I don’t have kids, but I know some teachers AND some cops… police don’t like to get involved in bullying because it could ruin some kid’s future for being “young and dumb”. Putting a kid “into the system” for shoving a younger kid in a locker strikes them as “could make that kid not grow up to be a productive adult”.
And they have a point. Juvie does bad things to kids, according to everyone I know who has been there or who has had a kid go there. They’re as likely to be scared-violent as scared straight.
And as you and I know, it’s about scaring the school straight, not the kids. But the school often knows all this. Especially small-town schools.
Better send that bully to juvie than letting them keep on bullying other innocent children.
Unless you plan on locking that bully up for a long time or overhauling several systems, you’re statistically creating worse than just a bully with juvie. The current legal system doesn’t have a good measured response for bullying. You either do almost nothing or dis-proportionally (and ineffectively) punish them.
Fuck bullies and their future.
And fuck their victims, too? Because bullies only have a slight chance (still much higher than non-bullies) of becoming adult offenders, but if you put them in juvie, that number skyrockets.
Look. I have no sympathy for bullies, and had to deal with my share of them. But when someone decides the answer in a broken system is to increase the suffering of minors, that’s when I put my foot down.
I don’t have kids, but I know some teachers AND some cops… police don’t like to get involved in bullying because it could ruin some kid’s future for being “young and dumb”. Putting a kid “into the system” for shoving a younger kid in a locker strikes them as “could make that kid not grow up to be a productive adult”.
And they have a point. Juvie does bad things to kids, according to everyone I know who has been there or who has had a kid go there. They’re as likely to be scared-violent as scared straight.
And as you and I know, it’s about scaring the school straight, not the kids. But the school often knows all this. Especially small-town schools.
Better send that bully to juvie than letting them keep on bullying other innocent children. I rather let the innocent keep being innocent.
Fuck bullies and their future.
Unless you plan on locking that bully up for a long time or overhauling several systems, you’re statistically creating worse than just a bully with juvie. The current legal system doesn’t have a good measured response for bullying. You either do almost nothing or dis-proportionally (and ineffectively) punish them.
And fuck their victims, too? Because bullies only have a slight chance (still much higher than non-bullies) of becoming adult offenders, but if you put them in juvie, that number skyrockets.
Look. I have no sympathy for bullies, and had to deal with my share of them. But when someone decides the answer in a broken system is to increase the suffering of minors, that’s when I put my foot down.