Posted on 02/23/2009 12:11:39 PM PST by christianhomeschoolmommaof3
PITTSBURGH — A jail warden said Sunday he will ask a judge to move an 11-year-old boy accused of killing his father's pregnant girlfriend from an adult lockup to a juvenile detention center because the jail cannot accommodate the boy.
snip
Patricia Papernow, a psychologist from Hudson, Mass., and expert on blended families, said tensions from combining families, as Brown's father and Houk were doing, were "pretty normal in a new stepfamily."
"It looks awful from the outside and sort of unspeakable, but these are the kinds of feelings that are pretty normal in a new stepfamily," Papernow said. "You just hope there's not a loaded gun around."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
The point still applies. How do you teach him if you dont hold him responsible for this? It will no doubt be a hard lesson to learn but one that he must learn for his own good and the good of society. By the way, I think it was the lawyer that wanted the boy back in school. I dont think the article quoted the dad.
It said the father wanted to post bail. Lawyers don’t post bail, and whoever posts the bail is taking responsibility for the accused. If the father (and/or lawyer) was asking the court to transfer the boy to a juvenile therapeutic facility, no bail would be involved.
There’s definitely a LOT more to this story. But I completely disagree with you that the boy should be punished as a first step in learning self-control and responsibility. That’s like spanking a child for hitting a sibling, when you’ve never told the child not to do this. If he keeps doing it after being taught and corrected, that’s when punishment is appropriate and beneficial. Obviously this boy can’t be given enough freedom to possibly repeat this sort of behavior for several years at the least, but an effort at gentle correction, in a secure environment, should be the first step. For all we know, this boy has seen his father repeatedly slam the pregnant girlfriend across the room without any consequences. I just think we need to be fair about what opportunity this boy has had to develop basic civility.
No kidding. It's the latest trend. And how are the kids doing? In general, they are boiling over with rage, most of which they inflict on themselves and/or society at large.
From the article “Brown’s attorney, Dennis Elisco, said he planned to file motions on Monday asking a judge to move the case to juvenile court and to let the boy’s father post bail so the boy can be freed.
“I want him to be occupied and busy and back, essentially, in school,” Elisco said.”
The lawyer was quoted not the father.
So basically, we should have to tell the boy not to kill someone and then if he does it again we should punish him. An eleven year old boy KNOWS that it is wrong to kill someone. No one needs to teach him that. What he needs to be taught is that he will be punished for doing it. Basic civility is saying please and thank you, murder is evil. You seem to think that because he had a bad example that he should get a pass on this murder. Tell that to the children of the woman he murdered.
His family background has nothing to do with it. As a society, if we allow "gee, my childhood has been/was terrible" to be an excuse for committing a crime, then we have to let every prisoner out of every jail.
If someone ignored warnings, that's a different issue and can be dealt with under the law. But it does not negate the fact that this child needs to be punished for what he has done. He has taken two lives, for crying out loud.
If he's so insane that he didn't know what he was doing, then he needs to be committed to a facility for violent 'insane' offenders. Going to counseling while living at home is not acceptable. He's obviously a danger to others.
“Patricia Papernow, a psychologist from Hudson, Mass., and expert on blended families, said tensions from combining families, as Brown’s father and Houk were doing, were “pretty normal in a new stepfamily.”
“It looks awful from the outside and sort of unspeakable, but these are the kinds of feelings that are pretty normal in a new stepfamily,” Papernow said. “You just hope there’s not a loaded gun around.”
I beg to differ.
So do all normal people.
I’m certainly not saying he should be sent home and just required to attend counseling sessions. Home obviously wasn’t conducive to his mental health before, and it isn’t likely to be now, plus, as you noted, he’s a danger to others at this point. What I’m objecting to is dealing with this as a criminal case, and an adult criminal case to boot.
This is a child who has in all likelihood spent most of his childhoood to date in severely dysfunctional homes, and has one or more mental disorders as a result. At 11, he certainly can’t be held responsible for not removing himself from this situation and getting mental health treatment before he completely lost it. There ought to be some adults held responsible for that failure, but not the kid.
