Hard line on Crime is being soft on Peace!

One of the toughest parts of youth reintegration is a two fold issue of perception involving public and the youth. There is the often vocal thought of being soft on crime and second is the reality of the situation a youth is raised in. Both are very difficult and complex realities to overcome.

The public perception is dealt best with focusing on the youth who are currently known to be in what is labeled as at risk situations. We also have to be aware of those who are currently in programs of reintegration. To have a grasp of the situation the best phrases that comes to mind are these:

“It takes a community to raise a child and no child starts out with the intention to be bad.”

During these time of early 2020, we are learning again the need for everyone to work towards a common goal. Raising children has always been one such common area of effort. However, at some point in history we have lost the total community mindedness to some degree. A great deal of child upbringing fell to government. As teachers, daycares and other organizations have become saddled with raising many of our children, individual responsibilities of parents eroded. Thus the breakdown in the community as a whole.

Often we see the youth who are caught up in gang violence are from marginalized groups of society. This sector of society has always been fertile ground for adults who seek to prey upon them. The children targeted in such efforts will become the adults who continue the cycle of violence. Next, on a global scale we can be very certain that the youth who are and have been “educated or brought up” in gangs/terrorists organisations will be the future leaders. Organizations such as ISIS or human trafficking networks, gangs, etc... are preparing the next ones who cause harm to future children.

As we work with the youth who have lived through such situations we can learn a great deal of what is needed and what is working. These efforts will also need deep assistance to rebuild the damage done to youth and the public. These efforts are the reintegration programs.

Even though it may appear that such programs are soft on crime, there is no such mindset of those who work to rebuild the broken trust that society deeply depends upon. Again, this is where we need the entire community to take greater steps to assist the youth if peace is ever to be achieved.

Peace begins in the mind of every individual. Without that, there is no peace. The fight for peace begins in the mind and reaches out into the community. We must work with the mindset of the youth who are currently in danger of keeping the violence going. This means we must work with youth who are involved with the sectors of society that work to destroy peace.

The perception of putting people in jails is popular. If jails worked we would not have any today. If violence worked to bring peace we would most certainly have peace already. If ignoring those who break the peace worked, we would have peace already. For those that say reintegration programs are being soft on crime, where is their evidence that what we are currently doing is working?

Then there is the popular public thought that jail will stop that one individual. What that mentality speaks to is vengance, ignorance and continuation of the reality of an unpeaceful thought process. Such thoughts will not improve the circumstances of those who have to grow up in harmful environments. Plus we have to work with those who have been labeled as threats. The alternative is a swirling sesspool of shit.

 

Some of the largest experiments of vengance have been the Nazis in 1930 Germany and Syria in 2010 and we all know what those spiraled into.