The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> juvenile delinquents

juvenile delinquents

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, October 31 2015, 16:02:13 (UTC)
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When I had my group home in Seattle in the early 70s I tried to understand the lives lived by the boys who passed through there for three years. I learned from them what their lives had been like in the dysfunctional and often brutal families they were born into. It seemed to me most of them were perfectly justified in running away from such homes and parents...the trouble was that to survive on the streets they had invariably to sink into a pattern of crimes which increased in severity the longer they had to lead discarded lives...the thing was clearly not their fault...sure, you could insist that they HAD to do better, that they had "choices"...but in reality they had very few and no one who criticized them of punished them could have done any better in those same circumstances.

After a couple of years it became plain these boys were inflicting pain and suffering on other innocents, as had been done to them...who taught them any better? But I couldn't justify their actions, even though I knew they were the wronged party...but they were now wronging others...I began to get tougher with them, as had everyone else who ever dealt with the problem...I even stranded us on an island for six weeks just to get away from temptation and from shield the community from them. On the island, with no stores to rob or drugs to buy or cars to steal and girls to rape and with no comfort except what you yourself could make with the miserable supplies I provided, the grew up, fast...it was an amazing transformation to watch and participate in.

When we came back to the city we came back to the same patterns...there was "man" to take their anger and frustrations out on and the whole thing fell apart because I could no longer justify my part in harassing the community through the juveniles I was getting out of prison, or keeping from going there.

In the last months I even did what I never thought I would...I threw a kid over my shoulder and carried him the four blocks back to the detention center and turned him in myself....something I never imagined I would do.

But, I hadn't been wrong in trying to understand them...I even remember saying to the six of them..."I understand that your lives had been miserable, I understand that you have stored up hostility, I understand that you want revenge...I understand that most people would feel the same had they lived your lives...but I can no longer allow myself to use my understanding of you to forgive or allow you to express these things.

I had become almost what I despised when I had started...I too was now turning kids in...kids I knew to have been innocents who never asked for any of this...except for one difference; I understood. They had my sympathy, I empathized with their plight, I saw the injustice of it...I didn't blindly and foolishly assert that none of that mattered, that they had to get over with it almost as if it had never happened....in the end I turned out to be a more punishing person...but at least I UNDERSTOOD them.

Israel is a criminal state...it behaves in reprehensible ways...I am not excusing Israelis, but at least I UNDERSTAND that the life they have been subjected to by Christians is what brought them to this point and not some innate Jewishness...if I can understand the plight of the Palestinians and understand that the methods left to them to seek justice and security are severely limited and that they must do the best they can with the weak hand dealt to them...then I can certainly understand the Israelis....understanding is not license to commit more crimes...in this case "understanding" means I see who had brought people to the point where this is their only recourse.

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