More on Boredom or Bars

Yesterday I came out against jailing kids for skipping school, opting instead to advocate for looking at the school system and determining why it is failing to engage young people. I was prompted by an article in the Seattle Weekly highlighting how truancy is being dealt with in Washington State as a result of that state’s Becca Bill. Lest I be accused of hiding facts, however, I feel it only fair to mention something else that was in the article: since the establishment of the Becca Bill, King County (including Seattle) has seen its juvenile arrest rate drop by nearly a third.

Does that change my position? I’m going to have to go with “no”.

Lets leave aside for a moment how much fun we can have with statistics. I would need to see more conclusive data than a line in a newspaper article before I accept the veracity of the assertion. And, in any case, correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. There is any number of factors that could contribute to a drop in juvenile arrest rates. Has there been a significant change in the population base? Have funding cuts reprioritized police focus? Are King County’s young people simply behaving better? These are the things I would want to look at before I bow at the alter of the Becca Bill.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say I looked at every possible angle, and the result of my investigation is that the drop in juvenile arrests is unequivocally due to the truancy enforcement of the Becca Bill. Surely that would change my position, yes?

Uh … no.

If something is wrong, it’s wrong. It doesn’t become right because it has a desired effect. The Soviet Union had one of the lowest crime rates in the world. The streets of their cities were safe to walk any time of the day or night. All it took was a complete suppression of human liberty and a totalitarian police state. But, hey, the crime rate plummeted.

Young people have developmental needs. When we fail to meet those needs, we see things like delinquency and juvenile crime. When the systems we have in place to meet those needs are failing, we should fix the systems. Incarcerating young people may … may … reduce juvenile crime (at least temporarily, until we’ve bred a new generation of institutionalized youth), but it certainly doesn’t do much to aid a young person’s healthy development.