Gordon Fitch wrote:
> He _said_ he was in Spofford.
Actually, at his age, he might have been mistaken, in good faith. After all, wherever he was he must have been under extreme stress.
>
> I'm sure the routes through
> the mill change from time to time.
Yes, but the distinction between the foster care and juvenile justice systems has been the same for decades.
>
>
> It's really a difficult situation. You have a community which
> has been severely damaged by racism and economic oppression
> as a mostly sealed-off enclave within a larger community which
> is increasingly subject to control addiction and hysteria.
> Much of the anxiety of the larger community is projected onto
> the smaller one, giving rise to political behaviors which
> cause further damage. You can try to step into this maelstrom
> to rescue an individual here and there, but it's delusional
> to suppose that anything short of a fundamental, revolutionary
> change in social relations and institutions will make a
> substantial difference to the majority.
I agree, of course. This is one of the reasons why I am in favor of legalization, with regulation of substances now banned. Even the use of quite benign substances, as people said on another recent thread, introduces the cash nexus, reification, competition, and, as a result people treating each other in dangerous ways. Including episodes of extreme child neglect. Heroin is a threat to the ability to parent. Crack is infinitely worse. Things are much better now, but I recall very vividly the first time the emergency room where I work got an advisory to look out for a child whose mother had forgotten where she had left her while high off crack. The worst I can recall was a seven year old girl whose crackhead mother prostituted her to grown men so as to earn crack money. The market is a rationally distributive mechanism of course.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema