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I find myself conflicted on the issue of juvenile crime. There is an angel on my shoulder and a devil on my shoulder. Or maybe I should say the devil is in my knee jerk. All of these progressive ideas about crime and restorative justice and such appeal to me but my knee jerk reaction has a very different idea. There have been trends of teenagers stealing kias for fun. They have also done smash and grab robberies by organizing in large numbers. Some of the businesses that they have targeted have shut down after losing all of their inventory in one go. Then you see complaints about the lack of grocery stores in these children's neighborhoods. I wouldn't open a grocery store there either. According to the devil on my shoulder, there is something to be said for retributive justice and a lot of that comes down to emotional need. Seeing these so-called Kia boys get off scot free after causing enormous uncompensated losses in their victims is not very satisfying emotionally. We're seeing so many juvenile crimes that I would have considered completely unthinkable and beyond the pale when I was growing up. I wasn't a perfect angel. I did graffiti. I skipped school sometimes. The thought of shooting someone or stealing a car was utterly unthinkable to me. Those are offenses that are utterly beyond the pale. The level of destruction from some of these children makes me wonder if they are just straight up psychopaths. And when they get arrested, they wind up on the street again. Or they have a punishment that feels like a slap on the wrist, but a slap in the face of their victims. These are crimes that make even me angry. Here in Chicago we're having issues with what are called euphemistically, “large group gatherings” where large groups of teenagers are gathering in the loop and wrecking the whole place or beating up random people they see for no discernible reason. There's too many of them in one place for anyone to handle. At least a very frightening and traumatic circumstance for people who are just bystanders. And there's no punishment. The angel on my shoulder says that we don’t have a fair system. We don’t even have a criminal justice system, we have a punishment system, a suffering system. The impact of incarceration is the destruction of families with the remaining family members being set up for additional failures and incarceration as the owners of the private prisons get rich off free labor. The children come from homes that have been broken by the impact of redlining, institutional racism, violence, and poverty stress. That is all assuming they even get the correct person. Frequently the court backlog and the power of the state cause defendants to be forced to confess. It’s far worse with juveniles. These children are not exactly engaging in protest when they do these group gatherings or they steal and wreck Kias for seemingly no reason. But there is a proverb that a child rejected by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. In the case of the large group gatherings, there has been a loss of free, third places in their communities. All the other ones have driven them out or they cost money the kids don’t have. I can’t speak to 12 year olds stealing Kias specifically but I have to imagine that the complete loss of hope or plan for the future has to have had an impact. There used to be jobs out there for people without academic aptitude where you could make a decent living wage with union working conditions without a college degree. We lost those and Aid to needy families because of NAFTA and neoliberalism. K-12 students lose out on instruction because of the lack of trauma informed structure and discipline that leads to them getting suspended and arrested for acting out or maybe they never had someone at home who made them go to school in the first place. There are communities where even the Kindergarteners have attendance problems. Many of them have trauma and lead poisoning and it affects their behavior. They get passed through the system like kidney stones and get to grade levels where the content is utterly alien to them because they didn’t learn the prerequisite skills. What I want to know is how do we find the right balance when it comes to enforcing the law? How do we find justice? Both victims and juvenile offenders have suffered. The victims have taken massive losses or died as a result of juvenile crime. Those victims and their families need closure and satisfaction. Those people vote. They will vote progressives out of office in favor of reactionaries and authoritarians like Eric Adams. Juvenile offenders need to have a justice that reckons with their traumas and the very real history of institutional racism and lack of hope. Locking them up may hold them accountable but also puts them further behind, until eventually they become adult criminals and then permanent residents of the jail. So what is to be done by Chicago policy makers and judges?
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Nov 23, 2023 03:12
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Queering Wheel posted:
Yeah that is what I am thinking too. I want our approach to crime to be proactive but car theft is unthinkable. Like you said, it ruins people's lives. I saw a story where some teenage girls tried to steal an uber driver's car, murdered him, and the camera footage showed one of the girls, before fleeing the scene where they murdered this grandpa say "oh no, my phone!" Their initial defense was that it was the uber driver's fault that they murdered him because he didn't just let them go with his car, the only thing he had to make a living with. It's heartless, soulless, behavior and that man's family deserves more justice than being locked up until they are 21. Murder and carjacking are not kid stuff. Graffiti is kid stuff. Shoplifting is kid stuff. Fistfights are kid stuff. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teens-get-maximum-sentence-death-uber-eats-driver-n1273276) I am sorry that their parents raised them bad but the rest of us need to be safe from them. Other children who don't have third places do not engage in these behaviors. Tnega posted:Let's focus in on this. Mentally send yourself back to the "you" who did such things. Now as your past self we can ask some questions. 1) Attention and amusement, and because I had a sharpie 2) I didn't get caught, though the harm of bathroom graffiti is fairly trivial 3) With bathroom graffiti the likelihood getting caught is pretty small but virtually any certain punishment would work. The key is that the likelihood of getting caught means punishments are not good deterrents. 4) I can't see my friends at the time becoming a violent gathering to be honest. 5) I think bathroom graffiti is normal behavior 6) Well I do think one bit of deterrence is to have better locks on the cars and to censor kia theft videos on social media. I also think that if these kids see their friends getting slaps on the wrist for grand theft auto and destroying someone's livelihood, that it encourages them to do it more. But if their friend goes away for a long period of time, they might rethink their destructive hobby. People die because of what they do. Nobody dies because of bathroom graffiti.
