'what's that make us'?

it makes us Prisoners
to our reptilican
brainstems

held hostage
to impunity
hubris &
greed

and
oddly
enough
it makes
eltrumpfster
a mad, market-
ing Genius ready
to Conquer the World

even if he's gotta
Burn it all Down
to "save it."

Impressively, the Sentencing Project study the author cites reveals a key to understanding youth violence -- and then minimizes it afterwards: "Studies find that youth who become involved in the juvenile justice system are several times more likely than other youth to have suffered traumatic experiences." A few paragraphs above this, we read,

"Studies that track youth outcomes into adulthood have found that an alarming share of young people incarcerated in youth correctional facilities are later arrested, convicted, and incarcerated as adults. Research studies that control for young people’s backgrounds, offending histories and other relevant characteristics have found that confinement most often results in higher rates of rearrest and reincarceration compared with probation and other community alternatives to confinement."

No word as to whether "young people's backgrounds ... and other relevant characteristics..." included a history of having "suffered traumatic experiences," but it appears there was no attempt to control for this factor in this study.

Later in the study, the very last paragraph of the "Why Incarceration Fails" section finally admits,

"Incarceration can retraumatize youth and make them less likely to succeed. Often, incarceration is itself a traumatic experience for young people, and it can exacerbate the difficulties experienced by youth who have been exposed to violence and other adverse childhood experiences."

Why this factor was placed last is a question for the authors, but these mentions of childhood trauma tell us our intervention efforts must start far earlier than the young person's first encounter with the criminal-justice system. We must intervene to remove children from violent homes, or our efforts to eliminate youth jails will fail against the reality of traumatized children growing into violent adolescents, and jail as the way of protecting the rest of us from their violence.

Unfortunately, all this cray-cray has run right into reality.

Once I saw the reference to caging youth, I knew where we were going with this.

This irrational hatred of a facility shows the immaturity of the movement. OF COURSE incarceration should be the last resort. I think all rational people agree with that. But this building is not just a jail. It's also the Juvenile Court, which serves an important administrative function in determining what the consequences should be for the offender. Would it be better to have that downtown with the adults in a facility that is already over-burdened?

As for the "jail" part, there will always be some children who are better off as wards of the county than they would be at home, and some who will be safer behind bars than on the street. And there's always the occasional child who needs to be behind bars because they did something heinous. This is a modern facility that allows for the juvenile justice system to function in a much better and safer environment than the previous facility, which was the definition of grim.

Pretending we don't need a facility for administering the juvenile justice system is stupid. It serves no one, especially the youth who are caught up in the system.

Thank you once again Catalina for being a voice of sanity here on Slog.

Anyone who seriously believes that we should close juvenile detention needs to be kept far away from making policy decisions. They should never be handed the levers of power. As long as there are humans, there will be a need for a facility to separate those who cannot follow rules from the rest of civil society.

Catalina Vel-VuRay, you should write for The Stranger. You make structured, fact based arguments that are based in rational thought.

Housing juveniles with adult criminals is true cruelty. Not sure why The Stranger pushes this nonsense