Paint the town clean and watch pride grow

The decision of Sheriff Randall A. Wellington to put inmates from the misdemeanant jail to work eradicating graffiti on Youngstown's East Side is welcome. It's about time the city was reclaimed for the people who live there, rather than the young gangsters who deface communities by spray-painting their territorial imperatives. Now that the temperature is warming up, the sheriff can give other inmates the opportunity for fresh air by assigning them other clean-up spots. The cleaner the city can become, the more inviting it will be.
Grime and crime go together. The demoralizing effects on a neighborhood of graffiti and trash can not be underestimated. Who wants to buy a home on a street littered with garbage or where walls and buildings are dominated by gang insignia -- indicating that the neighborhood, too, is dominated by gang members?
Dignity: As Maj. Michael Budd of the Mahoning County Sheriff's Department put it Wednesday, "Graffiti strips a neighborhood of its dignity."
Still, graffiti eradication can't be an occasional assignment for miscreants. The key to ridding a community of graffiti's unsightliness is its immediate removal and the prosecution of those whose vandalism blights a neighborhood.
In the state of Oregon, where & quot;unlawfully applying graffiti & quot; and & quot;unlawfully possessing graffiti implements & quot; are violations of state law, one city's police and public works departments have an anti-graffiti program. In Eugene, a city of some 130,000 residents, the program includes a computerized system for photographing and tracking graffiti. The graffiti data base is capable of linking graffiti or tag designs to specific individuals, and it also can be used to identify problems and trends in geographic areas in order to focus graffiti-suppression efforts.
While this kind of program may require resources Youngstown doesn't have, it points to the seriousness with which other cities fight graffiti. And in Eugene, where its normal annual rainfall is 43 inches a year, the weather doesn't deter immediate removal of graffiti.
Volunteer effort: Other communities have also faced the trash problem -- with volunteers as well as with municipal employees and inmates from correctional facilities.
City councilmen are ideally positioned to organize "trash-a-thons" in their wards -- which would not only help clean up the city but deter future littering and dumping.
Once a group of people has worked hard to make its neighborhood attractive, it's more concerned about keeping it that way.