HidingFromGoro posted:

Perhaps even more disturbingly, there is a movement to implement the kind of isolation and physical restraint used in these programs within schools- a practice which has provably resulted in the deaths of children as young as age 7.

nm posted:

I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that these are first offenders, likely with low-level drug offenses. Or that they self-select those most likely to succeed (and fail those unlikely to succeed).

mew force shoelace posted:

I wouldn't be surprised if just getting arrested and released the repeat rate was something like 20% and being inhuman to a person for 6 weeks raises it to 23% and 6 years to 32% more than anything, I wouldn't be shocked if their statistic was exactly right but for the wrong reason.

nm posted:

That could be true.
However, I think that felony conviction on your record is just as damaging as prison time in re-integrating.

mew force shoelace posted:

That wouldn't make sense. The felony conviction would be there either way so it would be exactly equally damaging in that respect but then prison also does thing like torture people, given them huge gaps in employment, integrate them into gangs, ect.

mew force shoelace posted:

That wouldn't make sense. The felony conviction would be there either way so it would be exactly equally damaging in that respect but then prison also does thing like torture people, given them huge gaps in employment, integrate them into gangs, ect.

21stCentury posted:

Yeah, but where Prison puts you in a "prison mindset", the felony charge makes you unable to get out of the prison mindset, thus bringing you back to prison.

mew force shoelace posted:

Huh? Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? I am saying that even a terrible program will have better results than a prison stay because prison is ruinous.

Jeb Bush 2012 posted:

And it doesn't just make it harder for them to pursue legal careers, it also makes it easier for them to be criminals. (prison being the best place to get criminal contacts and credibility)

lonelywurm posted:

This is the big one. I remember an ask/tell thread with a ~20 year old goon who'd spent a year and a half in jail in Texas for felony vandalism (apparently as a result of writing on his high school bathroom's wall) and couldn't even get a job making fries because of it. Simply put, felons are going to have a much harder time doing the poo poo that we expect of them - getting a job, apartment, and generally not committing crimes any more because of that felony on the ol' record.

Rutibex posted:

That's pretty much how the system is designed. It's kind of to say so but look at how the incentives are structured. A whole lot of people get paid a whole lot of money the more prisoners there are. These are the same people who are in charge of the prison environment.

lonelywurm posted:

This is the big one. I remember an ask/tell thread with a ~20 year old goon who'd spent a year and a half in jail in Texas for felony vandalism (apparently as a result of writing on his high school bathroom's wall) and couldn't even get a job making fries because of it. Simply put, felons are going to have a much harder time doing the poo poo that we expect of them - getting a job, apartment, and generally not committing crimes any more because of that felony on the ol' record.

Kawalimus posted:

Just an FYI, that was all fake. The guy made it up. Doesn't make the prison stuff any less terrible though.

21stCentury posted:

Wait, what? Are you talking about, like, school programs for disturbed teens or are you talking using prison tactics in the public school system? On non-criminal, children?

quote:

(1) prevent and reduce the use of physical restraint and seclusion in schools;

(2) ensure the safety of all students and school personnel in schools and promote a positive school culture and climate;

(3) protect students from—

(A) physical or mental abuse;

(B) aversive behavioral interventions that compromise health and safety; and

(C) any physical restraint or seclusion imposed solely for purposes of discipline or convenience;

(4) ensure that physical restraint and seclusion are imposed in school only when a student’s behavior poses an imminent danger of physical injury to the student, school personnel, or others….

quote:

Although GAO could not determine whether allegations were widespread, GAO did find hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades. Examples of these cases include a 7 year old purportedly dying after being held face down for hours by school staff, 5 year olds allegedly being tied to chairs with bungee cords and duct tape by their teacher and suffering broken arms and bloody noses, and a 13 year old reportedly hanging himself in a seclusion room after prolonged confinement.

quote:

For example, teachers restrained a 4 year old with cerebral palsy in a device that resembled a miniature electric chair because she was reportedly being “uncooperative.”….Teachers confined [a 9 year old with learning disabilities] to a small, dirty room 75 times over the course of 6 months for offenses such as whistling, slouching, and hand waving….In another case, a residential day school implemented a behavior plan, without parental consent, that included confining an 11-year-old autistic child to his room for extended periods of time, restricting his food, and using physical restraints. The child was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder as a result of this treatment.

quote:

Education researcher Mary Hollowell spent months chronicling an alternative high school in rural Georgia before she discovered the awful secret that continues to haunt her today. Walking with the principal down a hall, Hollowell heard a loud pounding. She followed the principal into a room and then through a connecting doorway that led to a solitary confinement cell double bolted from the outside.

