I think it’s possible. If nothing else, they know that if someone warns them to knock it off or they’re going to take things to the school authorities, they’ll take that as a real threat and not something to mock. They were both scared shitless - went from poking fun of her and her friend to flat out not talking to her as if by court order. My daughter was asked, at one point, what she wanted their ultimate punishments to be. I thought that to be rather unfair to ask. She said all she wanted was for them to stop, and they had stopped. So other than getting the shit scared out of them by the school authorities, they weren’t ultimately punished very severely. That’s pretty much what I wanted all along too - just for things to stop.
My daughter learned how serious the school takes certain things. And I sense her and others think “I’m not going to tell the school about this because they’ll over react instead of just react.”
That is very unfair to your daughter. Let people like you and me say, “fuckem”.
I of course mean that in the more nuanced sense: a person who is abused or threatened should not be forced to interact with their abusers if they choose not to, and a group of peers should use rational and legal means to adjudicate the incident.
School started two weeks ago, and my daughter has had no problems. The approach I used was one recommended to me by many of y’all, here and in private messages - use the Internet to find the kid in meatspace, then go to his house and work this out with him and his family. His father and I made sure it was understood that further misbehavior would not be tolerated.
(Yeah, I know I never said it was my daughter before; but if I had, people would most likely have used the relationship as a rhetorical bludgeon against me instead of arguing their approach to this situation objectively. We humans are like that; we are emotional.)
Unfortunately, the young man managed to get into a fistfight with another student this week, and when the school’s “resource officer” (aka resident armed thug) broke that up he took a swing at the cop. Naturally, this being a zero-tolerance state in the USA, the cop tazed him to a smoking puddle, cordoned off the area, and carted him off the the pokey in zipties.
I feel sorry for this fool, who has economic and physical challenges, and has fallen in with bad companions. But I had no part in what’s going to happen to him now, and I like to think I did everything I could, under the circumstances, to prevent this. He probably deserves a harsh beating, and stricter limitations on his freedom to associate, but he’s going to get a lot worse than that. Maybe in a few years time, if he survives, he can get a GED and start over.
On the other hand, zero tolerance measures often end up just causing more victims, especially where correctional facilities repeatedly show that correction is not that high a priority, and many comments here allude to the fact that going there means facing more violence (and quite possibly developing violent coping mechanisms to deal with this). Some people can be turned around when rejecting the zero tolerance solution means taking threats seriously, but not treating people who are barely adults as hardened criminals.
True. This is very apparent in substance abuse cases. Although I hate the term substance abuse as it is…
If RatPark has taught us anything it’s that people (or at the very least rats) will choose to do drugs when they feel helpless and have no social structure, boredom and lack of opportunity also plays a large role. But once you introduce lots of stimulus, and structure, and other individuals doing their own thing to the “addicts” nearly all of them will self-wean and re-integrate into society.
So it is with violence. If you’re being treated violently and you’re bored, and you have no social structure, you’ll end up violent and angry and chaotic yourself. But if you’re put into situations that don’t reward violent responses, and give you opportunites to discover and use your talents, then you’re much more likely to flourish.
A lot of young people in our “corrections” system are taught by the system itself that the only way to have a decent level of security and comfort is to use force in order to get your way. This is not accepted by normal society. So the corrections systems are basically setup in order to fail those it “serves”. It’d be much better if there was adequate funding of psychologists, counselors, and took a harm-reduction approach so that people who end up in juvenile corrections weren’t just encouraged to “do better” but were actually give the opportunity to interact socially and show off their skills and be valuable members in the society there.
As it stands, juvenile corrections facilities at best are a pre-adult-prison holding tank, and at worst are an institution for teaching the kids how to be better criminals, because they don’t get shit there, and have to run a rat-race just to get by.
Talk to the victims of violent crime (or their remaining loved ones), 20 or 30 years out. It’s a different imprisonment, but still life-changing and soul-crushing.
Seriously, we’re talking about someone who had intervention and still did not stop committing violence against others. It would be wonderful to live in Scandinavia where incarceration would include therapy and life training, but we don’t. What do you do with someone who attacks people regularly? Worry about how hard it’s going to be for him if he finally gets in trouble for it?
I don’t see Medievalist as saying otherwise – he said he did his part, and wished it would have worked, and that the kid deserves some sort of beat-down - but does not deserve as much as the f****d-up system is actually going to dole-out.
As far as I know, the young man did no physical harm to anyone prior to this point. He was making threats, which is a perfectly normal behavior in his birth environment, a behavior that he probably sees every single day from adults (including law enforcement) in his neighborhood.
Eventually another young man took offense to his threats and escalated the conflict to minor physical violence; a typical teenage fistfight such as young men and boys have engaged in since the dawn of time. You know the story from that point on - there’s no situation that can’t be made worse by inserting a police officer.
In any case, your viewpoint has won the day; you can rest assured that mercy and restraint are foreign concepts to our educational system, and that another young person of color will not graduate from High School this year. He is currently being held at a juvenile correctional facility where I hear there is hardly any violent sexual abuse of young inmates by the guards any more, and I am sure he, too, is very sorry for what he has done.
