A bit over a year ago I met Alfonzo G. while he was still a resident of Cuyahoga Hills Boys School (a euphemistic name for a juvenile prison). As part of our effort at Château Hough to interrupt the cradle-to-prison pipeline I got involved with the institution a few years ago and made a promise to every young man who was released from the facility and was returning to Cleveland proper that I would either help them find a job or we would hire them to work in the vineyard.
A number of youth have taken us up on the offer, Alfonzo included. But like some of the youth, he was a “problem child,” something we have come to expect. If he weren’t, the state would not have locked him up at age 16. Although he had a loving mother and grandmother at home, he’d been raised in the rough Union-Miles neighborhood amid a gangster culture.
First off I had to explain to him that he could not depend on one of his older brothers or a homie to give him a ride to work; he would have to learn to ride the RTA (something he thought was beneath him). But the offer of a paycheck was very tempting.
So I taught him how to ride the bus. I’m not kidding, I had to put him in my truck and drive the route the bus would take and show him where to get off one bus and transfer to another. But he would show up on time, and partly in an effort to impress me, he’d work his tail off. At age 19 he was a bodybuilder and could bench press 400 pounds. He also was pretty handy with tools. I grew to like this young dude, but then, I find something to like in all of them. After all, they didn’t raise themselves — someone failed them.
However, Alfonzo had mental health issues: he is an obsessive-compulsive and his disorder manifests itself in kleptomania. He stole about two dollars worth of quarters from the armrest of my truck — twice. I’d already gotten him into high school (it’s a damn shame the state had him for over two years and released him before he completed high school) and told him that he needed to seek treatment for his disorder. When he resisted the idea, I suspended him in an effort to coerce him into treatment.
I tried to contact his parole officer (whose job it was to get him enrolled in high school, something she failed to do) in an attempt to discuss what kind of mental health services were available to Alfonzo, but with no luck. Maybe she had too big of a caseload (which is somewhat common) but I think that she simply was being slothful in his case.
Anyway, in the interim, as I was wading though the mental healthcare delivery system (talk about a hot mess!), someone got him a job as a bouncer at a bar. I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea, but since he was earning more on Friday and Saturday nights than I was paying him for all week, I knew there was no use arguing my case that this was dangerous work. Like most young people, Alfonzo thought that he was bulletproof.
From that job he got another, working as unarmed security operating the gate at the entrance to a yacht club, where, due to his upbeat personality, he got lots of tips, or so he said. He called me every week to let me know he was still in school and that things were going well. Then the calls stopped. I tried calling him but the number was no longer in service.
Then I saw him again, or at least I saw a photo of him. It was a mug shot. He was one of the 11 dudes that got busted for backing vehicles into businesses and making off with the ATM machines. The group has been pulling this stunt for a couple of years now, and Alfonzo could not have been working with them for more than a month, maybe two at most.
But it makes no difference. All of them are going to get dropped by the judge like bad habits. The only thing that’s going to beat them to the penitentiary will be the headlights on the bus. The paper said they are looking at up to 20 years since someone was in one of the stores when they rammed the truck through the doors and they could have injured that person. But of course all they were thinking about was the money.
When Alfonzo came to work for us, we were halfway through rehabbing a house down the street from the vineyard where we planned to house young people just like him. My wife and I know that if we can keep young men from returning to the homes and communities that failed them in the first place we can be far more successful in turning young lives around. We need a place where I can keep a loving foot on their necks, and you know what? They love it — someone finally cares enough to establish rules and enforce them.
We approached the state (and others) for funding assistance with the rehab, but were turned down cold. All we needed was another $50,000 to complete the rehab, since we already have sunk $40,000 of our nonprofit’s money into the beautiful eight-bedroom house. We simply don’t have the funds to build out the winery and complete the rehab too.
So now the state will spend $25,000 a year housing Alfonzo for a minimum of five years if he’s lucky, 10 years if he’s not. Multiply that by the eight men we could house, employ and mentor, keeping most of them out of that prison pipeline, and the math simply makes no sense. We’re doing something seriously wrong here folks.
I personally feel a sense of loss over Alfonzo, but you, the taxpayers, are losing too, it’s just that you don’t realize it.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Chalk Up Another Loss”
DrBOP
Certainly not on the same level of your work, but I worked for the St. Leonard’s Society in Burnaby, British Columbia in Canada. The papers had been full of a “Multicultural Junior Mafia” forming itself in the community over the past couple of years. Our main effort involved contacting the Judge who would be sentencing particular youth offenders to their first adult sentence, and intervening with a list of requirements/timeline (i.e., return to school, get a job/apartment/license, etc.) that if accomplished the Judge would then allow a supervised release.
The most amazing thing to me was how most of our recruits responded to basic discipline in their lives. We heard the statement “You are the first person in my life to say NO, and really mean it” MANY times.
Of course, it was more than that. It was our devotion to assisting them in discovering themselves. Once that feedback-loop of strength-building was established, it was incredibly joyful to watch them bloom.
I’m hearing the same devotion in your articles, and simply wanted to say thank-you for ALL your efforts. I KNOW it ain’t easy. Keep on chooglin’!