“The cell was dark inside and had a small, square window,” she said. “It was the kind of set-up you saw in a mental institution, not a school.” Inside the cell was a boy Hollowell recognized; she had tutored him in reading and even had artwork from him. “I felt like I had been punched in the stomach when I realized what I was seeing,” she says. “The principal’s comment to me was that most people didn’t know this room was there.”

HidingFromGoro posted:

E: never mind

Edit 2, for content: here's my take on the prison shows such as Lockup


1) Corrections is an inherently sedentary field (with infrequent, short-duration periods of activity, and then only for certain jobs); and- more so than police which is saying something- there's a sharp divide within the correctional community between weightlifters and non-weightlifters. This is further subdivided between juice vs no juice and bodybuilding vs powerlifting.

1a) Weightlifting (specifically bodybuilding, but also powerlifting) is a large and historic part of prison culture; and as the inmates go, so go the guards. (The osmosis works the other way too, which is why introducing harsher tactics or meaner guards increases rather than reduces inmate-on-inmate violence).
\

21stCentury posted:

I'm relieved that the bill got passed. I was under the impression it was a bill to introduce solitary confinement in schools...

But i don't know what's worse, that so many people were against making those illegal, or that they were used at all in schools... Are Americans really in the mindset that schools are prisons for kids first and educational second?

mew force shoelace posted:

That wouldn't make sense. The felony conviction would be there either way so it would be exactly equally damaging in that respect but then prison also does thing like torture people, given them huge gaps in employment, integrate them into gangs, ect.

nm posted:

This is just as damaging as the effects as prison. Obviously these two team up for a double whammy of being hosed.

mew force shoelace posted:

I guess I agree, it's just weird to phrase it like that, it's just as damaging plus their is more bad effects can be rephrased as "more damaging" without implying either is not damaging.

mew force shoelace posted:

Clearly this stuff is misused, and it certainly is misused in special ed as well, but special ed can be a weird little universe sometimes, with some really absurdly extreme cases. A lot of children are getting education now where in the past they would have just been set to institutions and kept "chemically restrained" with drugs that made them lay in bed all day. This stuff has to exist for them, and has to be used properly, it's not a punishment and shouldn't ever be used as such. But yeah, special ed teachers do really learn how to restrain children, they need to do that. They need a thing to do when a kid with down syndrome starts slamming the edge of a metal ruler into another kid's face.

21stCentury posted:

I'm relieved that the bill got passed. I was under the impression it was a bill to introduce solitary confinement in schools...

mew force shoelace posted:

I hope no one misinterprets me as supporting the sort of things that have been done because it is raw and pure evil.

But some of this stuff exists legitimately in special ed. There are autistic kids that do repeated behavior and one day will just get it in their head to scratch their eyes over and over no matter what and are not high functioning enough to get rationalized or even punished away from it, and the only thing that can be done is to physically keep them from it for the period until they move to another behavior.

Fire posted:

mew force shoelace posted:

I hope no one misinterprets me as supporting the sort of things that have been done because it is raw and pure evil.

But some of this stuff exists legitimately in special ed. There are autistic kids that do repeated behavior and one day will just get it in their head to scratch their eyes over and over no matter what and are not high functioning enough to get rationalized or even punished away from it, and the only thing that can be done is to physically keep them from it for the period until they move to another behavior.

