Sad Pictures Of Kids Locked Up In America

[aikoaiko]

3. Sad pictures indeed

In the early 1990s I worked for a halfway house system in AZ for juvenile offenders and had the chance to learn about their lives. In the past 20 years I'm sure it's only gotten worse. Almost all the kids had been victims of violent crime (usually domestic) and/or psychological trauma. They started off life with warped realities.

While its true that many are incarcerated for trivial things like truancy it's because thats the "crime" that is easiest to Prosecute. Most of the kids I worked with who were hit with truancy were already neck deep in other more serious crime (usually involving gangs).

We spent a lot of time trying to develop empathy for the offenders victims. Sadly this article talks very little about their victims. Some kids are incarcerated for victimless crimes but others are there because they beat on or steal from on other kids, elderly or poor.

I was often assigned sex offenders. Some of them seemed to turn the corner with therapy. But for some I'm sure that incarceration and watching then like hawks for their two or three years in the system may have been the only thing that kept them from sexually molesting or assaulting younger children for that period of time.

It's also true that the jumbie system made them harder and more knowledgeable criminals.

Zero tolerance at schools who use police to enforce infractions is a bigger problem now. It's one of the reasons I pony up for a secular private school. The adminstrators are expected to show more discretion.