(wasn't quite sure where to put this one)

I attended my towns neighborhood watch meeting this week. ( Using "Roberts Rules of Order" I called a few procedures into question, and proposed an amendment to the by-laws, irritating several of the elderly members, but that's another story ).

In talking with our Community Affairs / DARE officer of our local police department I learned of a problem our community as well as all of the surrounding communities are having with juveniles. It seems that the county Juvenal hall is so over crowded that they will not take kids into custody who have not committed serious violent crimes.

For example. A Child at the local middle school assaulted a teacher by shoving her up against the wall (hard enough to cause bruising). The police were called. They took the child into custody, after all you can't leave him there, it would be a terrible situation for the teacher and a bad message for the other kids. However, Juvenal hall would not take the child (Not a violent crime in their eyes). As a result, the town had one officer tied up all day at the police station "baby sitting" until the parents came to pick him up (after work of course). The town had to pay for the officers time, and the town was short one officer on patrol, making it less safe as a result.

Another example. Those little motorized scooters. They, as well as any other unlicensed motorized vehicle, are illegal on the streets in my town, as well as most towns. Kids ride them on the streets with impunity anyway. This is because the police cannot issue a ticket to a child under 15 and you can't issue a ticket to a child under 18 who does not have a drivers license or learners permit.

Kids ride these scooters in the streets. They race and drive all over, in and out of traffic. I have had a situation where a kid shot into the street from a driveway without looking, I barely missed him. The police can do nothing about it other then talk to the parents (who are frequently the real problem), yet if I had hit that kid I would have been at fault, and suffered a huge lawsuit. Of course the irresponsible parents would have be outraged by by my careless disregard if I had hit their child.

The police can not confiscate the scooters because they are legal to own but not legal to drive on the streets and there is no law allowing for the confiscation of such "vehicles". I suggested impounding them as would be done with an unregistered vehicle found repeatedly in use on the road. Apparently, this has been tried and failed in court.

It gets worse. When the local police stop a child in a stolen car, Juvenile will not take them! It's not a violent crime. As a result there has been a surge of juvenile car thefts. Even if the child drives recklessly through town, even hitting other cars, bushes, street signs etc. It's not a violent crime in the eyes of Juvenal hall, unless a civilian is seriously injured or killed.

You can take the issue to Juvenal hall, but they facility is hopelessly overcrowded as it is (which is sad when you consider the limited offenses they will accept).


Questions:

Do you see the same type of problems in your area?

Would legislation to enable the police to ticket parents for their children's actions be a good solution?

Would legislation to enable to police to confiscate unregistered vehicles and charge a fee of say $100.00 minimum to get the vehicles out of impound be a good solution?

Should we consider legislation to limit damages assigned to a driver if a child is unsupervised and playing irresponsibly and assign the rest of the damages / blame to the child's parents?

Would you think that child endangerment laws can be and/or should be applied to parents who's children are so unsupervised that they can play with scooters in traffic or steal cars?

Would returning to a reform school system be an option to allow communities more space to deal with non-violent criminal children, while still giving the kid a chance to turn around?

If officers are forced to baby sit kids waiting for parents to pick them up should we charge the parents for the officers time?

(sorry for all the questions but it is a difficult topic)

Great thread overland!, I'm visiting my brother in law in Kansas and we went to the park with the kids yesterday. We saw a few kids unsupervised, whose parents you could say a lot about....that is usually negative.



Not at all. There are a few trouble makers, but that is because the parents are lazy and don't care what the rest of the town thinks about the kids raising themselves. The police are very strict in not allowing some of the stuff that you mentioned go on. Of course, it helps when parents actually think their child, yes, I said their child......does something wrong.



I dont' see why you couldn't, I would make it under the category of neglect or "lacking moral instruction" or something like that. As far as I understood it, you could demand payment as a business from kids under 18 or sue them, but that the parents are ultimately the ones who are liable.



This would be great overland, but whose kids spend the money on the bike? Is it the banker's boy or the school board president's son? Usually the only people who handcuff the police are the parents. The rich ones use their position to get junior out of a sticky situation while the poor ones claim their child is being "picked" on.


Sounds to me like the kids are running the parents where you live. I'm sure yours is not the only one facing that kind of dilemma.

Here's an entirely different solution. Lets be soft on youthful indiscretion. I know it is pretty much taboo to say something along these lines; but in every jurisdiction in the world that has tried "Restorative" justice of some form or another in juvenile crime, said crime rates have dropped; the process almost completely eliminates recidivism.

It is alarming here that you trace the problem to the inability of detention centres to handle the situation. Our political culture has become so skewed towards the concept of "Crime and Punishment" that any alternative, effective or not, is unpalatable.

Do you see the same type of problems in your area?
Yes, some. My wife and son both teach 8th graders, they will tell you that it is only a few brats that make things bad for everyone.

Would legislation to enable the police to ticket parents for their children's actions be a good solution?
I would love that! Once you get into the parents wallet, you get their attention.

Would legislation to enable to police to confiscate unregistered vehicles and charge a fee of say $100.00 minimum to get the vehicles out of impound be a good solution?
That would help, same reason as before.

Should we consider legislation to limit damages assigned to a driver if a child is unsupervised and playing irresponsibly and assign the rest of the damages / blame to the child's parents?
Yes.

Would you think that child endangerment laws can be and/or should be applied to parents who's children are so unsupervised that they can play with scooters in traffic or steal cars?
Yes

Would returning to a reform school system be an option to allow communities more space to deal with non-violent criminal children, while still giving the kid a chance to turn around?
No. The parents spawned the child, make the parents raise the child.

If officers are forced to baby sit kids waiting for parents to pick them up should we charge the parents for the officers time?
sure, again, you are getting into their wallets.

OK first, lets consider how bad the situation has become. The juvenal detention center only takes VIOLENT offenders and murderers. (Shoving a teacher hard into the wall hard enouh to cause bruising is NOT violent enough to them). So if the J.D.C. is full, how out of control has this situation become?

Secondly, what about the effect on the rest of society? In the case of the scooters illegally on the streets, how would you address the real problem with lawsuits when these irresponsible kids get hit? How about we let them run wild, but if they get hit by a car it was there fault and the parents should pay for the cost of EMS and the damage to the car? (going too far I know, but I want to know what the solution is in your eyes).

Considering the fact that we are already so soft on youth offenders that many of the car thefts are done by kids, recruited and trained by adults, how is getting even softer going to solve the problem?

Who pays for the damage to all the victims of these kids?

I'm so glad you were willing to thoughtfully consider the entirety of my post instead of simply reading "soft" and expounding by yourself...

If you were unclear on what I was suggesting, you should clarify instead of assuming I meant "we should just let kids off." That is not what I said, nor will it ever be. What I am suggesting is that the failure of Juvenile Justice as it is currently practiced demonstrates that it is in fact the incorrect system to handle youth-crime. I would propose alternate approaches; some of which are called "restorative justice," or "rehabilitive justice." Native groups in Canada have found healing circles to be tremendously effective in mediating crime. Catherine Lawson writes on one study...



Lawson, Catherine. "Restorative justice: an alternative approach to juvenile crime." Journal of Socio-Economics. Volume 33, Issue 2 , April 2004, Pages 175-188

Now, "Restorative Justice" is hardly a new idea, nor is it one that exists in obscurity. I recommend that anyone interest do some research, or at the very least 'google' it. What they will find is a massive body of research indicating that the problem isn't necessarily one of poor implimentation, but a fundamentally flawed approach to crime.

In more general terms, prisons and the related criminal justice approach has been around for the last 250 years or so; and crime has been getting worse steadily in that time (with variations in the nature of crime and areas of particular activity)... so why are we so convinced that punitive and revenge oriented approaches to this sort of behaviour actually works?

In the case of the kids with Scooters, the answer seems quite simple to me, they should be given a warning in one instance, a ticket for a second (issued to the guardian of the household), and confiscated in the third case. However, I think it is a bit silly to lump together this sort of behaviour with criminality. To compare reckless behaviour like riding a scooter in traffic with car theft is foolhardy without being able to demonstrate any sort of parallel with the thought process involved. In the case of stealing a car, except in extreme cases the child understands that what they are doing is wrong. In a situation where a kid has a cool scooter that they want to ride, they are more likely to think that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing.