Clearly this stuff is misused, and it certainly is misused in special ed as well, but special ed can be a weird little universe sometimes, with some really absurdly extreme cases. A lot of children are getting education now where in the past they would have just been set to institutions and kept "chemically restrained" with drugs that made them lay in bed all day. This stuff has to exist for them, and has to be used properly, it's not a punishment and shouldn't ever be used as such. But yeah, special ed teachers do really learn how to restrain children, they need to do that. They need a thing to do when a kid with down syndrome starts slamming the edge of a metal ruler into another kid's face.

quote:

Safe Choices for Troubled Teens
Residential treatment centers for troubled teens are plagued by allegations of abuse and ineffectiveness. But do anguished parents have an alternative?
By Anthony Meza-Wilson and Christy Harrison

Posted August 12, 2004 (( I helped them make this article way back when ))


Helen Taylor didn’t feel like she had much choice. A registered nurse and mother of five, Taylor was caring for a sick parent and studying for a law degree when her seventeen-year-old daughter Grace* was raped at a party and fell into a deep depression. (Grace is not the daughter’s real name). Taylor, who lives in Thousand Oaks, California, knew she couldn’t handle Grace’s needs by herself. She took Grace to a therapist, who recognized the overwhelming nature of Taylor’s other responsibilities and suggested that Taylor place her daughter in residential treatment. Mother and daughter both agreed that a full-time care facility was a good idea, and Grace, who had always been a well-adjusted, bright girl, was willing to do whatever the therapist suggested in order to get better. Taylor asked a neighbor for advice, and after a little research and a tour of the facility, decided on a treatment center in Utah called Provo Canyon School. When Grace entered in December, 2003, the school promised therapy mixed with outdoor sports, dances, and other recreational activities.

Less than a month later, says Taylor, Grace came home covered in bruises, gaunt and traumatized by her experiences. On one of the worst nights, says Taylor, [] staff forcibly injected Grace with the antipsychotic drug Haldol for supposed insubordination. Grace’s only crime, she told Taylor, was telling staff she needed to use the bathroom. Grace awoke to a kick the next morning and found herself lying on a hallway floor, her vision blurred and her facial muscles severely contorted. Worse still, Taylor says that Grace, a rape victim and voluntary patient, was forced to submit to strip searches on several occasions and was sexually assaulted by Provo Canyon staff—only compounding Grace’s emotional despair. Provo Canyon did not return phone calls seeking comment.

It's a Big Business

Despite horror stories like this one, there is big business in residential treatment centers like Provo Canyon: there were 43,365 admissions to RTCs in 1997, and 27,642 patients under care in RTCs at that time, according to a 2000 report by the United States Surgeon General's office.

Private residential treatment centers can cost as much as a year in college; they’re mostly the province of well-off parents. However, some insurance companies will cover treatment at schools accredited by Joint Commission for Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), an independent, nonprofit organization that inspects and accredits nearly 16,000 health care facilities in the United States. But JCAHO’s standards are geared mainly toward monitoring surgical and pharmacological procedures And so RTCs, which are more like boarding schools than traditional hospitals, can become accredited under standards that have little to do with the daily programs and activities practiced in them. Many RTCs are not accredited at all.

Some residential treatment programs have amassed a disturbing number of complaints from kids and parents who, like the Taylors, allege that the schools physically and mentally abuse their students. Recent articles in the New York Times and the UK Guardian document abuses at treatment centers abroad including Tranquility Bay School in Jamaica. Controversy has arisen in Tranquility Bay amid the death of a student, parent custody battles, and allegations of unlawful incarceration. Lawsuits have been brought against the Worldwide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS), an affiliated group of private residential treatment centers and schools that manages Tranquility Bay. And there are many complaints about other RTCs on websites run by watchdog groups, parents, and survivors.

Most RTCs use a religious "tough love" approach to treatment, doling out points for “appropriate behavior” and imposing consequences—ranging from the loss of phone privileges to solitary confinement and physical punishments, according to survivors.

