Mentoring Children of Prisoners
In January 2002, President George W. Bush signed a bill expanding the Safe and Stable Families Program (Public Law 107–133), which included authorization for a mentoring program for children of prisoners; and, in his 2003 State of the Union Address, he proposed a $150 million initiative that would bring mentors to 100,000 of these children.
Since then, the Family and Youth Services Bureau within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been funding community- and faith-based organizations to provide mentors to children and youth with incarcerated parents.
According to a U.S. Senate Report, children of prisoners are six times more likely than other children to be incarcerated at some point in their lives. Without effective intervention strategies, as many as 70 percent of these children will become involved with the criminal justice system.
Read more about this topic: Youth Mentoring
Famous quotes containing the words mentoring, children and/or prisoners:
“Never be intimidated when you deal with men. Curse, don’t cry.”
—Anonymous, U.S. professional woman. As quoted in Aspirations and Mentoring in an Academic Environment, ch. 4, by Mary Niles Maack and Joanne Passet (1994)
“Our children do not want models of perfection, neither do they want us to be buddies, friends, or confidants who never rise above their own levels of maturity and experience. We need to walk that middle ground between perfection and peerage, between intense meddling and apathy—the middle ground where our values, standards, and expectations can be shared with our children.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)