A Stone of Hope

by Jim St. Germain

  I thought about the days when food was a distant idea that my mouth struggled to remember, the days I scouted in the dirt for anything salvageable to eat, the days my father seemed on the verge of succumbing to the heaviness that had defined his life, the days that the empty space where a mother was supposed to be spread wide and deep in my soul, the days school was a distant luxury afforded to the lucky, the days I questioned God—at eight years old—if suffering was our sole purpose, which left me wondering what he made me for.

  Edwin and I used to have these long and winding conversations in his living room: How do we change our neighborhood? How do we mentor kids? What can we put into place? Where would we start and what would it look like?

  One of our talks was running through my head when I came home after a frustrating day working inside the city’s bureaucracy. Things were too slow, or misdirected; we weren’t making enough of a dent in these kids’ lives and every moment we wasted, we were losing more. It takes constant force to change course and we just didn’t have the necessary momentum. I started to think bigger and then back to those state-of-the-neighborhood conversations with Edwin.

  I got Christine on the phone. “Listen,” I said, talking at double speed, trying to get the words out as my thoughts bubbled to the surface. “The problems these kids are facing are overwhelming and we just have to do more. I have this idea. I want to create a mentoring program in my neighborhood and bring all these people together.” I launched into all these servant leaders I had recently encountered, those who shared a common purpose to invest in the lives of the youth, and how they could participate.

  “Jim, Jim,” Christine said, finally getting a word in. “I’m in. What do you need?”

  In one burst I typed up and fired out a mass e-mail to about twenty people—Marty, Joanna, judges, advocates and legal-aid attorneys, people who’d handed me a card or given me their number, people committed to and passionate about helping kids. Suzette and Nicole were twin-sister pediatricians who studied the impact of trauma and mental health issues on at-risk children. I started the e-mail by expressing gratitude for their help with my life, for their commitment to others, and for their decision to look beyond paychecks and vacations in their life’s work.

  “We don’t do anything that’s easy,” I concluded. “We do what’s necessary.”

  What began as a kernel in my mind that day turned into PLOT, Preparing Leaders of Tomorrow, a nonprofit organization we founded dedicated to mentoring at-risk youth. PLOT provides a support system and college preparation to formerly incarcerated youth or those on the verge of falling into the system. Christine took on a lion’s share of the administrative and legal paperwork. Everyone pitched in creating bylaws and setting up a board of directors and an advisory board, a mentor coordinator, all the scaffolding required to get it going.

  An essential component is helping these kids get in touch with their feelings. “I have come to see that in teaching boys to deny their own pain,” writes Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, “we inadvertently teach them to deny the pain of others.” It’s a huge gap and I try to approach kids emotionally, show them a man isn’t about being macho. When I see them I hug them, talk to them softly, express what I’m feeling explicitly.

  “Yo, Mr. Jim, you’re soft,” they’ll say, not accustomed to my approach. Ten years ago I would’ve bristled at the label, but it rolls off me now.

  I try to turn it into a teaching moment. That mentality—that enforced masculinity—kills as many people in our community as drugs and alcohol combined.

  “What exactly is soft?” I’ll ask, trying to get them to examine the perception. “Is it because I’m respectful? Is it because I’m speaking to you politely? Is it because I’m showing you love and respect? Why is that soft? Why do you think that?”

  Of course, I know where it comes from. And it’s hard to shake. Recently I was walking around my neighborhood with a girl and she held my hand. As she did I noticed some of my homeboys, people I grew up with, and this discomfort shot through me. What she felt was a beautiful moment, my body instinctively read as a threat. Things like holding a woman’s hand shows weakness and weakness makes you stand out, putting a target on you in a million little ways. It’s unhealthy and destructive, but it is part of the fabric of my community. I grew up in a household where my family didn’t show love or affection, where we barely communicated. I wanted to accept her gesture, but that voice in my head wasn’t silenced. It shows how pervasive it is: I’m trying to teach the next generation to shut that out, but am still hearing it myself.

  21

  Unfinished Products

  If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

  —ZORA NEALE HURSTON

  As I write this I’m in the process of obtaining my master’s degree in public administration and embracing every opportunity to speak—to give voice to the voiceless; to meet with kids; to effect policy on local, state, or national levels. It’s not a noble fight in my mind; it’s a blatantly obvious one. There is something wrong if fighting for disenfranchised youth isn’t a collective effort that emits from the very moral center of our country. This should be a given, especially in a country blessed with so much. I resist any attempts to treat me as a symbol, which strikes me as so far beside the point. Symbols are rarities, by definition, and I have no interest in being one. I’m working toward a world where my story is no longer a story.

  With each milestone I force myself to tie things back to the individual or kind act that set it into motion. Sometimes it’s immediate—like Christine forwarding me an e-mail—or distant, like the day Aunt Louloun shared her lone spoon of rice with me because she took on my hunger as her own.

