FACT: When you have opportunity, life turns out better.
PROBLEM
Too many communities have too few opportunities for their children, youth and families to thrive. As a result, too many people end up in bad situations, and then way too many people are sent away to expensive institutions and group homes such as: foster care, juvenile confinement and prison, away from family and friends.
The state spends $742 million a year trying to fix these people – most of whom would never have gotten into trouble to begin with – if they had opportunities to succeed. And even worse many of those released from these systems will get in trouble or hurt again and return to the expensive institutional care… stuck in the cradle to prison pipeline.
SOLUTION
Spend less money for better opportunity and results. Our state departments of Human Resources, Juvenile Services and Public Safety & Correctional Services are doing just that. For far less money the Secretaries are putting alternatives in place that cost less and give people the chance to connect to opportunities – including jobs, treatment, education, health care – to get on with their own good and productive lives. About 600 Baltimoreans get these alternatives now – yet thousands need and deserve them. We can do more and we have the funds to get started.
The city can invest $11 million of its surplus in the Youth Works Opportunity Compact and give 200 young people an alternative to juvenile confinement AND provide peer-to-peer jobs, internships and after school activities to over 3,500 other youth in Baltimore. And even better, the city only needs to use their funds in the first year, because the state will fund it in future years with savings generated from the young people who got an alternative to being sent away to secured facilities and instead are doing well in their homes and communities. (note: research shows that 75% of the young people given the effective alternative will succeed.)
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