James Paul
Amachi combats the symptoms of parental incarceration with a volunteer mentor program. Mentors and mentees say the relationships formed often last for years.
MarQuice Scott-Ford grew up in Larimer on Pittsburgh’s east side, where criminal activity offers fast money and mentorship to kids who lack both. Only 24 years old, Scott-Ford said he needs both hands to count the number of his friends who have died.
“Sometimes people are born into that lifestyle,” he said. “Their older brother or their dad was in that lifestyle. They inherited it. It’s generational … They’re not offered that love or that companionship that they’re looking for at home, so they find it in other people.”
With his father in and out of prison throughout his entire life, Scott-Ford said he lacked a positive male role model he could look up to. He said if not for the mentorship he received through Amachi Pittsburgh, he could’ve had the same risk of entering the “lifestyle.”
Amachi Pittsburgh is a nonprofit youth mentoring program aimed at helping children with incarcerated parents avoid the criminal legal system and patch feelings of loss and abandonment by pairing them with volunteer mentors, according to Anna Hollis, executive director.
Between 2018 and 2021, there were 25,335 children in Allegheny County who had a parent in lock-up, according to a 2023 county report. Parental incarceration imposes a wide array of heightened risks on children, ranging from learning disabilities to juvenile delinquency.
The Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation founded Amachi Pittsburgh in 2003. The organization is independent but one of hundreds based on a Philadelphia model that leveraged local faith-based groups to provide mentoring services to kids in the ‘90s.
Since Hollis took the helm in 2005, she says Amachi has begun complementing mentoring with family support systems and policy and advocacy work. The organization also operates a youth ambassador program to promote civic engagement and activism in teenagers.
Mentorship services are free to children and their families. According to mentors and mentees, after Amachi pairs them, their relationships form and grow independently.
“We have to really make sure that [mentees] understand there’s a lot they can do,” Hollis said. “It’s not up to an individual child to beat the system in terms of changing the system, dismantling an oppressive system, but they certainly make decisions that can put them on a course towards a successful future.”
When Scott-Ford was eight, his mother entered him into Amachi, where he met his mentor, Sean Farr, around 26 at the time. Scott-Ford said he connected quickly with Farr. They would play catch and watch college football games.
The two met at least once a month but typically more often than that. These were not structured therapy sessions or motivational talks; Scott-Ford describes it as hanging out with a positive figure he could look up to and who helped him work through his violent past.
While growing up, Scott-Ford said he walked past crime scenes and had friends die — experiences that bubbled up years later as trauma. But given the stigma of therapy pervasive in Black communities, he said he felt he had to hold on to that trauma rather than unpack it.
“I feel like [Farr] had an understanding of how to say the right thing to me and break it down in bits and pieces to the point where … I could understand the message that he’s trying to get across without it being too big for me to comprehend,” Scott-Ford said.
Hollis said “Amachi” is a Nigerian Igbo word that means, “who knows what God has brought us through this child.”
“It really speaks to the inherent value that all children have regardless of their family circumstances, and at the fact that we really can’t write kids off based on their zip code, based on who their parents are,” Hollis said.
Kids with an incarcerated parent are three times more likely to face behavioral problems and depression than their peers and twice as likely to suffer from learning disabilities, ADHD, and anxiety.
In a cycle called intergenerational incarceration, 30% of kids with an incarcerated parent become incarcerated themselves — a rate six times higher than kids without a parent in jail or prison, according to the National Institute of Justice, the research, development and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice.
“Whatever they were accustomed to relying on that parent for in terms of support, engagement, laughter, love — all those things have been disrupted,” Hollis said. “You know, when that parent goes away, it’s hurtful. It hurts. It is painful.”
According to Hollis, Amachi’s internal assessments show that kids in their mentorship programming have lower levels of anxiety, higher levels of self-esteem and higher rates of college attendance, along with improved conflict resolution skills. She noted a 92% success rate in breaking intergenerational incarceration.
“We do ask our mentors for a one-year commitment,” Hollis says. “They sign on, so you have to be able to make that commitment. And, oftentimes, when a mentor establishes that relationship with the kid, the relationship extends well beyond that one-year minimum commitment.”
In 2015, Amachi assigned Will Carpenter, who was 54 years old, to mentor Antonio Mahan, who was 8. Nine years later, even with Mahan’s father back home from prison, the two still meet weekly.
Carpenter enrolled in Amachi as a mentor because he was looking for a way to volunteer his time after his kids left for college. Mahan’s mother enrolled Mahan because she wanted to give her son a positive male role model while his father was incarcerated.
Carpenter is a suburban dwelling general contractor and describes himself as “the whitest white guy you’ve ever met.” He said before he started mentoring, he was initially worried that he would encounter a cultural barrier with Mahan, who is Black.
“What if this kid says, ‘What do you know about my life?'” Carpenter recalled asking Hollis. “[Hollis] said, ‘Well, don’t worry about that. The families that are in Amachi want to be in Amachi, and the parents want their children mentored.’'”
Twice a week, Carpenter, who is also the vice chair of the Amachi board, started taking Mahan to kung fu lessons. After classes, Mahan said he would go out to dinner with “Mr. Will” and talk about what they had just learned and how it may apply to their lives.
“It’s good to have a balance, especially because [Carpenter] took me and gave me a whole different sense of culture,” Mahan said. “He took me out to try Sushi.”
Carpenter became close with Mahan’s siblings and mother and introduced Mahan to his own wife and kids. Even when Mahan’s father returned from prison, the two stayed close.
“I couldn’t have had a bigger advocate than [Mahan’s] dad,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter, 63, is now a first-degree black belt, and Mahan, 17, just took the SAT and plans on studying electrical engineering in college. Marhan still calls Carpenter “Mr. Will,” and the two still try to see each other once a week.
“My dad really pushed me to go hard,” Mahan said. “Mr. Will would just take me out to have fun. He’s definitely a positive male role model in my life.”
Like Mahan, Scott-Ford stayed with his mentor until he went to boarding school at age 13. He said it was on those trips to college football games with Farr that he first saw a world beyond Larimer and Pittsburgh’s East Side.
These outings inspired him to become the first male in his family to attend college and graduate from Robert Morris University. Preparing to move to Georgia to work for his uncle, Scott-Ford said when he was a child, the easier option would have been to fall into a life of crime. Scott-Ford, with thanks to his own work ethic and his mentor, counts his blessings.
“It’s easy to pick the easy route; it’s harder to pick the more difficult route,” Scott-Ford said. “The blessings from the harder route last longer than the blessings from the easy route. For the blessings from the easy route, I feel like they expire faster”
Photo courtesy of Amachi Pittsburgh