Children in the shadows

While I was getting my Master's Degree at a seminary, I worked at a children's home in Los Angeles. My professional career up to that point had been working with teenagers. The job in LA was with little ones (6-12) who had been removed from the custody of their parents (usually as a result of abuse) and, because their behavior was challenging, they'd failed in adoptive and/or foster homes as well.

Of all the positions I've had in my life, that one was the hardest.

When kids are teenagers, despite what kind of home life they have, part of the job is to work with them to take responsibility for their own decisions. When I worked with the little ones, I couldn't get away from the fact that they had done NOTHING in their lives to warrant being "warehoused" - living without adults who were crazy in love with them. But I knew that they would be the sole ones to bear the responsibility for that.

Being in seminary at the time and deep in the process of sorting through my own religious beliefs, that experience made me question one of the foundational things I'd been taught...the idea of original sin. It's clear there is evil in this world. But what is its source?

As I looked at the children in that home, I knew that some of them would grow up to do awful things. And our society would mete out punishment to them - never facing the fact that we, as a culture, had been culpable too.

I was reminded of all of that when I read this story by Leonard Pitts.

Three years ago, a 14-year-old boy named Brandon McInerney walked into a classroom at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, 60-odd miles north of L.A. He sat behind 15-year-old Lawrence “Larry” King, pulled out a .22 caliber revolver and shot King in the head. The teacher screamed. King slumped. McInerney, according to testimony, made eye contact with a classmate. Then he shot Larry King again...

Larry King, who lived in a children’s shelter, stood not quite five feet tall. He identified as gay and wore high heels and other feminine accouterments. This made him a target for bullies, McInerney among them, according to witnesses...

McInerney lived in a bedroom in his father’s house containing Nazi memorabilia, Hitler speeches and swastika drawings. His parents divorced after a violent, tumultuous marriage. His mother was once arrested for drugs. The father was an alcoholic presiding over a home so dysfunctional that, according to one report, he forbade his son to cry after punching him in the face.

Prosecutors chose to try this troubled boy as an adult for first-degree murder and a hate crime. It was a grotesque decision. You do not send a boy away for 50 years for a thing he did, no matter how heinous, before he was old enough to shave.

What we have is a tragic ending to a story that started for both of these young boys long before Brandon pulled that trigger. Is this the best we can do...wait until the unthinkable happens and then react by locking a child up for the rest of his life?

If you think this is just an odd anecdotal story about an abused child becoming a criminal - you couldn't be more wrong. Data shows that 84% of prison inmates were abused as children.

You might then assume that we don't know what to do to stop this. You'd be wrong there too. Years ago Lisbeth Schorr wrote what I consider to be a groundbreaking book, Within Our Reach, chronicling what works for what she calls "children and families living in the shadows." The trouble is, you can't franchise this stuff like you do to recreate a McDonalds. It takes real people caring enough and trained well enough to do the job.

But perhaps even more serious is that, as a country, we don't even seem to want to try. I suspect that lack of will comes partly from misunderstanding. But for some, its an extension of the same attitude that had people at a Tea Party debate clapping for execution. Its bad enough when we're talking about adults. But when we also abandon our children to either abuse or institutionalization and then carelessly throw them away in prison when that results in tragedy, we have no basis for calling this a "civilized" society.

When it comes to locking children up for life in prison, the Equal Justice Initiative is doing excellent work on that issue. If you'd like to get involved in stopping that practice, I'd start there.