Hazelwood Boys

“A lack of education, leads to incarceration.”

Naturally, Maurice Cole has a penchant for being highly quotable in real-time.  

He could easily be regarded as the Mayor of Hazelwood. His attitude is collegial, reinforced by firm handshakes typically reserved for greetings between zealous uncles and their younger relatives. Officially, Maurice is the Community Liaison for Center of Life and has been present in Hazelwood since his childhood.

Maurice recalls Michael Givens (Mike as he refers to him) and their upbringing in Hazelwood well enough, albeit in retrospect, to describe today how young people can become victim to pitfalls. He’s kept in contact with Mike over the phone for nearly two decades.

“He’s got twenty years in” Maurice said while thinking about Mike’s incarceration. Mike has told Maurice that he—much like the others with who he’s serving a life sentence—would only want one more chance at freedom. When writing to Maurice, Mike says of prison there is “no satisfaction to be gained.”

When Maurice exchanges stories about how a diminished focus on education leads to youth facing jail or prison he explains the correlation based on what he’s witnessed in the past.

“If Center of Life don’t exist in Hazelwood, all hell gon’ break loose,” he said.

Hazelwood Outreach Branch YMCA

Not only for nonprofit organizations like COL or other community-based programs in Pittsburgh, but Maurice says the same goes for the recreation center in Glen Hazel. He likens them both to the YMCA, he and his friends went to when they were growing up.

“Because when me and my friends started making bad choices, it was after the YMCA’s closed,” he said.

The YMCA gave Maurice tutoring and that’s where he learned how to ride minibikes. He believes the YMCA was what Center of Life is to the Hazelwood community today. And once it left, the young people that were once captivated by its programs began to pay attention to people whose behavior they considered bizarre, people who weren’t being positive.

“Before then, we’d walk past them [thinking] ‘weirdo, you’re doing that?, we’re going to the Y!” 

Maurice describes how a lack of education and after-school programs, even today, can lead kids in the wrong direction, in just a few years. Throughout the length of our conversation, Maurice often takes to conveying his ideas with concise, thoughtful verbal illustrations.

At one point he describes creating a billboard with two images side by side; one showing a nearly empty PTA meeting, the other, showing a fully packed set of bleachers during a Friday night football game. The caption would read ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’  

Maurice employs this way of thinking by making an example of how, over time, trips to the corner store before school can impact the attention of a student.

“The first year a kid goes in the store gets what he wants and walks out. Second-year he goes in the store get something and stands around for a little bit ‘like oh, this feels cool.’ The third year, he’s hanging out there full time” he said.

Maurice explains this as the beginning of a luring effect that draws attention towards those people who aren’t doing right.

Across the state of Pennsylvania, Robert Saleem Holbrook echoes a similar sentiment. Holbrook is the Director of Community Organizing for the Abolition Law Center. He currently lives in Philadelphia and himself was incarcerated as a juvenile. 

From Holbrook’s perspective, cutbacks on social programs and the closing of rec centers in his own community created the “perfect storm.” 

“The culture of the streets lured us in,” Holbrook said.

For kids that have already entered the system, Holbrook says it creates a pipeline even after they are released. Holbrook saw juvenile incarceration leave communities feeling vulnerable. 

“When they come home oftentimes they’re out of school or they can’t get back into school…” Holbook said.

Maurice isn’t preaching when he feels the need to make the case that support for the youth and education will be crucial to keeping young people out of the prison system. For him, framing the issue as urgent is an understatement. 

Maurice says, as one of his co-workers puts it; “this is an emergency.”

- Zion Adissem