Usdk wrote:
Are you thinking a 9 year old who stabbed his parents to death will be anything resembling a model citizen?
For two months, I shared a jail cell with a young man, about my age, who had stabbed his adoptive mother to death when he was 16.
He was one of the most good-hearted people I had ever met - very thoughtful, very compassionate, full of hope and life, surprisingly enough.
He had a very difficult life. He had symptoms of fetal drug/alcohol exposure, including slightly "melted" features and occasional lapses into characteristically infantile FAS behaviors such as body motions and repeating individual words or phrases as if they were the funniest thing he'd ever heard. His adoptive mother was a strange person - she was capable of having children, but chose to adopt instead; she was cold, glacial, distant, given to unpredictable and vindictive behavior. She had adopted him and his (much, much more damaged) brother when they were six and eight, but she was very obviously not cut out to be a parent, she basically couldn't handle bonding.
He remained in contact, even now, with his biological father, who was a lowlife pothead but not a bad person. His mother had disappeared - she was a woman of ill repute - but the state refused to give him custody, instead parcelling him out to this woman. He had been prevented from providing more than marginal moral support to the kid, but now continued to keep in touch and do what he could. He had a picture of him on the wall of his cell.
The adoptive home was in a difficult area, and the kid fell in with the wrong crowd. He got hooked on drugs by this dealer who was a sociopath. While he was high, the dealer mocked him and told him to go kill his mother. In a drugged stupor he did just that, then couldn't explain why.
At the time, I was very upset about having been arrested. Disparagingly, he said that a few misdemeanors were nothing and it was ridiculous I was brooding over my life difficulties when he was facing many decades in the penitentiary, and yet he still had hope. He was most worried that the pen would "change" him, because it changes everyone, it's incredibly brutal and destructive.
This person had tremendous strength of character and energy. Tremendous wasted potential. What would this person's life have been like if the adoptive and mental health systems hadn't totally fucked it up? Was he ever offered a choice of the life he had been compelled to live as a child? Who's to say that anyone in those shoes would have done any better?
After I got on with my life, he wrote me a letter. I misplaced it and wasn't able to get his address again because the social workers, who had known well we had a supportive relationship, insisted on their non-disclosure policy and refused to even ask him to mail me another. There was no risk, nothing to be lost - they just did not care enough to make even the slightest deviation from the most conservative professional responsibilities. I still remember how desperate he was that he remain in contact with me going into the pen - he was so frightened and in such need of real human support that the pompous and superficial social workers, caring only for their paychecks, prerogatives and drama, didn't care enough to provide, going around talking to everyone in their affected, saccharine tone.
There was one social worker who wasn't that way. I formed a good relationship with her. She, and my parents, wanted her to keep in touch but I wanted to distance my personal relationships from a clinical context. Immediately after my case was concluded, she left the field of social work, frustrated at the intransigence of her peers.
Some people say "don't judge". Everyone judges, that is life. That is the world we live in. The imperative is not to not judge, it is to judge rightly. And too many people, under the pretense of "not judging", fail to do that. People like Dvergar to whom pompous idolatry of bureaucratic lip-service to PC ideas is more important than really helping people or asking difficult questions about social institutions and their role in perpetuating human misery and injustice.
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