The State has Abandoned Our Children And We Allowed It to Happen

I’m sorry, but the State has had a LOT of time to find ways to deal with kids who are challenging, but it has abdicated it’s responsibilities, and putting our children in environments where rape is THE NORM is a far, far worse thing than anything a ten-year-old could possibly do.

Legally, it’s criminal. But parents are overwhelmed, and I get that. Nevertheless, we STILL have responsibilities to protect our children, and allowing prison guards to assault them and rape them with impunity is on US parents whether we like it or not, and history WILL condemn us because it will be unable to see the difficulties parenting really is at a time where we still cling to Nineteenth Century values.

The reason juvenile facilities are overcrowded and dangerous is because we have allowed states to manage our children’s welfare by placing those children in for profit corporations whose goal is to make another buck off the sweat of the people who can least afford it. It’s not getting better. It’s getting far worse.

I CANNOT even type the name of the corporation because the blow back is on kids, and they would pay the price for my demands of transparency and accountability. They have expanded to five other states who have washed their hands of kids.

This is not progress.

I have seen these programs count the number of calories they testify a teenager needs to survive, and I have seen them IN MY FACE give kids nothing more that water and two pieces of bread placed between a piece of baloney .

1. They’re wrong. Adolescents need much more than that as sustenance.
2. The use of food employed as negative reinforcement is draconian.
3. I would ask: how much food did your teenagers eat this week.

Where are the parents.

They have legal problems themselves, and frequently there are no parents.

I have had (have) kids whose parents shot each other dead at the family dinner table.

These kids didn’t even speak for two entire years.

They needed more than foster care. They needed real HELP.

I can’t even imagine being a kid and seeing two adults shoot each other dead while you sat there at the table.

Often, there are no parents.

The State is a lousy parent because it’s a political animal, not a parental one. And it has hired and empowered these corporations to run prisons with an iron fist.

Which is so cheap, a profit must be made.

There are eight other states who next year will sign the contract.

These corporations hire monsters like themselves.

The people running these prisons are not qualified to run security for a dog park.

They are simply poor people who exploit other poor people and they will work for minimum wage.

They are issued a uniform and told to come back tomorrow.

Many of them have rap sheets a mile long.

Many of them were prisoners themselves.

It’s a vicious cycle of poverty, rape, disease, money, and abandonment.

What this kind of punishment does is turn children into criminals. We seem to really get off on that.

Recently, this particular state investigated judges who had received kickbacks from the corporation so the judges would send them as many kids as possible. Those judges have been disbarred.

But they were two little fish judges in a big barrel of them.

Bribery is a crime, and those judges should have gone to prisons like the ones they put kids in. Why were the judges treated so lightly.

They’re white.

We hire criminals who care for our children.

We put CHILDREN into places where they are systematically raped BY OTHER CHILDREN.

One of the highest rates of drug addiction is not the kids. It with the guards. They commonly have big problems with alcohol and anger management.

There is no one to counsel guards or even teach appropriate restraint techniques because the private corporation will not pay for it.

And they know that mom and dad are likely to be in prison themselves.

I deal with some boys who have to testify as material witnesses that mom and dad abused them. These kids want to know three things: Will mom and dad be at the hearing. When will mom and dad get out of prison. And can either mom or dad find where the kid is located.

These are not stupid questions. Far from it.

Sometimes kids are safer living on the street.

Diabetic kids are a problem.

Kids with HIV are a problem.

Boys who hang themselves are a problem.

Kids who go through unsupervised withdrawal is a problem.

In Los Angeles, these kids were problems where there were no beds for them. So the kids slept on office floors.

Caseworkers can be assigned 300 children.

Guards who work in these hell holes often get beat up themselves. By kids and by other guards.

The system isn’t simply broken. The system is rape on steroids.

The average education for these so-called guards is in real time, third grade.Black boys get the brunt of it. I call it genocide.

Because that is what it is.