I wrote a post a few weeks ago arguing in favor of abolishing the age limit on the right to vote. I want to follow up that proposal by arguing in favor of abolishing prison time for people under the age of 25.
Here’s what it means to work at a therapeutic school: never giving up on a child. A lot of the kids we get at our school are on their way down the drain of life. Their parents (or usually at least one of them) have abandoned them. Their schools have either asked them to leave or admitted that they don’t know what to do with them. Their friends have either never appeared or, in almost every instance, rejected them. They’ve been told in ways both verbal and nonverbal that they aren’t worth anything and that no one could ever love them; and like that, dripping wet with the sloppy shit of society’s refuse, they arrive at our door.
And the first thing we tell them is that we will never let them go. We’re like Robin Williams’ character in *Good Will Hunting*: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
Today, the Vermont State Supreme Court agreed with over a hundred years of state precedent to declare that an 18-year-old boy (from my hometown) who had undeniably taken several positive steps towards enacting a mass shooting at a local school, and despite those undeniable steps, the state could still not hold him without bail.
The finding goes deeper than that, however, because the decision to overturn the lower court’s ruling registers a formal level of doubt regarding the state’s original charges against the boy. Due to legislative reasons and over a hundred years of precedent, to maintain the lower court’s ruling, the justices would had to have found, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the boy *was going to attempt* the shooting; fortunately or unfortunately, the justices were not able to do that.
Now, that same formal level of doubt called for by the justices will be in the instructions given to the jury when the state asks them to convict the boy to prison. But if several justices can’t convict him to be held without bail because all of the available evidence doesn’t support the state’s argument beyond a shadow of a doubt, then a jury shouldn’t be able to convict him of that either.
Essentially, today’s opinion explained all of the reasons why the boy should be declared not guilty: because he did not do the crime with which he is being charged. Faced with the climate that has arisen in this country in the aftermath of Parkland, the state’s prosecutors overreached and charged the boy with something that would make big headlines in terms of the story —— maybe not necessarily for selfish publicity, but maybe as a kind of warning to other potential shooters; unfortunately, they charged him with a crime that he, in all good conscience, did not commit. He did not yet *attempt* the mass murder; he had taken steps toward it, but there were plenty of steps left for him to take, and he was capable of changing his mind, for whatever reason, at any moment. He truly is not guilty of the crime for which is being charged.
But that’s not to say that this young boy belongs on the streets. In their ruling, the Justices suggested that, even if he did make bail, the lower court could reasonably keep him under watch for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which, while not being prison, still registers in a real and formal way the Justices’ specific distrust of the boy.
This boy is eighteen years old. I know next to nothing about him except for what I’ve read in the papers, read in his journal (which he titled, “Journal of an Active Shooter”), and what people have said about him around town. I’ve never met him and I don’t know his family, but by all accounts, including his own, whatever caused him to want to do this had nothing to do with his family.
This is a boy who, for whatever reason, is sick, and he needs some real help. We — the real human beings who make up our community (town, county, state, nation, earth) — need to step in and give him some help, if not with our hands and hearts, than at least with our tax dollars (which ought to be considered just another way of saying “our charitable donations”).
We don’t need to exile this boy. He is eighteen years old. Everything we read and everything we see tells us that adolescence lasts longer and longer. This is not just a cultural reality; it’s become a biological reality. Americans reach puberty at earlier and earlier ages, and they’re dependent upon their parents for longer and longer amounts of time. Adolescence is no longer just the teenage years. It extends from 10 or 11 all the way to 23 or 25, and sometimes even longer. There’s a reason the Affordable Care Act gave children the right to stay on their parents’ health insurance for longer: today’s kids are dependents for longer.
This boy is eighteen years old. He’s not an adult. Just because we, as a society, can put a gun in his hand and send him off to war, that doesn’t make him an adult. It makes him young and vibrant and able to fight and march for longer periods of time than people who are in their thirties and forties. It makes him less attached to the next generation of kids and less burdened by mature responsibilities. We don’t send 18 year olds to war because they’re adults; we send them exactly because they’re *not* adults.
No one who is eighteen years old ought to go to prison for life, and I’m not sure they ought to be sent there at all. Prison is exile. Prison is society saying it’s done with you. Prison is saying, quite explicitly, “It *is* your fault.”
I want to make it clear that everything I say for this eighteen year old white boy from rural Vermont stands true for the eighteen year old black boy from urban California. Eighteen year old kids should not be sent into social exile, I don’t care what color their skin is, what societies they grew up in, or what their crime was.
