re: #139 InfidelOfFreedom

This is a topic somewhat personal to me because my boyfriend spent about 7 years of his childhood in the Texas juvenile system. He was a runaway from an abusive home at age 14 and got picked up for shoplifting and other typical teenage runaway offenses. He still has huge scars from police beatings he suffered as a kid despite never committing a violent offense, and he’s lucky that he was never shot because there were times they threatened to shoot him if he did not stop running.

Until he started telling me the stories from his time in the Texas system, I had no idea how awful these child prisons are. I could write a very long post about this, but I’m at work at the moment so I can’t do it justice. I would also want to run it by him first, just as a courtesy, although he is pretty open to discussing it with most people now.

All I can say, is I feel his anger at the fact that the system didn’t care that he was abused, and in fact abused him even further, robbing him of a normal childhood and education. I’ll never understand how grown adults can treat children with such cruelty.

Terrible. He’s lucky to have survived. I’ll never get that either by the way how grown adults can be so cruel to children. There’s a fucked up mindset that exists in a sub-section of our society that demands punishment above all else. The way I look at prisons and jails is this, most of these people are going to be coming out eventually, we need to treat them like human beings and allow them to become functioning members of society and treating them horribly is no way to do that unfortunately a lot of people in charge don’t think like that.