by Gary Craig Staff writer http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20111231/NEWS01/112310342/Ex-con-trains-lens-tough-spots-new-TV-show

James Young could not believe the data he found about his home, the city of Rochester:

A per capita rate of violence much higher than many metropolitan areas.
Neighborhoods where one of every three young men was imprisoned or on probation or parole.

Homicides largely attributed to disputes that mushroomed into violence.
Young, who spent time in prison himself in the 1960s and ’70s, wanted to find a way to illustrate the dimensions of poverty and violence in Rochester.

So he has started a weekly television show, It’s A New Day, on the city’s public access channel — Rochester Community Television (Channel 15 http://www.rctv15.org/).

The show airs from 9 to 10 p.m. Sunday and repeats at 8 p.m. Thursday.

“He is a pretty interesting kind of guy from my perspective,” said Rochester Institute of Technology criminal justice professor John Klofas, who will be the guest on Young’s show when it debuts Sunday. “I think he could get some people engaged in the conversation in ways that other people haven’t.
“I don’t think he has any ambitions to be a political leader of any kind so he comes at this from a perspective that is not a political leadership position or even an agency leadership position.”
Much of the data that is the centerpiece of Young’s first show come from Klofas and the research at RIT’s Center for Public Safety Initiatives. The conversation stresses the impact of heavy levels of incarceration on entire communities.
“This stuff is quite disturbing,” Young said about the research.

After an imprisonment for drug dealing and gang-related violence, Young built a career in Florida as a restaurant owner and the publisher of a newspaper focused on minority-owned businesses. He returned to Rochester in 2009 after publishing a book about the trajectory of his life from hoodlum to businessman.
The Rochester he returned to, he said, was more segregated by race and income and more in decline than that which he left in the 1970s.

“I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I’ve gone to sleep and I woke up and I’ve come back to this.”
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Young’s politics cannot be easily shoehorned into standard stereotypes. In a stance similar to many liberals, he thinks incarceration has become a too-easy solution to crime. But, in an opinion that would mirror that of many conservatives, he believes welfare has created generations of people who don’t see the benefits of hard work.
For one future segment, Young filmed bustling neighborhoods like Park Avenue and planned to contrast them with the city’s more impoverished communities. When filming in a poor neighborhood, Young explained to one young man that he hoped to show the disparity through the lens.
“He said, ‘So what? You filming this, what difference is it going to make?'” Young said. ” …What is happening is that we have become complacent.”

Young is planning future segments with anti-violence counselors, prosecutors and police.
He acknowledges that his audience may be limited, but he hopes to at least start the conversation.

“He’s interested in really a grassroots audience in some ways,” Klofas said. “That’s a hard sell in a lot of ways. People have their own set of immediate kinds of concerns.”
But the residents of Rochester’s tougher neighborhoods can’t be forgotten if the entire community is to thrive, Young said. “The people that live in these communities, they still feel that there’s hope there,” he said.
GCRAIG