Locking up Children
Hello Sunday Morning Coffee drinkers/readers! I am sitting on my back porch watching it rain buckets, drinking hot brew, and watching baby chickens (they’re actually more like juveniles but still babies to us) try to figure out the wet stuff as they run around the yard. Between grandbabies and farm animals, I’m invigorated every time one or the other of them discovers something new in the world that I tend to take for granted. Not that I ever take rain for granted, mind you. I grew up in arid West Texas where sand storms are much more common than rain, so rain always feels like a blessing to me. And we have a new roof, so there’s that. No niggling worry about the leaks in our 144 year old attic.
When the roofers got to work on our ridiculously steep roof, they had to peel off layers of shingles. No one, it seems, had ever taken off a roof before laying down a new one. This is a serious code violation now, of course, which tells us a little bit about the last time the roof was repaired. As the layers came off, our roofer called us and said he was looking at the metal “shingles” that were original to the house. How cool is that? They were such an integral part of the actual structure and therefore risky to remove, we decided it was best to leave them there, but we got some cool pics.
So, yeah. This made me think allegorically about covering up the old with the new until the old Is so buried we sort of forget about it. Maybe that’s good. Because sometimes the “old” needs to be dead and buried. And sometimes we start with something good and noble and over the years discover asphalt and vinyl and think that layer after layer of the same old materials will somehow stand the test of time. Occasionally, the weight of the old can no longer be sustained, right? And under all those layers, the house can collapse.
Hang with me. I’m going somewhere here.
A former colleague wrote an entry in LinkedIn this week around an article that chronicled the latest woes of the Texas Juvenile Justice system, and as I read the article and her response to it, I was hit with a feeling of intense sadness, a feeling I have every time I think of the system, mainly because the discussion hasn’t changed since I started there back in 2010, and the same discussion had been going on long before I got there.
If you’re unfamiliar, Texas incarcerates children aged 10-19 in maximum security prisons for children. At the age of 19, kiddos may age out of the system or they get a ride to a TDCJ facility and do some time there.
10 years old.
I want everyone reading this to understand the GRAVITY of that…
10 years old. In maximum security prisons.
Ok. So the “conversation” is always about closing the facilities down, moving all the kids to one location (Austin), housing them (in separate quarters) in the adult system, moving the younger kids to counties (with no additional resources given to the counties of course), and this goes on and on year after year. Legislators ask for “reports” and they get them, and they all say the same thing (i.e., kids need to be close to their homes, they need specific therapies, smaller staff to kid ratios, etc), and the multitude of reports given to policy makers by experts go ignored. Year after year.
Sort of like shingling a roof without taking the last layer off, until eventually, your structure can’t take the weight and you have some real problems. Not that the juvenile system in Texas hasn’t already collapsed (note I removed the word “justice” here). It was doomed at conception.
And still…here we are…putting the latest layer of shingles on, and no matter how many we peel off now, the original layer isn’t cool, it’s tragic.
Tear that mutha down, I say.
If you want to read my colleagues’s response, you can find it here on Linked In. If you want assistance in creating meaningful programming for young people, or you want to join my rant in conversation, contact me here. I love hearing your stories and ideas.
Back to my coffee, rain, chicks, and the youngest gbaby woke up and is snuggled in my lap, making typing a little bit difficult. These rants are exhausting any way. :)
Fight for our children, ya’ll.
