When children grow up in poor and violent neighborhoods, it greatly increases the odds that they will turn commit violent crime in their life. For one, these places have bad role models and other damaging influences. Also, living around crime and poverty encourages kids to join violent gangs. Worse yet, cities and poor neighborhoods tend to have the worst schools. All of those factors help create a cycle of violence.
On a societal level, I think we can greatly prevent violence by getting kids out of bad neighborhoods and out of the inner-cities. Let’s get the kids away from crime and poverty, and let’s put the kids into good schools. That way, they will learn less destructive habits and will get a good education from a respected school, which will set them up to become law-abiding professionals as opposed to poor, uneducated thugs.
How do we get children out of the inner-cities and out of bad neighborhoods? We can do it by putting children into high-quality boarding schools in better areas, which we can do with student loans and grants. Alternatively, we can get entire families out of poor or violent neighborhoods, which we can do by building affordable homes in affluent neighborhoods with low crime. The first option works best with kids whose parent(s) will not take care of them properly. The second option works well with parent(s) who will take care of their kids as best they can but just need a little assistance to get themselves and their children out of the bad neighborhoods. The second option may also require that we find well-paying jobs for the parents, which itself may require that the parents get more education first. Additionally, the parents may need loans to pay the upfront costs of getting out of bad neighborhoods.
Whatever we do, we must stop the cycle of violence to prevent violence and put an end to violent crime.
What do you think?
Saturday, April 12th 2008 at 3:13 pm
“How do we get children out of the inner-cities and out of bad neighborhoods? We can do it by putting children into high-quality boarding schools in better areas, which we can do with student loans and grants. Alternatively, we can get entire families out of poor or violent neighborhoods, which we can do by building affordable homes in affluent neighborhoods with low crime.”
These bad neighborhoods and poor school system is a revolutionary form of slavery. I would love to go on and explain why I strongly believe that, but I must go to work. I will post comments on more blogs to come.