Allow me to tell you about my 9th grade math teacher, Gentry Torian. He was new to Brownell Junior High School (the building still sits at 14th Street, near Carnegie Avenue, adjacent to the old Erie Cemetery) back in 1958.
The school’s population was drawn from perhaps the roughest neighborhoods on the East side of Cleveland at the time: The Dirty 30s. And as teenagers we attempted to live up to the area’s reputation. We raised holy hell in all of our classes, starting in the 7th grade. By the time we got to the 9th grade we were really cutting the fool in periods one through three, but when we got to Mr. Torian’s fourth period math class we all turned into — well, if not quite little gentlemen, at least we were respectful little dudes. How did Gentry Torian accomplish that when other teachers could not?
For him it was easy: He let us know right from the beginning that he simply wasn’t having it. He was a former hood rat himself. He let us know that he knew us and was going to respect us, and we were going to respect him in return. End of story, no if, ands, or buts about it. It worked.
Which brings me to the article in Sunday’s PD, regarding the myriad problems at the County Juvenile Justice Complex — which has turned into a virtual hellhole, where the young wards are more warehoused than educated. One of the primary findings of the team of six national experts that were contracted by the Gund Foundation to study the problems had to do with staffing, which isn’t surprising in the least.
But the staffing problem can be solved if we understand that the best way to reach these youngsters is via a form of peer mentoring. We need some folks of the mold of Gentry Torian reaching out and connecting with these wayward kids. And we have to keep in mind that in the end, that’s what they are: Kids. But they are kids from my neighborhood, of my kinship, of my tribe.
I’m going to propose that we engage in some out-of-the-box thinking: My suggestion is that Charles See, who recently retired from Lutheran Metropolitan Ministries where he headed Cleveland Community Reentry for over 40 years — indeed, perhaps making it the oldest reentry program in the country — be lured out of retirement to take over the juvenile facility. Anyone who knows my good friend Charles knows why I’m making this suggestion. Over the years he has designed and implemented successful programming in some of Cleveland’s toughest neighborhoods, including housing projects where rampaging youth were running amok. His track record is impeccable.
And as his top assistant, the person in charge of hiring staff and overseeing the day-to-day operation, I’m suggesting Damien Calvert, who currently works for the City of Cleveland as an outreach specialist in the community relations department where he works with youth gangs. Calvert is perhaps the most successful and respected O.G. in the region, and for good reason: As a youth he was incarcerated in virtually every juvenile facility in the state of Ohio, and then as an adult he was in virtually as many state prisons. Yet now he is a successful family man with a lovely wife and three kids, and he has recently purchased his first home.
They should be allowed to institute new hiring rules, so that grown black men from the ”hood, men who have had similar experiences as these juveniles and have turned their lives around, can be brought in as staff. The reason is simple: They can better interact with the young wards of the facility on a peer-to-peer level. If you are not speaking the same language, communications fails.
The logic is simple: These incarcerated young men are our family — that’s Ralph’s nephew over there, and Ray-Ray, that’s Miss Ruby’s grandson, and we know and love them. That’s the missing ingredient at the facility: Love.
Tough love, to be sure, but know this: the best way to solve the problems at the juvenile justice complex is to empower stable, concerned and caring black and brown men who can talk the talk because they’ve walked the walk to go into that place of little hope and wrap their loving arms around our young brothers.
I’m not guessing; I know what I’m talking about, and I know this would work. What have we got to lose by trying?
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.