When my mother was growing up in post-World War II Ireland in the 60s, she was expected to have a job, and she did by age 14. This was the norm when you came from a family with limited resources in that era. There was no great emphasis on educating girls at that time in a country under the grip of colonialism and the Catholic church.

When she was in her early 20s, my mother immigrated with my father, who was a Jamaican, to Jamaica. By this time, she had been living in England after leaving Ireland as a teenager. At about 40 years of age, my mother suddenly began studying to sit Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations. Within a decade, she had a bachelor’s and a master’s degree and returned to England to serve the Metropolitan Police Service.

I say this to say that what you are as a teenager does not always resemble what you eventually become. This occurs most of the time without you ever having a vision of what you will eventually achieve.

An absence of vision as a teenager does not mean that you are doomed. You can change your ambitions as you are exposed to various influences or stimuli.

My father put in my head very early that I needed a university education to be a complete and successful human being. That was his belief. He had not finished high school. He had worked as a labourer in England before immigrating to Jamaica.

Whilst back home in Jamaica, he found his calling in police work and was a pioneer in the security industry. He would often say to me: “I want you to walk with a pen, not a gun like me. Go to school, get educated, and people will pay you 10 times what they pay me to run down a man with a gun.”

Well, look how that worked out. I got my education, I still joined the police force. Like my father, I served on special squads and operate a security company.

The lesson from my father’s example is that even if you get your children to buy into your vision, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have a vision for themselves. I was going to go to school, but I was also going to be a policeman, and I was going to develop in the security industry.

The difference between my mother and myself is that I had a mentor who pointed me in the direction he wanted me to go; he had a vision for me. He got me to buy into it.

My mother, coming from a humble family of nine children — all living in a tiny cottage — was not surrounded by people who could conceptualise attending a university and earning not one, but two university degrees. She developed these ambitions as she was exposed to England and the Caribbean.

I am very proud of her. Can you imagine what she could have achieved if she had a mentor pushing her in that direction when she was a child? Exposure is everything. You can’t achieve it if you can’t conceptualise it.

I have worked at the Caymanas Park race track for nearly 30 years. There is a group there called “grooms” that provide the extremely valuable service of taking care of the fundamental needs of the racehorses. Most of these men come from the Gregory Park community, which is one of the oldest communities in St Catherine — formed as far back as the apprenticeship period in Jamaica in the 1800s.

The grooms are the poorest set of people that I have ever worked with. They have a culture that is unique to them. They rarely leave the parish of St Catherine. In fact, they rarely leave the district of Gregory Park, operating between their homes and the track. So their life is on a one-mile radius format.

Annually, they make one trip into Kingston to renew their racing licence, which is issued by the Jamaica Racing Commission. Their lack of exposure is a case study in the significant impact of same.

In my early years at the track, I watched a generation of youth — children of the grooms — grow up to become replicas of their parents. They inherited the ability to work under very difficult circumstances. They also inherited the culture of uniting as a group to oppose any and all threats. This threat response unfortunately included security officers trying to enforce rules.

I embarked on a programme over two decades ago to end the cycle of the grooms’ children’s non-participation in the educational journey that is normal and mandated by law in Jamaica. This programme took the form of paying the school fees of any child of any groom employed at Caymanas Park.

There were two dramatic results of this intervention. The first and most obvious was that the children of grooms did not follow their parents into the industry. This created a shortage of grooms that I have been criticised for causing.

The programme also resulted in more of the children attending traditional high schools. Quite a few achieved tertiary level education. It is now extremely difficult to find men to work as grooms because of this.

This same situation has occurred in the United States of America as they have grown as a nation. Far fewer people are available for minimum-wage jobs in factories, for menial tasks like screwing bottle caps on to bottles. The result is that immigrants are brought in to fill the roles, with no allowance for growth.

Immigrants from less developed countries do these jobs because they have no choice or the factories move overseas.

The absence of exposure is a by-product of the absence of any real mentorship efforts in our inner cities by our more educated and fortunate men. The introduction of real mentorship could make a difference, not only in how seriously our young men take their education, but also in the number of them who choose a life of crime.

There are a few reasons for this lack of mentorship: First, there doesn’t seem to be a massive, structured effort to introduce mentorship into the inner cities by any government programme. Second, there is a risk in operating in this environment that is not limited to things that can happen to you whilst you are there. The best protection from inner-city threats is for them to be unaware that you exist. Third, there is a behavioural norm to want to put behind you periods of your life or your family history that were difficult. Fourth, few truly understand the benefits of mentorship to adolescents and young adults.

There was a programme directly after the Cuban Revolution that grew feet in the decade after the end of the violence. It was an effort to combat the illiteracy that was rife in this period. It was mandated that each person who could read would teach five people who could not. It caused a domino effect that grew like a pyramid scheme.

Now Cuba is one of the few countries on the planet that can boast zero adult illiteracy or 100 per cent adult literacy. Whichever term you like is fine with me, but what is certain is that it is an amazing achievement that began with government-mandated mentorship.

So back to the inner city. I know mentoring there comes with its risks, and yes, I know these risks are not necessarily contained. Well, tough! Man up and do it anyhow. Your nation expects it of you.

There is a saying in the United States that was popularised by the National Rifle Association. It states: “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Well, in the world of small space influences and community indoctrination in inner-city Jamaica, the only thing that can stop the mentorship by a criminal who will ultimately die badly is a good person who lives his life for more than just himself and his family.

In both examples cited above, a bad guy is being stopped by a good guy, and when good men get involved, things change for the better.

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