The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [48]
Only a patient reader learns how far from normal was Jacob’s larger reality. Well into the article, the reporter lets us know that Jacob lived in a crack house and that his father, who used to beat his mother, was murdered when Jacob was four or five, about the same time that Jacob witnessed one of his seven siblings get shot in the face. Jacob’s mother, raped when she was in seventh grade, had once sold her children’s clothes for drug money, according to court documents. When she testified in court on Jacob’s behalf, she was drunk.
Perhaps if journalists talked more with children, as Margaret Tinsley of the Daily Telegraph in London did, they would come to see the folly in purveying an impression that every kid is at risk of becoming a killer. When Tinsley spoke with her ten-year-old son about the widely publicized story of two boys his age who abducted a toddler from a shopping mall and brutally murdered him, the child was totally baffled. “What’s the point? Why would they want to?” Tinsley’s son asked her. When Tinsley drew a parallel to bullies at his school, he balked. “That’s different. They’re your own age. Hurting a baby is just stupid. Like pushing over an old lady,” the boy avowed.51
The Telegraph, along with the rest of the British media, had gotten swept up in speculation about what this murder meant about the decline of civilization. A more reasonable response, Tinsley recommends, is to see young murderers for the exceptions that they are. “A child who has grown up with any love at all, who has had a reasonable amount of self-respect left intact, may succumb to greed or mischief or anger or panic. But he or she will not see ‘the point’ of gratuitous cruelty, any more than my son did,” she notes. “Our growing fear of children is itself a great social evil,” Tinsley correctly concludes.52
Stupid Policy Tricks
Our fear grows, I suggest, proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt. By slashing spending on educational, medical, and antipoverty programs for youths we adults have committed great violence against them. Yet rather than face up to our collective responsibility we project our violence onto young people themselves, and onto strangers we imagine will attack them.
For young people who go astray the consequences of our projections are dire. The more fearful people are of crime, the more punitive their attitudes toward juvenile criminals, studies show, and politicians capitalize on this correlation to build more and meaner prisons. “We must shift the focus of the juvenile justice system from rehabilitation to punishment,” Bob Dole proposed during the 1996 presidential campaign, ignoring the fact that many juveniles serve longer sentences than adults for the same crimes, and that many juvenile facilities, grossly overcrowded and understaffed, provide rehabilitation services in name only. At $30,000-plus per youth per year and with 100,000 youths behind bars on any given day it is the prison-industrial complex, not American society, that comes out the big winner from laws mandating longer and stiffer sentences for juveniles. In a page-one investigative piece in 1998 on a privately operated juvenile prison in Louisiana that he described as “rife with brutality, cronyism and neglect,” New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield noted that some of the worst conditions in juvenile facilities nationally are found among privately operated prisons.53
Other research on private prison