Plight of youth provides soul searching

LYNN – There was soul food, soul music and soul searching at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church this week, as congregants wrestled with how to stop the “school-to-prison pipeline” for black youth.”The gangs provide a better sense of belonging, sometimes, than the church,” guest speaker the Rev. Angela Ifill, director of the Office of Black Ministries of the Episcopal Church, said in a speech Sunday at the 12th annual Soul Celebration at the South Common Street church. “Help this congregation become the gang of choice for our young people.”After the morning service, families and congregants of all ages gathered in the church basement to feast, not just for a celebration but to offer “Pipelines to Possibilities, not Prison.””Help us look for hope,” the Rev. Jane Soyster Gould prayed in her welcome. “Help us look for ways for transformation in our lives and in our community.”Ifill focused on transforming what she called a private for-profit prison system that is more successful in housing than rehabilitating individuals.Ifill cited statistics from the American Civil Liberties Union and the book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” that evoked gasps of surprise from the audience. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 25 percent of the world’s prison population – “despite evidence that large-scale incarceration is not the most effective way of rehabilitation,” Ifill said.And a huge percentage of those prisoners are minorities, particularly black men. Ifill said research shows there are more African-American men currently in jail, on probation, or on parole than the American slave population in 1850. There is also a higher percentage of black people in prison in America than imprisoned in South Africa during Apartheid, Ifill said. The minister blamed tough sentencing guidelines resulting from the War on Drugs that targeted black, poor and urban men. This broke up families, saddled young men with criminal records that precluded them from jobs, thereby perpetuating poverty and left a generation of young black children without role models or with role models who are convicted felons, Ifill said. In effect, segregation continued with the prison system replacing Jim Crow. And the prison population needs new clients.”They need to make money for their stakeholders and need a market,” Ifill said of the prison system. “Our children are their market.”Ifill said current issues such as Stop and Frisk policies – which allow police to stop and quickly pat down a person deemed “suspicious” – and particularly the “school-to-prison pipeline” perpetuate this market.Describing the “school-to-prison pipeline,” Ifill said the prison system predicts its future needs by examining school discipline records for children as young as in second grade. Meanwhile, police involvement in school discipline issues – for example, having a student arrested for assault after a playground fight – get young people into the criminal-justice system at an early age. And too often, that young person continues in the criminal justice not the school system.”But how do we implement this change?” congregant Elizabeth Fortes asked.The resulting discussion illuminated the complexity of the issue as well as the diversity of the event.Tim Potter, who was DJing the event, asked how to counter the “thug image” presented to youth through the media and which youth seem to emulate.”Everybody has a younger brother, cousin or sister,” said Jason Jimenez, tour director of the Music Motivates Me Tour, featuring local, anti-violence hip-hop artists Fame or Juliet, who performed two songs before dinner. Jimenez spoke of how he mentored and promoted his brother Jeremiah, a member of Fame or Juliet.But another congregant noted that some family members can provide poor role models; and that the prison system can change an individual ? and not for the better.A young member of the St. Stephen’s Kids’ Choir asked the final question of the dis