<<<Sure there is. Drug courts, more money for rehab and education and less for jail, and, of course, jobs. There's a gang interventionist here in Los Angeles whose mantra is "nothing stops a bullet like a job."[WS:] >>>
[WS:] That is way too optimistic - it will take much more than that. It takes much more than taking a person out of a ghetto, it takes taking the ghetto out of the whole class of people. And that takes much more than rehab centers and school funding, and far longer too - two, three generations, if not more.
If the experience of socialist countries is any indication - it took massive relocation, changes in living arrangements, and a great deal of compulsion in addition to providing educational and occupational opportunities to take the village out of the sizeable part of the population. But even after 30-40 years of these efforts, there were still segments resisting those changes.
Furthermore, the success of any social engineering varies with the circumstances. It is much more successful in the periods of "great transformations," when the established social institutions and patterns of behavior are uprooted by large scale economic and technological forces. But that prospect of success diminishes dramatically when those social institutions and behavioral patterns associated with them solidify and become internalized.
This is the case of culture of poverty in the US. There was a good chance of eradicating it in the 1940s and 1950s, but that chance was squandered mainly as a result of racist housing policies. Today, the culture of poverty is institutionalized and internalized - uprooting it requires a far greater effort than it would have fifty years ago.
To sum it up, you can have individual success stories here and there with the "social work approach" to social problems (rehabs, education, etc.) but for every success story there will be dozens of failure stories, largely unseen, and recorded only as crime, unemployment or poverty statistics. To reverse that ration and have a dozen of success stories for every failure story - a far greater effort is needed. I am pretty sure that much of that effort will be strongly opposed by various interest groups, including the populist left. I am also pretty sure that no significant changes will take place in our life time.
Wojtek