“They took something out of me and they just left a lot of anger inside of me,” Aguilar said. After that, gang members protected him. He looked up to them like big brothers. He dropped out of school and racked up at least a dozen arrests, he said.
Fight on Broadway
He met Rosa 16 months ago. She was driving down Broadway, a popular hangout for Bloods and other gang members in Revere, when she spotted an unfamiliar young man pummeling another. She broke up the fight, she said, and when an officer arrived, she persuaded him to let her take the assailant, Aguilar, to Roca instead of arresting him.
By the weekend of the shooting, Aguilar had started preparing for high-school equivalency testing, served on a Roca work crew and earned certificates in occupational safety and retail management.
‘Walk Away’
Proponents of social-impact bonds stress that they aren’t a panacea. Full-throated criticism is scarce.
One detractor is Mark Rosenman, a 30-year veteran of nonprofits. To him, the deals symbolize government’s failure to attack social ills at their roots. “The popularization of these private finance mechanisms in some program areas might eventually allow government to say, ‘Sorry, we couldn’t raise private capital for it,’ and to walk away,” he said.
Roca’s founder and chief executive officer, Molly Baldwin, counters that the cost of doing nothing is too high to justify turning away funding, no matter its source.
“That’s what Wall Street does: They make money,” she said. “But why are we more uncomfortable with that than watching kids die in the street, or go to prison and come out with worse outcomes?”
“If there was another way, I’d go for it. But there isn’t.”