FROM WHAT I CAN TELL, YOUTHS HAVE FEELING OF BEING TRAPPED

During a Jacksonville Journey session last week to weigh strategies
for stemming the tide of juveniles flowing into the criminal justice
system, one word kept coming up.

That word was hopelessness.

First it came from a minister, who talked about how he thought that
his church's effort to get ex-offenders involved in construction work
would become a model for showing youths how to use their skills to
build gainful careers. Many young people in troubled communities, he
said, don't see much hope for their lives beyond the realm of
fast-food joints and incarceration.

Sherron Watson, a member of the Journey's Juvenile Intervention
Strategies Workgroup, understood.

She talks to the kids, too. She talks to them enough to know that the
hopelessness they are battling must be confronted with access to jobs
and training that will offer a livelihood, and not just a means of
surviving.

"Young people express lack of hope because of economics," Watson said.
"The guys I talk to say they don't want to work at McDonalds. ..."

But, Watson said, they understand that they need some skills to get
higher-paying jobs. Yet the fact that so many youths can't seem to
find a road map to jobs and hope in their own communities, or at least
to no longer see incarceration as an inevitability, speaks to a larger
problem - one that has been building for years.

That problem is the evaporation of middle-class workers in the older,
struggling communities where many of the youths live.

The hopelessness that the youths refer to, from what I can tell, comes
from feelings of being trapped. Except for what they see on television
- - images that delude too many of them into thinking that the only way
out of the trap is to become a professional athlete or entertainer -
the world that surrounds them displays limited choices.

They live in places where they don't see the nurse, or the postal
worker, or the teacher leaving every morning to go to work. What many
of them see are frazzled workers scrambling to catch a bus in the
morning to get to a job on the other side of town. They see people who
work at fast-food restaurants all day for wages that barely pay the
rent.

Then they see people who have acquiesced to living on the government
dole, and the drug dealers who live outside the rules of the
government and the legitimate world of work.

Some - though not all - believe that's all there is. And finding no
motivation from it, they allow themselves to drift into
criminality.

Like members of Watson's workgroup, I'm on board with the idea that
youths from struggling neighborhoods need role models and mentors to
avoid that fate. But I also know that the only way to build a steady
supply of role models and mentors is to continue to rebuild struggling
areas socially and economically. That's one way to attract
middle-class workers back, workers who can show youths that their
options don't have to be limited to fantasy lives that they likely
won't achieve, or to low-wage jobs they think they'll never escape.

Or the hopelessness that they can't seem to shake.