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Nov 26, 2023 03:09
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Tnega posted:Thank you for answering, we can use those answers to speculate on the mindset of the juveniles I'm question. That last bit is interesting because the same logic could be applied to murdering someone. We don't actually fine people for committing murder unless of course they are a corporation. And I know lots of companies that make dangerous products have these math formulas about civil and criminal liability versus the gains and profits from committing the crime, such as knowingly releasing a dangerous product that kills people or under staffing a chemical plant that blows up and kills a whole community. I understand some people might respond to my earlier points by saying we just need a communist revolution and capitalism is always going to produce these outcomes and such but I feel like we need a shorter term, smaller scale answer than waiting for a Messiah. Here in Chicago our mayor is Brandon Johnson and he seems committed towards models of justice that are more forgiving that appealed to the better angels of our nature. I like that I like that better. But in the short term, I'm seeing next door posts and r/crimeinchicago Reddit posts. There's a lot of anger and reactionary resentment out there that has to be responded to because those people vote. There's a real emotional need that people have to see justice done against people who steal catalytic converters or steal Kias but get light sentences because of their age or who get released from custody only to commit another crime. There's a whole blog called CWB Chicago that stirs up these people. You can say those people are racist and ignorant and they are but they also vote. These are problems and they do need to be addressed in the short term if only to prevent Kim Fox or Brandon Johnson from getting replaced by someone like Eric Adams. We need more long-term solutions but we aren't going to get them if these people aren't in office long-term.
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Nov 26, 2023 07:20
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A Buttery Pastry posted:If you took the concept of restorative justice to its logical conclusion, it seems like the answer to the Kia theft question is to have the state immediately replace the vehicle, so the victim is harmed as little as possible, and then worry about the offender after. The simplest solution being that they now owe the state, like they had taken a student loan, but that runs into the issue of it essentially making it consequence-free for people with money. I guess maybe they could make it so it's only payable in organs and/or body parts? Really though, how you actually deal with the offender is a much tougher question, but (essentially) fungible property theft/destruction is like the least difficult question to answer if you're trying to apply the concept of restorative justice: Just replace the stolen item. Sure, there might be some emotional damage too, but it's not like assault or battery where it might be impossible to even get close to restoring the victim. That is a good idea, though with teen murderers and robbers, I'm not sure what you would do.
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Nov 26, 2023 10:49
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Tnega posted:Define murderer in this case. A juvenile running someone over while joyriding a stolen Kia is probably closest to involuntary manslaughter while intoxicated, morally. They both have impared judgment (ether from being a dumb hormonal teenager, or being drunk). And, in California, for instance the former can be as little as a misdemeanor. I bring this up, not to approve of DUI, but rather as part of a broader point: If we seek justice and not vengeance from our legal system, it must generally be consistent rather than arbitrary and / or capricious. I was thinking about those cold-blooded and heartless 14-year-olds who murdered that guy in DC and only got 7 years in jail. It was on camera that right after they left the wreckage of the car where they killed a man, they were more concerned about their expensive phone. I've talked to kids who've done stuff like this when I briefly worked at a school. They maimed an elderly teacher's assistant and said that they were glad that she was in the hospital and "gently caress that bitch" and they were more concerned with the fact that they were going to jail (to be let out in a matter of hours) then that they almost killed somebody. They can do stuff like this that I never would have considered and just not show a smidgen of remorse.
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Nov 26, 2023 15:12
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Tuxedo Gin posted:Again, the numbers are significantly lower than before. An almost two-thirds reduction in violent crime arrests of juveniles compared to 15 years ago, and around 75% reduction compared to 25 years ago. I saw what you said. But outlier or not they make the news, as does the punishment. People still fear going outside that makes a difference.
