Don't Kiss, Don't Tell

Happy Valentine's Day!

MTV's "Juvie" UPDATE

I saw the first episode of "Juvie " on MTV last night and it was interesting, to say the least.

I liked how the producers juxtaposed the two cases. The first person we meet in the premiere episode is a white girl who ran away from home. She made it all the way from Indiana to Texas before the authorities got her to turn herself in with some not-so-elaborate ruse. Also, she wants to audition for "American Idol" and you get to hear her sing in her cell. She isn't terrible, but I doubt Simon will be so forgiving. Let's just say she's no Kelly Clarkson, that's for sure.

The second "Juvie" was a black 17 year old male who got tagged with stealing a car. He says during his intake that he was driving but that the car wasn't stolen -- it belonged to a friend of his (or the friend's mom, I'm not sure which.) At the beginning, he's very standoff-ish towards the other Juvies he's housed with. But by the end of the show, he comes around and realizes that all the kids aren't so bad or so different from himself.

Anyway, you get the sense that the girl doesn't have the most stable home life but that the guy does. His mom comes to visit him while he's in jail and she's there at his hearing, where he gets to go home pending his next court appearance.

The girl's mom doesn't visit, but she does send her daughter a package of new sneakers with a long note tucked into the shoe that gets confiscated. Apparently if all the items aren't on a packing list, you're not allowed to have them. (Btw, is there anything that screams Crackhead Mom more than, "Here, I got you some sneakers. No love, but at least you got sneakers.")

It seems a little overly punitive when the guard doesn't allow her to even read the note. I mean, sure, take it away, but have a little humanity and let her read what her mother wrote. You get the sense that what happens at the hearing wouldn't have been such a surprise to this girl, had she read her mother's note beforehand. But the guards can't have their authority questioned so after the girl talks back for a while they put her on room restriction, which basically means solitary confinement for the night. It's the Juvie version of the hole, I guess.

At the hearing the Mom says she doesn't think she can control her daughter and doesn't want to bring her daughter home, so needless to say, the court decides not to send this girl home to her mother, from whence she ran away in the first place.

At the end of the episode, you learn that the girl is doing well in her new group home and is working on rebuilding her damaged relationship with her mother.

Here's hoping both of those crazy kids stay out of trouble!

Better Red Than Dead

Tragic death (I suppose it's too soon to declare it a murder, maybe a manslaughter though) of a young person at a prep school for juvenile offenders in Maryland. Allegedly staff sat on the kid for hours, while others watched, until the kid died!

First, the loss of life aside, it's a little bizarre that there's a school called the Bowling Brook Preparatory School and it's for youthful offenders. I mean, from the name, one could easily confuse it with a school for the children of the privileged classes.

Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services has a contract with Bowling Brook to educate juveniles in trouble with the law. Of the 170 students at the school on Tuesday, 74 were sent there by the department, said Edward Hopkins, a juvenile services spokesman.

So there are 96 kids going to school with Maryland's "juveniles in trouble with the law" who weren't referred by the Department of Juvenile Services? DAMN! It sucks to be them. I mean, they must learn all kinds of things before/during/after class that aren't part of the standard curriculum. That's what happens in any school, or prison, so I'm sure it goes on at this combination school-prison.

But I will say that unlike in some other places, people with experience with this school say this is an anomaly. It's not like this is a place with a reputation for guards staging fights between youth inmates or anything. From the same AP report...

Bowling Brook has been in operation for decades and has drawn few complaints from youth advocates, who expressed surprise at Simmons' death.

"My experience with Bowling Brook had always been that it's a great program," said Susan B. Leviton, who directs the juvenile law clinic at the University of Maryland. "When you (visited) Bowling Brook, every kid was involved in sports, they were going to school, they were keeping facilities clean. It was a very active and engaged place."

Either it's a great place with one huge stain on its record. Or they do a great job of cleaning everything up when people come for a visit. Either way, this kid's death is a tragedy.

I'm Not Alone

I'm far from the only person blogging to cover youth issues. In fact, it doesn't surprise me that there are people out there with far greater qualifications than I have writing on similar topics. ( I don't search for them, this one just happened to pass my desktop, thanks Google News Alerts.)

One such person is Elisa Poncz over at Children's Rights & Laws. She's in her 3rd year at Harvard Law School (so you know she's wicked smart!) and on Friday, she mused about the appropriateness of using, or potentially exploiting, youth rights to achieve desirable social changes.

In this case, there was a murder in Florida involving 3 teens. Two of them were 19 and one was 17, at the time of the crime -- a savage beating of a homeless man resulting in death. The prosecutor declined to seek the death penalty for the 19 year olds, (in the U.S., you can no longer execute people who were under 18 years old at the time of their crime) for reasons of proportionality between the sentences.

Assuming all three are equally guilty, all three should get the same punishment. That's Justice.
Now both Ms. Poncz and I are opposed to capital punishment, but something doesn't sit right with her, it seems, when youth rights are used as a proxy for achieving societal goals, even ones she agrees with. Money quote:

I'm concerned that the unique character of children might be exploited for the political gains of adults seeking rights that cannot be achieved in the broader society, but might be achieved with children (and then hopefully extended).

That's a fair point. She goes on to wish that the prosecutor would have not sought the death penalty on moral, rather than age-related, grounds. I understand her concern. I would hate to see youth rights exploited to achieve some end I disagreed with. But in this case, I'm satisfied.

Call me a hypocrite -- ends justifying means in this case. What can I say? I'm not perfect. It's not that I disagree with Ms. Poncz, I'm just not going to get worked up about it in this case.