"I am getting 15 years on Monday Mr. Miner" was a
statement my student said recently. The student is 15 years old and is looking
at this amount of jail time at his young age. On his 17th birthday his present
is that he will be woken up, shackled, and then transported to the Cook County Jail and placed in general population of the adult facility that is
notoriously overcrowded and the largest county prison in the country. Happy Birthday!
By the way, I try not to pay attention to the cases of my
students and I don't watch local news because I teach at a Chicago Public
School located in a county temporary juvenile detention center. The students that are
on the news will end up in my school and perhaps in my classroom and it is
better for me to teach them as a student without bias or preconceived notions.
I do know the student who made the comment above is not in jail for murder. Are
we rehabilitating Juveniles or abandoning them and letting them be lifetime
offenders who will be incarcerated for most if not all of their lives?
Illinois is in the process of changing laws for Juveniles to
have them stay in Juvenile facilities until they are at least 18 (see brief here from
the Illinois Juvenile Justice Coalition about this law in the process in
Springfield). I am not advocating being soft on Juvenile crime. As a matter of
fact as a person who teaches and interacts with juvenile offenders daily as
well as a Chicagoan who is raising a family within city limits I am definitely
for a strong Juvenile Justice system, the question is what is the goal of this
system? Is it rehabilitation or punishment? Instead it seems that the system
does both at the same time and then ends up with doing neither well. When we
figure out that rehabilitation and restorative justice is the goal of the
Juvenile Justice system, so that we have less teens becoming adult offenders,
we will be heading in the right direction. But by that time my student, who
will not be getting out for 15 years, will have already left the system briefly
and then returned as a repeat adult offender because our system was not sure if
we were punishing him or rehabilitating him. In my opinion I don't think you can do
both.
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