Community-Based Approaches Can Help Keep Youth Out of Trouble

Kids who are incarcerated are less likely to finish high school and more likely to end up behind bars as adults, research shows.

So, what works to protect and enhance public safety while holding youth accountable for their behavior and helping them develop the skills they need to succeed?

“Credible messengers” are key, Logan Seacrest, a fellow at the nonprofit R Street Institute, told a session on keeping youth out of trouble held at the 2025 NCSL Legislative Summit in Boston. “Trying to reach a kid who’s been in and out of detention, someone who’s maybe already lost friends to violence, he’s not going to trust someone in a suit, necessarily. Even the most powerful or well-crafted message is going to fall flat if the recipient doesn’t identify with the person delivering it.”

A program that got it right, Seacrest says, was “Operation Ceasefire,” which addressed a spike in youth violence in Boston. The program, which ran from 1996-2000, targeted the young people most at risk of being either a perpetrator or victim of gun violence with a message that those who were violent would be held accountable. “That message was delivered by folks that those kids trusted,” he says. 

The result: a drop in youth violence of 65% over a two-year period, Seacrest says. “Ceasefire didn’t try to reach all the youth in Boston. It focused on only a handful of young people really at risk, and it was really successful.” 

Ceasefire’s lesson is that, sometimes, less is more, he says. “Instead of expanding government, let’s approach this problem in a smart way and expand the limited resources for maximum effect.” 

Seacrest points to another Boston-based program, the Cambridge Safety Net Collaborative, which brings together police, social services and schools to address youth violence as a public health problem. 

“Violence actually is transmitted almost like a virus. It moves through neighborhoods like a contagion. A single incident can lead to retribution, reprisals, even more violence in the same way cells become infected with a virus,” Seacrest says. “The goal of Cambridge is to give the community an immune system to try to protect the against that. They’ve been able to reduce recidivism very, very nicely over the years.”