Fatimah Ali: Saving the Derrions & the Rolands

HUNDREDS of young people are murdered every year across the nation by angry young black men who are lost.

Like the four teens accused in the senseless beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert, the honors student caught in a turf war on his way home from school in Chicago last month, the perpetrators of these crimes have no regard for life. Minister Louis Farrakhan spoke at Albert's funeral and called his death a "call to action" - which I think should come in the form of something drastic, like a trip to the morgue. For shock value.

In 1989, the Philadelphia Anti-Violence/Anti-Graffiti Network (PAAN) took "at-risk" young men to the city morgue to view gunshot victims and show them how they could end up if they didn't fly right. That year, according to one ex-PAAN employee, none of the boys in the program got caught up in any killing.

Given that result, I think the viewings should be reinstated, launched nationally - and even go a bit further: Have the murderers prepare their victims' bodies for burial!

Disturbing findings released last week in a report from the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention ("Children's Exposure to Violence: A comprehensive national survey") concludes that nearly half the children surveyed had been assaulted at least once in the last year.

That the president deployed Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to Chicago to investigate the violence and gave a $500,000 emergency grant to the community where Albert was killed signals that the White House intends to do more than just talk about that grim statistic.

The week of Albert's funeral, I ran into "Roland" again. He's the young thug I wrote about in May after I became concerned he was loitering in front of my supermarket in the middle of the day.

Once again, he told me, he'd just gotten out of jail. Apparently, the talk we'd had the first time we met had no influence.

There he was, five months later in the same circumstances: cold, hungry and homeless. Unlike during our first encounter, I didn't buy him food and a magazine. Money was tight, and I was very short on patience, so instead I pointed him to the local homeless shelter and wondered if the story he'd told me was true.

But I'm also worried about safety since an uneducated, unskilled and jobless young male filled with rage and low self-esteem is such a potentially lethal combination.

Tyrone Werts, an inmate at Graterford Prison, wrote to me in response to that column, and said: "The young boy Roland you encountered is emblemic of a larger problem, there are many Rolands roaming the streets, caught up in . . . the culture of street crime."

Werts, who's serving a life sentence for a second-degree murder during a 1975 robbery, has received numerous commendations for being a model inmate. He's also pressing to have his sentence commuted by the governor. While incarcerated, he's earned a degree from Villanova and counsels teen inmates about personal responsibility and violence reduction.

In 2001 he founded the Lifer's Public Safety Initiative and describes the "positive peer intervention program" as "a strategy designed to deter other young men from walking his same path of crime."

Roland, at 19, is running out of options for social services. He's also considered an adult in the judicial system, which is much less compassionate. Solving the problem of violence requires measures that start long before a child becomes a teenager.

If a positive set of core values isn't instilled and cultivated by parents early in life, a child can easily fall prey to negative influences from peers. Werts says that "effective inroads can be made with a complete understanding of who these young men are and what can impact their thinking."

Chicago clinical psychiatrist Dr. Carl Bell, an expert on teen violence, says "the brain doesn't fully develop until the age of 26."

That means Roland still has time to turn his life around. But, unless someone grabs hold of him, he could ruin his own or another person's life and end up back in jail. Or, even worse, he could end up dead.

Fatimah Ali is a journalist, media consultant and an associate member of the Daily News editorial board.