In a sympathetic moment, the average person would readily pardon the crime of a juvenile delinquent under the assumption the youth is only a youth and they do not have the slightest clue what they are doing. But that view is changing and people, and the courts, are fed up with young people who commit crimes just because they were bored.

A rising issue in America's courts is whether to try juveniles as adults, seeing more of them are committing adult crimes, such as murder, rape, and personal assaults against law abiding citizens. Well, the fact is that juveniles have been committing crimes for many years only gone unnoticed in the media. The reason it is gaining attention in today's society is that the criminals are becoming younger, more organized, more vicious, and may it be said, more whiter.

When black-on-black crime was running rampant during the late seventies and early eighties because of the pushing of crack cocaine, and there was a drive by shooting on every urban street corner in the nineties; and even though many of the victims were innocent kids, the issue was undoubtedly winked at. Now that the criminals are young white males, and females, and the victims are other privileged whites youths, and/or their parents, the issue has attracted the attention of every neo-liberal activist group in the nation. What does this really say about the priorities of this country?

Blacks remain at second class status regardless of what successful Blacks are occupying what public office, and those who have overcome the supposed curse of poverty. While ignoring the murders and crime rates in the inner cities, suburban-class families were also ignoring the well being of their own families. Talk about irony.

Now what do we do? We watch the suburbia legacy drown in drugs, teen sex, immorality and self-pity while the urban communities recover from a long and difficult drought of the same. Now that it is a "national problem", the solution will miraculously come; one that was there all along.

Gun control, as opposed to manufacturing and shipping the Uzi's to Harlem and South Central and all the other projects of America, would be a start. Now we can curb the violence among our youth since it poses a real threat to the very structure of society. Now, we must pay attention to the demands of our children and make sure we are not setting bad examples for them to follow.

Surprisingly enough, the hypocrisy of the judicial system of this country cannot go unmeritted. When sentencing young black juvenile offenders to adulterous prison terms, although they were doing it in the name justice, the injustice the offenders suffered was not totally due to an unsympathetic mind. For, they are sentencing young white offenders to prison terms too. Racism may not be a factor in racial profiling no more than simple ignorance of the definition of true justice. In other words, the justice system of this country is not only color conscious, but they are judgmentally incompetent. They really do not know what to do with a disobedient child no matter what color. Therefore, they lock up offenders and throw away the key. They close eyes to any alternative forms of discipline and enforce laws written at the spur of the moment and based on public outcry. They choose to make an example of any child, or case, which they do not understand.

On the other hand, to be a victim of a murderer or a murdered child, one would say, yes, fry the bastard; and, to be white and the victim of a black deviant, yes, fry the bastard. Nevertheless, to be the victim in a culture that holds social norms up to the eyes of the world and then cast away one of the young bastards can be an eye-opening experience. Sad to say, America is one of the few countries that sentence juvenile offenders to the death penalty, in the company of countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq. Not even China or Russia executes or imprison children for life terms.

Racial profiling and inner city crime is not all that bad according to the judicial system compared to the school shootings and parental homicides of suburbia delinquency, you see, blacks and the gangster mentality that plagued urban neighborhoods in the past, and the stereotypes and prison sentencing slapped upon them are not the problem. The young, white children are.

© 2003 by C.R. Hamilton