Roca: a rock for the at-risk: a program in Massachusetts is successfully transforming the lives of the most troubled young men.

• Author: Brown, Sarah Alice
• Position: JUVENILE JUSTICE

Imagine a young man who, before age 17, has been arrested three times for shoplifting, expelled from school for bringing a gun to class and kicked out of his home.

Now imagine a program that persuades that teenager to finish high school, teaches him useful work skills and helps him find a job, essentially turning his life around.

A program in the Boston area called Roca is steering young men away from lives of crime so well that the state government is banking on its continued success. Last year, Massachusetts set aside $27 million for seven years of "social innovation financing" for this program aimed at high-risk young men. It's the country's largest investment in this new type of funding.

Both the financing model and the Roca program have gained the attention of other states and communities that seek effective ways to invest in programs that ultimately prevent future crime by reducing delinquency.

The cost savings alone can be significant.

States spend $5.7 billion annually just to incarcerate youth-arresting, prosecuting and treating them runs several times that amount.

An Ounce of Prevention

Effective juvenile justice policy and programs must balance rehabilitation with accountability and public safety. Roca appears to have found an effective balance.

Founded in 1988, Roca ("rock" in Spanish) takes the most high-risk young men between the ages of 17 and 24 and offers them support in finishing school, training in certain job skills and help in finding a job. The program's guiding principle is clear: Decent employment that shifts troubled young people toward economic independence keeps them away from a life of crime. Its goal, simple: Move troubled young men out of violence and poverty and into the workforce.

The young men in the program have committed crimes and are at-risk of committing more. They have joined gangs, abused illegal drugs, dropped out of school, stolen cars and burglarized homes. They have failed in other rehabilitative programs.

Roca has helped more than young men by offering "a rock to lean on, strength to draw from, and a foundation for the future," says its website. "We work hard to end the cycle of prison and poverty by targeting the highest risk youth," says Dana Betts, senior program director at Roca. "We change their behavior and develop their work ethic to ultimately transform their lives."

Extensive evaluations of the program's intervention model have produced consistent evidence that lives are changing. In FY...