Reply to Girls, 13 and 15, Charged With Murder After Armed Carjacking Near Nationals Park

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Girls, 13 and 15, Charged With Murder After Armed Carjacking Near Nationals Park"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]

Anonymous wrote:
I really can't calm down. This really hit me to my core.

I teach kids in DC. I see it. All this Social Emotional Learning that we are engaged in, Restorative Justice...I believe in it. We work tirelessly and I mean tirelessly to support our students in every way possible. You don't see it, but I do. Every day. It's an uphill battle of enormous proportions and still I see the utter lack of disrespect.

It goes against what I'd like to believe but I still think these girls need to be locked up.

Have you considered that all this restorative justice, emotional learning is actually feeding this problem? If a person(s) has already killed someone before they reach adulthood, which sadly happens almost daily in DC, then maybe these aren't the people we should focus on. 
At some point we need to throw out the garbage. Crime went down when Three strikes was law and criminals were in jail.
[/quote]

This reminds me of an episode from the season of the Wire which focused on the Baltimore schools.  One of the retired police captains want to volunteer in the schools and is working with a social scientist researcher who wants to work with high school kids.  The captain grimly tells the researcher that the teen years are too late for effecting change, and takes him to interview a 15 yo who has just been arrested for a violent crime.  Ten minutes of talking to the 15 yo ---who has zero remorse, empathy and is all about trying to effectuate revenge--convinces the social scientist that the former captain is correct, and they focus their intervention program on a local middle school instead.  Even then, their ability to positively change the trajectory of the most troubled studies is extremely limited.

I don't think that a 13 yo should be locked up for life, but I definitely don't think DC's Youth Rehabilitation Act, as currently practiced, is good policy for either the juveniles or their victims.  Honestly, sending these kids away to a military like environment of high structure/high nurture for 10-12 years---completely away from their home environments---is what is needed to repattern their behavior.  Catch & Release with a few poorly attended social programs is useless.  
[/quote]

PP teacher here and I 100% agree with this. I work in an elementary school so my experience has always been with the little ones. But the writing is on the wall for some of my more troubled kids and most of the time, as they grow, you can see this behavior run in the families.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics