Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I disagree with you OP. I think treating juvenile offenders as adults in DC has led to a sense of nihilism among a lot of young people in DC. They sense (correctly) that the city does not care about them or what happens to them, so they embrace criminal activity because they don't see the point in following rules that are designed to protect everyone BUT them and their communities.
Many juvenile criminal offenders in DC have spent their entire lives in a city that sends them to substandard schools, neglects their neighborhoods, and focuses all the city's economic growth on wealthy, mostly white, college graduates. And then they wind up in adult prisons because of drug and gang activity they engage in as teenagers. It really is a school to prison pipeline and we are treating these kids as though they never had a shot at a different kind of life. Keeping them out of adult jails and prison populations is a small but important step to interrupting that pipeline.
Do you really think punishing juvenile offenders more severely is going to have a deterrent effect for young people in this city growing up with poor educational and career options? All it does is expose them to more violent, adult prison populations at a younger age. That doesn't help.
Juvenile offenders thoughts do not run so deep as to “sense that the city does not care about them”. The whole genesis of Racine’s proposal is that kids’ brains are not fully developed, so they certainly aren’t thinking as deeply as you suggest. What they sense is that there are few consequences for criminal behavior in DC so they take their teenage years as a crime freebie. Being committed to DYRS is a bit of street cred for many kids because they know that commitment doesn’t mean you will be locked away, you’ll generally still be at home with no supervision and running the streets.
Feel free to do a search of the kids between 16-17 in DC who have been charged as adults with murder, and then realize that under this proposal those kids would have been looking at a commitment to DYRS (which does not necessarily mean they will be detained) until a max of age 21. Here are some examples: the murderer of Neil Godleski in 2010, sniper Lee Malvo, one of the people charged with killing 10 year old Makiyah Wilson, and Maurice Bellamy who was convicted of murdering 2 people at age 17.
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