Lax Regulators

In recent years, government agencies in other countries have begun to crack down on these American-owned programs; authorities in Costa Rica, Mexico and the Czech Republic have shut down at least four WWASPS programs thus far. But in the United States, regulators have been less assertive. In 2003, Congressman George Miller of California asked the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate a growing number of allegations against WWASPS, but to date the DOJ has taken no action. In Utah, State Office of Licensing Director Ken Stettler proposed legislation that would have established stricter licensing requirements for teen treatment centers, but it didn’t fly with lawmakers. As Stettler told the Salt Lake Tribune in April 2004, many Utah legislators felt that his office was “empire building” when it proposed instituting licenses for the paid “escort services” that private treatment centers use to transport teens to their facilities, even though there are many complaints against them.

After her daughter’s ordeal, Helen Taylor mounted a letter-writing campaign to inform Stettler and other state and federal legislators of Grace’s experiences at Provo Canyon, but to date she has only received a couple of terse replies. She feels that these legislators are taking reports of child abuse in their state very lightly and that the police are clearly acting in league with abusive schools. Local police routinely come out to help Provo Canyon deal with attempted escapes, for example, but have not investigated the children’s charges of abuse. “This is political corruption at its worst,” Taylor said.

Parents like Taylor commonly assume that there is more government oversight than actually exists within the treatment industry. On the contrary, kids incarcerated in a juvenile prison may have more protection from abuse than kids voluntarily enrolled in private treatment centers. The DOJ routinely shuts down juvenile prisons when abuse occurs, but it has yet to investigate the private RTCs. The industry is not well regulated, most facilities operate without accreditation or a license, and some take unfair advantage of distressed parents. Some families have experienced problems with the enrollment contracts, discovering too late that they signed away too much authority or waived too many of their legal rights regarding disputes with the schools.

Parent Watchdog Groups

Survivors and parents have formed watchdog groups and mounted education campaigns to warn other families about the risks. Some are listed below. Other parents are pressing lawmakers to step in: Helen Taylor has developed an email list for updates on her attempts to contact legislators, while another person launched Fornits, a web forum with an extensive teen treatment section allowing survivors and parents to air their frustrations, tell their stories, and strategize the legal and criminal investigation of abusive facilities. Many people now in their forties post messages at Fornits documenting the long-term emotional devastation that results from time they spent in RTCs as teenagers.

Even parents whose children were well served at residential programs are wary of the teen treatment industry because of the big money involved. Linnea Soderlund, a parent who sent her teenage son to two different residential programs primarily for what she called “out-of-control behavior,” says that parents should proceed with extreme caution when selecting a residential program. “Consultants and programs are happy to take thousands of dollars from you in exchange for the hope of saving your kid,” Soderlund wrote me in an email. She says, “Stay in close touch if you place your child in a treatment program,” because parental vigilance is the best protection against abuse.

Soderlund also counsels parents to seek expert diagnosis when determining whether to send a child to residential treatment. “I would urge anyone considering residential treatment to obtain a physical exam and complete psychological evaluation before making any plans for treatment,” she wrote. While she said that the psychological evaluation was a large expense not covered by insurance, she was “immeasurably thankful” that she got one for her daughter. “This is the only way to determine what the issues are and what is at stake,” she wrote.

Karen Stanton, another parent who has enrolled a child in residential treatment and was particularly happy with the results, agrees that it’s crucial to screen both the child and the school. Her son, Peter, was diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age, and she and her husband had tried numerous treatments including therapy, Ritalin, summer programs, and a private school for students with learning disabilities. Nothing worked, she said, until she found an educational consultant who reviewed Peter’s test results, talked to his teachers and therapists, and helped find programs that were tailored to his specific needs. Stanton says that their consultant was “expensive, but totally worth the money.” Stanton added, “We were desperate when we went to her.”

Several parents we spoke with reported using educational consultants with good results, but here again, parents must be careful. Some consultants accept financial rewards for enrolling kids in specific programs, so bias could be a problem. It is important to ask about any commercial ties between your consultant and the schools so that you can evaluate their recommendations accordingly.

