California’s juvenile justice system was a mess in 1996, and
I don’t know exactly how much has changed in the last 22 years. I know that
teenagers, at least for the type of crimes committed in this book, are tried as
adults nowadays. Regardless of whether they end up in the Juvenile Courts or
regular courts, there’s no guarantee of a competent lawyer, and there’s always
the question of whether to keep them confined or release them to their families
pending trial. Then there are the kids whom you just can’t reach.
One of the cases involves two boys robbing a man at gunpoint,
they goof up, they drop the wallet they tried to steal, nobody gets hurt. Now
let us look at the back story; the kid is Korean-American, with upper middle-class
parents, and he wants for nothing so far so good. The problem is that two local
high schools merged, and he ended up in a school with stupid kids, and he’s a
bit of a follower. You’re probably thinking what I’m thinking, the parents should’ve
been more alert to what was going on, but we can see that they weren’t. The
parents worked long hours, so they were probably too tired to ask their kids
what was going on at school, and then there was the language barrier, and then
there was the culture gap. In some countries, there aren’t any minorities or a
criminal underclass, so the parents are completely alien to the issue of “bad
influences.”
There are some kids profiled in this book who really are
criminals and really do deserve jail time. Take for instance, the boy who
repeatedly punches women in the street and snatches their purses. Every time he
offends, the juvenile courts let him right back out again. Is he learning that
he can get away with these crimes? Is the constant leniency setting the wrong
precedent? The biggest problem is that once he gets to the age where he’ll be
tried as an adult, he’ll have ten strikes on his record. If he beats someone up
at age 18, the judge will say “you’ve been doing this for years, so I’m
throwing the book.” The juvenile courts are doing kids no favors be letting
them out again and again.
I appreciate the author’s impartiality toward race. There
are stories about Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic kids, one of them is an
adolescent surfer who refuses to listen to his father. I could relate to the
part where the surfer kid calmly says to his father “for the last time, shut
up.” I’ve seen that a million times, the parents are mad at the kid, and the
kid stands there looking annoyed. Parental neglect (or parental spinelessness)
is a running theme in this book, and I wish the author had included what the
judges have to say about it. The book centers around California’s juvenile
court system, but the same in this book were happening in New York back in 1996.
I read Judge Judy’s 1995 book Don’t Pee
On My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining, where she details her years on the
family court. It was the same thing in New York City; the kid commits a crime
and gets a break, then he reoffends and gets the maximum.
Remember the scene from the documentary Scared Straight, where the convict compares the juvenile offenders
to a dog pissing on the carpet? He says, “every time you go before that judge,
you’re pissing on his carpet, and after a while he doesn’t know what to do with
you anymore.” That’s exactly what happens to these young offenders when they’re
old enough for prison. Even if the judge lets it slide, the offense is still on
the record, and it’s going to add up when they offend as adult. Sometimes it
doesn’t pay to give a kid a break.
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