At Rolling Out, Yvette Caslin makes a plea for African-American men to intervene to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.
You know the saying, when a door closes, a window opens. In this case, the alienation from school opens a window of opportunity for our young black men to often end up on the wrong side of the law and land in prison. Our young black men are "at risk" and three times more likely to be incarcerated than non-African American males. And that's a fact. There's one organization who has opened its doors wide to mentors of color to address and banish these statistics, and save our black boys from criminalization. The sad part, though, is that black boys are waiting too long for a match. At press time, 455 children were on the waiting list and 95 percent were young males in metro Atlanta. Seventy-seven percent of that number were African American …
Be a big brother or big sister. Our children need us. McKenzie-Crayton writes in a recent AJC Op-Ed, "There are over 350,000 children [in metro Atlanta] that could benefit from the positive impact of having a mentor. BBBSMA, one of the largest one-to-one mentoring programs in the southeast, reaches only 3,400 each year. The need is great."
Read Yvette Caslin's entire piece at Rolling Out.
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