Staggering death rate for youth in Chicago juvenile justice system

Immune to the plight of the urban poor? Us? How can anyone say that when we're completely willing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on their health and welfare and training if only they'll clean up their act and agree to spend a few years or so in Iraq?

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/cook-d01.shtml

A recent study published in the medical journal Pediatrics sheds new light on the tragic fate that confronts the impoverished and troubled youth who are caught up in the juvenile justice system in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. After 10 years of research into the conditions of youth in Cook County’s juvenile justice system, Dr. Linda Teplin of Northwestern University found that they are four times more likely to suffer an early violent death than their peers in the general population.

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Another telling fact discovered by the study was that all the deaths were from external causes—95 percent of the deaths were the result of homicide or police intervention, mostly due to gunshot wounds. In comparison, most deaths among youths of the same age in the general population are attributed to accidents. The findings prompted recommendations that an investigation should be conducted into whether minority youth express suicidal intent by placing themselves at risk for homicide.

“These kids all died gruesome deaths...run over by a rival gang member, shot by a boyfriend,” said Teplin. “I think we have become immune to the plight of the urban poor.”

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The tragic outcome for these youth recalls a passage from Frederick Engels’s famous work, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, about how nineteenth century British capitalism devoured its human victims:

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual....”

more...

the hell did anyone ever care?

Vampires are real, they just aren't supernatural. The poor are nothing more than livestock, herded through neon-guilded chutes to the abattoir for the profits of those that wield the brands. This is the worst face of capitalism, its sociopathic manifestation. Until humanity comes before profit, this will not change.

Sorry. No matter how I follow what Einstein would call a thought-experiment, capitalism=bad, bad idea. If I modify it to a point where merit, innovation, talent, or hard work is rewarded and some kind of equality is possible for all members of a society it ceases to be something that could properly be defined AS capitalism.

There is no problem with a system of private ownership. The problem is with putting profit before humanity. Capitalism can, and should, benefit everyone in the community. However, it has come to the point where those most able to generate the greatest profit do so at the expense of humanity rather than for it.

Capitalism has spurred some of the most important advances in science, industry and even agriculture in known history. There is beauty in finding out that something you would normally discard holds great value to another, or that something you need is being offered cheap by someone else who doesn't need it. As long as humanity is put before the profit margin, I don't see any problem with capitalism, which is something we must change. Eliminating corporate influence in government is perhaps the first, greatest step we can make towards remedying the problem without discarding the ideology entirely.

"The problem is with putting profit before humanity."

That's what capitalism has come to mean to me--as opposed to humanism. I realize that's not what it's supposed to mean on paper, but witness how communism looks on paper versus how it works in practice.

Money-first is the only way I've seen capitalism practiced, really--in our current "free" market (unless you want to sell something the system doesn't approve of) profits are apparently sacred above all else.

I agree with you--I think elimination of the ridiculous corporation idea would make of capitalism something far more beneficial to humanity on the whole.

EDIT: What we have now, might more properly be called "materialism" or "profitism" for want of a better word. It's not private ownership I object to--it's gigantic independent systems with SO much capital/material that they can do what they like, frankly, and buy permission to do things that should NEVER be done.

I'm no economist; I'm in the trenches here, and the only clarity I have is that what I see around me is benefiting the very, very few at the expense of everybody else.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0379225/

By that, I mean the documentary is great, but what it shows you will make you pissed off. It will probably confirm some of your beliefs, though.

oh wait.

these aren't all pretty, blond kids.

nevermind.

I don't know if any studies have been conducted, but I would guess that the Philly numbers are very similar to the Chicago statistics. Every day it seems that there's some senseless violence and some young person loses their life.

This story is among one of the latest and most tragic:

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The victim of the 337th homicide recorded in Philadelphia this year, an 18-year-old who was gunned down on a Germantown street Thursday night, was recognized by People magazine this summer as an outstanding father.

Terrell Pough, who worked long hours to support his 2-year-old daughter, Diamond, and to finish school, was killed on the way home from work, officials said. About 10:30 p.m., Pough was set upon by a single gunman while on the 5400 block of Wayne Avenue. Pough was shot once in the back of the head and died a short while later at Temple University Hospital, homicide Inspector James Boyle said.