Experts are Skeptical

Unfortunately, even if a parent finds a suitable, non-abusive program, the long-lasting results are difficult to predict. Dr. Oscar Bukstein, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who specializes in children’s psychiatric disorders, says that even when kids make progress in these “tough-love” residential programs, they very often have trouble reincorporating the skills they learn into their home lives. “When kids get back to their original situation, they start to slip back,” he said. “If anything, the center is probably a safe holding place until kids mature out of [their behavior problems].”

Bukstein also says that some parents send their kids to residential treatment too early, without first considering other and potentially better options. He says therapy and community-based intensive treatment centers that provide more than just an hour a week of counseling are good options for overwhelmed parents, and that generally kids don’t need “tough love” to be treated effectively. “You have to model appropriate behavior,” he said, “but intimidation doesn’t model appropriate behavior—being tough and consistent doesn’t entail being mean and abusive.”

Listening to adults who were sent to RTCs as teenagers, you often hear a much harsher judgement of these programs. Said one, "these toughlove programs are not merely ineffective, but often totally devastating to the children and families taken in by their marketing experts." Many adult survivors want the programs shut down completely.

The late Dr. Loren Mosher, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine and former Chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia at the National Institutes of Mental Health, agreed that residential centers aren’t effective at training patients to function in their normal environment. “If those programs are not continued after they get back,” he said, “the learning they received is gone within three weeks to six months.” Mosher, who is best known as the founder of Soteria, a revolutionary treatment center for schizophrenics that eschewed medication and placed patients in a shared living situation with non-medical-professionals, said that any effective treatment should involve the whole family. “Anything that doesn’t,” he said, “is probably a waste of time.” He advocated straightforward family counseling, which is widely available and which, he said, usually costs a whole lot less than residential programs.

“I don’t think there’s much out there to tell parents about where you draw the line between normal teenage acting-out and serious behavior problems,” said Barbara Huff, Executive Director of the Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health. While she says there are no easy answers to this question, guidance counselors at the local schools, private therapists, and other professionals can help identify children with behavior problems early on and can also work with families to find appropriate solutions.

And above all, experts agree, parents should avoid giving in to embarrassment or despair that keeps them from seeking appropriate help close to home. “We all fear the stigma that is attached to ‘troubled teens,’” said Dawn Martin-Rugo, a parent who enrolled her daughter in a wilderness program and a therapeutic boarding school. “We want to protect our teen and ourselves from the judgments of others, but it is important to get over this fear as quickly as possible—everyone knows someone who has a child who has “fallen apart.’” Common sense and community support are your best protections against the false promises offered by unscrupulous people who stand to profit from selling you an expensive residential program.

Practical Suggestions

IIf your children or your friends’ children run into trouble, consider these tips from other parents and mental health experts:

Get a ‘reality check’ from school officials, teachers, family, and friends to help assess the seriousness of the child’s behavior problems.
Explore local options first, and look for a therapy program that works with the whole family, not just the teen.
Invest in physical and psychological assessments that will define the child’s problem and point to appropriate remedies.
Hire an educational consultant who works only for the family (and does not receive a commission from schools).
Investigate the schools in person, and also check with the parent watchdog groups (listed below) to avoid the worst offenders.
Ask a lawyer to review enrollment contracts before signing them.
And finally, stay in contact with the child throughout their stay in a residential facility so that you can move them out quickly at the first sign of trouble.

flux_core posted:

Seclusion, 'restraint' as either bondage and restraint, or pain-compliance holds (basically UFC bullshit against kids, if you want a visual) is used as a means of control, discipline and easy-way-out by a plethora of fly by night profit seeking institutions who call themselves therapeutic boarding schools, residential treatment, emotional growth, alternative, or just a boarding or 'alternative' or charter school

mew force shoelace posted:

I agree 100%, I really wasn't posting an argument.

flux_core posted:

I'm kind of trying to orient this thread towards the private for-profit prison industry which makes its money off of scamming parents, social services and mental health providers by commoditizing children and then torturing and brainwashing them for years.

It kind of fits, and I was hoping to stir up discussion, not use it as a brick-bat against you. I'm sorry if you received it that way.

