COMMENTARY
Prisons part of vicious cycle
By Mike Coleman
President of Like A Child
When you look at the various statistics for at-risk children, there is one that stands out glaringly: Such youngsters usually have addicted, criminal or dysfunctional parents who were at-risk children themselves.
Advertiser library photo • October 1996
That tells us that their dysfunction is largely learned behavior and that their children follow in their footsteps. Without some form of prevention to break the cycle, we are as certain to pay more for the programs and prisons they perpetually inhabit as they are certain to inherit them.
America's prisons are filled with inmates whose parents were inmates, part of a cycle that can be broken by reaching out to at-risk children, according to community groups such as Like A Child.
It is truly tragedy, because when they grow up to use drugs or steal like their parents did, we will hold them to standards of responsibility that they were never taught. Because they never had enough help and love in their lives, we will put them in a prison where there is none at all.
Like A Child is a community concept. An idea, really, for how we might effectively make a difference in the lives of so many impoverished and neglected children as a means to strengthen our community and future.
We have positively identified 12 significant areas of risk — from poverty and drugs to media violence and poor schools — as the source of most future anti-socials. We seek to narrow the gap between our many resources and the children who need them most. In this way, we can build a stronger community by redirecting the path those future misfits are on.
We call it "Reconstructing the Future."
Lately, there is increasing concern for the welfare of underprivileged children. From "No Child Left Behind," made into law by Congress, to concepts like Garth Brooks "Touch 'Em All" foundation, we are increasingly aware of both our social responsibility to our disadvantaged youth and of the long-term consequences for failing to act now. The statistical evidence showing that it is for many of these very children that we are building prisons is inarguable.
Few will disagree that we must do all we can for our keiki, nor that failing to do so is why so many go astray. But when you attempt to follow that logic to its conclusion, the picture gets a little murkier. Who wants to admit that the many children whom we failed are crowding our backwards and abusive prisons?
In his book, "The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime," Joel Dyer writes of the big business prisons have become. If he is right, then the commodity from which they reap their profits is our at-risk children.
Our mission statement is "To increase the community's awareness of the risk to all youth and further a network that uses every community resource to achieve total outreach."
We are building files that document every area of risk and have a risk-reduction prescription for each of them. We are building a database of every agency and resource in the community that will be widely available not only to the families that need them but to the agencies themselves, so they can greatly increase their effectiveness by referring to each other the needs for which each is suited.
Whether or not you support Like A Child and what we stand for, you must support some alternative to the endless cycle of treatment and imprisonment that accompanies doing too little.
Read the newspaper and ask yourself why ever-younger children commit increasingly violent crimes. Or why four out of five of them return, like their parents, to prisons that only inflame their discontent.
There are dozens of worthy youth agencies you can support. You — yes, you — can make a difference.
We are convinced that by providing children with discipline, compassion and an alternative to gangs and drugs that we have drastically improved the odds that they will someday be responsible citizens instead of predictable statistics.
Like A Child is just a model for how the whole community can make a difference, and it is not difficult to replicate our outreach. When you and your neighbors begin to do more for the children in your neighborhood, you can almost see the ripples of your good will when those children grow up as your friends and decent neighbors instead of perpetrating some theft or murder in your family. Imagine every neighborhood following your example.
Children are not complicated creatures. Their response to poverty, despair, abuse and neglect truly is predictable. Their response to the love and the outreach you can provide is predictable also.
Reach Mike Coleman at 524-4139 or through www.likeachild.cc.
