Reposted From: Kings Crossing Foundation
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Before the beginning of every year, organizational presidents, vice presidents and board members sit around the table trying to develop a winning strategy for the coming year. It is the same in the world of advocacy. We review the past season’s accomplishments and the items that we could not check off our list. We look at the current political climate, the agendas of other organizations, we toss around the general feelings of the public, count the opposition and start a new plan.
The story is always the same, the debate is always the same and it is always based around the current political climate. We feed off of each others catch phrases, we hire experts to help us frame our message appropriately so that we reach a wider audience and we try to ascertain who our allies are. These are all good strategies if we are trying to work within the constraints of the political process.
As the course is set for the coming year, there are statistics to consider. These are not figures reported in the countless documents that are generated concerning the size of our problem. The consideration should be the individuals that become the statistics in these reports. As we develop strategy’s and confer with each other concerning the politically correct message that will cause change, our prison population ages. As we agonize over words, pictures and messages, 14 year old kids are being sent to adult prisons. As we divide the lists of politicians into “friend or foe” people are abused, mistreated, abandoned and condemned to a life in prison.
If we are to have any impact I believe we need a new language and a new level of awareness. This is not about political process, government agencies or any of the old rhetoric we have become so accustomed to using. This is about people, reality, honesty and justice. We need to be prepared to speak truth and accept truth.
In October of this past year, a 14 year old boy was arrested and charged with killing his parents. In Colorado the District Attorney has the sole authority and right to decide whether or not this young man should be charged as an adult. He was. Then the court was left with the problem of where this kid would be housed. The arguments were heated and loud as the judge tried to decide whether or not to send this young man to county jail where he would be held in solitary confinement during the course of his proceedings and trial. We are a country that declares you are innocent until proven guilty yet we are willing to subject a possibly innocent person to cruel and unusual punishment. Even if this child is guilty of the crimes he is charged with, did it ever occur to anyone that he was in need of serious help? 14 year old kids do not kill out of evil malice, only adults with an agenda do that.
Because we, as advocates, have been met with hostility and vehement opposition from victims advocacy organizations and District Attorney’s, we have softened our stance, our language and learned to re-present the truth in a more palatable manner. It has not worked.
We need to start by stating the facts. Our current criminal justice practices have not worked in preventing crime, it has only increased crime. We have 7.3 million people under the authority of the department of corrections in the United States. A system full of, and fraught with, criminals and instances of continuing criminal acts. These acts are acts of violence between inmates, abuse inside of facilities, drug use and corruption inside of facilities as well as the crime against the human spirit which causes a break down of social skills. If you take the current rates of crime, add our current prison population and then add the population of people who will carry the label of criminalfor the rest of their lives, we are creating a large population of criminals through our laws and practices. Instead of allowing individuals to serve penance for their wrongs, helping them to find healing for themselves and those they have wronged and restoring our communities from destruction into prosperity, we are choosing to live in brokenness…..forever.
In order to see change come, we must become bold in our statements. We must confront our authorities with the truth of the consequences of the laws in place. If we believe that we are innocent until proven guilty and that is the law of the land, then we need to hold our authorities accountable to those laws. If we believe that these are broken children who are in need of intervention and that we are judged by the treatment of our children then we must hold our law makers accountable for their protection. We can no longer afford to be cautious and calculating and we must be prepared for opposition. The cost is too great….destruction of our nation…..poverty and brokenness….human life.
Instead of “tough on crime” or “soft on crime” rhetoric we need to confront our policy makers with the human cost of incarceration practices to the citizens of this country. Instead of juvenile justice reform policies we need to speak of child protection policies, rehabilitation policies and the future of our nation. Instead of emphasizing crime rate statistics we need to emphasize criminal reform statistics. We need new language new bench marks and new strength. When confronted with victims advocacy organizations we need to be prepared to speak of the pain and loss that our current policies hold them captive to and that healing is for everyone…even them if they choose it.
I challenge all of us to look again at the challenges we face as advocates and see those challenges from a new perspective. Look at them with fresh eyes and maybe this year we will leave a legacy behind instead of a wish list for next year.