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Nov 26, 2023 20:16
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Like I said: Hey thanks for posting this. Is there any chance there could be gaming the system or policy makers managing the data to make the benchmark they are judged on any better? Also do you know if there is one for car theft?
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Nov 27, 2023 10:10
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L. Ron DeSantis posted:Semi-related to this there's a very good article in the New Yorker about Kip Kinkel, one of the first mass school shooters who carried his out ten months before Columbine. A lot of it is about his relationship with his sister but there is some about how the victims and families all wanted him to rot, but it seems like in the 25 years since, having been medicated for his schizophrenia, he's a good person who is stuck in prison with no possibility of parole unless he gets resentenced. It's sad that a mistake he made at such a young age has denied him a chance to have a real life. How about this, when the victims he murdered rise from the grave and resume their lives, he can get out of jail and resume his.
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Nov 28, 2023 03:54
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Liquid Communism posted:From a purely pragmatic standpoint, rehabilitation is less expensive anyway. It is not cheap to keep someone locked up, having them instead be a tax paying citizen is good financially for society. Verviticus posted:well you see i think you start with a humane and not psychotic perspective which eliminates two of your options, and then to avoid paying literally millions of dollars to keep someone in jail forever, you maybe try to get them to be a functioning member of society again These are good points. Someone might counter that irrespective of impacts of deterrence there is a message to be sent when people are given sentences about what society values and what it condemns and that if murderers and mass shooters are let out it means their crimes are more tolerated than they should be. Immanuel Kant defended retribution. Other theories of punishment than restorative justice or rehabilitation exist. Those folks might say that rehabilitation makes the punishment good for the criminal, which they don't deserve and that deterrence is using people as a means.
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Nov 28, 2023 08:16
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Hobologist posted:It's a charming idea, and fortunately not forbidden by the 13th amendment, but who's going to hire a 15 year old car thief? And if the state is going to make up work for them to do, why not just have the state pay restitution directly? I actually like the idea of the federal government being allowed to either create make work jobs for economically vulnerable people or just straight up handing people money to correct injustices. Better that then having an hegemonic evil empire. Anyways, like I said, I posted this thread because I am emotionally conflicted. I don't necessarily intend to "win" this argument. I just want to hear people rip apart my worst impulses. I like the idea of restoration and rehabilitation in theory but I see news stories that piss me off and get under my skin. Juveniles who upon getting probation for stealing cars, proceed to do a home invasion. Juveniles who murder, carjack, and rob people. Heinous poo poo, though given statistics, probably cherry picked. I see them come up on my browser home screen all the time. Zoeb fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Nov 29, 2023 |
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Nov 29, 2023 07:01
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:
As I said I am of two minds about this. Y'all have already covered what the angel on my shoulder says. Some teens who have committed extreme crimes like carjacking, armed robbery, home invasion and murder have genuinely tragic stories about growing up in troubled circumstances and long term I would rather we did something about those circumstances but the devil on my shoulder says that that is merely a sign that those crooks are never going to change and they should be charged as adults. They caused lifelong consequences for others. A home invader has a good chance of getting killed by a homeowner and that is a risk they tacitly agreed to when they do home invasions. There is a place for retribution because without the state giving victims and society that retribution, people will take it upon themselves to seek retribution. When I was growing up a burglar broke into my house while my mom was sleeping, if he had harmed her, like many other burglars have done to other families, I would not have cared if he happened to be 15. I was young and I didn't break into people's houses. The angel on my shoulder though, knows at least a few stories where a boy murdered their pedo/rapist/wifebeater father and the court charged the kid with murder for doing society a favor by murdering infectious human garbage. I feel like that should have been taken into account. I know that prosecutors can't help themselves, they will over charge and put people to death to make their numbers seem higher. They will put people in jail who had good reason to break the law, who were more or less defending themselves but not in the clearcut way the law demands.
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Dec 3, 2023 20:21
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OwlFancier posted:I mean you don't the state literally has the ability to take kids into custody if they think their parents aren't doing a good job. That's not much of a solution either. They take the kid away from the appallingly bad parent for sure but where they end up after that could very well be worse. Parents looking to adopt usually don't adopt teenagers and only rarely adopt non-babies.
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Dec 3, 2023 21:05
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 16:45 |
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OwlFancier posted:Which I think is a product of the same desire to have prisons merely be punitive and exploitative without regard to their social utility other than to perpetuate a race war and enrich their operators. The juvenile custodial system functions poorly because its primary purpose is to get the children out of sight by whatever method is expedient. I certainly agree more resources should be dedicated towards helping children who either don't have parents or who had grossly unfit parents
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Dec 8, 2023 16:50
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