Stop! Police!

USA Today reports that 1 in 3 young people in the US will be arrested before the age of 23.

Wow.

First effect: Constricting job pools. Constricting job choices.

I worked for many years for an agency in social services that I saw "gentrified" over time for the sake of insurance premiums. If I'm feeling resentful of the process, it comes to mind as the agency choosing to use a standard of "no arrest record, no exceptions" for the sake of a lower premium. If I'm feeling more generous, I have to admit that it's likely that the difference in insurance premium between the agency choosing that strategy and the agency choosing to go with the Department of Social Services standard was probably a make-or-break difference, financially.

That doesn't excuse the situation. The effects of being removed from family and neighborhood are intense enough for a child whose family has fallen apart, being simultaneously separated from his or her own culture is a double injury.

How is this a cultural issue? Cities call it "gang management." Step 1: Arrest every young man in the inner city. Arrest them for loitering if necessary; arrest them for jaywalking. This is to establish a record of the person in the police database. This alone will not follow the person forever. If it remains the only arrest on the person's record, it will probably disappear at 18. However. If that person gets into a fight, punches someone for insulting his sister, or has a lapse in judgment as so many young people do, the first thing the Judge looks at is whether or not the person already has an arrest record. Often as not, the paper arrest magnifies the mistakes of youth.

Time was, when young people tipped cows, got into fights, did a little vandalism, took the police chief's car for a joyride--the police drove you home to your parents and that was the end of it. If you stole something from the store, you did a few hours of chores, and that was the end of it. How many judges today kept their noses clean all the time as kids? I'd bet a very, very few (and those are probably a little nuts, cuz let's face it, it's not normal).

Does criminalization of youth mean that only people with super-clean noses will be able to have certain jobs in the future? No. If it did, I would complain less.

It means only people with super-clean noses who got them by any means available will be able to have those jobs. People from the smallest towns and the richest families will be the only ones standing.

Another effect: Normalization of arrest.

OK I admit it, I was never arrested as a kid. (And no, I'm not even remotely normal.) I lived in the country in the middle of absolutely no where; there was no "legal" trouble to get into, really. There was more than one time the police would have been in my home if we'd had neighbors one wall away. But we didn't. And when I was a little older, I was afraid of the police and getting arrested. So much so that it kept me more or less in line until I was even older and my brain finished developing. I didn't know anyone (that I knew of) who had been arrested. Not even for political protest. It was a very sheltered upbringing. The whole idea was so foreign to me that it was too terrifying to contemplate.

At 1 in 3 young people being arrested, that's simply gone. Every city youth knows people who have been arrested. No big deal; it's just part of life. What then is the deterrent for youthful indiscretions?

Gone.

Sadly, I don't have any packaged answers. The US has fallen into a vicious cycle of incarceration trumping education which leads to further incarceration. In California, as in most states, roughly 5x as much is budgeted for Education as for Corrections, yet these two seem to be inextricably linked.

Answers? Anyone? (Preferred answers do not include the assumption that people who do relatively well in this mess deserve it. They might. But statistical probability has more impact overall than individual character. It's easy to get lost in individual examples that don't explain how to fix the overall problem.)