Ducap.org
Title
DuCAP, Positive Choices for Youth
Contact
- Dupage County Area Project
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- Glendale Heights IL
- United States 60139
-
- +1.6306718000
Description
Clifford R. Shaw (1895-1957), founder of the Chicago Area Project, was a sociologist who devoted his life to juvenile delinquency prevention. Using police records, Shaw plotted the location of juvenile delinquents' home addresses and noted the areas that produce most of the delinquents are communities of greatest economic deprivation. Shaw believed that the way to reduce juvenile delinquency was to work in the neighborhoods - from the bottom up. Not, as traditional methods dictated, from the top down.
In the early 1930s, Shaw initiated the Chicago Area Project in three of the city's highest crime areas to test delinquency prevention techniques. Russell Square in the South Chicago area, for example, was a perfect neighborhood for the experiment. It was very poor, highly congested and filled with immigrant steel workers, many of whom worked night shifts while their families clung to old rural traditions and tried to cope with life in a highly industrialized urban setting. Fifteen youth gangs were the scourge of the community, although they never posed the violent threat that we associate with gangs today.
The DuPage County Area Project (DuCAP) grew out of the Chicago Area Project (CAP) movement through the efforts of one of CAP's original Community workers, Daniel "Moose" Brindisi. Moose's program, the Near Northwest Civic Committee, served for fifty years as the prototypical model for the CAP program. In 1987 a group of business and political leaders from DuPage County, under the leadership of Hank Gianvecchio, visited Near Northwest. Moose shared convincingly his belief that the time to deal with juvenile crime was before it became a fact of life- preventing it through community involvement at a very local level. They came away determined to establish similar programs in DuPage County. Moose assigned Tom (Caesar) Brindisi, who lived in DuPage County, the task of researching the community areas that should be targeted for programs, and working with this initial leadership group. With the additional assistance of Anthony Sorrentino, another of CAP's original workers and a longtime DuPage County resident, a Board of Directors was recruited and developed, and program sites were identified.
