Yeah whether you wage war on drugs or quit, or win, or lose, it doesnt matter.
What you need to combat crime is halfway decent jobs. And that means education. We keep focusing on the wrong damn things.
Education is at best a multi-generational fix. Most of the people that have turned to crime right now are not going to invest (time and effort) in education at this point, and the are not likely to push their kids to invest in education either. Maybe their grandkids can be convinced if we continue to push education for that long. But we don't have the political will to create a working education system and then wait two generations for it to actually have an effect on a society. If in a few years of inception it has not made a major difference we decide it is a failure and decide that we need more direct methods.
And that is all assuming that we are able to convince even the grandkids that education is a way out of poverty, and that is becoming a shaky proposition. I'm not at all convinced that education is going to help those kids all that much and I'm considerably overeducated.
Simply put our society has passed the point of diminishing returns on education.
No, the solution is not that simple. Education will be a part of it, but not the most important part. The most important part will be building a social infrastructure that gives them a reason to be productive members of society instead of predators and victims of it.
But doing that would require us to change as much as them.