The Shadow Penal System for Struggling Kids
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-...
https://revealnews.org/article/they-worked-in-sweltering-hea...
https://www.propublica.org/article/black-children-were-jaile...
A judge in a Tennessee county, Donna Scott Davenport, locks up elementary school children (as young as 7) basically at whim for crimes that don't exist. They're given a "perp walk": handcuffed in front of their classmates and teachers, paraded through the school, and off to jail in the back of a police car. She has them put in solitary confinement. She failed the bar exam four times before passing. The children cry and throw up as they're sent away.
I was never sure why we only got all worried about fascism when Donald Trump came around. Articles like all these show that, if you're poor enough or black enough, it's always been here. I wish I felt like I was exaggerating in saying that, but I don't think it's much of a stretch.
It was the transition from fringe to mainstream, along with the acquisition of power. Things like this might go from "isolated incidents" to more widespread to national policy. But yes, it's a change in degree not a change in kind.
Absolutely correct. But there's always a chunk of people who want to be in the Gestapo, or have someone to report their neighbours to.
My use of "isolated incidents" was ironic in that's the phrase always used to cover systematic problems that people don't want to address. You can have a lot of isolated incidents if you refuse to join the dots.
Dragging a teenager off to a prison camp for looking at boys is the tip of patriarchy, but the entire infrastructure of people who thought it was OK is also patriarchy.
I think that sums it up pretty well.
(Now, of course, this insane totalitarian bullshit happens even in these friends' allegedly liberal tech hub cities. But they see the Austins and Nashvilles of the world as being replete with such things, and articles like these suggest they're not all that far off.)
In fact, the US is the only country in the world to lack these legal protections.
Damn, this is some demonic shit. I love all the political connections they talked about in the article which keep this legal
For starters, because these statements are not true [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_young_people%27s_r...
Probably true, but technically because the sentiment is expressed in English. Non-western cultures often take some things a few steps further.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57592243
Perhaps someone should go round the American institutions with ground-penetrating radar and a shovel.
No matter how bad the scandal is in Canada, I'm positive that the crimes in the US are magnitudes worse.
You seem to be commenting a lot of unrelated, tangential things to create a narrative aligned to your political beliefs. Something to consider.
... in a discussion about the abuses and crimes of religious charitable organizations in the US.
I think they're entirely related. They may not be the same organization, but there's systemic patterns evident in such things, and I think your conclusion is, at the least, a little grasping.
https://www.krqe.com/news/politics-government/haaland-leads-...
on a local note: https://sourcenm.com/2021/09/03/indigenous-leaders-seek-an-a...
Now tweak any of those variables, and the situation just gets more difficult. Adoption is really hard.
What differences are you talking about? In behavior? In intelligence?
IMO these re-education camps are problematic, even when done "correctly", because they don't address the underlying cause of teen misery. And in fact they do more harm than good, for the simple reason that the teen is held accountable for our systemic failures. It is the parents' philosophy of rugged individualism acted out for profit using children as guinea pigs.
As a society, we share responsibility and consequences for the outcomes determined by the actions of individuals. This is the reason that the limits of individual freedom are somewhere in between the capacity and the demonstrated ability to infringe on the rights of others.
What seems to have happened is dereliction of the duty to shape those limits in response to demonstrated infringement in the past. We know - we know - what the status quo wrt, as examples, the penal system and firearms has meant for individual and collective suffering. What you're feeling is the same sense that we're not learning from the past and dooming ourselves to gory, nightmarish repetition.
It seems there's got to be a threshold, a critical mass of people who want to live differently than the rest before you can weather the challenges inherent in making non-mainstream choices. This is widely applicable; AA comes to mind, as does things like vegetarianism, homosexuality, Judaism, etc. There should be an -ism for the people who reject authoritarianism blind conformism, and who have a well-defined set of coping mechanisms to deal with misinformation, bullying, cruelty, and dehumanization. And ways to deal with people that embrace such techniques, especially those in power.
1. https://givingcompass.org/partners/ncrp/the-importance-of-gr...
Mutual aid is inherently local. It’s someone asking for help on Twitter or Facebook, or at work. It’s someone offering aid, or connecting someone in need to someone able and willing to help. These networks sprung up all across the country last year, mostly in big cities with large protest movements, but also among communities with strong ties. At one point in time churches and governments filled this role, however both have been derelict in their duties for many many decades.
That is the crux of the matter.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of former victims of the juvenile Justice system. On the one hand they’ve all demonstrated serious antisocial behaviors. On the other hand they’ve all been severely neglected (or worse) by all the people responsible for their wellbeing: parents, teachers, relatives, siblings, peers, social workers, religious leaders, etc. how can hold a Child accountable for their actions if we are unable ( read: unwilling) to hold the adults who’ve hurt them accountable for their failures?
The children are not mere Guinea pigs, they’re scapegoats for their caregivers failures.
I don't know what to say. How do things like these happen - and keep happening - in otherwise civilized, enlightened countries?
Shame.
“I still think about it every day,” she told me. “My child was stolen from me.”
It’s astonishing that no one involved with Élan ever went to prison.
Frankly, I’ve often wondered if the people involved just reopened under a different name to escape bad press.
I feel like they're somehow violating Margaret Atwood's copyrights with the naming, nevermind the religious oppression.
But, the New Yorker, for all the useless people and vapid criticism it employs, could not come up with an alternative to an organization like this. This is a place where children who have severe drug or other problems, possibly violence, can be sent that essentially functions the same as a juvenile detention center but is patently not as bad. I even empathize with the parents in the article. What would I do if I had four children and one of them is doing drugs, sleeping with numerous guys to the point of getting pregnant, and literally working at a brothel (buried in the hit piece, obviously), and the other children are perhaps younger, currently normal, but exposed to this continually? That is a challenging situation. Many New Yorker columnists surely live in a "post-children world", so perhaps that is not something they'd empathize with. The only evidence I saw that made me question if the parents were horrible was when they refused to let the move to a halfway house with the child.
Although I am not a Christian and empathize with not wanting to be in compulsory Christian brainwashing, I'm sorry, the article provided no evidence these kids are being physically or mentally abused. Citing that 13 of them attempted to commit suicide is more evidence about the type of kids, without judging whether their current mental state is due to genetics or a poor break in life, being placed here. Further, I didn't find other criticisms valid, such as declining to raise children resulting from pregnancies. It is not the organization's responsibility to raise children, and to their credit, again, it looks like they would have allowed the girl to transfer to a halfway house and keep the child, if not for the maligned parents. But, other than that, their "case study" seemed like she belonged in a mental hospital and I am skeptical it is entirely the fault of the "system". After leaving the program, she went on a desperate search to find her drug addict mother, before abandoning a husband and new son to live with friends, while literally repeatedly applying to work at "Teen Challenge" (what?!!?).
It is quite frightening to live in an era where we want to dismantle anything that is remotely Christian because someone had a bad emotional experience. This is the psychotic liberal zeitgeist - where the homeless capitals of the world want to dictate solutions to scenarios like this.