Where's the "Pork"?

What happens to youngsters when they come home to neighborhoods where there are no after-school activities or even safe places to play?

Hugh Price, the new president of the National Urban League, kicked off his term last month with a remarkable speech. It was moderate in the best sense of the word -- and a reminder that being moderate sometimes requires courage. Without attempting to gloss over the legacy of pain and the continuing cost of racism to African-Americans. Price urged black people to stop blaming racism for all their economic and social problems. At the same time, he issued a rebuke to those who say that the interests of black and white Americans are separate and irreconcilable: "If Nelson Mandela and F.W. DeKlerk can bury the hatchets of hatred and oppression in the sand, instead of one another's heads, and get on with South Africa's future, then surely so can we." Price's speech is an important counterweight to the rhetoric of hatred and divisiveness that we too often hear, and it deserves a wide readership in the African-American and the white communities.

It should also be required reading for another group that has been putting rhetoric above the facts. I'm talking about the members of Congress who spent last week denouncing what they called "pork" in President Clinton's crime bill -- by which they mostly meant the after-school programs for young people in urban areas.

In his speech, Price talked about how kids grow up in urban neighborhoods that lack all amenities and supports and the destructive effect this has on them. An important first step is fixing the schools, but the schools can't do it all. What happens to youngsters when they come home to neighborhoods where there are no after-school activities or even safe places to play?

Some inner-city parents refuse to let their children play on the streets so they become virtual prisoners in tiny, crowded apartments. A third-grade teacher in New York City named Sara Mosle tells about how her plan to punish kids who had not done their homework backfired. She threatened them with detentions, but soon even the ones who had done their homework begged to be kept after school so they could have a place to play together.

The alternative to being cooped up in an apartment ( or having a teacher who will "keep you in") is the unstructured life of the streets -- or the structure offered by a gang. Boys and Girls Clubs and scout troops have nearly withered away in most poor urban neighborhoods, and so have other community or school-based programs -- the money just isn't there. But gangs, as Price says, are "well-financed and omnipresent": "They've filled the void left by ... adults and have built their own anti-social infrastructure which ensnares youngsters in search of identity and companionship." For many kids, joining a gang is the first step to becoming a law breaker and eventually, perhaps, a career criminal.

What does Price think should be done? His suggestion for supplying what these kids need is exactly the kind of thing that the "pork" in the President's crime bill would provide: "youth services after school and over the summer in churches, schools, settlement houses, community centers, safe homes, museums, even National Guard armories.

The President's crime bill was designed to meet three major needs. It would curtail the deadly force that criminals can now muster by banning certain assault weapons; strengthen the hand of law and order by increasing the penalties for certain crimes and putting more police on the streets; and because punishment is not enough, it would spend money for programs to help keep kids off the streets. Far from being irrelevant to a crime bill, this is an essential part of it -- a concrete and practical way to limit crime by keeping kids from being recruited into the ranks of criminals.

Perhaps by the time you read this, the crime bill will already have been voted on -- and I hope passed. But it is still worth asking why the bill has had such a hard time. Were the Republicans so eager to deny President Clinton a victory that they'd doom a bill the majority of Americans supported? Were they so indebted to the gun lobby that they couldn't go along with the kind of law-and-order bill they are always calling for?

Mayor Giuliani stepped above partisanship when he gave the crime bill his unequivocal support last week. And Governor Cuomo gave the bill his support even though he opposes capital punishment. But if congressional Republicans were unconvinced by these voices, I wonder why they ignored a Republican president. George Bush hailed midnight basketball, a program about which critics were especially scathing, as one of his thousand points of light: "The last thing midnight basketball is about is basketball. It's about providing opportunity for young adults to escape drugs and the streets and get on with their lives." I think he had it right.