Eighteen year old brains are still in development — socially, emotionally, intellectually, and physically — in ways that twenty-five year old brains are not. They are, in all instances, still works in progress, and they ought never to be abandoned.
This is not to say that this boy — or the eighteen year old frat boy who rapes a girl on campus, or the eighteen year old black boy who stabs a grocer for his cash, or the eighteen year old Latino boy who murders his girlfriend in a fit of rage, or the eighteen year old Asian girl who smashes her guitar into a club owner’s face — ought to be free. I think it is completely fair for society to tell these children that their behavior will not be tolerated and that their judgement cannot be trusted, and to then remand these individuals to a place of socially provided care where they can receive food, shelter, therapeutic treatment, and both a liberal and a specialized education. And it ought to also say to them, at every instance, “It was not your fault.”
Will Hunting was worth saving not because he was a genius, and not because he was white. He was worth saving because he was just a kid.
And so is the boy who wrote, “The journal of an active shooter,” who had recently purchased a shotgun and documented his plan to purchase both an AR-15 and a deadly handgun, and, on top of that, had documented the ever-approaching dates for when he planned to carry out the shooting.
Because as guilty as he is of planning to commit mass murder, it is still, at bottom, not his fault, and more than anything, we need to show him, in every way possible, that we are here to help.
XXX
Nihilism. That’s what we are fighting.
John Goodman had it right: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
Nihilism feels no connection to anything, and it has no answer to the problem of suicide. If nothing matters, you don’t matter and I don’t matter, and then what’s the matter with a little mass shooting before I check out, you know, just for the thrill of it; plus, think of the publicity!?
Everyone who is not a nihilist knows that that way of thinking, that way of feeling, is wrong. We don’t even need to be convinced of it, and frankly, we’re a bit scared of people who feel that we ought to be convinced it, as if there were some plausible reason we ought to doubt it.
Of course walking into a room full of people and shooting them without mercy and without even really any passionate sense of anger is wrong. Of course it is. Why would anyone want to even discuss it, except to maybe make a joke (because, hey, for real, even jokes about school shootings can be funny)?
Arguments in favor of nihilism serve no point — literally, they are *in service* to nothing, to non-existence, to the real and true sense of an absence in the face of an everything.
It’s like pointing behind you at a giant emptiness and screaming at everyone in front of you, “Look at that! Don’t you see!?” and we follow your finger to find *the point* and we don’t see anything at all. And you say, “Yes! Yes! That’s the point!”
At which point, most of us turn to look at each other, and in each other’s faces we see, you don’t understand it all.
“Come here, my child. It’s not your fault. Society hasn’t done a good enough job with you yet. You’re still a work in progress. And you still deserve nothing less than our love.”
XXX
The name of the school where I work is based on the idea that a child is like a gemstone of jade and that society ought to be like a jade carver. Faced with any individual piece of jade, a jade carver knows she cannot bring any intention to the stone other than to help it become a socially-pleasing version of itself, something that other people can look at and allow themselves to be amazed by. If the carver tries to make the stone anything other than what it seems to want to be, the jade will crack and all of its potential will be lost, its destiny to now become less than what it oought to, by its own accounts, have become.
As the adults in a place where society sends its most challenging children, we do what everyone else has refused to do — we let the child become the adult he or she wants to be, and we do it while being caring, trusting, challenging, and non-threatening in every way we can imagine.
My school would not be able to handle the boy who has been accused of attempting to commit mass murder. Our model depends on trust, and this boy has demonstrated he cannot yet be trusted.
But I hope that there is a place where the spirit of our model can thrive while keeping the children within it wholly contained, much like the way plants can thrive despite being kept within a properly maintained and properly cared-for greenhouse.
My school is more like a raised-bed garden: there’s some structure, sure, but it tries to stay as open to nature as possible — which means it also lays itself open to attack.
My school couldn’t foster a nihilistic weed without choking off the oxygen to a garden’s worth of other plants. If the weed is going to be *allowed* to grow, it will need to be kept in its own roomy and healthy pot — until, that is, it can evolve into something else, something capable of existing within the larger ecosystem of the garden.
(Sure, I murdered the metaphor, but that doesn’t make it any less true).
Just because my school can’t handle him doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve all the positive things my school’s model can do for him, and I sincerely hope the state considers caring for him in my school’s specific kind of way.
To want anything less for this boy — or for any child convicted at his age — is to live a life without a sense of mercy, and for anyone who lives life like that, I simply feel sorry, because true mercy — *Jesus-level* mercy — is a beautiful sense for each of our spirit’s to feel.
May society help this boy’s — and all accused children’s — still-forming spirit to heal.