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I am superprised that someone would go to all the trouble of creating a website without conducting proper research in this area. Direct filing is reserved for crimes that if committed by juvenile is serious enough to warrant filing charges as an adult. A District Attorney does have the sole ability to file charges. That office is elected and can be changed. Judges do not have the authority to decide what charges are to be filed. They do decide where a juvenile can be housed, with the help of a Senate Bill 94 team. This blog referenced juveniles “do not kill out of evil malice…” I beg to differ. Please, if you have a ethical and sane reason to protest direct filing, do the proper research and find facts. Do not blame “the system.” If more people to responsibilty upon themselves, I believe the Judical, Executive, and Legislative branches of government would have less work.
I am not surprised that you chose to remain anonymous. Kids aren’t mature enough to make adult decisions and yet District Attorneys filed adult charges against juveniles 138 times in 2007. You claim that adult charges are only filed in the most egregious cases. And while I don’t know exactly what crimes were committed in each case, I’m confident that not all of those 138 filings were as egregious as you would have us believe.
We don’t let people under 18 vote, sign contracts, or go into combat. We won’t even let people drink or become police officers until they’re 21. As a society, we almost universally, recognize that children are not capable of making adult decisions–and yet when they commit criminal acts we try to hold them accountable as adults. If they aren’t responsible enough to vote, how can they be responsible enough to make decisions with “evil malice”? How does that work, exactly?
District Attorneys continue to use the practice of direct file to meet out cruel and unusual punishments to kids to make headlines. DAs, whether they admit or not, have political motives in charging children. Punishing kids for political gain isn’t just unethical; its immoral and its wrong.
The most interesting thing about our “anonymous” commenter is that he chose the word malice to argue about. Malice, as far as it goes, requires a mind fully functioning and able to form malicious thoughts. A teenager lashing out at a physical abuser with lethal force speaks more about the sad realities of our society and our world than it does about that teenagers rational state.
Adults who commit heinously violent acts are one category of criminal offenders. Children who commit similar acts are a category of psychological patients screaming out for help. It takes a very shallow mind to not see the difference…the type of mind that would, say, wish to remain anonymous.
Beyond that, why give DA’s the sole power to judge children? What have they done to merit such blind faith and trust?
You people sit here and complain that we need to stop kids being tryed as adults. I think this is the best law that could exsist for kids because, if a kid kills their parents what are we supposed to do slap them on the wrist and hope that when they are 18 and roming free on the streets they don’t kill again? You need to be realistic about this and that reality is that kids now days are more dangerous than they ever have been in the past. In my mind if that means we lock up an 8 yr old for the rest of his/her natural life for killing their parents then so be it that is what they would do with an adult. You people here in Colorado might remember a few years ago about a lady being killed by her daughter and her boyfriend over in louisville? That lady happened to be the sister of my best friends wife. The girl is now doing 25 yrs in prison at 14 (at the time) she destroyed the rest of her life so she could party with her freinds. When she recieves her parole she will be so institutionalized she won’t be able to function in normal society and I don’t feel sorry for her. As far as I am concerned if you kill someone no matter your age you should be put to death to. If we went back to the old days of justice crime would not be as rampant as it is now days.
Mike, I’m glad for your sake that you have never been forced to deal with the things that these children have had to deal with. Since you are so convinced that this law is good, tell me, if you had been physically beaten by your mother, raped by your father, and otherwise abused most of your life, would you at any point have wanted to fight back? Its real easy to do the shallow thing and simply judge these children by the crimes they have committed, its much harder to have the courage to look at the big picture. No one is suggesting a “slap on the wrist,” what we want is meaningful help and an intelligent justice system. Is that too much to ask, oh Wise One?
Mike,
Vengeance isn’t justice and justice is supposed to be blind for a reason. The contradiction of your position is in your own words: You want to lock children up for as long as possible. The problem is that if they ever do get out, they are an even greater threat to society than when they went in. The fact is that prison doesn’t solve the problem. It only postpones it.
We are being realistic. When you institutionalize children, you teach them to be much worse criminals than they would otherwise be. When you rehabilitate children you eliminate the threat. Over the long term, that policy would save Colorado hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
It currently costs $29,000 per year to house each prisoner and the state of Colorado spends more per year on Corrections than it does on higher education. Maybe if we spent a little bit more time educating young people and a little less time punishing them for mistakes their parents made, we wouldn’t have a problem.
I don’t mean to be harsh, but your taste for vengeance shouldn’t be imposed on everyone. If I were you, I would seek anger management counseling.
Additionally, I would bone up on your facts.
1. Children who have killed are not likely to kill again
2. Violent Juvenile Crime is at historic lows.