Pough was on his way home from New Orleans Chicken at 122 W. Chelten Ave. in Germantown, where two weeks ago he had started as the night manager.

In his often rough neighborhood, Pough stood out as a single father with custody of his daughter. The young man was quoted in People as saying: "If something ever happens to me, no one can ever tell her that her dad didn't take care of her."

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/states/pennsylvania/counties/philadelphia_county/philadelphia/13207487.htm
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It just makes me sick. Last February, in two separate incidents over the course of one weekend five young people (3 of them that I knew, and 2 of them since they were babies) were shot here in Delaware, just outside of Philadelphia. It just makes my heart ache. What are we doing in Iraq? There are "wars" going on every day in American cities, wars we seem to be losing just as miserably as the Iraq "war". All that we could do or have done...wasted. Young lives wasted, dollars wasted, opportunity wasted...

Take away all their opportunities, employ their women - so, she'll lose respect for him, let the police harrass them and watch them kill each other...

We can take down Russia but, we can't stop street crime.

If we stop street crime, people will spend their time and energy on something else. Maybe empowerment. Maybe watching what the rulers are doing. This keeps us busy and self-contained.

If we stop street crime, the billion-dollar legal, police, corrections systems would lose alot of money. Black men. are a human resource and they make more money off use in jail than in the office.

They can't want crime to diminish, too many white people are making too much money from it. They want crime to diminish like they want electric cars - this system was designed by criminals to market crime, not utopia...

where they show the endless rows of bodies in those cells, being fed off of. Except, when they put us in endless rows of cells, they don't need our bio-energy, they get paid per black man. Still feeding off us.

When I was working at the Justice Department, on her earlier research (also from the article). During that session, she referred to the juvenile justice system as "the poor child's mental health care", and the more I thought about it, the more I realized she was right.

An earlier report co-authored by Dr. Teplin and presented to the American Medical Association in 2002 noted that nearly two thirds of males and nearly three quarters of females in the Cook County juvenile justice system suffered from psychiatric disorders, including major depressive, manic or suicidal episodes, as well as substance abuse and psychosis. The study found that disorders were highest among non-Hispanic whites.

Due to the gutting of public mental health facilities, the juvenile justice system has become the only alternative for many poor and minority youth with psychiatric disorders. The report stated that “Welfare reform has disrupted Medicaid benefits for millions of children who need treatment,” as their parents were forced into low-paying jobs without health insurance. Welfare reform had led to the further impoverishment of many families and made poor children more likely to get entangled in the juvenile justice system.

Because of managed care, even families with health insurance in many cases did not have coverage to treat many disorders prevalent among delinquent youth, such as conduct disorder, ADHD and substance abuse disorders. Moreover, few child and adolescent psychiatrists practice in poor and minority neighborhoods. “As the public health system reduces services,” the study noted, “youth with psychiatric disorders may increasing fall through the cracks into the juvenile justice system.”

The juvenile justice system, however, is woefully ill equipped to provide adequate mental health services for large numbers of detainees, the study concluded. Furthermore, in recent years, Democratic and Republican politicians have waged a war against the very notion of “juvenile justice” and rehabilitation and have labeled troubled children as incorrigible “predators” who should be tried as adults and locked up in prison.

And this country has the gall to consider itself a First-World Nation?! This ties to the other recent articles on whether racial and economic disparities in the U.S. can be considered a human rights violation.

:mad:

It seems like our society would understand this and the implications of this by now.

Yet they just build more prisons.

I saw a show that had similar take on adult prisons - to some extent they have also become the defacto psychiatric hospitals - since many of them closed.

It is very sad.

the juvenile justice system as "the poor child's mental health care"

I'd never thought of it like that before, but now that you've said it I don't think I'll forget it.

That middle-class children, when they do something like start a fire or some other childish call for attention and help, are considered a troubled youth and sent for counseling. A poor or minority child does the same thing? They're labeled a "bad seed" and "irredeemable" and incarcerated.

One that I never really thought of in that way. So sad...

My father works at a correctional facility for youths. A few years ago, a teenager we had grown up with and a friend of my brother's (he was about three years younger than my bro and thus 5 years younger than me) was sent there because of a fight. He had been jumped after a football game by several guys. He was the one incarcerated; he was black and his assailants were white, in a not-so-enlightened WV community.

nt