  There’s the skinny white police officer from Long Island who brought me a Bible when I was young and asked me to pick a better path than the one I was on.

  The time Dean Walton let me sleep on his couch even though it could’ve cost him his job because he simply could not allow the prospect of me being homeless.

  All the people in the system who made it less of a machine, made sure I was treated as someone worthy of care—Christine and Marty; Ms. Lauren and Charles at Dean Street; Iza and Damon, who raised me like a son.

  Prison is not a place someone goes to, a single point on the map. It’s something much larger, akin to a force pushing and spreading through time and space. It strips away a person’s life, humanity, and future, and radiates out into the lives of family, friends, and community. It impacts mothers and fathers, infects sons and daughters. It plagues blocks and neighborhoods and cities in a permanent way. Its power and weight and scope are undeniable.

  One in nine black children in America has or has had a parent behind bars.15 When you expand that out to brothers, uncles, and family friends, all the lives connected to that single statistic, it becomes startlingly clear that incarceration is swallowing these communities whole. The next generation grows up with it as a hard fact of their life and its poison seeps into every aspect of their being. It’s an epidemic stripping away the humanity and futures of far too many young people whose poor choices don’t make them criminals. They’re growing up in something akin to combat and are just trying to survive.

  Poverty is the underlying issue that feeds so many of these problems. According to the Pew Research Center, a staggering 38 percent of black children in America are living in poverty, which reads like nothing less than a pandemic.16 A National Scientific Council on the Developing Child report says that the impacts of poverty “overcrowding, noise, substandard housing, separation from parent[s], exposure to violence, family turmoil, [and] economic hardship” can “last even after the child has been moved to a safe and loving home.”17 Studies have shown that these experiences create a buildup of cortisol—the stress hormone—that has disastrous effects on the health and mortality of this community.18 Those of us who grew up in this world are not surprised at all by these findings. It’s only apathy and willful ig
norance that pretend they’re not the beasts in the room. America, and by extension its justice system, continues to criminalize poverty.

  The justice system—as it’s practiced by lawmakers, prosecutors, and judges—needs to be reenvisioned and reconfigured. If we invest in our youth’s future, I truly believe that there will be fewer violent crimes. In order to achieve this, we need to change not just policies, but hearts. Rehabilitation is the key to public safety. For far too long, justice has been practiced solely as punishment. I believe that such a narrow view is detrimental to the progress we need to make within the juvenile and criminal justice systems, as well as in society as a whole. Because of the adversarial nature of the legal system, advocates and prosecutors have been at odds. As such, the vital voice of prosecutors has been left out of this important conversation. I must admit that I too have failed to see that prosecutorial power can be a force for good instead of an engine for mass incarceration.

  A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to work with both Adam Foss, a local prosecutor from Boston, and the late Brooklyn district attorney Kenneth Thompson. Both men became crucial voices for racial justice at a tense moment between law enforcement and minority communities. They used prosecutorial power to provide second chances in the form of programs and job training, worked to stop imprisonment for low-level drug offenses, helped gain amnesty for those with outstanding warrants, and developed internal units dedicated to reviewing wrongful convictions. As prosecutor Adam Foss has said: “Every day, thousands of times a day, prosecutors around the United States wield power so great that it can bring about catastrophe as quickly as it can bring about opportunity, intervention, support and, yes, even love.”19

  There also needs to be a concerted and systemic effort to separate violent crime from youthful or minor offenses. Lockup facilities and detention facilities—essentially junior prisons—just contribute to the hardening process. Juvenile justice facilities are exit ramps and they should function as such. Facilities can learn from, and should expand according to, the Boys Town model, which recognizes that it’s not just a moral but a scientific issue: youth are apt to make poor decisions and have weak impulse control, but also are capable of great change because of their brains’ plasticity. I benefited enormously from that safe environment, which focused on privileges and motivation, not punishment and intimidation. And I was saved by those people who recognized the possibility that, under the right circumstances, I could change. Hundreds of thousands of kids would benefit enormously from that same opportunity, and all of society would benefit.

  I’m an advocate of keeping kids out of the system, but it was the people I encountered in the system who saved my life. Thus I’m an advocate for the right system, run by the right people. The best program in the world is a thin façade for care without the right people behind it. I remember once hearing a young woman talking to the federal Office of Juvenile Justice administrator Robert Listenbee, who has done so much for me and countless other young people. She emphasized that it’s not enough to get people willing to work with kids—they have to like kids.

  In addition, mentoring programs need to be expanded, incentivized, and funded so that at-risk youth can engage with role models in their community. Raise the Age asks for society to recognize the role of age and maturity in decision making, the undeniable biology at play. The Close to Home initiative looks to implement a circle of support and services around those who have already made poor decisions in an effort to help them make the correct ones. President Obama’s task force asked police departments to respect the community around which they work, appreciate the humanity of the populations they are sworn to protect, and acknowledge the malicious impact of their own racial biases.

