At-Risk Youth Quotes

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

I've had more students die than I ever thought possible. My husband urges me to quit Fairfield and teach at some school without gang members who live their lives only to die or end up as drug dealers.

Let's figure out ways of keeping our children out of the juvenile justice system and in the classroom so that they'll thrive. Because if you're in the juvenile justice system, the chances of your going into the adult penal system are greatly increased.

I do believe in lessons learned. I have learned that you work with gang members and not with gangs; otherwise, you enforce the cohesion of gangs and supply them oxygen.

Growing up in Flint, Michigan, I saw so many kids from my school end up in jail or unemployed, and gangs would hang out and cause trouble in my neighborhood. I had to learn how to protect myself, because it didn't feel like anyone else was protecting me.

At 18, I could have not been here. I could have been another statistic. All the odds were in favour of my just going to prison at that age. I had no visions of being a superstar.

I'm from Detroit. I was from a kind of violent neighbourhood.

When I was coming up as a kid, there were programs that kept me out of trouble and on the straight and narrow in South Central Los Angeles, and I always felt that when I got to a stage where I could provide similar opportunities to kids then I would do that.

Eighty-two percent of prisoners in the United States are high-school dropouts. A high-school dropout between the ages of 30 and 34 is two-thirds more likely to be in jail, or to have been in jail, or to be dead.

I grew up in a horrible neighborhood.

Gangs are born of a lethal absence of hope, and hope has an address: 130 W. Bruno St. in Los Angeles, CA 90012.

When you can't read or write at 14 or 15, in most cases you're headed for trouble, and trouble was finding me.

There are young people all over the country who don’t always have the helping hand, the second chance that I had.

Tragically, the White House Task Force on Disadvantaged Youth reported that one-quarter of our young people are at serious risk of not achieving productive adulthood.

Most of the kids that I meet in the street are serious hardened criminals that I meet in the street, never had a mother and a father to love them, to protect them, to teach them right from wrong and lead them out of crime and gangs and stuff like that.

I've also been working with the Challengers Club in the inner city of Los Angeles for 15 years now, I guess, and it's essentially an inner-city recreation club for boys and girls.

If I hadn't gone towards boxing, I might have been one of those kids getting into trouble. A lot of my friends did. They were clever kids at school, but they just went down the wrong path.

Gangs are bastions of conditional love, and one of the ways to counteract it is to offer community, which will always trump gang, and that's what happens at Homeboy Industries.

Home Stability Support is our best shot at creating an all-encompassing and effective system to ensure that our at-risk children and families can remain in the homes they deserve.

In my view, one of the major reasons that we have so many people in jail is that we have turned our backs on a lot young people.

One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth can return forty thousand dollars or more in his lifetime.

Why cannot some of the money the government spends be used to take the children and youths who will become criminals, and educate them and put them into suitable environments so that they will become normal people?

What we do best is we target the young men and women who are on the fringe. They could go either way. Maybe they have been in trouble before, but not serious trouble. ... We cherry-pick them and circumvent them away from the gang members and drug dealers ... (and encourage) them to hang out with us and become a Guardian Angel.

The reason most of the children are having problems in any inner-city neighborhood is because they don't see enough positive role models in their own environment.

I've had a pretty chequered past, you know, as a kid, as a troubled kid.