The Number of Youth in Juvenile Detention in California Has Quietly Plummeted

No, obviously there is room between "doing nothing" and Chinese-style "public executions."

How about the stocks? Make being a shithead as unpleasant as possible at least.

"Law and order", "tough on crime", they're all code words. Maybe not everyone realizes, but they're simply a method to enforce racist policies and hierarchies without getting in trouble.

As long as you don't explicitly say it's about race, the Supreme Court has ruled time and again that it's okay for police to target minority communities.

This is all detailed with plenty of sources in the book I mentioned. It's truly sickening.

I never understood the mindset of "oh, this person committed a crime, let's disallow them from voting in the future".

My opinion is, if society has decided that an individual does not get to exercise their right to vote, then they also should have no tax liability. No taxation without representation, and all that jazz. I guarantee you if they were forced to make the choice between the two, they'd immediately reinstate every felon's voting rights.

It's fine to not run on "tough on crime" because it was always bs anyhow. HOWEVER, I am watching what has been going on in the large midwest cities near my home and the lack of enforcement is causing crime to soar. There are definite and measurable consequences to not letting police do their jobs.

In my city, which is really just a large suburb, we have a guy up the street who is shooting guns at street signs from his back porch. There is a park and a church right behind where he is shooting. I brought this to the attention of the police as did another neighbor, but nothing has been done about it. I even showed them how I could tell where the bullets were coming from, it's not rocket science to see how each sign was hit at a certain angle. But no, I don't even think the cop was intelligent enough to understand what I told her. It's also sad that we have a former army vet who is drunk or on drugs and goes out and shoots at signs at night--no respect for his community, his neighbors, himself, or anyone.

If it takes bringing back caning or whatever, it's a small price to pay for civilization to continue.

And whether drugs are legal or not, they're a terrible idea, they will destroy your life the same as alcohol and cigarettes.

What bothers me about the discussion about this in Europe is that it keeps focusing on how sorrowful and tough this system is ...

... on the people who work in it. Not on the kids. They hardly get mentioned at all.

The kids barely get mentioned at all. And of course, when the system abuses kids (including literally), the employees/bureaucrats are protected/shielded from consequences and the kids ?

Sometimes it seems like half of them commit suicide. This is distressingly common thread in the stories about these people. Now I get it, stories only make it out if they're dramatic enough, but still.

In the name of being "nice" to the kids they are locked up, excluded from schooling, imprisoned (including in solitary confinement for weeks), beaten ("pain impulses" is the psychological term), constantly moved around (so they don't have safety and predictability), and so on.

Everything is done to prevent these kids from, even if they want to, get a normal life going. But you know who this is hard on ? The employees of youth services. That's who it's hard on.

This has been going on for decades like this. The result is that most of the employees never even sees the kids. Everyone's working on figuring out what to do (without seeing the kids, of course), on dividing up the kids, on "influencing" the laws and advising government/parliament, on administrativa like processing request forms, on ... and the kids systematically aren't happy with their performance.

And the saddest part is. These people are being judged against the lowest standards you can possibly imagine. These kids, most of them have been in youth services since 10 years old or less. They have never known differently, and so they accept the abuses of the system. Getting thrown out of their residence into the street every friday evening, because they can't pay for a weekend presence, then incarcerated by the police because they weren't back on monday morning ... Kids comment "that's inconvenient, I cried a bit", and move on in the conversation as if that's the most normal thing to have happen to you. Like this is hitting your head on a door. "Oh well".

But even these kids judging these people by those sorts of extreme low standards ... aren't happy with the system, mostly because of the psychological safety issue: the kids can't predict what the youth services system will do to them in 2 months, and it's just 100% forced on them. So they can't plan, they can't compensate, they can't achieve anything, because it's just ripped away from them by someone they've never seen before 2 months down the line.

Needless to say, the standards youth services uses to judge parents are getting ever stricter, and what they themselves do is ... remniscent of the stories we used to hear from Eastern Germans when I was young.

Reality is that it's pretty damn clear that leaving a kid with alcohol addicted parents is a far superior option to putting the kid, even part time, into youth services.