First, the horrifyingly neanderthal nature of some of the comments here give you the vapors, and send you swooning into your fainting chair, as if your corset was too tight and making you lighheaded. Then when someone mocks out your pompously sanctimonious moaning, *they’re* the victim??

You must have a very rich fantasy life, don’t you?

Yeah, we get that…that is why it is, as Cynical in New York put it, fucking disgusting. To treat juvenile offenders as if they were all the same is repugnant.

Seriously look at that picture. Is that kid a murderer? I don’t know. Did he simply swipe some candy from the multiplex? I don’t know. But that either way he ends up in that facility should bother anyone with even an ounce of rationality. Seriously…that is where we send preteen offenders for swiping candy bars?

MEMO TO RETARDS:

Juvenile prisons, like adult prisons, don’t have separate facilities for people who are in for petty crimes and people who are in for serious crimes. The kid in the picture could be in for murder, or he could be in for stealing from the multiplex candy bins, or anything in between. Whatever it is, he ends up in the prison facility they have available. What you see pictured is the prison facility they have available, for whoever is being held.

Somewhere down the line, a juvenile (or adult) might be moved to one or another facility according to “security classification,” but this is not solely determined by the seriousness of the offense, and a lower-security facility is no necessarily less “crappy” than a high-security facility. What you see pictured could be low security, and there might be a high security facility that looks a lot cleaner and better.

END OF MEMO TO RETARDS

So, how do we know the kid isn’t in there for the rape and axe-murder of two elderly nuns? Or alternately, sneaking a smoke in the boys’ room? The cell is surely bleak, but what’s just out of the frame? …

I don’t think that either the offense or “what’s just out of the frame” matters.

The kid is very young, pre-adolescent, definitely not adult. No matter what his crime, no child should be confined in that manner. I would go so far as to say neither should adults.

I don’t think that I’m a bleeding heart liberal. I just don’t want to live in a medieval society.

Here is a look at it by state:
http://www.juvenile-in-justice.com/locations

Doesn’t look like they were after Mississippi in particular, but that image is one of the worst I saw.

And the point of the series isn’t to claim racism, since there are white children in the photo series.

However, I did see in one of the other pics that children can get sent to that place for a parole violation, so they couldn’t have done anything THAT bad.

David seems to sum it up nicely.

As I said in post #12, I couldn’t find any information on what that kid did to be in Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center. However, the links I posted showed photos of other people in juvenile detention centers throughout the country. Inmates were being held for crimes ranging from drug possession to murder. There’s an anecdote from the director of a juvenile detention center in Reno Nevada who recalled an eight-year-old being brought in for taking a bagel.

I was just trying to help people out. I agree that the ACLU post didn’t include any context. That is why I did the digging in the first place.

The point is that while much can be read into the image, nothing can be read out of it.

I won’t pretend to know how to handle those people who really do make life miserable and dangerous for the rest of us, but I can safely say that this isn’t it.