Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

haha all she needed was a time out..... poor kid.

full profile including full name on yahoo profiles

http://profiles.yahoo.com/catman5169

I am not a morning person... though mind you,  i'm posting this at 6 am eastern standard time in the united states.  I'm only up at this hour because i HAVE to be thanks to my job.  I think that a later school would be a wonderful idea.  it would also alleviate the issue of overcrowding in public schools.  If i had my way, i wouldnt wake up until about 10 am or 10:30 am and go to bed between 1 and 3 am.  i'm typically a night owl, but unfortunately due to my job (school bus driver) I have to be up early.

i completely agree with the article.  I work in education and there are fights daily at the highschool that arent reported.  the media got ahold of the last major fight because kids actually used their cellphones to call parents to get them out of school.  and now the school is cracking down on cellphones...

http://www.crimelibrary.com/news/ap/030 ... ystem.html

Scandal Rocks Texas Juvenile System

 

By Alicia A. Caldwell

PYOTE, Texas (AP)? For at least two years, investigators say, boys at a juvenile prison in the West Texas desert were summoned from their dorms late at night and taken to darkened conference rooms, offices and ball fields for sex with two of the institution's top administrators.

The boys told their parents, their teachers, any staff member who would listen. A few diligent staff members took their complaints to their supervisors. But the allegations were largely covered up until last month, when they exploded in the biggest scandal ever to engulf the Texas juvenile prison system.

The No. 1 and No. 2 officials at the Texas Youth Commission have lost their jobs over their handling of the allegations. Prosecutors are looking into criminal charges. And lawmakers are infuriated.

"What scares me the most is what I don't know," said state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee.

The allegations became public when the Dallas Morning News cited a never-released 2005 Texas Rangers report that said 13 boys were molested at the West Texas State school, a red-brick institution ringed by razor wire in a desolate part of the state. Since then, others have come forward with allegations of sexual abuse at other juvenile prisons across Texas.

Lawmakers were outraged to learn that the two men accused of molesting boys at the West Texas State School ? Ray Brookins, an assistant superintendent who temporarily ran the place, and Principal John Paul Hernandez ? were quietly allowed to resign in 2005 with no criminal charges. (Hernandez took a job as the director of a nearby charter school, which accepted his resignation last week.)

Attempts to reach Hernandez and Brookins by telephone and at their homes were unsuccessful. Hernandez previously denied wrongdoing.

The Texas Youth Commission oversees 7,500 youths ? including some of the most dangerous offenders, ages 10 to 21 ? and operates 15 prisons, nine halfway houses and numerous treatment and counseling centers.

Among the parents to come forward with horror stories since the scandal broke is Genger Galloway, who told lawmakers this week that her 19-year-old son finally told her Saturday about abuse he suffered when he was held a juvenile prison in central Texas at age 15.

"They've tried to figure out why he's so angry and why he's so hurt and why he won't talk," Galloway said. "And it's because he doesn't feel safe in there."

Galloway said that her son, who has been jailed for molesting his siblings, was sexually assaulted by a female staff member and beaten and sodomized by a male inmate in 2003.

Mary Jane Martinez of San Antonio told lawmakers last week that her son also was sexually assaulted at a juvenile jail. "My son is home, but he is not the same since he was raped in the TYC," she said. She said her 17-year-old son "is so ashamed of himself he built a wall."

Randal Chance, a retired inspector general with the Texas Youth Commission and author of the book "Raped by the State," said the routine mistreatment of children by the TYC has long been ignored. "This one here, it finally snuck out," he said.

Investigators said that at Pyote, Brookins and other administrators used intimidation to suppress complaints about sexual abuse.

On Tuesday, Jay Kimbrough, an outsider appointed by Gov. Rick Perry to look into the widening scandal, said investigators are being sent to 22 Texas Youth Commission institutions and the agency headquarters to investigate claims of abuse of inmates.

In a warning to any agency employees who may have molested inmates, he said: "If you are part of this gig, you need to move on or we're going to find you and prosecute you."

Since the scandal broke in February, Executive Director Dwight Harris has resigned, TYC board chairman Pete C. Alfaro has been fired, and Lemuel "Chip" Harrison, who led the West Texas State School when the abuses allegedly occurred before he was promoted to one of four directors of juvenile corrections, has been suspended.

