Florida Catholic | Jailhouse Ministry Reaching Out For Better Things

Reaching out for better things

Hands on quilt represent jailed teens who grasped hard-earned diplomas.

JANET SHELTON | FLORIDA CATHOLIC ST. PETERSBURG BUREAU EDITOR

Published: 03.07.08

Elena Zerfas, who heads the volunteer–run Success and Empowerment program for juvenile offenders housed in Hillsborough County’s Orient Road Jail, talks about the quilt that carries the handprints of boys in the facility.
JANET SHELTON | FC

Success and Empowerment, the jailhouse education program that has helped the teens whose hands are depicted on the quilt, needs volunteers. For information, call the Diocesan Office of Prison Ministry at 727-345-3338, ext. 414.

ST. PETERSBURG | The hands of the quilt have committed violence. The hands of the quilt have dealt drugs. The hands of the quilt have robbed and stolen, been placed in handcuffs, rested on the walls of a cell.

The hands of the quilt have studied books, taken tests, grasped hard-earned diplomas.

The hands of the quilt — now silhouetted in felt, signed with initials and sewn into a blanket large enough for a queen-size bed — belong to teens incarcerated in the juvenile section of Hillsborough County’s Orient Road Jail. Through the help of Catholics and others dedicated to serving them, they hope their handprints will let the world see that their footprints, changed by time, can help the community they once hurt.

“The hands represent the juveniles reaching out for better things in their lives,” said Elena Zerfas, who heads the volunteer-run Success and Empowerment program in the Orient facility that houses youth offenders. “They have all earned their GEDs or high school diplomas.”

Success and Empowerment provides emotional and practical support to Hillsborough County’s teen inmates. It provides mentoring and tutoring, and teaches youths important life skills, such as how to find and keep a job or how to use checking and saving accounts.

Zerfas said she has seen miracles in her work. They don’t come easy, but they come. Hardened boys open their hearts to education and open their souls to change.

Success and Empowerment works closely with Hillsborough County teachers such as Joanna Scaglione, lead teacher for the juvenile education program at the jail. The positive two-punch guides the boys toward high school diplomas and, hopefully, better lives.

Scaglione has been teaching juvenile delinquents in Hillsborough County School District’s Youth Services for more than 30 years. Her students follow all the usual school requirements to earn credits toward graduation. All of the juvenile offenders are required to attend classes.

Asked if her job was tough, Scaglione laughed.

“It is tough, but I have a lot of experience,” she said. “You work with them and you learn how to tie into them and win them over. Then you’ve got them. They go from there.”

Success and Empowerment helps, she said, because it works with teachers and adjusts its mentoring and tutoring to meet the needs of the individuals. It also provides programs designed to get the kids thinking about their lives, their values, their past and their future.

“I think what they do through the program is they open the kids’ eyes to ‘What is making you think like this? … You have more value than you have credit for,’” the teacher said. “When they come out of those (Success and Empowerment) classes, they come into mine and talk about how they feel.

“I think that’s a good thing,” she continued. “If a teenager realizes he has self-worth, he will work harder and accomplish what I am trying to get them to do.”

Zerfas, she said, is a “real go-getter.”

“She is right in there with these kids,” the teacher said. “She supports them any way that she can. If she needs to buy something to help them with what they are trying to do, she gets it.”

SEEING WHO THEY ARE, NOT WHAT THEY’VE DONE

Scaglione and Zerfas see the youths as young people in need of their services. They don’t know and refuse to think about the crimes they committed.

“I don’t look at them as criminals, although a lot of people see them that way,” Scaglione said. “I have to separate what they’ve done with who they are. … I know they’re sitting there in orange, but to me, it’s just a uniform. … We are nonjudgmental about their criminal charges. We don’t even talk about their criminal charges. We’re here to teach them.”

The quilt represents positive change. Zerfas said those who contributed have earned a high school diploma or an equivalency diploma and have left Orient Road. The quilt will be displayed in the hope that those who see it will rethink how they feel about teens who commit crimes and not see them as hopeless.

“I understand it will soon be hung in the lobby of Orient Road Jail, and once we get that done I am going to get it into the hands of the Hillsborough County School System and have it hung in the lobby” (of the school system headquarters), Scaglione said.

“That way, they can see that these kids have value.”

LOOKING TO PARISHES FOR VOLUNTEERS

The quilt also will visit area parishes, where it will introduce Success and Empowerment to Catholics willing to practice their faith through a diocesan Ministry of Mercy. Over the years, most of the handful of seniors who provided the backbone of the program left because of health problems. Zerfas desperately needs volunteers, especially math tutors, and she needs them now.

Attracting volunteers to a jail is a hard sell. But, hey, people are doing God’s work. What more do they need?

“I was taught that when you do God’s work you do the best you can; there are no rewards,” Zerfas said. Then she reconsidered. “I take that back. If you do God’s work, God makes your family household a little more peaceful.”

If no one responds to the quilts’ call to volunteer, eventually the two women and one man holding up Success and Empowerment will become none.

The program will end, and the youths and teens society has jailed in the hope of change will return to their before-incarceration lifestyles — the friends, the family, the gangs — without the tools they need to forge a new life.

Zerfas will pray that doesn’t happen. She believes her prayers for the teens are working, because she has yet to see any of the boys whose hands help make the quilt return with a new sentence.

“What I pray for is that they become aware of another lifestyle out there and that they can embrace it,” she said. “That they can go out into the community and they can escape that (former) type of lifestyle.

“I know that’s hard, but they can do it,” she said. “I pray for them a lot.”

Shelton is interim St. Petersburg diocesan editor.

Return to Diocese of St. Petersburg Front Page

Reaching out for better things

Other Stories