial term, Romney has consistently demonstrated a near-total detachment from criminal-justice issues (other than the death penalty), abstaining from personal involvement while making Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey his point person on the issue. This Tuesday, making a rare appearance in one of Boston’s poor neighborhoods to open a housing development, Romney never broached the subject that has the city’s parents afraid to let their children go to the park. With regard to the recent uptick in inner-city violence, Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s communications director, says via e-mail that the governor "is confident that the mayor and the police commissioner have the situation [in Boston] well in hand."

Healey, the administration’s crime expert, led the criminal-justice commission that produced the April report which, among other things, dismisses the efficacy of summer-job programs on the basis of a 1982 study. Urban violence is "symptomatic of all kinds of social problems," she said in an interview with the Phoenix last week, citing the re-entry of gang members and drug dealers into the community as the number-one cause of Boston’s recent spate of violence. In the same conversation, the lieutenant governor dismissed talk of MCAS-prompted dropouts as a "red herring" and made no mention of community centers, summer-job programs, or youth-outreach programs — no surprise, since her Commission on Criminal Justice Innovation panned many of these measures as ineffectual. Healey did add that preventive steps need to be taken to keep kids from joining gangs, and called the Romney administration’s proposed restoration of drug-treatment funding a "critical piece" of the puzzle.

This presumably means that Romney’s cuts to those funds were instrumental in creating the problem in the first place, but you won’t catch Healey saying that. Indeed, the last few weeks have seen a lot of blame cast and fingers pointed, but very little responsibility taken for contributing to the problem. That will not come as a surprise to the troubled kids who have little faith that their worlds might one day improve. Says the BPD outreach officer, "These youths have known for a long time that adults are whacked."

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com. Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com