Delinquents

I know I said I'm on strike, and I am, but the strike has lasted much longer than I thought it would, and there's been something on my mind for rather awhile that I wanted to discuss.

The tone of this blog is mostly lighthearted and often downright silly, but this is something serious that has been bothering me for months.

I work for a non-profit with children and adolescents in a wide variety of areas and ways, and one of the things I do is work with teens who have been sentenced to community service for various crimes, from fighting in school, to stealing bikes, to breaking and entering to assault. I fondly refer to them as My Delinquents.

Everyone can (probably) agree that breaking into people's homes, dealing and doing heroin and meth and etc, destroying others' property, and assaulting classmates are bad things. But it doesn't follow that the kids who do these things are bad kids. Not necessarily. In the last few months I've seen between 20 and 30 of these kids in and out of here. There crimes and their sentences have been extremely varied, and so have they.

The problem with this is that I can't say much about anything, but I can at least say that I have had boys and girls come through who were friendly, polite, sweet, hard working and seemingly responsible. Working with them I can have great conversations, and after a few days or a few weeks I still can't imagine what they could possibly have done to get themselves sentenced to as many as 100 hours. I've had a few favorites over the course of these months, kids I was actually sad to see leave even though I know it's probably better if I never see them again.

Example. I had a girl come in with 20 hours for getting into a fight in school. I really liked working with her. She was nice, liked to chat, did everything she was asked to do with no attitude, always smiling. Towards the end of her time with us, I asked her, baffled, what she could possibly have done to get in trouble. She had gotten into a fist fight with another student in school over something that student had said to her. I won't repeat it, but I agreed that the other student probably deserved a few punches in the face. However, actually doing it, especially in the middle of the cafeteria, was a POOR DECISION. She agreed with me.

She left, and even though I missed her happy presence, I was hoping to never see her around here again.

She came back last week with another 20 hours.

I had a boy awhile back with an insane number of hours. I still have no clue what he did, but all the clues point to it being something particularly bad. He too was a favorite, and definitely is missed. Fortunately though, I do really doubt he will be back. I hope I'm right.

This job really brings home the idea that a single bad decision can completely turn things around.
It's upsetting to watch these kids make these decisions that now put them in my care, and will possibly someday put them in jail. Or dead.
That's really all I have to say.