I was also a bit amped up expecting someone to act like a complete Neanderthal about "tuff love" but I guess teenagers being raped, forced to soil themselves and brainwashed while being told it's for their own good scared away everyone from the thread.

HidingFromGoro posted:

Right but you're able to handle these kids without killing them.

There's a difference between those war stories and what this bill is trying to prevent- and you know it. It even has an exemption to allow (sometimes fatal) restraint measures to prevent injury, and you could drive a bus through that provision. Look at what cops can do if they're "concerned for officer safety" or "thought he was dangerous," or all the rest.

flux_core posted:

I'm kind of trying to orient this thread towards the private for-profit prison industry which makes its money off of scamming parents, social services and mental health providers by commoditizing children and then torturing and brainwashing them for years.

It kind of fits, and I was hoping to stir up discussion, not use it as a brick-bat against you. I'm sorry if you received it that way.

I was also a bit amped up expecting someone to act like a complete Neanderthal about "tuff love" but I guess teenagers being raped, forced to soil themselves and brainwashed while being told it's for their own good scared away everyone from the thread.

quote:

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.


Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.

“In my entire career, I’ve never heard of anything remotely approaching this,” said Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim, who was appointed by the State Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Judge Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention.

The case has shocked Luzerne County, an area in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been battered by a loss of industrial jobs and the closing of most of its anthracite coal mines.

And it raised concerns about whether juveniles should be required to have counsel either before or during their appearances in court and whether juvenile courts should be open to the public or child advocates.

If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months. Lawyers for both men declined to comment.

Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.

With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.

They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.

Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.

Though he pleaded guilty to the charges Thursday, Judge Ciavarella has denied sentencing juveniles who did not deserve it or sending them to the detention centers in a quid pro quo with the centers.

But Assistant United States Attorney Gordon A. Zubrod said after the hearing that the government continues to charge a quid pro quo.

“We’re not negotiating that, no,” Mr. Zubrod said. “We’re not backing off.”

No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers. Prosecutors said the investigation into the case was continuing.

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Judge Ciavarella was unusually harsh. He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.

“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

“There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down.”

quote:

“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

mew force shoelace posted:

nm posted:

21stCentury posted:

HidingFromGoro posted:

[*]MA judge feels 'troubled' by JLWOP for autistic + mentally-ill 16 year old, but upholds the sentence anyway. She could have changed LWOP to straight life, making him eligible for parole as early as age 34, but said she didn't want to act as a "13th juror." There is some hope that the way she worded her (12 page) ruling will open the door for the sentence (and possibly others) to be appealed on Constitutional grounds.

Also the US is the only country in the world that even allows JLWOP in the first place:


[/list]

Domini Cane posted:

When this judge says she doesn't want to be a 13th juror, that resonates with me. We spend so much effort and time getting people to serve on juries and then spend days and days educating them on the rules they have to follow it can be hard to poo poo on their decision once you've placed it in their hands. Is the system imperfect? Yes. But humans are imperfect.

In America we see the level of good and the level of bad in people. Life without parole is a harsh sentence and especially so for juvenile offenders. But the legislatures have decided the potential threat to society outweighs the rights of individual offenders once they have been adjudicated. Blaming that decision on the courts is misapplication of fault. Personally, I've seen juveniles of all stripes and colors: stupid kids all the way to sociopathic monsters. The kids can straighten out. The other kind are so hosed up it is scary to contemplate releasing them.

Domini Cane posted:

In America we see the level of good and the level of bad in people. Life without parole is a harsh sentence and especially so for juvenile offenders. But the legislatures have decided the potential threat to society outweighs the rights of individual offenders once they have been adjudicated. Blaming that decision on the courts is misapplication of fault. Personally, I've seen juveniles of all stripes and colors: stupid kids all the way to sociopathic monsters. The kids can straighten out. The other kind are so hosed up it is scary to contemplate releasing them.

Lyesh posted:

Why is it that other countries seem to do fine with not putting "sociopathic monsters" away for life without parole? Every other first-world country does this, and NONE of them have huge crime waves because of it.