Today a juvenile court Justice in Monroe, Georgia sent two young boys to a Juvenile Detention Center after they confessed to unintentional arson that destroyed four homes. News reports cite that the boys started a brush fire after exploring the site of an old welding company. When stomping out the fire failed to work the boys ran away in fear. Two of the boys' mother brought all three of them (one was a cousin) to the police station where they confessed to the incident.
Here's my contention: First, the mother didn't have to turn in her children. No one had linked them to the scene and no police offers had questioned them in the investigation. But the mother, out of her sense of what was wrong and right, turned in her own children. This shows some integrity of a mother-- a mother who probably isn't doing that poorly of a job raising her children. Second: They are children--- 7, 10, and 11 who will now be exposed to strip searches, being locked up, and other dire elements of our juvenile justice system. If they weren't delinquent before (and they have no prior record of misbehavior) they will be after they've been institutionalized. And then there's this man to my left. This man burnt down his family home as a child and his father simply said: "Don't ever do that again." He didn't. Richard Parsons is now the Chairman and CEO of Time Warner, Inc. My point? He didn't go to juvenile hall.