ST. LOUIS — St. Louis is investing more than a million dollars to reach youth before they resort to violence. It follows several recent cases where teenagers are accused of serious crimes.
It's a conversation about solutions -- investments for prevention and even justice for offenders. A local professor said courts shouldn’t just throw the book at kids.
"There's no value for life,” Alderman Joe Vacarro said while reacting to recent news.
There have been multiple St. Louis carjackings involving youth. One is accused of fatally shooting the victim in South City.
Teenagers are also accused of smashing car windows and shooting at police outside of The City Foundry.
Just this week, a 17-year-old plead guilty to shooting at police back in September before taking off in a stolen car. His sentence -- not incarceration, but less than a year in a state social work program, a program he reportedly escaped out of in the past.
"I actually believe they should go to jail…do the crime, do the time. At least if we catch them and they go to jail, even if it's just for a year, hopefully at the end of that, they would have learned a lesson. Right now, the lesson is, ‘we can do whatever we want,'” Vacarro said.
Vacarro heads the public safety committee. He wants to see solutions that steer young people away from crime.
Tuesday, his committee awarded more than a million dollars to some 20 local agencies to do just that.
"If we don't start with these kids at 10 and 11 years old, by the time they're 16 and 17 years old, it's too late," he said.
It comes as there are differing opinions on what justice looks like when those crimes are committed.
"We have to look at where this person is emotionally, cognitively,” SLU Criminal Justice Professor Kenya Brumfield-Young said. "I always ask people to think back to when they were 13, 14. Are they the same people mentally? Now they're not, we grow up, mature. We look at things different."
She said she is not excusing the behavior of crime but said there are special factors to consider when the offender is a child.
"We don't have enough resources for them. We don't have things for kids to do. We have families that are struggling. We have young people who are feeling like they are the ones who are left to put food on the table or clothes on their back," she said.
It’s why Brumfield-Young said she understands why courts may not rush to incarcerate youth.
"Then we look at who we get out. So, we've sent all these young people in for very long times, and we get them out and we go ‘what happened?’ We start to cycle because these young men and women are having kids and they've been institutionalized and raised by the system, so now whose raising kids?” she said.
Vacarro said local groups such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, Pianos for People, and Gene Slay's Boys & Girls Club will get more than $50,000 each. That money kicks in right away.
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