The Ultimate Bleeding HeartGet this bit from Stephen Elliot over at
Arianna Hufnpuf:
It's really not so complicated. A fifteen-year-old boy sets off to commit his first crime. He's a bumbling criminal, his chances of success were never good. Where are his friends? There is evidence of psychological trauma, but isn't there always? Who is this young Jesse James and where did he get his gun? Who cares? The boy is sentenced to thirteen years in adult prison. There will be no school, no rehabilitation. The child is thrown into a warehouse, a crowded meat locker, separate from the adult population but without access to education, gang intervention, drug programs, etc. Not even eligible for education courses offered to adults because the child populations has to be kept separate from the adult population until they turn eighteen, at which point they are mainlined into the system. There is no doubt Alonza will come out worse then he went in. His chances were always low; now there is no chance at all.Here's what the bumbling boy did:
It's the second week in March, 2000, just days after the election. A fifteen-year-old boy named Alonza Thomas walks into a convenience store wearing a bandana over his mouth and nose. He's carrying a gun. He places the gun against the clerk's chest and demands money. Another clerk tackles the boy and a struggle ensues in which the gun is fired leaving a tidy hole in the store rooftop. Plaster and dust sprinkles on the combatants while the boy is subdued.Yes, a gun was fired. So what, nobody was hurt, right?
Look this is simple. The kid needs to be locked up as a menace to society. The only difference between him and a killer is aim. If you want to grumble that he should be afforded an education while he's in an adult prison, fine (although I doubt he'll be very interested). But don't expect tears from me because he got a stiff sentence.
And get this:
Because the financial expenditures that we are going to put into punishing Alonza Thomas are much higher, hundreds of thousands of dollars higher, then they would have been had we tried to rehabilitate him. And the likelihood of his continued drag on society are astronomically higher. There is no academic debate on this. Everybody knows the numbers. Studies have been done. It is well documented that threats of longer sentences do not deter crimes, particularly threats to adolescents that they will be tried as adults. The research is unambiguous and the conclusions exactly what one would expect.We aren't punishing Alonza with a longer sentence because it acts as a deterrent to other juveniles. We're punishing him with a longer sentence because it acts as a deterrent to Alonza committing more crimes; he's not a threat to do so while in jail.
Other Voices:
Ex-Liberal in Hollywood has much the same take, but he does a full-on fisking.
Talk Left sees this as
a serious article.
