Lending A Helping Hand To Youthful Offenders

Jessica Turral has a tough challenge. She wants to show local teens that a jail sentence is not something they have to inherit.

“I heard one of my students’ say, ‘This is what we do. Every man in my family has been to jail, and this is just all we do.’ And that really bothered me because I was thinking, ‘No, it is not. That’s not all you can do.’”

Turral and more than 20 volunteers are part of Hand In Hand Baltimore, a local non-profit youth program. Four days a week, they enter the Baltimore City Detention Center-- an adult jail-- to tutor juveniles charged as adults.

“People assume that if you’re in prison, then you are a really horrible person… But to me, I see these people as like my little brothers.”

Little brothers who are paying for the poor decisions they’ve made. Turral stresses the mental health services Hand In Hand offers -- a service not offered to juveniles incarcerated in other adult jails.

“That’s what the foundation of Hand In Hand is -- mental health—making sure that your mental health is stable, you can function. Because, how can I ask you to plan your life, if you’re so depressed, you don’t even want to live another day?”

A 2009 summer internship at the Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice led Turral to start Hand In Hand later that year.

“They wanted me to look at what was happening with young people being charged as adults because quite a few of them were either getting shot or committing heinous crimes, or just coming back and back.”

The Public Justice Center and Community Law in Action released a 20-10 Just Kids Report, which found more than 12-hundred juveniles in Maryland face adult charges. Laura Furr, senior director at Community Law in Action, says about 270 youth are housed in BCDC each year. She says Hand In Hand is vital in changing lives.

“Programs like Hand In Hand are there to provide them those kinds of skills, so that when they do go home, they are not coming back, they are successfully getting back in the community and not re-offending.”

Hand In Hand services also extend beyond the detention center. Turral says an after-care component of Hand In Hand is available, once the students are released.

“So, if they are ready for school, I go and we get them registered for school. If they’re ready for GED, we go and get them in a GED program. Then, once they start coming to our meeting consistently, and we see they are doing well in school, then, there is the opportunity for employment.”

Forty-one-year-old Charles Carter is in charge of keeping the teens out of trouble with one-on-one mentoring and job readiness skills. Carter, who spent seven years in prison, was convicted at 19. He understands the obstacles the teens face while trying to improve their lives.

“One of the things that we have to continue to do, and Jessica and myself have been doing this, and that is just building bridges with corporations. You know, who are willing to understand that these are young men that are coming home, and are willing to hire these young people. So, we just have to keep, we have to be persistent.”

Re-establishing young people back into society is Hand In Hand’s mission, not with one hand, but with many hands.

I’m Ken Stukes, reporting in East Baltimore, for 88-1, WYPR.