“My courtroom is ground zero for the good, the bad and the ugly in this community, but there is so much good. I love what I do.

Before I was a judge, I was an assistant DA and sent a lot of young people to prison who were 15 and 16 years old. They were all high school dropouts and were coming from extreme poverty. It all comes down to the age of the first offense. If a child commits a crime before he is 14 years old, he is more likely to commit a crime of violence. The two factors contributing to the first offense are educational failure and dysfunctional family. 92 percent of the kids come from a single parent home.

We give a lot of attention to truancy and have built good programs and have good people working on this but I have lost 50 percent of my staff the left seven years because of budget cutbacks. We are having to do more with fewer resources. N.E.S.T. (Nurture,Equip, Strengthen, Transform) was born with Dr. Norman McCrummen out of my frustration for kids who don’t have hope. A kid can walk away from trouble if he has somewhere to walk to and someone to walk with. I begged people to get involved and they started coming. The missing piece is people who commit to the child or the family and it makes all of the difference.

We have 50 children who have been through N.E.S.T. and we have close to 40 teams. No one else really does this and we are learning as we go. These kids need miracles because nothing good seems to happen for them. When you get to a certain point, there are no good choices left. They are abused, beat down and neglected, but these kids want good things in their lives, too. With N.E.S.T. we realized we needed to take care of one child at a time.

Andre was a 7th grader in the Mobile County public school system. He missed 80 days of school the year that year and it looked like he is going to fail the 7th grade again. He had a history of bad behavior and 19 acts of suspension. The school was done with him. I saw him in April a couple of years ago and could tell he was a decent kid, not the horrible thing the schools labeled him. His mom worked two shifts at Cheddars and was struggling to keep a roof over their heads in a bad neighborhood. Andre helped get his siblings up and to the bus, but he didn’t go himself. We got the family into our Transitions program and provided access to counselors and case managers. We barely salvaged the 7th-grade year and worked with him over the summer. I saw him in mid-September and he had no suspensions and no absences. It was a big deal, but he was failing everything. We went to the school and asked for tutoring. That was a failing school and they didn’t have tutoring. How does that happen in a failing school? I was so frustrated because I feel like I am fighting for lives here. This is life and death and we are getting kids out of horrible situations. We had Andre almost where we wanted him but we were going to lose him because he couldn’t make up the education deficiencies. A team formed of five men and they took on Andre. They found him a tutor and paid for it themselves. These are busy men and each of them took turns taking him to the tutor. He started to bring Fs up to Ds and Cs. He was up to Bs and he wasn’t failing anything. Then before Christmas Cheddars closed and Andre’s mom lost her job. The N.E.S.T. team helped her with her resume and got her a job and there was no loss of income. Andre played baseball and did things no one expected him to do. He is a sophomore in high school now. The inspiration, love and guidance of those five men made a difference to his whole family.

There are 7,000 to 9000 kids who are homeless in Mobile right now. There is no stability when they go from auntie to grandmother to friend to shelter. They go to multiple schools a year and no one cares for them or has a chance to get involved with them. I work with the schools and we need to have a strategy for focusing on the ones most in need.

This is why I care. I was loved by a big family and had great teachers. I always had love and people who weren’t going to let me fail. Every child needs someone to stand by them. When I was young, my Uncle Elias and a bag boy were murdered in his store. My father and I arrived at the hospital before the ambulance and we saw them roll him off the ambulance. I loved my uncle almost as much as my father and deep down I was warped by his murder. It motivated me to become a lawyer and a District Attorney.

I prosecuted a capital murder case that was eerily similar to my uncle’s. It was not a case I would normally do but I begged for that one. I knew the young man who was killed and I got coffee at the store where he worked. He was 21 and about to graduate with a degree in engineering from the University of South Alabama. He wanted to make his father’s life easier when he graduated. I prosecuted the case and we were down to the jury’s decision whether the young men who killed him would die or live. The families begged for their children and said ‘I know the prosecutor has created monsters out of our children, but they weren’t always like this.’ They told some of the reasons their children turned out the way they did and begged to let them live, even if they spent the rest of their lives in prison. During that whole trial, I felt like I had been reliving what I experienced over my uncle. There had been hatred there all of my life, but after the families said their piece, the hatred was all gone. I didn’t even want what I had been asking for and it didn’t happen. I loved the boy and his family and hurt for the promise that was stolen from them but I couldn’t bring their son back. I realized this other family also lost their children. That is when I knew I needed to do something different.

People think the kids I deal with are monsters, but when you see them they are just kids. They may do bad things but they aren’t evil. They are victims of the circumstances they are growing up in. There are no good choices and there isn’t much positivity in their lives. We have the opportunity not only to change the direction of their lives, but of our community. We need to take care of our best and brightest, but also the ones who are doing poorly. Our best and brightest are going to find a job in Mobile or go off to another city. The ones we turn our back on never leave and one incident can upend everything. In Mobile, 3,000 children are not going to school and aren’t working. What do you think they are doing? They are either doing harm or being harmed. That is every year.

I don’t want kids failing out of school and not working because we haven’t put the efforts we need to into educating them. It starts in the first grade. It is a caste system if you are born in poverty and don’t have an education it is hard to get out. The last thing I want to do is put them in jail.

No one program is going to fix this but good has to come in and fill the places whiere it is absent. We want to bring good in through mentors, theater, arts, sports and education. It has got to be good people in the community reaching out their hand and saying ‘I won’t let you fail.’

If you aren’t a humanitarian, look at it as survival. Our community is only going to be as stable as those kids, the 15-20% of children who don’t have hope of a better future unless we improve their education and their family situation and mental health. They are the ones who commit the majority of the crimes and misery. If we don’t take care of these, they are the ones who can come back and hurt you.

I think I have found the solution and we are constantly trying to improve it. We want people to know what is going on here. We want people to come in and help. I also want to see less fear among the races both ways. We can’t undo the past. All we can do is approach it from where we are now. I love these kids regardless of what color they are.

I admire these kids. Trauma is a part of their lives and they get up every day facing challenges that I never had to face. They overcome on a daily basis and become powerful children. Give them an education show them and a little bit of love and we can create some incredible people.

I love my job because each day I think I may get to change a life. But I don’t want it to be just one. I have 1,000 kids on probation right now. I want to improve the lives of every one of them. I can’t do it alone or with my staff, but I can do it by asking for help. Somebody can affect the life of a child, if we get enough somebodies, we are going to have tremendous success and affect our community. We already are.”