Teaching Truants a Lesson..... in Evil!

Rogier van Bakel reports on the jailing of a Florida woman for not making her son go to school, even though he is older than the state’s mandatory schooling age: http://www.bakelblog.com/nobodys_business/2006/10/the_parent_trap.html.

I confess that I once served on a Florida Truancy Arbitration Board and meddled in the affairs of families of truants. Some were even old enough to drop out but had not officially done so. Accordingly, they were still truants rather than drop outs, and we could mess with them all we wanted. We never went after the parents, though, because we understood that parents aren’t really able to compel teenagers to do anything. Heck, we had truant foster kids, and the state couldn’t make them go to school either.

We were armed with a procedure known as CINS/FINS (Child or Family In Need of Services). Parents could also file CINS/FINS petitions to deal with their incorrigible children. This procedure had its roots in colonial law where parents could bring their disobedient children before a judge. In colonial Massachusetts, you could even have the judge order your child’s execution. “Son, we’ve tried grounding thee and taking away thy horse, but none of that has worked. So now we have to kill thee. This is going to hurt me more than thee.”

Of course, the state was not really equipped to provide helpful services to families with rebellious children. All we really did was persuade a judge to order the child to be obedient and go to school and to do or refrain from doing any number of things. When they disobeyed the order, they would be held in contempt and put in a juvenile detention facility. We weren’t supposed to use the juvenile detention facilities in this manner, but judges were reluctant to send the contemptuous youths to jail. The children would then languish in the system, being unable to purge themselves of contempt other than by convincing a state social worker that he or she had really learned a lesson and would be good.

This procedure never did any child any good, but it allowed some exasperated parents to take a long break from their troublesome offspring. Wealthier parents tended to put their unruly teens in psychiatric hospitals for long stays, so our CINS/FINS clientele tended to be less prosperous families or folks who had run out money for in-patient psychiatric care. The whole thing was a nightmare for the teens caught up in it. I reckon that too many parents figured that their kids would raise themselves, and they couldn't deal with the results of their negligent parenting.

I was a real jackhole for participating in this idiocy. May God have mercy on me.