Real News and the Nickel Boys and Crime and Punishment

My daughter is into Drama of the theatrical kind which she once told me I held her back from because, as I recall, I discouraged her from being checked out by a talent agency interview/cattle call. She is helping Denfeld High School put on plays and the last one I attended featured my grandson in a blood letting tale that got gallons of fake blood poured on the witting front row of the audience. I got a red stained t-shirt out of it.

On Saturday Claudia and I helped out as volunteers for the big Denfeld 64th Rotary Speech Invitational. Our reward was watching our grandson and a team mate put on a spectacular DUO presentation. Duo was not an event when I was a storytelling semi-phenom in High School.
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At any rate I’ve been lobbying to take the family to see the movie the Nickel Boys when it gets to town. I read Colson Whitehead’s novel to Claudia a few years ago, a rare fiction book for me, and it was spectacular. I’m sure the movie will be too but Claudia fears my daughter who loves kids might find it too traumatizing.

So in the previous posts where I snarled at the Fake News of the Murdochs I had in mind a wonderful news story in the New York Times where seekers of the Truth would be well advised to subscribe.

The Headline of the story was What happened when America emptied its juvenile prisons.

I was on the Duluth School Board when this started happening but I was surprised to read this take. Its wonderful sensible news and of course its one more place where Donald Trump threatens to take us back to hellish conditions. Not surprising for this one time lynch mob leader.

Here are three selections I copied and sent myself from the story which is a must read for children’s defenders.

1 “Alongside revelations of abuse came evidence of just how much money was being spent on juvenile prisons. In 2008, the American Correctional Association estimated that it cost, on average, $88,000 a year to incarcerate a young person. Some states spent much more than that: Costs in California, for example, exceeded $250,000 a year. State funding for K-12 education, by contrast, was roughly $11,000 per student. States might have been willing to tolerate such outlays when coffers were flush, but these figures came to light during the Great Recession of the late 2000s, causing more states to doubt the merits of lavishly funding abusive prisons.”

2. “We laughed, because we both knew the answer. Despite the progress of the last quarter-century, the United States still incarcerates many more young people than most countries in Europe or Asia do. More than half of those behind bars are there for nonviolent offenses, and racial disparities are endemic: Black youth are almost five times as likely to be in custody as their white peers. Though almost 1,800 juvenile facilities have closed in the past 25 years, the remaining ones are often violent places, marked by sexual abuse, solitary confinement and woefully inadequate schooling.”

3. “Even more ominous, as The Marshall Project recently reported, some communities are rolling back reforms. North Carolina lawmakers recently made it easier to try juveniles as adults. The Louisiana State Legislature has allocated over $100 million to build new prisons — for both adults and juveniles. Colorado prosecutors are fighting to increase the size of the state’s juvenile facilities. And no one expects the Trump administration to support any state or locality still working to reduce youth incarceration.”

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