Hearts and Hands: A New Paradigm for Work with Youth and Violence.

摘要

We are in a disturbing and dangerous time in our development as a people and a nation. A Chicago Tribune article by Michael Dorning that appeared on May 7, 1997, was entitled, U.S. Rewrites the Rules on Youth Justice. The lead paragraph declared: After a decade of escalating violence, the political consensus developing in favor of fundamental national changes in juvenile justice comes down to this. A child stops being a child when he picks up a gun. The article explained how congressional Republicans and Democrats, as well as the Clinton administration, united in supporting new federal laws that would incorporate tougher approaches from various states in dealing with (for example, by mid-1997, 41 states had passed laws making it easier to try juveniles as according to the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh). California Governor Pete Wilson, in a state that already has the highest incarceration rate in the world, had a month earlier suggested that people as young as 13 be subject to the death penalty. the case of violent offenders or those involved in the drug trade, the young no longer would be viewed as more redeemable than adults, stated Representative Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) in the Dorning article. are people who we want incapacitated. These are violent predator youth. This has become the prevalent thinking permeating all aspects of our society. Schools, law enforcement, agencies, child protective services, and even religious institutions are becoming entangled in a web of policies and directives to turn our backs on a significant section of young people. We need, therefore, abroad and encompassing national debate on all the issues surrounding and violence in this country. It is time we challenged the concepts that young people are unredeemable, that superpredators are prepared to overran our streets in a generation or two, and that the only way to be safe is to build more prisons, institute zero tolerance wherever encounter programs, and take the deviants from our midst. The net effect of all this pressure is that more and more adults are being forced to remove themselves from authentic and respectful relations with children and adolescents. Professionalism has come to mean don't get involved, particularly in the emotional life of a child. The threads of community are being severed at a time when we need to reconnect them more than ever. We are seeing the wholesale abandonment of young people, particularly those most in need of guidance, resources, patience, and caring. These are primarily the young people who have already been abandoned by the economy. The 1970s through 1990s saw the greatest loss of jobs since the Great Depression. Cyclical economic crises were compounded by an important salient development: the technological shift from an industrial-based economy to one based on electronics. A new class of unemployed or subemployed people was being created as a result of the robotization and downsizing in the workplace. This situation echoes what happened at the turn of the century when millions of poor people - primarily immigrants from Europe - were forced into the most threadbare existence. In Chicago, a movement was established to address the rise in youth crime among the poor. In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Bill Ayers describes this development: Jane Addams and the dauntless women of Hull House established the first children's court in the world on July 1, 1899, in Chicago. Their goal was straightforward: to create a special, separate place for children in crisis, away from adult courts and the horrors of adult jails and poorhouses. Between 1897 and 1899, 1,705 children had been incarcerated in Cook County Jail; from 1900 to 1902 only 60 children were jailed, the rest diverted to probation and other services by the new Juvenile Court. The founders strove to develop a safe haven, a space to protect, to rehabilitate, and to heal children, a site of nurturance and guidance, understanding and