Mario Rodrigues has found a vehicle to steer peers away from criminal activity through the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in Fields Corner. Patrick McGroarty photo

By Patrick McGroarty
Reporter Staff

"In the early 1990s, it was hard to walk around wearing a baseball cap or jersey, because everything was tied to a gang," says Mario Rodrigues. "Now that the economy is doing bad, attention is being focused on the violence, but the violence never really went anywhere. I don't want to say someone getting killed is not a big deal, but there's nothing else to focus on. There's no jobs. They don't want to tell people that. They always want to direct attention back to violence with youth in the inner city."

On a Friday afternoon in late June, Rodrigues and three young volunteers from the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute huddled around a conference table inside the institute's second floor offices at the Lenane Building in Fields Corner for a discussion about the violence in their community. Rodrigues and his three friends (who each asked that their identity be withheld) discussed what they believe it would take to stop the violence that exists around them or, more accurately, what it would take to change the factors that they say lead their peers to violence: a lack of economic opportunity, deficient and misdirected programming, and no support for one-time lawbreakers.

Rodrigues left his life as a drug dealer for a full-time position at the institute over two years ago, and dreams of someday opening a business with friends. To his left sits a 28 year-old South End resident with an associate's degree in international business from UMass-Boston, who despite his education has struggled to find a job. Across the table sits "E," a fifteen year-old from Uphams Corner. E says even he remembers a time when the streets seemed more dangerous.

"My sister and I were on a bunk bed once, and a bullet came through the window," he said. "If I had been on the top bunk, it would have been a wrap. It was hectic back then. Right now, it seems more calm."

Rodrigues agreed that the streets are tamer than when he was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, but said there will always be violent crime: The question, he said, is whether to focus on the shootings and killings, or go after the root of the problem.

The problem, said the South End resident, starts when young children grow up surrounded by violence on television, on the streets, and in their own homes.

"Think of 9-11, think of all the programs on television, the first six pages of the Globe and the Herald," he said. "You are constantly being bombarded by violence, and it manifests itself on the street. If you practice the piano, you become good at the piano. If you're bombarded with all types of information about violence, it becomes part of your psyche."

Kids carry that psyche into their teenage years, he said, and out to the street corners and community centers where they hang out with their friends. Those labeled as troublemakers are kicked out by many programs, leaving them with no place to socialize but the streets.

"A lot of these institutions, like [local youth centers], they actually keep kids out if they think they're bad," said the South End resident. "They put them on the street, where altercations start. If you know a kid is bad, he's definitely going to be bad outside without supervision. If they would take a kid in for three hours a day, that's how he would be saved."

The unsupervised streets become the focus of life for kids left behind by the centers, the volunteers agreed, where they meet other kids who have been left behind, kids like E who despite their best efforts can't land a summer job.

"I signed up for the Hopeline, but didn't get a response," said E. "I applied to four different Shaw's, and haven't gotten a call up to now, and that was early in the year. When they do that to you, it's like, I'm trying to get a job, I'm trying to stay off the street, to help my mother, my family, and they're still not calling me. I think a lot of kids get aggravated waiting."

While they're waiting for that call, or after they've given up hope, E said many of his friends have no option but to follow their friends out to the streets. Maybe they stay out of trouble. Maybe they make a mistake. In a worst-case scenario, a youthful indiscretion might even land them in jail, as was the case for a fourth volunteer who walked into the tail-end of the roundtable conversation. After ten years in prison for a crime he committed as a teen, he only recently returned to Dorchester. He said that that freedom had come with no job, no support network, and no official forms of identification.

"Because of the way the CORI law works, if I want to get a job, they do a background check, they aren't gonna want to hire me," he said. "Not to mention the fact that I need a social security card to get an I.D., and proof of residency to get the social, and I've been in prison for 10 years so I don't have that. It's just one big loop."

It is incredibly difficult, he said, to come straight out of prison and stay on the straight and narrow when it feels like the system is against you; when there are easier ways to make money than the legal ones.

That's the point, said Rodrigues, where people like Tina Chery, the institute's founder and CEO, can help.

"She helps us with resources, she guides us," said Rodrigues. "Instead of letting us fall, she keeps us from falling. That's all you can do, because she doesn't have all the answers either, but she takes a chance on us&emdash;she knows we could fall anytime&emdash;and she helps each individual person that works here or comes in the door."

The obstacles facing many youths in Dorchester and Roxbury are high, said Rodrigues, and the kind of humble, realistic approach taken by Chery might be the best model for developing an effective response.

"You see the pain of the mothers who come in here, and you start thinking differently," said Rodrigues. "You gotta change yourself, and move on. We don't want to blame. We just want to point out the problem, and then do whatever we got to do to correct it, because obviously, people are losing their kids. There is no greater loss than that, a life."