Urban Crisis: Beating the Mean Streets

By the bleak arithmetic of the inner city, James Jacobs should be dead. Or in jail. Or strung out on drugs. Or selling them.

Instead, on a pleasantly cool Monday night in June, the soft-spoken 19-year- old, who grew up in the public-housing projects in Bridgeport, Conn., proudly marched into the local civic auditorium with 128 other green-and- white-robed members of the Bassick High School graduating class of 1991. He didn't sit on the podium with the class leaders, nor was he one of the nine students who wore a blue satin collar symbolizing membership in the National Honor Society. But...