Change Font Size:   A A A

Dec 06, 2012 | ENS Staff

St. Martin's Helping Transform 'School-to-Prison Pipeline'

[Episcopal News Service] At 16, Antonio hadn’t envisioned much of a future, except to join the Southwest Cholos street gang in his Houston neighborhood “or else become their enemy.”

 

Now, two years later, he is preparing to take the GED exam this month and to enroll in community college courses in January. The difference, he said, was that he joined reVision instead.

 

“It’s pretty hard growing up like that: the environment, the gangs, you have to join,” said Antonio, whose last name was withheld to protect his identity. “I just opened my eyes one day; it came to me that it wasn’t going to be the right thing.”

 

His nephew, who was on probation in the juvenile-justice system, invited Antonio to come along to “the Island” youth activities center at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, in Houston. St. Martin’s, through reVision, partners with other churches and the Harris County juvenile-justice system to mentor gang-affected and at-risk youth.

 

“At first I was afraid,” Antonio recalled during a Dec. 2 telephone interview with ENS. “I couldn’t believe they were trying to help me. But they opened my eyes … to realize that faith is real, it’s not a joke. Without reVision I would still be thinking with a criminal mind; they talk to me all the time, they keep me in the right mind.”

 

Eric Moen, St. Martin’s lay director for youth and young adult ministries and missions, said reVision “is giving community to gang-affected kids, and it’s putting kids in relationship with mentors.”

 

From Houston to New York, Episcopal churches are seeking partnerships and creative ways to mentor at-risk youth, to help avert the “school-to-prison pipeline” that disproportionately affects young people of color and those with special needs.

 

That pipeline is created by lack of educational and economic opportunity, as well as unjust social structures such as racism and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, which treat minor school infractions as law-enforcement issues, said Diocese of Iowa Bishop Alan Scarfe.

 

Per capita, Iowa has one of the highest incarceration rates of African-American young men in the nation, said Scarfe, who proposed Resolution B024 at the 77th General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Indianapolis in July. Convention approved the resolution, which promotes creation of an alternative “Pipeline to the Kingdom” through community and church involvement and grassroots organizing, said Scarfe.

 

Read the rest of the story here.