  The United States of America accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. President Obama noted in a speech to the NAACP that our incarceration rate is four times higher than China’s. In a global community where we think of ourselves as representing the pinnacle of justice and freedom, this is appalling. America too often uses prisons to solve problems they were not designed to solve. “When you’re a hammer,” the saying goes, “everything else just looks like a nail.”

  American society also spends far too much energy and focus on the effect instead of the cause. We don’t offer legitimate education or job opportunities, and we don’t offer a safe environment to all of our citizens. New York State spends approximately $260,000 a year to incarcerate a juvenile while spending less than $20,000 a year to educate one in its crumbling schools. Even if that education figure were doubled, and we spent $80,000 per year, per kid, we’d still save $180,000 per kid, all the while decreasing the chances that he or she would end up as an adult in the system. We’re also improving the chance that they would become productive contributors to society—taxpayers, rather than tax burdens. And none of these numbers even factor in the immeasurable human cost. We comfortably spend billions of dollars incarcerating these teenagers, but refuse to invest in fixing their circumstances. By going after the symptoms instead of the root causes, we let the problems fester, grow, and multiply.

  There is a reason to be optimistic with what the Obama administration put into place: Pell grants for prisoners, the Justice Department challenging states for incarcerating those who can’t pay for their freedom, the president’s aggressive clemency history (more than all of our presidents combined), severing the relationship with private prisons, and wide investigations into various police departments.

  I’m fearful and despondent that President Trump and Attorney General Sessions appear committed to rolling back all of the progress made under President Obama. But I believe that policy makers and stakeholders will overcome their fears, get past the rhetoric, and make real efforts to uplift humanity—not through charity, but by offering genuine opportunities. We can’t continue to victimize people for failing if we don’t give them a chance to succeed.

  The justice system is too often treated as an ugly corner of society that we ignore. But it feeds and affects so much of our day-to-day society. Marilyn J. Mosby, the Baltimore prosecutor at the center of the Freddie Gray murder, said, “I believe that we are the justice system. We, the members of the community, are the justice system because we are the victims of crimes. . . . We are the accused . . . We are the cops . . . We are the witnesses . . . We are the perpetrators . . . We are the judges. And as community members, we are the jury.”

  As painful as it is, I’m learning that social justice is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s painful because lives are vanishing with each delay. Once I was just a vagabond kid looking for hustles. Now I’m doing it all over again, only the hustle is something so much bigger than me. My energy has been turned outward and downward—and I’m going to pull up whomever I can. “Any country, any society which does not care for its children,” Nelson Mandela said, “is no nation at all.”20 Mandela implicitly understood that we are all tied to one another—inevitably and irrevocably—whether we want to accept it or not.

  One day my son, Caleb, and I were hanging out with Marty and his wife, Amy. Marty casually said to my son that he’s looking forward to visiting him one day in college. The comment was tossed off so naturally; by Marty’s standards, attending college was as normal as the ability to speak. But it affected me in a way I couldn’t even verbalize. Something that eluded me until my late teens was the expectation for my son at the tender age of three. I was reminded how enormous those small things are—that piece of exposure, those words of expectation—to a young mind.

  As I finish writing this book, I’ve been reading David Brooks’s Road to Character, in which he writes about a group of people who faced a “moral crisis,” as he called it, and came out the other end. Brooks is a well-known conservative but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t extend great generosity of spirit to all those trying to make it.

  When they had quieted themselves, they had opened up space for grace to flood in. They found themselves helped by people they did not
expect would help them. They found themselves understood and cared for by others in ways they did not imagine beforehand. . . .

  They find a vocation or calling. They commit themselves to some long obedience and dedicate themselves to some desperate lark that gives life purpose.

  Recently, Mr. Walton called me up at work and told me one of his mentees, Luke, needed some help. Luke grew up in Bed Stuy as an A student who mostly stayed out of the trouble churning on his street. His mother had recently died and his stepfather kicked him out soon after his eighteenth birthday. After the passing of his sole nurturer he was left to face the cold world alone. The combination of rootlessness and homelessness led him to the street. He was lucky to find some mentors who talked him into entering Job Corps, a training and education program. He had landed a job interview the next day and needed clothes, but Mr. Walton was stuck at work.

  I had never met Luke before, a shy and skinny kid who showed up at my office later that day—but that was only literally true. From my point of view not only had we met hundreds of times, we were the same person. In his eyes I saw the perseverance and beauty and struggle that I’ve seen in so many young faces.

  At a clothing store in downtown Manhattan, I brought Luke to the same African gentleman who had sold my graduation suit a few years earlier. I convinced the salesman to take all the money I had for it, about seventy bucks, and told him he’d be helping out the next generation.

  “Sure thing, man,” he said. “No problem.”

  “Thank you, sir. We need more of you,” I told him.