"I'm gonna just stay in my cell. Not even come out for meals and stuff. They can stick my cake through the little flap in the door."
"Damn, they have cake at Secure?"
"Yeah, every day. Sometimes twice a day."
"How do I get in?"
Said the fourteen year old to the twelve year old on the day he got convicted for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a way I guess he had it coming. When your friend says, "let's go rob a house," riding along in the getaway car will probably get you convicted even if you don't steal anything. Having a rap sheet for drug possession, fistfights, and petty theft doesn't help your case either. I can't help wonder where he'll go after his 8 months of prison are over. There isn't much future for a twelve year old with several felonies.
That's not how I grew up, you know. I lived in a town where it was shocking if someone had sex when they were 17, and if a kid had drugs, it was probably because their parents were trying to stash their goods during a police search. It's not like children never committed crimes, but no one ever knew about it, and most of the kids were good.
I was sitting in a courthouse one day taking notes on legal procedure, when this fifteen year old was escorted in. He was there on charges of posting, "I've got a bomb" on an anonymous social media page, which lead to the evacuation of his school. He was also sent to juvie and assigned quite a bit of community service. I don't know where this one came from; whether he was serious, or just playing a joke, whether he had a history of shaky decisions, or if he had just made one mistake.
I think that's always been the scary part of law: you never know if your future will be thrown in jail over one mistake.
I don't have fond memories of police officers. I've never been in a real jail. I've never been accused of a serious crime. But I've been stopped too many times. "Have you been drinking? You seem high. Another suicide attempt? You almost ran me into the median. How fast were you going when your car rolled off the road? What were you doing at the site of the vandalism?"
I don't think a cop has ever treated me as human. I don't think I've ever met a cop who doesn't suspect me of something I should be fined for. Even my friend who used to be fun became suspicious and accusatory after a few years as a cop. I don't like it.
But my point isn't to rag on cops. The stupidity and slime they deal with doesn't come with a handbook. There's no official book of right words to say when you see a kid sitting naked on a street corner smoking. There's no right way to tell a child that they're making stupid decisions and you want them to stop endangering themselves and people around them. There's no good way to break it to a mother that her child will begin his adult life with thousands of dollars in debt for spending a week at a detention center.
Sometimes you wanna just slap these guys who make their kid's lives so hard that they'd go to jail just to get cake twice a day. It seems like a hopeless situation; these kids didn't ask to be born, didn't ask to have the whole world against them. While they're allowed to make their own choices, what twelve year old admits, "smoking is gross, but I've got an addiction; deal with it"?
I wonder how any of us make it. Why do any of us have dreams and futures? Why wasn't I the one born in the middle of a civil war, or to a homeless person as a result of rape, or to a rich lifeless politician who ODs within a few years of my birth?
I also want to know if there's a way to actually help these kids.
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