More intervention by DCFS is no way to stop juvenile carjackings

Subjecting people to more punitive systems doesn’t produce better outcomes, it only adds negative outcomes for the families involved.

SHARE More intervention by DCFS is no way to stop juvenile carjackings
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Chicago police investigate the scene where a 67-year-old retired Chicago firefighter was shot and killed after an attempted carjacking in the Morgan Park neighborhood on Dec. 3, 2020.

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Chicago’s recent string of carjackings has been met with an urge to blame the parents of the involved youth and call for more and earlier intervention by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. Giving in to this urge, however, absolves us of the need to dig deeper into the social, emotional and historical factors that contribute to harmful behavior and address it in ways that don’t cause additional harm.

Assuming that these youths’ parents are not adequately or appropriately supervising their children makes an enormous causal leap that weaponizes poverty and carceral system involvement against marginalized families, particularly Black families. It also assumes that DCFS intervention would have prevented these youths’ harmful behavior in the first place, which research and data contradict.

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When parents are accused of abuse and neglect, they are met with a traumatic investigation process, a lack of due process and long-lasting punishments with minimal support to meet their needs and care for their children. Their children face significant risk of negative outcomes associated with the foster system, including high rates of involvement in criminal legal systems. Black children and youth are overrepresented at every key decision point in Illinois’ foster system.

When Black people make up only 14% of Illinois’ population but 43% of children in foster care, 68% of incarcerated juveniles and 55% of incarcerated adults, we must recognize that it is the same families and communities being impacted. As renowned legal scholar Dorothy Roberts explains, there is a pipeline from the foster system to juvenile detention and the adult criminal legal system. That is often due to vulnerabilities created by the foster system itself, including the trauma of forcible removal of children from their parents. 

Subjecting people to more punitive systems doesn’t produce better outcomes, it only adds negative outcomes for the families involved. Supporting Black families means listening to them, providing them with resources they need, and investing in them and their communities without punitive strings attached.

It means finally interrupting the vicious cycle of systems that criminalize. What it does not mean is expanding these systems’ ability to traumatize Black communities under the guise of providing such support.

Andrea Durbin, CEO, Illinois Collaboration on Youth

Impeach Trump, save taxpayers money

I have heard people say that it’s pointless to impeach a president who is already out of office, but this argument overlooks the fact that we taxpayers are responsible for a lot of expenses for former presidents: $200K per year in pension; office and staff that can run two or three times that annually; Secret Service protection (over $1 million per year); medical treatment at military hospitals; and a presidential library managed by the National Archives.

All of this taxpayer expense goes away if the president in question is impeached and convicted.

There has to be some consequence for abusing the presidency. Being removed from office is one possibility, but if that is a moot point, it does not make the conviction moot. Knowing that one might lose the ex-officio perks of the presidency might serve to deter future presidents from engaging in impeachable activity. Stripping a convicted abuser of these gifts would at least save the American public a lot of money.

Kenneth Stein, Lombard

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