Program links kids at risk, mentors

BOISE – For thousands of children in southeastern Idaho, prison is a place where Mommy or Daddy lives.

Those kids need strong role models to help them stop a pattern of bad choices, said Sister Janice Otis with the Pocatello-based Southeastern Idaho Community Action Agency. Without that influence, they stand a much greater risk of some day going to prison themselves.

Now, thanks to a $100,000 federal grant, the agency plans to provide those role models.

“We did a survey in schools, and out of 4,000 children in the rural communities here, almost 2,000 had parents who were incarcerated,” Otis said.

National statistics don’t offer the children much hope, she said.

“We know that at least 65 percent of kids who don’t have a mentor and have one or more parent incarcerated end up in prison themselves. So this will help them stay in school, study harder, get better grades and plan for the future and college. But mainly, it ensures that the kids stay out of the prison system,” she said.

The three-year grant, from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, will enhance the agency’s existing mentoring program by helping them target kids from families who have had negative contact with the criminal justice system, said Debra Hemmert, the agency’s executive director.

“Pocatello is the home to the Idaho Women’s Correctional Facility, so of course we’ve long thought there was something we should be doing with those women and their families,” Hemmert said. “When a parent has a brush with the law, it tends to make the children very distrusting of the police department and adults in general. Children tend to learn what they live, not what they’re told, so children have a natural tendency to repeat the error of their parents’ or siblings’ ways.”