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.)

On Crime, DNA, and Kittens

DNA before being brutally hacked
to pieces by a heartless crime lab

ABC News for Australia reports that the court in Holbert (that's the capital of the Australian state of Tasmania) has heard DNA evidence in the case of the decapitation of two kittens and the strangling of a third.

Three men went to the home of a woman whom they suspected of throwing rocks to try to break up their all-night party. So I'm guessing these are neighbors and not just random people messing with each other. The ABC report doesn't clarify.

At any rate, the woman wouldn't let the three men into her house and one of them broke a window of her car, so she called the police. (I'm wondering if she could have done that when the all-night party continued beyond reasonable bounds, leading her to wish to throw rocks.)

When the police arrived at her house they found three dead kittens: one intact, one in two pieces and one missing its head. There is no mention of the head of the third kitten ever being found.

They called in CSI. Well, they called in whatever CSI is called in Tasmania, Australia. They tested for DNA. Now they did this even though it's the testimony of the DNA profiler that it was "unusual" to get a full DNA match from contact. They swabbed the kittens anyway.

Having swabbed the kittens, they performed DNA testing, and got a full match on one of the defendants. The full match, according to the expert witness, would indicate that the kittens were handled with force.

Damning evidence!

Except that the expert witness then also acknowledged that the DNA could have been transferred to the kittens by the defendant leaving DNA on the axe that someone else then used on the kittens.

In other words: Tasmania performed CSI-level investigation on the murder of these kittens in order to incontrovertibly prove absolutely nothing about who actually killed the kittens.

In Tasmania's defense, they can engage in such exercises because Australia in general has an intentional homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 population per year (compare to Monaco with 0.0 and Iceland with 0.31, Netherlands with 0.93, the UK with 1.17, the US with 5.0 and El Salvador with 71*). Tasmania has the lowest crime rate of all the Australian states, and with a population of 500,000 the authorities don't get to play CSI all that often.

*Compiled on the Wiki from multiple sources by people who (yayy) have way too much time on their hands. Thank you people with way too much time on your hands.