It’s very different when we’re talking about someone 18+ who commits a crime like this, after a vile childhood that did some mental damage. First of all, they DO have the option of getting out of the home and at least requesting mental health treatment (if they get turned down, and then go out and kill somebody, we need to take a long hard look at the mental health professionals who insisted he didn’t need treatment). And perhaps more importantly, when someone has reached adulthood with their head that messed up, correcting the problem at all is a long shot and at best is going to take a very long time. With an eleven year old, there’s a very good chance that spending the next seven years in some of sane setting (perhaps first a secure juvenile mental health facility, and later a well-supervised group home or foster home) will result in a mentally healthy young adult. Saddling him with an adult criminal record for something he did when he was eleven closes off many doors to a decent life, meaning that even if he arrives at 18 in excellent mental health and with a meaningful high school diploma, he’s just going to start getting doors slammed in his face and become very angry and frustrated again.
Obviously we don’t know the whole background to this, and of course it’s possible that he’s really a “bad seed” and has had a reasonably sane and stable home life, and it just didn’t do any good. But given the tidbits of info we’ve gotten so far — no mention of his mother, dad living with pregnant girlfriend, pregnant girlfriend’s brother in law apparently having not rung any alarm bells when the kid told him he wanted to kill the girlfriend, and a seven year old stepsister whose reaction to a shotgun blast in her home is to get on the school bus as usual and not say anything to the driver about a problem — just adding it all up, I expect the full picture of what’s been going on in this household is something really appalling.
And add to the evidence of insane household, the fact that the boy’s lawyer is asking for the boy to be released on bail TO HIS FATHER. The lawyer can’t be requesting that without the father’s support, so we’re talking about a father who wants the kid back home, right after the kid blew away his 8 months pregnant stepmother. As I pointed out in an earlier post, if the intention was to have the boy transferred to a mental health facility, no bail would be needed. Plus the father seems to have been totally unaware of his son’s mental instability, since he saw fit to give a him a shotgun as a present quite recently, and allow the boy to have unsupervised access to it. Sounds to me like the father belongs in secure mental institution.
I don’t disagree with your assessments and I certainly laud your compassion. However, no sane person should ever trust this broken soul living next door. Tempering compassion with public safety, the best we should ever do is remand him to a psychiatric facility for the rest of his born days. He should never, ever, ever be in a position to even view another human being without safety protocols in a controlled environment.
I disagree, simply because of his age. An 11 year old who is completely uncivilized, presumably due to lack of exposure to any civilized home life, very likely still has a sufficiently plastic brain to be turned into a normal human being. Obviously not guaranteed, but I think you’d be able to tell by the time he’s 18 or 21, whether the effort to re-raise him was succesful. I wouldn’t have the same optimism about a 17 year old who did the same thing — still a small chance, of course, that he could be re-molded — but the basic biology of brain development suggests a much smaller chance of real success, and a big chance of superficial appearance of success but a dangerous risk of sudden relapse.
At any rate, I think such decisions need to be made by medical experts in neurology and psychiatry. This boy’s individual stage of development (i.e. how far along in the puberty process he is) would have a strong bearing on how plastic his brain is. If he’s a typical eleven year old, whose voice hasn’t begun to change and who has little or no pubic hair development, then his brain is still in a more plastic, juvenile state. On the other hand, if he’s physically more mature than usual for his age, his outlook for fundamental brain remodelling would be grimmer.
I really would like to know what investigation of the family/home situation has revealed, but I suppose we won’t ever know due to “confidentiality” laws. Something just seems WAY wrong here, with the father wanting the boy back home right after he’s shot the pregnant girlfriend to death, the “in laws” who didn’t take serious action over the boy’s earlier threats, the younger sister who just got on the school bus as usual and didn’t raise an alarm about the gunshots that had just rung out inside her home . . . It’s all pretty surreal, and leads me to believe that the closest thing to a normal social environment that this boy has ever experienced is likely the inside of public school classroom.
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