The other morning my friend Mike McIntyre, the host of The Sound of Ideas (which is heard every weekday morning at 9:06am on 90.3 FM), interviewed four young residents of the Cuyahoga County juvenile justice detention facility. Their voices caused a deep sadness within me. The depth of their ill-raised social maladjustment and verb-busting ignorance was heartbreaking, shocking and grotesquely pitiful all at the same instance.
“My god,” I thought, “these kids have close to a zero chance of living a decent, fulfilling life absent some serious mentoring intervention.”
I was embarrassed by them and their words but was more embarrassed that my country allows centuries of institutionalized racism to create neighborhoods that produce such damaged children. The fact we as a society stand by and allow inept parents to raise such stunted offspring is actually criminal, given that we know how to do better. These boys didn’t do this to themselves; no, they didn’t raise themselves, so it really isn’t their fault. Something was done to them to turn them into the probable failures they most likely will become.
But programs such as the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) and Promise Neighborhoods take these exact same kids, from the exact same family backgrounds, and the exact same types of neighborhoods — and turn them into success stories; they’ve been doing it for decades. Of course, they start at the beginning of life, and as Geoffrey Canada, the director of the HCZ is quick to point out, in most cases, they are raising the parent as well as the child at the same instance. But he has proven that it works and works magnificently.
However, one of the four youth McIntyre interviewed did have a correct answer or at least a correct observation. He stated (but not exactly in these words) that once he’s released, if he goes back to the same neighborhood where he was raised, his outcome is going to be disastrous, and he’s right. But where is he going to go?
The answer from society is that we cannot afford to provide a safe space for these ill-raised youngsters that want to get away from the madness and do something positive with their lives. We have explicitly said to them the only place we can protect them is behind bars. And you’ll never ever hear law enforcement say, “We can’t afford to build more prisons.” Certainly building more prisons makes no sense since they don’t solve the problem, but my point is, as a society, if we can find money to build prisons, we can find the money to build whatever we want. It’s a matter of political will.
What’s actually needed for the young people that are already in the cradle-to-prison pipeline is a safe, encouraging and disciplined place where mentors can undo the damage that’s been done to them. Somewhere that’s not a juvenile prison, but a place that allows them to mature into responsible adulthood, without having to dodge gunfire along the way.
We know that many young people from all backgrounds sometimes act out during their teen years, and some go buck wild. What wealthy families do is send their kids off to a military school where they can get the type of attention and correction they need. Kids from less affluent backgrounds don’t have such options. But they should have, and the government should shoulder the bill for such facilities since it was the government that created and propagated the conditions that created these lost young people.
The dollars and cents fact of it is the state will pay on the front end to keep the youth out of prison, or pay more on the back end to incarcerate them after they’ve committed a crime. The major difference is, the young person will have committed a crime (and might have hurt or killed someone) to earn their ticket to prison.
Again, the real long-term answer is to provide help for unprepared and unskilled parents who simply don’t know what they are doing in terms of successfully raising children (the failure is truly generational — their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents all the way back to the door of the slave cabin didn’t know any better either.) But the short-term answer is to remove these at-risk kids from the troubled neighborhoods where their failure is virtually assured.
My question is … why aren’t juvenile court judges sentencing youth to Job Corps programs in other cities, or moving to establish safe environments for them locally?
From CoolCleveland 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 in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Finding a Better Way For Youth”
Lucy M McKernan
Once again, Mr. Frazier has pinpointed not just the source, but also offered the solution. Love reading this guy’s stuff. Comprehensive. Intelligent. Compassionate. I hope the people who make decisions about what happens to our youth also read this. Thanks, Mansfield.