TYC spokesman Tim Savoy acknowledged mistakes at the Pyote prison. "When you take a number of years and condense it down to a concise report, you can easily see how it all fits together," Savoy said.

He said Brookins never should have been promoted and probably should have been fired in 2001, when he was disciplined for looking at adult pornography on a state computer.

At the Pyote prison, acting Superintendent Curtis Simmons said at a staff meeting last week that what happened two years ago "was a shame, but it is no reflection on what we do" now.

"This is a kid facility," Simmons said. "We treat kids with compassion."

http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/s ... 6193.shtml

Troubled girls are being pushed into institutions




By TONYAA WEATHERSBEE, The Times-Union


After 12 years of enduring sexual abuse at the hands of a family member, the juvenile girl finally tried to speak out.

Unfortunately, the system kept hearing her wrong.

When she hit her abuser, the girl, then 16, wound up being arrested for battery. That same year, when a police officer tried to intervene in another confrontation, she wound up hitting the officer.

That led to another arrest. The arrest generated more anger, more acting out, and the beginning of a series of confinements to a girls' residential facility in the Florida Panhandle.

But it didn't lead to mental health therapy, said LaWanda Ravoira, past president of PACE Center for Girls Inc. Because of that, she joined the ranks of girls from Duval County and the state who wind up in the juvenile justice system because it only judges their actions, not the traumatic history that often leads to it.

This girl, because of the failure of the Department of Children and Families and the Department of Juvenile Justice, was fast-tracked into the state prison system, Revoira told members of the Women's Giving Alliance last week.

"She is so wounded it would break your heart."

The plight of abused girls has Ravoira pushing for change in a system in which minor offenses such as shoplifting and joy-riding often land them in residential facilities.

There are few community-based programs geared to deal with untreated mental and emotional issues that often lead girls to commit crimes, as well as zero-tolerance policies that treat girls who commit minor, angst-ridden transgressions as menaces to society.

"We do not tolerate any behaviors by girls that are too far out of the box," Ravoira told me.

There's something to that - because Florida incarcerates around 1,000 girls a day - the highest rate in the country.

And of the girls imprisoned in Jacksonville, 43 percent are incarcerated for misdemeanors.

The state average is 29 percent, Ravoira said.

On top of that, nearly 80 percent of the girls who are confined suffer from untreated mental and emotional problems. And the ones who Jacksonville confines don't even get to stay in the area because there are no residential facilities in North Florida.

"Our girls are sent as far away as Milton, Fla., and Miami," Ravoira said. "These are facilities with razor wire ... You do not see males locked up in razor wire facilities for misdemeanors."

Of course, there's a cheaper, more effective and more sensitive way to stop the explosion of girls in the system, said Ravoira, who co-authored a study on the subject titled, "A Rallying Cry for Change: Charting a New Direction in the State of Florida's Response to Girls in the Juvenile Justice System."

That way is by creating more community-based programs and efforts to target girls who struggle with the issues that get them entangled in the system.

A program patterned after the Guardian Ad Litem Program, for example, for girls in the juvenile justice system would be one place to start, Ravoira said. Another would be a series of small, respite group homes, she said.

"The guardian ad litem could be the person who speaks out and says, 'Wait, she shoplifted,' " she said.

Such reforms ought to be given a chance.

The numbers, as well as the sad tales of girls, tell me that something is severely out of whack. Among other things, it tells me that this race to incarcerate - which now has the United States as the world's top jailer - has now reached down into the bottom rungs. Punishment is the priority while rehabilitation has become a four-letter word.

No matter that punishment is more expensive.

But what's worse is that the system sends an ominous message about how it values girls.

For most girls who start doing dumb things like shoplifting, or who slap someone in anger, it makes more sense to help them without sending them away.

According to the study, there are clear answers why most of the girls in the juvenile justice system commit their offenses. It makes no sense to continue on a costly route that ignores those answers.

Most of all, it makes no sense to acclimate girls to a life of institutionalization. Especially when there's a way out.

jesus thats barbaric.....

its not so much getting arrested, i just want to do it in a way that wont raise suspicion if someone sees me... just not causing alot of noise etc