Car Theft = Choosing to break the law
Scooters = Deciding that the law isn't fair

Actually the parallel is quite simple. In both cases children are ignoring and/or breaking the law. Ignorance of the law has never been an excuse.

Personally, I am tiring of the ever increasing negative tone around here. Hopefully this is a symptom of the upcoming election and AD will get back to normal after it is over.



The problem with this idea is that it would require extensive possitive re-enforcement. The problem with that is most parents of juvenile criminals think parenting is a noun and not a verb. They fail to supervise, educate or council their children as it is. Secondly, the community as a whole has become more and more selfish. People are usually only interested in an issue if it directly effects them. Getting the average person to put in any time towards possitive re-enforcement of strangers children is highly unlikely, let alone the entire community.

Lastly, the point of law and justice is to protect society. Rehabilitation is secondary. We treat juvenile defendants far more leniently then we did 30 years ago. And we have far more juvenile crime and far more major crimes committed by children. It would seem to me that the move away from punishment to rehabilitation is at least partially responsible for the situation.



Excellent Idea The problem becomes, how do we implement it? Legislation? I am not sure if a town can pass an ordinance like this. Would it require county code or state legislation?

Simple solution. Put the juveniles who commit violent crimes in jail and then the other juvenile crimes in the actual juvenile hall. See how the kids like it in jail... i would bet anything that they would be set straight. The biggest thing would be for it to act as a deterrance. If kids think that they could go to jail, they would be less likely to commit it. So tell your town or neighborhood to vote on something that would send kids who commit the most serious crimes to jail and then make room in the juvenile hall.

Do you see the same type of problems in your area? In the area I live in now, no. I saw it a lot in the neighborhood I grew up in, and I taught for a while in the type of school you mention.
Schools are in an especially dire situation in these sorts of cases. Just as the community at large can only rid itself of the worst offenders through the juvenile court system, the same is true of the disciplinary system in the schools. In my old school, “classroom disruption”, no matter how severe, seldom resulted in true disciplinary action of any kind. All disciplinary measures were documented, and the principal looked better with fewer suspensions, so he discouraged teachers from sending the bad apples to his office. There were just too many bad apples. One child in my class choked another to unconsciousness in the bathroom. She immediately returned to my classroom and came to class everyday as usual (continuing to antagonize the others and disrupt), but was placed on a waiting list for in-school suspension. Two weeks later, she fulfilled her “punishment”, and sat in a silent classroom (the “suspension” room) for three school days. It was the first time she did any schoolwork at all.

Back in the late 70s, my parents had a severe problem with vandalism of their property. Gangs in the area would make this the cost of “initiation”. I suppose that’s a bit nostalgic now that gang initiation often means killing another person, or being gang raped, but it was a problem none-the-less and it was rampant. Broken windows, stolen gas caps, gasoline poured on all of the trees, and cars doing donuts on the grass. Every single night someone would knock out all of the mailboxes on the street. One night, my dad actually saw the boy do it. He followed the car to a house and watched him get out of the car and enter. The next day, he paid the parents a visit. Initially, they denied his involvement. “My son would never!”, but when my dad explained that he followed him home after the child vandalized his property, the other father stood up, ordered him out of his house and yelled,”No one follows my son home!” The police did nothing because they said it was my father's word against the delinquent's.

Would legislation to enable the police to ticket parents for their children's actions be a good solution? Yes. Holding the parents accountable might work well. Also, if the juvenile courts are full, perhaps they should assign community service duty to the children. Maybe they could even work off their own scooter payments this way. I think a lot of the trouble with delinquent behavior in minors stems from lack of productivity.

Would returning to a reform school system be an option to allow communities more space to deal with non-violent criminal children, while still giving the kid a chance to turn around? Yes. I like this idea. It would also offer the non-violent, non-criminal children a much better environment to learn in.

there is no way to stop kids from breaking the law. literally. it is partly the police's fault for a (if any) lack of action in the cases. they do it just so they can feel cool around their friends and gain some sort of respect or make their friends laugh. theres really no way to stop it. i mean george carlin, in one of his comedy specials, talked about how its natural selection if kids dont wear helmets. he said just let the stupid kids die, they didnt want to wear a helmet. true, this is a quite neanderthalic approach to it, but on the same track.