COMMENTARY
Resolution offers children a promise, not a prison

By Mike Coleman

If you want to offer disadvantaged children brighter futures, if you care about the scourges of crime and addiction that plague our community, please contem-plate a real solution.

In many articles over the years, The Honolulu Advertiser, Like A Child and various writers and agencies have written repeatedly about the risks afflicting our youth today and have done our best to suggest sane solutions. We have faithfully reported statistics and other evidence that point to the likelihood that it is precisely such high-risk children who end up as most of our future inmates and drug addicts. It is a reality beyond the arena of speculation: It is a thoroughly documented fact.

Although those of us who seek lasting solutions have campaigned tirelessly for a paradigm shift — from more incarceration and the like to more true prevention — we have little chance of truly relieving the suffering of our children without more community support and much more will from legislators with the power to enact policies to achieve real change.

On Feb. 19, a historical resolution quietly passed through the State Capitol. Senate Concurrent Resolution 13 formally identifies and seeks to aid the high risk associated with the children of the incarcerated.

It is historical in that we as a community have finally recognized the tragedy of these "prison orphans" and raised that tragedy to the level of legislative recognition. We have taken the first humane steps to relieve the long-overlooked suffering of the children of our prisoners.

It is a great day for them and for us all: We now know that such outreach is one of the most effective things we can do to impact crime and addiction.

In the long, painful struggle to blunt crime and our mushrooming prisoner population, this is the Holy Grail: a true and simple preventive model that will produce verifiable results. The numbers do not lie. Three out of four of the children of prisoners follow their parents to prison. Children with parents in prison are five times more likely than their peers to end up there themselves. It is with those children that we must focus our outreach.

The day before SCR 13 was sent to the Senate floor for a vote, CNN "Newsnight" with Aaron Brown ran a compelling piece about a nonprofit group in Houston called No More Victims, www.nomorevictimsinc.org. A former parole officer, Marilyn Gambrell, founded the agency to work with the kids at Houston's M. B. Smiley High School, "one of the roughest, poorest schools in the nation."

School administrators estimate that half of Smiley's 1,600 students have a parent in prison, but the students say the number is even higher. No More Victims teaches a very special curriculum for very special students. They have only one prerequisite: All of these special students have at least one parent in prison.

They use the word "special" often in Gambrell's class because that's exactly what these kids are. They belong to a special risk category of children who have heretofore slipped under the "at-risk" social radar. They are not only special because Gambrell tells them over and over that they are; they are special for what they have achieved. With their community, their school and Gambrell cheering them on, they have overcome impossible odds and bucked sad statistics to stay in school and achieve a special goal, a diploma.

All 15 of this year's seniors are expected to graduate. You can hear the marvel and awe in Superintendent Ed Walker's voice: "These kids are going to college! That would have been unheard of with any of these children without this program." Since the class started two years ago, only a handful of its participants have gone to jail.

In Hawai'i, where 5,000 inmates have 10,000 kids, we statistically know that some 70 percent — 7,000 — will end up in prison someday. A program like Gambrell's in every high school would offer these children a promise instead of a prison and offer our community more productive citizens instead of more prisoners and taxes to pay for them.

Sen. Suzanne Chun Oakland — and her colleagues in the Keiki Caucus and Legislature — have taken a giant step toward making that promise a reality. Now, we as a community must do our part.

Gambrell's program is a program without a real price tag. I invite any high school to offer one classroom a day and schedule the children with parents in prison to attend.

I will volunteer my time to set up the program, but it won't happen unless the community contacts its legislators and school board to support it.

Who wants to help me save some very special children?

Mike Coleman is president of Like A Child, www.likeachild.cc, and host of "Like A Child" on KHNR AM 650 at 7 p.m. Saturdays.