Hercules Finley has devoted much of his life to helping kids in trouble
Hercules Finley (yes, that’s his birth name) spent 25 years in the Sedgwick County Jail, not as a resident, but as a volunteer chaplain, in service and obedience to his ministerial calling. As his time there grew longer, the faces changed.
“I looked up and I was the oldest person in there,” said Finley, now 68. “At first, the people in there were close to my age. Before I knew it, the average age was like 30. They were getting younger and younger.”
Finley then turned his service and attention to youth, and to helping stem the flow of youth into the juvenile justice system where profiteers hunt and hound them. It has become his life’s focus.
Like the ACLU of Kansas, Finley said the staggering debt juvenile offenders continue to accrue keeps him deeply concerned about their future, and the future of the communities they come from. He supports ACLU efforts to eliminate juvenile fines and fees.
He’s been working out of a Wichita middle and high school, helping students with social and emotional learning. Later this year, he will begin work in a community-based project called, “School Halls, Not Prison Walls,” a prison prevention program founded by his friend, Dr. William Polite, director of equity, diversity, and accountability with Wichita’s school district.
Finley said his ministry took him to every prison in Kansas. Those experiences convinced him that his work needed to begin earlier and upstream.
“I’ve always been an advocate for the imprisoned,” he said. “But we have to work to make sure we get to kids before they end up in that school-to-prison pipeline.”
Polite’s program aims to turn potential dropouts into what he calls, “math-letes,” a play on the word athlete. Along with mentorship, they believe a strong mathematics foundation will boost graduation rates while simultaneously lowering incarceration rates.
Finley was his first recruit.
“We have to put faces on that data,” Finley said about the high rates of incarceration for Black males in particular. “We have to get in their face and say, ‘hold up, we see you.’ We have to make it known that there’s a future for them.’”
He said he and Polite make weekly visits to juvenile detention centers hoping to fish yet another youth drifting toward prison.
Like the Roman hero whose name he shares, Finley is known for his strength and for his numerous and far-ranging adventures, though Finley’s work could rival the 12-Labours of the historical Hercules.
The monstrous prison industrial complex stands perhaps as more frightening than the Nemean Lion or the Lernean Hydra the historical Hercules defeated. Where there is profit, there’s sometimes also predation, he said.
We must awaken people to the systemic calamities claiming so many young lives he said.
“We have to help these kids,” Finley said. “At this age, I’d like to think that I have nothing to lose. I’m all in.”
Date
Thursday, April 25, 2024 - 6:00pm
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SB 233, an extreme bill restricting medical freedom and targeting trans youth, passed both Kansas chambers last month. Learn how you can protect medical freedom and the rights of trans youth by stopping it.
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Friday, April 12, 2024 - 5:15pm
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We’ve settled the issue of gravity. We know that the earth is not flat. We know the cosmos is infinite.
But this society still struggles with equality, especially, gender equality.
In 2011, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said, “Certainly, the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that is what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey, we have things called legislatures and they enact things called laws.”
Again, that was 2011.
Is it any wonder that today, there were numerous bills in the legislature this session aimed at stifling voting rights or that the nation was unable to pass The Equal Rights Amendment or ERA?
This follows a historical trend in the nation and more recently here in Kansas, to make voting more difficult for certain groups of people including women, whether it’s restricting mail-in ballots, creating delivery restrictions on advance ballots, or treating them as provisional ballots.
Much of the impact hits its intended targets, but sometimes, there are unintended consequences where voter suppression efforts like documentary proof of citizenship and CrossCheck, where people were caught up in nets not intended for them.
We’ve also seen measures fail recently related to banning remote drop boxes immediately and electronic voting machines eventually, along with an effort to eliminate the three-day grace period on mail-in ballots.
The ERA is a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would explicitly prohibit sex discrimination. Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman introduced it in Congress in 1923.
Adherents said it would end legal distinctions between men and women in matters of divorce, property, employment, and other matters. Opponents worried it might be used to protect reproductive rights and more recently, to protect transgender rights.
When the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, the Equal Protection Clause, which guarantees equal protection under the law, did not apply to women. It was not until 1971 that the Supreme Court extended equal protection to sex-based discrimination.
Women, however, have never been entitled to full equal protection as the Court subsequently ruled that statutory or administrative sex classifications were subject to an intermediate standard of judicial review, a less stringent standard than that applied to other forms of discrimination.
ERA finally passed in 1972, following a nationwide strike by women. The bill received a seven-year deadline to be ratified by 38 states. Kansas was one of the 22 states to pass it in the first year.
But it never reached the 38-state threshold.
It has been introduced to Congress every year since 1982 and even though it failed nationally, many states have incorporated some form of it in their respective constitutions.
The fact that equality remains controversial and contentious speaks to the need to fight harder than ever to protect voting rights. The only thing we know for certain is that attacks on voting will continue in Kansas and beyond.
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Monday, March 25, 2024 - 6:45pm
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