Pamela Price has a right to her beliefs. One of her beliefs is that “children,” which is to say anyone below the age of 21, should not be punished with the full force of the law, no matter how evil the criminal act they committed may be. Thus, she said the other day: “Anytime we take a child into custody, we are impacting that child in a very deep way. And my charge is to make sure that the system does not destroy them.”
In fact, Pamela Price doesn’t want “children” to be arrested at all. Now, we all know that some of the “children” Price is so dedicated to helping out are monsters. With their fetish for guns and an almost complete absence of empathy or morality, they kill and maim Oaklanders. They don’t like to work normal jobs (and in most cases have no qualifications to do so), so they make money through criminality. That means that your car, your wallet, the sanctuary of your house or apartment is wide open to them, if they want to take it. Therefore, when Price says that “we are impacting that child in a very deep way” if we take him into custody, she conveniently overlooks that fact that the “child” already is damaged and dangerous. She also overlooks, deliberately, the “impact” the “child” has on the rest of us. This impact clearly is a negative one. The reason so many people are reluctant to walk the streets after dark is because nighttime is when these feral “children” emerge, in their search for prey and loot.
I get so tired of this ongoing debate about how to properly deal with criminal young people. Whatever happened to punishment? Several millennia of human experience has shown that “spare the rod, spoil the child” is a basic truth. Children are feral. They have yet to learn the basic rules of civilized conduct. Learning is a slow process that takes many years, and in some cases is never accomplished. Humans also have learned the necessity of isolating feral individuals for the greater good of society. It may be sad to see a young person willingly throw his life away due to the personal choice of being a criminal, but that person made the choice, and thus has to live with the consequences.
The threat, therefore, that Pamela Price poses is that she will refuse to indict criminals below the age of 21, in the mistaken belief that they are “children” whose lives can be salvaged. In some cases, this may be true. In many cases, it isn’t. We can’t know whether any particular criminal can be rehabilitated in advance, because we’re not fortune tellers. My preference, therefore, is to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst: in other words, common sense. Consider, say, a 17-year old male who’s just been arrested for shooting someone in a drug-related gang war. That male already has a long record of crimes, including auto theft, assault, illegal possession of a firearm and parole violation. Is it likely that the young man will be rehabilitated? Or do the odds favor a continued pattern of criminal behavior, becoming more and more frequent and violent as he enters his twenties?
Pamela Price says, “Oh, he’s just a misguided boy, driven to making mistakes by a racist culture of white supremacy and vicious cops.” I say, with all due respect, “Ms. Price, you’re out of your mind.”
Steve Heimoff