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AP: NY Juvenile Detention Centers and "Gender Expression Issues"
If the story had been how a disproportionate number of transgendered people were landing in New York's juvenile detention centers because they are transgendered; or that they were the only ones facing violent incidents, the AP piece I read today might have passed as journalism.
The AP's was a PR piece for GLBT advocacy groups which believe that transgendered young people are exercising free expression. We all have a right to free expression, however, we do not have a right to demand that the taxpayers pay for an infrastructure that favors our expression versus others'. Is that why NY Governor Paterson's comments contain a the phrase "gender expression issues"? To raise a sort of ADA aura about the policy?
Violent incidents happen in juvenile detention centers all the time, and to all kinds and categories of young detainees, yet the transgendered get special protection. This raises a question as to their capacity for adjudication in the first place, and makes me wonder of medical facilities might be a better fit.
Instead of equal protection, the State of NY gives transgendered people their own cells and private showers. It is done in the name of protecting the right to gender expression issues. However, it is really an expensive and unnecessary type of segregation, isn't it?
If "expression issues" warrant special perks in juvenile detention, then must they also be provided in jails and prisons? And if so, then what other individual "expression issues" will the taxpayers ultimately be expected to accomodate with individualized cells and extra guards and so on? This begs the question of why they have been institutionalized in the first place. How many crimes or delinquencies are related to their imposition of their "expression issues" on others?
Re: the warping of the laws and public obligations, this is on the level with California's Orwellian ban on student vocabulary that "might offend" alleged GLBT students in public schools. When an ideology so narrowly interested warps the First Amendment, it has been allowed to go too far. When it requires taxpayers to fund an unlimited criterion for subjectively determined special needs, such as "expression" issues, where does that end?
What's next, a third set of barracks for such folks in the Armed Forces? Majority norms, fairly applied and enforced are usually sufficient to protect everyone. It's when they go unenforced or disparately enforced that useless laws and policies are passed. It seems to be another species of the "hate crime" juris-imprudence suggesting that new laws ought to be passed to remedy existing laws' ill-enforcement.
I do not believe people with gender expression issues should be treated badly. But neither should anyone else. Given the nuances of human behavior in the public square, I suspect there is something much more complex at work here than a stereotypical society going out of its way to oppress people with "gender issues." Rights and responsibilities apply to all.
Comments (6)
typos:
para 3, last sentence should read:
"wonder if medical facilities would be a better fit."
para. 4, first sentence should read:
"If "expression issues" warrant special perks in juvenile detention, then must they also be provided for in jails and prisons?
June 21, 2008 1:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mike7Woodson - "Violent incidents happen in juvenile detention centers all the time,"
Actually, in my old home state,violence in juvenile detention centers did not happen often. There was a decent ration of staff members, the population is much lower than that of an adult jail. Juveniles are treated differently, and they get more protection than adults do.
Usually the biggest concern in our detention centers were efforts to escape, or for the males and female to try to lock themselves in the main room's bathroom somehow. That happened once and it took a chainsaw to the door to get them out.
If there were alot of incidents of violence, then the state would be sued, and lose.
Perhaps some states are different. Oh well.
June 21, 2008 1:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
You want to throw a transgendered individual, who was born male but identifies as female, and who has transitioned to the other gender to some degree or another, in the population with a bunch of other male detainees? What the hell do you think is going to happen to this person?
Obviously, violence in juvenile detention centers and prisons needs to be reduced across the board, but some inmates are more vulnerable than others and we have a responsibility to ensure that they are not abused.
June 21, 2008 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Akbar, what is going to happen to the persons they group them with? What will they do to each other? What did they do to get there?
I think your comments involve prison and detention conditions in general...is there anyone in there who is truly safe if they want to remain an individual and not someone else's slave or servant? Think about that for a while and then tell me about relative vulnerabilities. All you have to be to be very, very vulnerable in these institutions is yourself. And that's a real problem that is increasingly expanding beyond institutional walls into the public mindset.
June 21, 2008 8:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are offering up the same tired arguments, used against the extension of hate crimes to cover victims targeted because of sexual preferences and gender identity that fail in analysis: equal application under the law.
The fact is that there exists a tremendous variation in applicability of laws.
Should an arsonist to burned down a church out of animosity towards the sect be sentenced differently that an arsonist who burned down an abandoned building used as a crackhouse in the neighborhood the perpetrator lives in, if in both instances, there was no bodily harm, or intent to cause bodily harm?
Should a person who committed a violent felony against an individual be treated differently by the government if the victim was specifically targeted because they were:
Should an individual detained under state powers, who because of a deeply believed matter of personal conscience, follows a dietary regimen that is non-standard from the general population, be supplied with appropriate meals?
Should a society that sentences child offenders into adult penal institutions segregate them from adults who are incarcerated for child molestation?
The list of examples could continue on for a very long time. You advance a strawman argument predicated upon a sense of equality that you yourself do not adhere to.
June 21, 2008 1:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
PCyA,
The examples of categories of persons you have raised have to do with their objectively discernible identities. There are a limited number of clearly objective identifications such as child, race-A, B, C, and so on, that are indisputably matters outside of the control of the identified person. These are situations where the persons discussed have no control over their ID-features. This goes to basic human and civil rights in terms of protected classes of persons.
You are comparing such classes falsely to transgendered demands, which are a subjective set of demands that can take on as many variations of requirements for accomodation as there are folks so identifying themselves. Above I wrote that perhaps TG issues truly are matters for medical care and not for juvenile adjudication. You must have missed that, as did the other commentator.
In this case we are discussing minors. And so minority is a objective ID, or suspect class. You cannot determine your age -- it's not a fashionale variation open to subjective demands upon others. It is something all can ID with.
What I would suggest is that the juvenile justice systems are barbaric in a similar sense that some public high schools are, in that they disrespect individual variation merely by massing children together for nearly all educational and physical development needs. This is not to help them develop their full individual potential as some dreamy theorists pretend, but to utilize the herd experience to form kids into categories easily used by future employers. Perhaps individual educators, some schools and school officers try to provide a different result...it doesn't change the "mass" effect (credit to Alvin Toffler for his discussion of "massification" as something to be replaced by technology assisted individuation).
So I don't accept the straw man criticism because it just isn't correct.
You discussed segregation of convicts who were children sentenced as adults...again, their minority is an objective ID, fictionalized as majority status for the purposes of sentencing and incarceration. This is actually a legal fiction that satisfies retributive desires.
OTOH, you may speak with some in juvenile detention centers and law enforcement who fear the violent youth offenders more than the adults, because they are more volatile, unpredictable, intense and in many cases faster, more limber and sometimes stronger. It is usually only the index crime violence that gets these young people tried as adults. So sometimes putting young folks in with adult offenders might actually make them safer if you consider that child sex offenders are hated most in adult prisons and anyone fooling with a kid there takes on that status. I'd want to see data on this issue before speaking to it more.
Religious differences do not garner special cells or groupings in any prison systems I know of. They trigger access to varied chaplaincies, and sometimes not even that.
Mental disabilities vary. These are objectively diagnosible. Transgender complexes, if they are a mental disability, should mean that youth and adult offenders with such problems should probably go to a psychiatric care facility or ward.
In the main, corrections are way-out-there archaic and even barbaric. They are, I'd suggest, connected intimately with the barbaric cultural cancers that beset people in our civilization. And that's a much broader subject.
June 21, 2008 7:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
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