To find tough solutions for tough crime problems, the best place to start is in tough cities. Before we succumb to despair, as we contemplate the almost routine catalogue of violence that stained the nation last weekend, let us see how youth crime is being tackled in four places where violence is hardwired into the landscape, and how fighting it has prompted the most radical solutions anywhere in the world: Chicago, Brooklyn, Glasgow, Belfast.

One theme links all these places as they fight drugs, alcohol, gang culture and random violence: prison, they all agree, is failing to do the job. On the contrary, it is making things worse. To use it as a first resort is the easiest and most useless of all options: it simply breeds the next generation of criminals. This across-the-board consensus comes not from social workers or well-intentioned reformers but from those tackling crime on the front line - the police and the judges.

Here is John Carnochan, head of the Violence Reduction Unit at Strathclyde Police, where knife crime is more than three times higher than in the rest of the UK: “It is a truism that putting people in jail doesn't work,” he says. “It may make the rest of us feel better, but it was never intended to solve the problem, nor does it.”

Judge Alex Calabrese, who presides over the Red Hook Community Justice Centre, set up after the murder of a public school principal in one of Brooklyn's roughest areas: “[The centre] has boosted confidence in the justice system, brought the community together and, most importantly, saved lives.” By keeping kids out of jail and setting them to work in the community itself, it has brought crime down dramatically.

In Belfast, where the aftermath of the Troubles brought a spate of sectarian crime, the process of “restorative” justice, in which criminals are confronted with the impact of their crime and forced to make reparation, has taken the whole process of punishment out of prison and placed it in the very centre of the community. Perhaps only in a place so riven by traditions of hatred could the idea of bringing offender and victim together have caught on and been seen as a solution.

Finally, Chicago. Appropriately enough, the city that became notorious for gang violence, but also produced its own school of free-market economics, has brought both together in a scheme that has made it a national proving ground for early intervention. Since most juvenile crime occurs in families that are dysfunctional and deprived, investing in schooling and support during the very earliest years of life - offering advice and financial help to parents expecting a child, giving health and education advice, teaching them to read if necessary - is sound social policy and saves money. It is the brainchild of the Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, who calculated the comparative costs of early education and late imprisonment. He reckoned it was 11 times more expensive to lock up a teenage criminal than it was to educate a young child away from a life of crime. “Even at age 4 or 5 you may be starting too late,” Professor Heckman said.

None of these places rejects prison for serious acts of violence - indeed their sentences are often tougher than those in England and Wales. What is striking, however, is how effectively they expose the sterile counsel of the punitive lobby, which has no answer except to repeat its mind-numbing endorsement of imprisonment as the only solution, to the point where Britain not only jails more people but also presides over the most overcrowded and ineffective penal system in Europe.

The central lesson, and one that cannot be emphasised strongly enough, is that dealing with criminals in the community is not a soft option. On the contrary, it makes far more demands than prison, which removes all responsibility from the inmate and creates a climate of compliance and dependency, making him a soft touch for the nearest drug dealer or criminal recruiter.

Forcing a young offender out into the community where he has committed his crimes, and involving him in the hard graft of working on local projects, has the double effect of introducing him to the reality of labour, while contributing to the improvement of his own home territory. Instead of being hidden away, he is there on show, seeing and being seen - paying his debt to society in the most public way.

In Red Hook, those on community sentences wear distinctive red tracksuits; everyone knows who they are, and why they are there - including their peers. Whereas prison, for a young offender, is considered a badge of honour, community sentences, which may involve restoration work or cleaning up graffiti, are tough, demanding, often banal, but ultimately useful.

And because they are seen to work, they have the backing of every agency involved - judges, probation officers and police. Most important of all, they have begun to command the confidence of the community itself. This, of course, is the stumbling block in Britain - the idea that society has become so frightened of violent crime that it is only interested in longer prison sentences, the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach. The notion that we are a nation of hangers and floggers is a chimera.

Most detailed surveys show that people are fully aware of the limitations of prison. They know that they have become, for the most part, universities of crime, and the public are more interested in schemes that work - that offer treatment to drug addicts, training programmes for young offenders, or properly supervised service to the community. They would probably understand the Sure Start programme, which helps young families, if the Government was prepared to come out and sell it properly. They would not necessarily condemn a politician who spoke up for alternatives to prison if he or she did so with conviction and passion.

No one pretends it is an instant solution. It might not show results for 20 years. But it would be taking us in the right direction, instead of the mean route along which we are travelling in such fear and trepidation.

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