Only 15 days...

There are only 15 days, 20 hours, four minutes and 31 seconds left as I write this. Left to what? What important event occurs that has a year round tracker on the precise date and time of the event? Is that when the Supreme Court will review their first case of the year? Is that when Congress is first in session for the year? Is there some vote that happens on that date? Nope. Those are far more grandiose than what this is tracking.

The tracker I look at almost daily is for when the NFL Draft starts. Yep, courtesy of http://www.nfldraftcountdown.com/, I am waiting for that first round to begin. Now, once the draft is over, the new countdown starts, but no one pays attention to it until their team's season is over. Thankfully, I had a rather late start as far as checking in on the rankings of college players, viewing the never-ending supply of mock drafts and checking to see when the NFL draft starts.

If you are not a hard-core football fan, this will not seem important. Even if you are a hard-core football fan, you probably realize it is NOT important, but it is something that interests me a great deal. There are also thousands upon thousands that eagerly wait for any football related news in the off-season. That's an amazing thing to me, that so many of my fellow humans can be so intensely interested in an unimportant subject in the grand scheme of things. I often think that's why they are so interested in that subject, as paying attention to and acting on important matters takes a lot more effort and a lot more courage. Speaking of which, I received the newest copy of the CJNY (the Community Justice Network for Youth) newsletter today and would like to share a couple of paragraphs written by the Director of the Burns Institute, James Bell.

"It is up to us to turn motion into movement by giving young people our hearts, our sense of urgency and love. After all is said and done, justice is what love looks like in public and democracy is the flower that is nurtured by justice. We cannot have one without the other.

No act is too small, no gesture too humble to be unrecognized by our young people. I challenge you to be a champion. Quit waiting for someone else to make moves or “take the lead”. Hell, you be the change you’ve been waiting for."

My favorite line is that, "Justice is what love looks like in public and democracy is the flower that is nurtured by justice." I'll be using that line frequently in the future and hopefully I'll remember to credit James as the source. The rest of the front page of the newsletter is also well written and talks about the overuse of detention and how there are places that are not treating young people well. I am thankful that I work with an organization that has excellent facilities and a well-trained, caring staff.

That being said, no matter how gilded a cage is, it is still a cage. No matter how nice and caring the strangers that take care of you in detention are, they are not your family. They won't be coming home with you. The artificial environment created in detention does not prepare you to handle your real-life problems. You don't excel in your education. If the only thing keeping you away from using drugs is a cage, as soon as you are released from the cage you'll start using drugs again.

Too many children being detained are not a high risk to my community's safety, proven by qualified professionals studying the issue and validating that the release of these children is an appropriate response that does not increase crime in the community and that 9 out of 10 of those kids released will have no problems prior to their court date. Too often they aren't given the chance to show responsibility after a major life event. Too often they are presumed to be guilty and not innocent of the crime they were arrested for. Too often we rely on what we emotionally feel is the best thing for that child rather than absorbing the data on why detention is not good for children or that most likely the kid will be better off not being detained than staying in detention.

My shout out this month is to D.A. He is a colleague and he sent me this YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UVyjf5DcIU. The title of the video is The Confessions of a Racist. He created the video and it is definitely worth a look.

Well, I waited overnight before publishing this and we're now at 15 days, zero hours, 38 minutes and 14 seconds... But who's counting?