Changing A Community Of Violence: An Interview With Jack Farrell, LCSW

15 May 2016

“Given the right resources and opportunity, people can bring about a change in their lives,” community organizer and social worker Jack Farrell explains to me.  For over 40 years, Farrell has served as a bridge between community members and policymakers to address issues of trauma and violence in Northern New Jersey.  His career started with substance abuse recovery– “and I see violence in the same way,” Farrell explains, “it’s a learned behavior.”

According to Farrell, the intergenerational proliferation of violence is the greatest obstacle to creating nurturing neighborhoods in Newark and beyond—but one that he says is not impossible to surmount.  Farrell served as a Program Analyst at the Violence Institute, housed at Rutgers University- Newark until its abrupt closing last year, where his research and outreach to social service providers, law enforcement, and at-risk youth and families served as the foundation for his evolving approach to violence reduction. 

CLiME recently sat down with Farrell to interview him about this approach, and his vision for transformative engagement throughout our communities.

How do we learn violent behavior?

“You learn to be violent based upon your exposures – exposures of the home, the exposures of the neighborhood, the exposures of the world around us… We’re seeing multiple generations of families who have been exposed to violence, so violence has become, now, normal.  Normalized in terms of how to act and react.  We no longer problem-solve.  We’re no longer civil to each other, and it takes on its broadest concepts from the top-down.

America is a violent country.  When we look at America years ago, we used to do things diplomatically.  Today, we send the troops in first, and then we talk about diplomacy.  If we’re talking about a true systemic change as it relates to violence, it’s a little bit hypocritical when we talk about trying to change the violence in our urban neighborhoods, when from the top down, we’re violent.”

How can we change this behavior?

“We have to do a better job of assessing the cause of violence, the impact of violence – and this is where trauma-informed care plays a major role.  We need to assess it earlier, and we need to assess more than the individual affected.  We have to do a better job of assessing the family and the environment.  The underpinning aspect of trauma-informed care is preventing violence from happening again, the re-victimization of the individual who’s been exposed to violence.

[For example] when people are injured physically, and even psychologically, they tend to be brought to the emergency room.  We’re really good at healing the medical emergencies of trauma as it relates to shootings and stabbings… [But] the gunshot wound goes deeper than physical injury, or its impact as a psychological injury... Who comes to see [the victim]?  His mom, his aunt, his grandmother, and there are also children—the cousins, the nieces, the nephews.  Now they’re seeing multiple exposures to traumas at the early stages. 

In situations of that nature, we should be assessing all individuals of a major traumatic event.  For example, the shooter, who has now put that person there.  Probation, parole, the court system, the criminal justice system—they should be assessed, too, because their exposures are telling them that ‘this is how I handle my emotions and my feelings.’

Unfortunately, we’ve become a society where we want a cookie cutter model, we want a political answer, and we’re expecting change to happen immediately.  I think my experience has shown, realistically, that change will not come immediately, that we’re going to have to talk about generations of change, that will be a more positive generation-building.  If a community is violent, there is no evidence-based model that is going to change a community.  The community is made up of people who live in neighborhoods, the people have to change before the neighborhoods change.  Once the neighborhoods change, then the community can change.  When the community changes, the state changes.  That process is a rebuilding aspect, which is going to take generations.”

Where is a good starting point for this generational change?

“Preschool exposure is where we should be looking at, and studying.  If you want to see how kids interact with each other, look at how they play.  If you have a group of kids who are off to the side, playing separately from the rest of the kids, and they’ve taken the nicest toys, and they’ve isolated themselves—they’ve already been exposed to dominant theory behavior… Those kids that are isolated on the side, are really the ones we should be looking at, and recognizing how we can integrate them back into the group.

If I’m dominant and I’m socially isolated from the group, when I get into the public school, I’m going to find that same group, and I’m going to continue to grow down that same path.

We’ve got to be able to offer what we’ve taken away—we’ve taken away the fine arts, that many could develop in…We’ve taken away sports…Where do we learn sportsmanship? By learning to win and lose.  If I don’t have the ability to learn this in a positive structured environment, then I’m going to only learn from the negative environment.”

What have you seen as the most effective programming for supporting this change?

“I think one of the best initiatives that I saw and worked in was the Newark Safer Cities Initiative, which took the population that had been recognized in the parole system and the probation system, as the highest risk of becoming the victims of violence or perpetrators of violence.  They were assigned specially trained parole and probation officers, social services, prosecutors, public defenders—they had wrap-around services. 

I think what happens typically and unfortunately, is that we have too many model programs that start out well-intended and become evidence-based, but there’s no sustainability.  The sustainability has to be based upon the recognition that over the years, there’s going to be a change of the program and the modeling, so that we’re not locked into the program as it started five years ago.

What I liked about the Safer Cities Initiative is that Rutgers became the neutral convener, so they became the neutral center, where you can bring to the table all the people you want [in order] to bring about change—politicians, prosecutors, law enforcement, social services agencies—yet we weren’t on anybody’s turf.

That should have evolved into the next phase.  I would have likes to see something very similar to a broader employment concept and training concept like Homeboy Industries, where you teach people sustainability: how to work in Panera’s Bread, how to work in a franchise, how to start small businesses.

We need to recognize that the community wants to change.  The community is sick and tired of being sick and tired. It needs leadership and it needs guidance. It needs us recognizing the informal leadership within the community.”