The Children's Justice Clinic will allow law students to represent children as clients and ideally, get at the underlying issues that led them to an interaction with the criminal justice system in the first place. According to the clinic's co-director, C.J. Lore:
“We have a small caseload and we can really take the opportunity to get involved in the child's life so the students spend an incredible amount of time with them so they get to the root problems.”
That's good news for kids in the Camden area. Hopefully, it's something that will become a national trend. At the very least, it's a reason for me to spend time in Camden, should I ever decide to go to law school.
7 comments:
"root problems"? Crime is cool and profitable. Assuming you don't get killed somewhere along the way (which is pretty hardcore in and of itself), it does in fact pay.
I think economists would have a slightly more indepth cost/benefit analysis. Getting killed is one cost, incarciration (and the lifetime of stigma that goes with it) is another.
I'm sure people who've lived those lives could share more with us than either you or I, from our positions of privilege, could ever know.
Well, all I can say is that I do attend graduate courses at Rutgers-Camden and it's a rough area. Kids growing up there could use any breaks they can get.
I don't doubt that my position as a privileged person of the middle classes makes it difficult for me to speak from experience on the nature of urban crime. But socio-economic position doesn't change one important fact: committing a crime is a choice. Most people don't do it. This goes for gangbangers and Enron assholes equally. I think it's somewhat naive to think of crime as a social disease or aberration when the attractions of street crime are obvious: it's profitable and glamorous. I fully believe that a policy of better schooling and more opportunity for advancement for people from socio-economically disadvantaged areas will be beneficial, but if personal responsibility is repudiated in the approach to crime, the goal of reducing it will be undercut.
I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you that crime is a choice. Nor have I read or written anything that repudiates personal responsibility. At least I don't think I did and certainly didn't intend to.
Where we disagree is your glib assertion that the reason people commit crimes is because "Crime is cool and profitable" and "the attractions of street crime are obvious: it's profitable and glamorous." I think you're oversimplifying complex causes, perhaps for the sake of attempting humor. I don't really know. It's hard to tell over blogs.
Yes, it's true. Some crimes do pay for some people (see Freakanomics) -- until the criminal justice system wipes out your profits with its legal costs. But I don't think your insights provide any greater explanation on why some people with similar backgrounds choose immediate profits via criminal acts, while others choose longer-term money-making schemes that aren't crimes (yet).
In the meantime, young people in areas, urban and rural, whose options are limited and make the choice to make money by selling drugs or committing other consensual crimes (vs. say robbing old ladies on the way home from church) deserve all the help they can get, including "schooling and more opportunity" not just time in juvie.
I'm entirely serious that the key motivations for crime, especially street crime, are profit and glamour. I don't think it's much more complicated than that. Just because it's a simple explanation doesn't mean it's not a powerful one. See Goodfellas for perhaps the most compelling portrait of this mentality.
I'd add protection as a third motivation, though probably not as important. The fear of being targeted no doubts leads individuals in an insecure area to seek protection in groups or networks capable and willing to use violence.
Most people from aforementioned privileged middle-class backgrounds give up a certain amount of glamour for the sake of security. In a context where there is less security to start with, glamour - in the form of criminality and violence - is a far greater incentive, which in turn increases insecurity. And so on.
Perhaps I was being a little glib when I said crime pays. Overall, it probably doesn't. But it pays better than McDonalds. Or any of the other shitty, unglamorous service economy jobs available to people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. You mention people who choose "longer-term money-making schemes" rather than committing crimes. I can't imagine one can make much money from those schemes - i.e. low-paid employment - and they probably involve punching in every day and obeying orders.
Why do people from similar backgrounds choose criminality or not? Who knows? I don't think anyone's come up with that insight yet. But background itself can't be the direct explanation because many people from the same background choose not to engage in criminality. And I think you're underestimating the extent to which some of our social scientist friends see social environment as a "cause" and personal choice as a construct.
Incidentally, I don't agree that kids who choose to sell drugs deserve all the help they can get. They deserve only what any other child in society deserves. And of course they don't deserve to be thrown in jail for selling a product to willing customers. But if you want them off the streets, a good first step would be to legalize drugs or make their sale a state monopoly. No other illicit activity creates such massive demand and so the profit motive will be severely reduced (and with it the glamour motive - no need for guns or violence and no money for ho's, clothes, and pimpin' rides) giving the kids far less motivation to be out on the street.
Who are "our social scientist friends?" My friends are all drunks. Who are you hanging out with?
You said, "I don't agree that kids who choose to sell drugs deserve all the help they can get. They deserve only what any other child in society deserves."
On help for kids, let me clarify my position by quoting from John Martin Fisher, "The essence of our effort to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each an equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different-to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind and spirit he or she possesses."
I think every child deserves all the help he or she can get. I'm just less concerned about the rich kids who sell drugs to their friends in prep school given the entirety of the network they're born into, than I am with the kids who sell drugs on the street and don't have the privilege of accessing the same network of connections, etc.
Incidently, you've convinced me about legalizing drugs. Thanks.
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