Coerced treatment..why?

[undergroundpanther]

When is Coerced Drug
“Treatment” an Alternative
to Incarceration?



..We support reforms like this because we hope they will reduce incarceration. But in many similar cases where progressives have supported those kinds of reforms in our history, they have ended up by expanding the net of social control. Juvenile courts, for example, were a progressive reform created to provide care for juvenile delinquents because punishment by imprisonment was thought, by progressives like us, to be harsh and unproductive. The juvenile courts were set up and the norms of due process were largely discarded. The format of a court was maintained, but now everyone, including the accused’s lawyer, was encouraged to see themselves as social workers, seeking to help and rehabilitate the troubled juvenile. No longer would we be just reflexively sending juveniles who committed crimes to prison—now we would be treating them, rehabilitating them, helping them, healing them. If we restrained their liberty, it would be in caring, residential treatment centers, not prisons. Imprisonment would be maintained only as leverage, as a last resort to induce the juvenile’s cooperation, to encourage him to accept “treatment.” Even the juvenile’s lawyer often became part of the process of finding out how best to threaten him with punishment so that he would accept treatment.

If you read the progressive literature of that time, around the turn of the last century, it sounds like us—full of bright promises and the replacement of incarceration with benevolent assistance. But here is what happened. Once benevolent care became the rationale and we came to believe that we were not punishing people anymore, that we were helping people to get better, we got seduced by our own language. If we’re intervening in order to help and heal, not punish, why not intervene before the crime was committed, why wait until the last minute? And so, soon it was not only juvenile delinquents (young people who committed acts that would be crimes if committed by adults) who were subject to the jurisdiction of the juvenile courts. Soon, the law gave juvenile courts the authority to use their police power against “wayward” youth, young people who stayed out too late at night, who were “incorrigible,” who were truant, who social workers found to be “in need of supervision.” No young people in these categories had committed a crime; that is, none was a juvenile delinquent. But now the juvenile court system, invented by progressives to treat juvenile delinquents less harshly, to heal instead of punish, became instead a broad net that captured all kinds of dysfunctional behaviors that were mostly a function of poverty and discrimination, over which the old, harsh system had no police power. And the new system, because it escaped the scrutiny of due process and the presumption of innocence and other protections built in to criminal systems, in time came, in the name of healing, to incarcerate and abuse tens of thousands of kids whom the old system could not reach. They were called “training schools,” “homes” and “reform schools.” But they harbored cruel punishments, including solitary confinement, and they imprisoned, yes, imprisoned tens of thousands of kids who had committed no acts that violated the criminal law.

http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/8jcl/8JCL57.htm
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(I was like those kids discribed ..It was like reading a chapter of my friggin life. I was drugged for being"hyper" the counselors who saw it fit to drug me, never asked if I was being bullied at school or abused at home.. Never did they ask that.. When I got older,and the abuse didn't stop my symptoms of mental injury got worse so I was dragged in court, for doing nothing,but being raised by assholes..and for being too intelligent, anti authoritarian, creative, not tamed enough,So I was labeled incorrigible . I got sent to a residential state home,at age 15,eventually they got rougher on me,I got more pissed than they put me in the loon bin,they kept in a damn room for 18 months,and he he me some horrid drugs...But hehe.. I am still free..fuckem all I say.)and BTW I still got a totally clean record,legally. Yet I was
locked up for years and in solitary for 18 months .Just like a criminal.


I wonder.. how many kids have been are adults this kind of thing,who are adults now, or kids ARE going through it now,..OR kids who will go through it with that "New Freedom intiative" being enforced..??


Bush cooked up that despicable initiative with that dispicable fascist shrink Sally Satel. THE Sally Satel who chickened out of attending a nationwide On Our Own conference,that I attended. I sat there with my freinds and this fascist wuss was too scared to take on some critics with hard questions.

She'll ship a lame video of herself apologizing,making excuses and propagandizing .. if SHE ain't the one controlling the scene,questions and all.. Typical for a psychopath shrink..

believe me I have seen my share of 'em... I had a front row seat and a shitload of questions ready for that cancerous creature,questioning her to explain to me how the new freedom intiative wouldn't violate my civil liberties.. all written down and she stood us all up!

Scared of a bunch of" nuts" if she ain't the one holding the restraint key. LOL..Bush co are incompetant,control freak cowards to the core.

Just some thoughts...On the artcle I Linked to and the New Freedom Initiative..

[bananas]

1. "Our social history is pockmarked with progressive reforms ..."

Our social history is pockmarked with progressive reforms that other progressives, years later, sought desperately to dismantle. And that is what worries me about embracing coerced treatment as a way of ameliorating long and harsh prison sentences.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[acmejack]

2. Sally Satel is the one has determined all the PTSD vets are frauds!