Don't forget the suntan lotion and bail money!
I've gotten to be pretty good friends with our Sheriff of Broward County, Al Lamberti. I was telling him yesterday of my concerns over the jailing of so many of Broward County kids, just talking about some of the scary statistics. He too, has been telling citizen groups of the fact that Broward County leads ALL 67 counties in Florida in jail population, so this wasn't news to him at all. What we discovered together was the fact that Florida now leads the nation in per capita prison population, finally "beating" California, Texas and New York in percentage of people incarcerated!
Were that not amazing enough … when you then factor into the equation that the U.S. just exceeded China as #1 in "most number of people imprisoned nationally," this reveals a frightening statistic: The United States now imprisons more of its people than any nation on the globe; and with Florida now leading the nation in per capita prison population, that means Florida leads the world in numbers of people imprisoned in any one nation-state; but even more revealing and even scarier for the citizens of Broward County (Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Pompano Beach, etc), Broward tops them all!
Why? Just do the simple math: Broward leads Florida, Florida leads America, and America now leads the world! This means that Broward County, per capita, imprisons more of its people than any other county on the planet!!! When I was sharing this with Sheriff Lamberti, he replied, "That's not even all of it John." He went on to give me even more cause for concern about our County's children and young adults:
Sheriff Al Lamberti shared the very disturbing fact that 70 % of our County's crimes committed during the day are committed by truant kids - kids skipping school or kids suspended from school. He went on to explain that kids are suspended 'from" school, but they are not suspended "to" any program or detention hall, etc. This means that they are suspended "to the street," since their parents are typically working.
This is a huge problem, especially given the fact that we have 1.8 million people in Broward! We are a huge County, with a greater population than nine (9) U.S. States! We had 5,486 people incarcerated in our County's five (5) jails as of yesterday morning. We had only one (1) jail 30 years ago when Lamberti started as a detention deputy in the jail, and we're at five (5) jails now; and because we've exceeded the jail cap, our brilliant County Commissioners want to build a sixth (6th) jail to warehouse even more of our kids and addicted adults - rather than use all three parts of their brains and come up with alternative solutions to this problem.
The Sheriff has had to start a whole new truancy unit just to keep up and track these kids, doing their level best to hunt them down for their own good. His solution to date: His deputies find the kids, and bring them to their parents; but since most of the parents are working, they bring the kids straight to the parent's workplace, essentially saying, "We've been babysitting your kid, and now it's your turn."
This is a sad revelation to me - and I know a lot of concerned parents and citizens generally. I have three kids who are school age, 17, 16 and 11; and because of this fact alone, and since I represent a lot of families suffering and in fear over the arrest of their child, I'm particularly sensitized to these issues. We can't blame the schools for suspending the kids for committing crimes or serious transgressions at school - since we want the majority of the other kids to get an education and not be distracted and disturbed by the rowdy minority; so the school no doubt did the right thing by separating those kids by suspension; and yet they probably ought to be suspended "to" a program of sorts - perhaps a work program or detention hall, and not "to the streets."
The parents can't babysit the kids as mom and dad are typically both working just to survive and provide for their families in this cruel economy; or many of these households are run by single mom's and as you can all too well imagine, they've got their hands full working full time and trying their level best to raise the kids, exhausted.
The crime rate is only going to go up as the economy gets worse, according to historical trends. Industrialized China and India are buying up all the barrels of crude oil that we don't consume; and therefore the demand for oil from the oil producing Arab nations is only going to continue increasing, which means that the prices for fuel will only increase, and not decrease. This means that the prices for goods (all transported by fuel!) will increase, causing inflation to skyrocket even more, making it even more impossible for our kids to afford to buy gas or anything at all. (We can hardly afford anything these days, let alone our kids!) This is alarming too, since this will only cause the crime rate to escalate even more.
Meanwhile, the rest of us who may not be struggling with this truancy problem, don't want to pay the higher taxes to support all these new truancy officers, and yet we want our homes safe and we don't want to personally fall victim to juvenile crime … so we can't have them roaming the streets getting into trouble. That revealing statistic is haunting: "70% of crimes committed during the day are committed by these truant kids."
Prison/jail population: Broward leads the State of Florida; Florida leads America, and America now leads the world. This means that Broward leads the planet in per capita imprisonment of its people - and that means lots of kids!! The syllogism is scary: If A = B and B = C, then A = C!
These statistics are obviously sad and scary for a lot of Florida's parents and kids, but actually, these Draconian sentences and effects extend all across our country
All the more reason we've got to pray more and spend as much time with our kids as possible ... pouring more and more of ourselves into teaching them whatever we can ... especially since they live in such an unforgiving world today.
© 2008 John Contini (OK to re-post with attribution and contact info)
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