OPINION - Editorial

Here's a helping hand

Right into a prison cell—or worse

There are so many lessons to be drawn from Bobbie Gross' tragic experience in trying to help her 17-year-old son that the challenge isn't to describe just one but how to sum up the the whole plethora of ills the young man fell into when left to the not-so-tender mercies of the State of Arkansas:

It turns out that his mother, seeking to help him, made her first mistake when she filed a petition with a judge of Arkansas' juvenile court system asking the court get her son treatment, maybe even an order that he get into a rehabilitation program. Instead she wound up getting him a criminal record and being locked up with already hardened criminals, most of them sex offenders and violent offenders. For the state is no substitute for the family, much as some wish it was.

Bobbie Gross now carries the heavy weight of those who have depended on the state to act like a loving parent when it's simply not capable of doing anything so personal. That realization hit her hard as as she drove all the way down to the 32-bed Dermott Juvenile Correctional Facility some three hours from her house in Heber Springs. "I expected to tour a rehab," she explains, but "what I got was a prison. We're hardening him, we're preparing him to go to prison. That's exactly what I feel like."

But no bureaucratic arm of the state would put things as plain as a mother and tax-paying citizen and caring parent would. So instead Bobbie Gross was reduced to filing what's styled a Families in Need of Services petition when it's really the state that's in need of using plain English to sum up her and her son's predicament.

Arkansas law offers little if any guidance to those trying to thread their way through the maze in which Bobbie Gross and her boy found themselves. Like all too many families in this state. Arkansas' juvenile code offers only sporadic glimpses of what folks can expect when the state begins to act in loco parentis, which doesn't mean like a crazy parent much as one might suspect it does from the results.

State Senator Stephanie Flowers of Pine Bluff, who's also a lawyer, says the grandly titled Families in Need of Services proceedings just sets up kids to fail when they're placed on probation. For the terms of their probation may be entirely too strict for even so-called normal teenagers to follow. This reference to a normal teenager is itself mysterious, for who has ever encountered this mythical creature? It's really more of a statistical abstraction than a living, breathing, real-life persona. Teenagers are as unique, each and every one, as adults are.

And the code of behavior set up for kids on probation, Senator Flowers points out, is impossible to live up to: no skipping school even once; not one failed exam; shirts always tucked in; no sagging pants; no earrings; and drug test at any time, for which the kid and/or his parents are expected to pay $50 and so on and on. Violate a single rule and the kid is now a criminal.

"And these are just boilerplate conditions," Senator Flowers adds. "All they're doing is just putting in the child's name and some other specific information . . . . These children aren't being served competently. This is not something you just boilerplate." But it is if you're running the juvenile justice system in this state, Lord help you and the kid. And all the other kids trapped in this maze.

There's gotta be a better way to run a railroad--and a juvenile justice system.

Editorial on 05/30/2018

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