Privacy carried too far

Anything carried to the extreme usually has unexpected consequences and this is a good example. Privacy laws to protect juvenile should be limited to status offenses and not to serious acts of delinquency. The public has the right to some protection and in this case, providing the video would probably prevent future assaults by the offender. D.C. Juvenile Detention Officials Won't Provide Videos To Police ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Police who responded to a disturbance Sunday at Washington, D.C.'s juvenile detention center made what should have been a routine request: to view surveillance videos to determine responsibility for the assault of a staff member and other possible crimes. Instead, they ended up in court because the city's confidentiality laws for juvenile offenders precluded release -- even to the police -- of this material. How much more absurd does the situation have to get before the D.C. Council does something about rules that show more regard for those who break the law than those who need its protection, asks the Washington Post in an editorial. A worker at the center had his jaw broken and three other staff members were injuired in the hour-long melee. It appears the incident started when a group of youths objected to the end of a basketball game and refused to return to their housing units. The police investigation was momentarily stymied when the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services cited a confidentiality statute in refusing to make information available. There are good reasons for protecting the privacy of youths who commit crimes; mainly, so they can have the chance of rebuilding their lives without the lifelong stigma of their youthful offenses. But Washington's laws are overly broad and unusually strict, making it a crime for anyone to release any information about a juvenile case. Attorney General Peter Nickles, who is reviewing the juvenile justice system, said he's increasingly convinced that strict confidentiality laws harm public safety by shrouding the system in such secrecy that public confidence is undermined. Washington Post

Connecting Prisoners and their children

This topic is mentioned in the text.

Prisons Work To Reconnect Inmate Fathers With Their Children

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More than 1.7 million children have a parent in U.S. prisons, says USA Today, citing the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of children with a father in prison grew by 77 percent from 1991 through mid-2007. And those children are two to three more times likely to wind up behind bars themselves, says Christopher Wildeman, a University of Michigan sociologist who has studied the effects of imprisoned parents.

To combat that trend, Louisiana's Angola prison and other institutions across the U.S. sponsor two programs aimed at reconnecting prison dads with their children: Returning Hearts, a day-long carnival-like celebration where inmates spend eight hours with their kids, and Malachi Dads, a year-long training session that uses Bible passages to help improve inmates' parenting skills. Inmates must show good behavior to participate, says Angola Warden Burl Cain. Once they feel reconnected to their family, their attitudes improve, he says. Around 2,500 inmates have participated in Returning Hearts since it began in 2005. Malachi, which started in 2007, currently has 119 men. "The ones who were problematic before are not problematic anymore," Cain says. "Prison didn't straighten them out; their kids straightened them out."

USA Today

Supreme Court has a new Miranda decision

In the past the Supreme Court required that a
suspect must clearly and unequivocally
state the desire to have a lawyer. The Court
has now gone a step further.

The Court has now held that if a suspect wishes
to remain silent (the first of the Miranda Rules),
the suspect must clearly state that he/or she
is invoking the constitutional right to remain silent.

Somehow the idea that one must speak in order
to remain silent is strange to write or even talk about.
But the Court has over the years endorsed Miranda
while requiring that a suspect articulate any
rights that are to be invoked.

Once a right is invoked by articulation, there
is no longer any question that police must
stop all interrogation and not ask any
further questions, no matter how much
time has passed.

The suspect could still contact the police
and inform them that he/she no longer
wishes to invoke silence, but without this
articulation, interrogation could not be
used as evidence, nor anything said ever
used in any manner to make a case
against the suspect.

The bottom line is that anyone who wishes
to utilize a right must clearly state the intention.