Priest Does What Gov't Ought To Do

The Daily Gazette - 10/4/05

"The View From Here" By Carl Strock

Thinking further about the Rev Peter Young's work to help drug addicts back on their feet, on the one hand it's amazing what he has accomplished, and on the other hand it's so simple and so utterly practical that you have to wonder why government doesn't do it.

What he does is provide low-cost, safe, supervised housing; jobs, often at his own profit-making businesses; hand-holding through the courts or social service bureaucracy; tutoring for high school equivalency diplomas; counseling and medical care. In short, the basics of what you need if you have hit rock bottom and want to work your way up.

Of course, a guy cannot get out of prison where he spent a few years for drug dealing, let's say, and right off the bat rent an apartment, get a job and be a solid citizen. It's ridiculous to suppose that he can, which is what government supposes.

He needs a helping hand if he's going to do anything but return to the criminal life on the streets.

And that's what Rev Young provides through his network of foundations, businesses, and non-profit corporations known collectively as Peter Young Housing, Industries, and Treatment.

He started operation in 1959, when he was a parish priest in the crime-ridden south end of Albany, and he's been at it ever since, expanding operations like a tycoon, almost. A tycoon of human rehabilitation.

He says more than 9 out of 10 people who enter his program graduate to productive lives, compared with a prison system that has a recidivism rate of 70 percent. "It makes more economic sense," he says.

He runs a regular empire - The Altamont Program Inc, 820 River Street Inc, Peter Young Residence, Inc, Vesta Community Housing Development, and the Peter G Young Foundation - but it's nothing compared to government. A mere $20 million operation, about the cost of running the state prison system for three days.

What he does is simplicity itself. He rents a block of 60 apartments in the formerly dangerous Ida Yarbrough Homes, for example, and sublets them to people who have gone through drug rehab and are working.

"We have their key," he told me, meaning he has leverage over them in case they mess up.

How many people has he had to evict over the years? None that he can remember.

His halfway houses are staffed by people who have themselves gone through rehab and who therefore know all the tricks and all the temptations.

His apartment houses are watched by tenants' associations with a keen interest in keeping them safe and drug-free. Rent is one-third below market rates, to give residents an incentive to stay clean.

He has an intake center in the old Public School No. 1 in the South End, now the Eleanor Young Clinic, where people come voluntarily or are sent by the courts or recommended by employers, and  from there everything else follows in steady increments until independence.

He has a wonderful personal touch and even at the age of 75 remembers the names of the people he banters with as he visits these houses, which you could hardly expect government employees to duplicate, but still.

Mostly what we get from politicians is: Lock 'em up. It doesn't work in the long-term, it's expensive, but it shows the voters they're tough on crime. I wish they'd pay as much attention to results as this priest does.

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