V-Day Blues

Not my blues, mind you, the blues felt by children separated from their loved ones. My blues were the playoff blues as the New York Giants beat my Green Bay Packers on the way to their Super Bowl Championship. Keep that trophy warm, boys, we're coming for it next year...

I attended a Valentine's Day party this morning with my first grader. There were 14 parents in the classroom along with 18 students. The bond between parent and child was very apparent. After the party, the wonderful teacher had great love of reading week activities. Children in detention do not have those experiences with their family members and miss out on those educational and social events that help create positive and contributing societal members.

Our detention facility is one of the best (if not THE best) facilities in the country and it is the only accredited facility in the state of Arizona. The kids in detention are treated well by a staff that is well trained. There are programs in our detention center not found in many other centers, including yoga, art therapy, residential treatment readiness counseling and mentors from the Air Force base. Facilities include a full branch of the public library, in-house medical services, in-house psychiatric services, Child Family Teams (CFT) meetings that are held in detention with our mental and behavioral health Medicaid agencies, a computer lab in every living unit and an in-house detention school. What's so bad about any of that?

To start with, children are cut off from their families. They get a minimum of one ten-minute phone call and up to two one-hour visits per week. These are not contact visits. These are visits like those that you see on TV, with parents and children talking through phones and viewing each other through Plexiglas. There are 14 kids who have been in detention long enough to have had an extra visit for Christmas and New Year and five had Thanksgiving in detention as well. Their presents are sitting for them at home. So are the Valentine's Day treats, but not the cards they'd be exchanging with their friends from school.

There are teachers in detention, educational programs and even other students. What there is not is an environment that kids learn to navigate that gets them ready for a successful life. If a child gets out of hand in detention, they are sent back to their cell. They don't have to manage their own behavior, as the highly trained professionals will help them manage their behavior in a manner that will never happen when they get out of detention. They do not have the positive interaction with their peers away from adult contact and if they make friends in detention, which they will, there are good chances that those are not the friendships that law-abiding society wants to foster.

That disconnection from family brings emotional trauma to children, particularly to the 20 youth in detention under the age of 15. Our mental health partners are willing to have CFTs in detention because they recognize that a child that has lost their liberty and freedom and is separated from all the supports in that child's life is in crisis. That is why The Dangers of Detention details the number of kids that are diagnosed with depression after being detained at 33%. In addition, several studies are cited that detail that youth that are detained penetrate the system and receive longer and more severe conseqeunces than those youth that are not detained. The PDF is 24 pages, so I'll cut it off at that. For those that refute the numbers and dismiss the hidden consequences of detaining children, I invite you to read the research or provide more than your opinion on the matter. No matter how gilded a cage is, it is still a cage.

Well, I'm taking my workplace Valentine's home with me, and I will share more Valentine's with my wife and children. I am blessed to be able to share such love with my family on this day and every day. I hope you are equally as blessed. These children have found out an old axiom: one often never knows how important the relationships that are taken for granted are, until one loses them.

May God bless you!