I think about this quite a bit, because I live and work around this area. My sis teaches at a secondary school in tooting so we talk about these issues regularly.
Firstly it's worth pointing out that south London hasn't turned into san andreas overnight, contrary to the impression given by some of the more excitable media reports. There isn't anywhere in south London that I'd consider to be a no go area - some places require a bit more vigilance than others, but that's natural. There's a steady drip-drip of violent crime, and you always see a few of those big yellow police witness boards dotted around, but no more so than in any other large city. What seems to have happened is that several murders committed over a short space of time - coincidence, it would seem, as none of them appear to be directly connected - have pushed this issue up to the point where the media sense a story in it. The fact that this is now driving government policy says a great deal about the political bankruptcy of the current rabble in power, but very little about the reality of what's going on in south London. Several other cities in the UK have been subjected to this kind of hysterical war-on-the-streets coverage over the last decade - Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Nottingham (although strangely not Glasgow, which, as I learned this week, has the highest murder rate in western Europe).
That said, there is a genuine issue with the progressive alienation of underclass youth over the last twenty years or so. It might be more acute with black kids because of factors specific to afro-carribean culture, but my instincts are that it's more of a class issue than a race issue. If you went to former milltowns in South Wales or Nottinghamshire, or fishing villages in East Scotland, I'm sure there'd be no shortage of white kids facing similar problems. The point about 'the kids feeling they have no future', as made upthread by swears, is true as far as it goes, but it's not very useful. It's one of those classic liberal/thatcherite tug-of-wars, and it obscures the truth - which is that they do have a future, if they want it. There s provision for them in education up to degree level (albeit debt-incurring), and enough jobs to go round once they come out the other side. We've had a decade of economic growth in the UK and there are big skills shortages in all sorts of areas. I remember this point being made very eloquently by Logan Sama a while back in a thread about grime lyrics. I think there's a tendency for well-meaning people in government to accept these kid's views at face value and focus on endlessly tweaking the institutions that serve them. This is counter-productive - it creates beaurocracy and change fatigue in the institutions themselves, and it makes them a sitting duck for political-correctness-gone-mad journalism. Ultimately it demoralises the people working there and pulls them away from the kids who need help.
A better approach would be to ask, why this belief is so prevailent amongst underclass youth? Unfortunately, that's complicated. It was exacerbated by the thatcherite assault on working class communities in the 80s and labour's unsuccessful attempts to assimilate her legacy over the last decade, but it's roots go back further than that. IMO, the key to the way these kids are behaving does lie in family, in it's widest sense. In every conversation I have with people actually dealing with these problems, it keeps coming back to the themes of family, parental attention and authority, and male role models (because this is ovewhelmingly a male problem). It's a grave mistake for the left to downplay the role of the family in raising and socialising children, and it's deeply saddening that 'the family' as a concept has effectively been ceded to the right as political territory. Because the right cannot get over the idea of family as a nuclear unit above and apart from society. In reality, effective families are pyramid shaped, with close family at the top of an ever widening base made up of extended family, trusted friends and neighbours, support networks like church groups, professionals working within institutions, and finally the wider community. If you cut the nuclear family off from that, you put a lot of pressure on it - if money is tight, the pressure is that much greater (because middle class families can at least afford home helps and holidays together to get the quality time needed to deal with these issues). Families need support networks, both fiscally and in terms of human contact, advice and practical help. When people talk about 'family breakdown', they're actually talking about the breakdown of this wider family that supports and protects the nuclear unit.
But the really important thing is for politicians to stop squabbling about who caused it, accept that it has happened, and start trying to address it. If the functions of the wider family aren't being performed, then the state will have to step in to perform them in the short term, while trying to encourage the regrowth of the wider family in the long term. The criminal justice system should be changed to give local communities thier own elected magistrates who can dispense small punishments for petty crimes - unpleasant stuff like hiking in the rain or digging flowerbeds in the park - and stump up the money for professional people to administer such schemes. There needs to be a direct link between crime and punishment, rather than a long, abstract legal process that kids don't understand and ends up with them being sent down and ruined for life. Kids should also be encouraged to take responsibility for thier own actions gradually, rather than making a sudden transition from innocent child to fully culpable adult on thier 16th birthday. The government also needs to stop sending out mixed messages in education, accept the vital community role of schools and help them fulfil it. Help schools to reflect thier local areas by stopping rich parents from bussing thier children out, and stop imposing ridiculous quasi-free market conditions on school funding. The aim should be to have all schools attaining an equal standard of excellence and service, not to kill off the failing schools - because when a school fails, all the kids in it are failed too. Above all, politicians of both parties need to accept that real communities can only be built on genuine authority and ability to make changes, and that means devolving power and resources away from the centre into smaller community-based institutions.
This will all cost money. But prisons, quite apart from the social cost, consume an absolute fortune of public funds - all politicians from left and right know this, but they're too shit-scared of the media to change it. It's depressing that no-one ever makes the case against incarceration from a right wing perspective that might get more sympathy from the Daily Mail - ie that we demand value for money in every other area of public spending, but we're quite happy to write blank cheques for the criminal justice system. There will always be a tiny minority of people who are a genuine danger to the public and need to be incarcerated - the reason that the prison system is under so much strain at the moment, and so many lives are being wrecked, is that kids who are basically decent are being dragged into criminality. Policy should be focussed on keeping out the marginal elements, who can be rehabilitated, so more resources can be used on the genuine wrong'uns.