youth at risk Quotes

Children are victims of a social problem that wounds the family.

The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths.

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.

Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it's going to building prisons and police forces.

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

I was a hoodlum. I was a gang member, and art saved my life.

If I hadn't gone into acting, I would have been one of those weird runaways on Hollywood Boulevard. No, it'd be uglier. I'd probably be dead.