According to a study reported by the Associated Press, Indiana is 4th in the nation in terms of jailing its kids.
Indiana’s 2006 incarceration rate of 415.4 per 100,000 juveniles ages 10 and older trailed only Wyoming (606.1), South Dakota (564.4) and Florida (451.8), the nonprofit, nonpartisan Every Child Matters Education Fund reported in “Geography Matters: Child Well-Being in the States.”
Vermont, at 72.4 jailed juveniles per 100,000, had the lowest rate.
Pansy liberal Vermonters and their gay civil unions have weakened their resolve to jail their families. What kind of family values are those?
Michael Petit, the group’s president, said Indiana’s high incarceration rate stemmed at least partially from the state’s poor ranking in other areas examined in the report, such as child-welfare expenditures, infant mortality and births to teenage mothers.
This looks like a pay-me-now or pay-me-later kind of situation. Hoosiers can typically be expected to go with the “pay-me-later” option since the money is spent in the form of punishment; a kind of outreach with which we are much more comfortable than anything that looks like a handout. It’s our Puritan heritage, I suppose. On the up-side, I guess we can hope that sending them to jail early puts them straight and keeps them from being criminals as adults. But, that’s not my sense of things.
No wonder MTV chose Indiana (specifically Lake county) for their reality show “Juvies.”
BTW I’ve been in the Lake County Juvie Center (visiting a “guest”) and I can tell you it is no place I’d want to stay. And this is a relatively new building!
As long as we privatize prisons, the rate of incarceration will increase. In order to have growing profits, you have to have more consumers(prisoners). The goal of private companies is to earn money for their shareholders. Private prisons can only make more money when they have more prisoners. It’s in the interest of no one to let someone profit from incarceration, rather than have a system based on rehabilitation, as mandated by the Indiana Constitution.
EV….so the problem is the type of prisons we have, not the fact that so many young people break the law?
I know this sounds incredibly simple, but if they didn’t break the law, they wouldn’t up behind bars be they rehabilitative bars or punitive bars.
I have no idea on this one, but I wonder if there are more laws, more enforcement against juveniles than there once was.
I broke a law or two in my younger days and the legal system didn’t always get involved.
Having had a nephew in the juvenile system, I would say there is more enforcement. Fights now become battery charges.