Unusual Cruelty for Kentucky Juveniles

Think Newt Gingrich is cruel for suggesting that poor children should clean the toilets in their schools? That's nothing - in Kentucky, if poor kids so much as look cross-eyed at an authority figure, we jail the little fuckers.

From the Courier:

Twice during Alan Hack’s senior year at Grayson County High School, police picked him up at school, handcuffed him and took him to juvenile jail.

His offense, both times? Missing school.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said in an interview at Murray State University, where he’s now a freshman majoring in music education. “I don’t even know how a judicial system can get that messed up.”

It's way more messed up than you imagine, Alan.

Also from the Courier:

Kentucky judges are jailing youths for truancy and other noncriminal offenses at one of the highest rates in the nation, sidestepping federal and state laws and ignoring the near-unanimous agreement of experts and advocates that it harms children.

Last year, more than 1,500 Kentucky children were sent to juvenile jails for such “status offenses” as missing school or running away from home — offenses that aren’t considered criminal and don’t apply to adults.

Although that’s roughly 200 fewer Kentucky children jailed than in the previous year, advocates and detention officials say the number is far too high and the practice is no way to treat children whose problems generally stem from abuse, neglect, poverty, mental illness or other social ills.

It’s also expensive — Kentucky spent about $2 million last year to incarcerate status offenders, a fact that some detention officials argue is a poor use of their facilities.

Keep in mind that "juvenile detention" is not indoor summer camp. It is prison - a place where children as young as 11, who have committed no crime beyond disobeying a parental order, are locked down as much as 12 hours a day in bare, windowless, locked cells. Even during the hours they receive school instruction, meals and recreation, they cannot so much as speak a single word without permission.

The Courier has a full package of stories that read like an expose, but which may be a planted excuse for the recently re-elected Beshear administration to eliminate the state Department of Juvenile Justice entirely.

While DJJ has certainly been a cesspool of incompetence and unconstitutionality for at least eight years - since repug Gov. Ernie Fletcher installed former Louisville cops as DJJ administrators and turned a blind eye to the detention-for-spitballing regime that ensued - returning Kentucky to the pre-DJJ days of juveniles suffering horrific abuse in adult jails is not the answer.

Beshear needs to admit that his DJJ appointees have failed to follow federal rules on juvenile offenders, fire their useless asses and replace them with people who understand that troubled juveniles need specialized services that are neither ineffectual coddling nor abusive detention.