Only among liberals is it deemed newsworthy that spending unsolicited time in police custody doesn't resemble a weekend at Disney.
Speaking with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow last night, NBC reporter Rehema Ellis could barely contain her disgust that juveniles arrested in Baltimore on criminal charges aren't being treated with "kid gloves." After all, they're just "kids", right?
Maddow's interview with Ellis was preceded by Maddow telling viewers that Baltimore police released 101 "protesters" due to a backlog in paperwork for their arrests and a 48-hour limit on how long those arrested could be held without charges -- yet more evidence of police brutality.
Then came Ellis telling Maddow that getting arrested can be a serious bummer --
ELLIS: One thing I should tell you right off the bat about the juveniles arrested, anywhere between 35 and some 40, it depends on the numbers that they're looking at. One thing that I heard from the public defenders because the public defenders' office is handling most of these cases 'cause people don't have the money to pay for private lawyers, 21 of those 35 or 40 cases, the public defenders tells me, are kids who've been arrested who have no prior criminal records.
MADDOW: Wow.
In other words, they can't be criminals, regardless of what they are now accused of doing.
ELLIS: So that notion that these are thugs, in terms of the juveniles, some mothers whom I talked to, they bristled at that characterization, even some fathers I talked to, they bristled at it too.
"Even some fathers" -- because men are inherently brutish or because you encountered so few?
ELLIS: They said that people have got to remember that these are someone's kids ...
First and foremost, their parents should remember this. Better late than never.
ELLIS: ... and they may have been misguided, they may have walked in the wrong place at the wrong time but they did not appreciate that title. And again, remembering they have no prior criminal record. That's 21 of the 35.
Ellis belatedly realizing that again saying 21 of 40, the range she previously cited, would cut too close to half.
MADDOW: Of the 35 to 40, do we know if all of those kids are going to end up getting charged or is that still an open question at this point?
After all, they have no criminal records, ergo, none of the violence and mayhem and destruction they're now accused of really matters.
ELLIS: Well, what's happening is that they had a mandate to try and process those kids today. They normally have between one and two courts operating in the juvenile detention court system. Today, they say, they put on two to three courts with judges on the bench dealing with these cases 'cause they wanted to process them through. We were over there until court just about ended today. It was a long day for many parents who came in at nine and they didn't see their kids until four, five, six o'clock in the evening, because they wanted to get them processed. That meant that this was a bail hearing day and so they determined that they would be released in their parents' custody for many of these kids and they will be back in court in 30 days to answer to the charges and what are those charges? Burglary -- that's a euphemism, as you know, for basically looting; disorderly conduct, which could mean throwing rocks or something of that nature. And then some of these kids are saying they just got swept up in the moment. They were in the wrong place in the wrong time and the police were coming through and sweeping people up and some parents feel that their kids got swept up that way.
Next came Ellis's description of the Soviet gulag-style brutality endured by those arrested after heaving bricks at cops and stealing everything they could carry, albeit at the wrong time and place --
MADDOW: Rehema, do we know anything either from the kids or their families or from anybody else who's been able to observe it about the conditions of confinement that these kids were held in? Obviously a lot of these kids were held for some considerable amount of time. Are there complaints about the way that they were held or the circumstances in which they were held?
ELLIS: We talked to a young man and he was very shy about it, his dad was standing next to him and his dad was unhappy about the fact that he had been arrested and he talked about, he was in a small room, it was a small cot, it was such a small cot that he literally took his blanket and he slept on the floor because it was so uncomfortable.
Aside from the kid with the lumpy cot, anyone else?
These kids were shackled. I saw these kids come out of detention after they were going into the court and to go into the court they had shackles, they had chains on their ankles.
Operative words here -- "chains." These aren't detainees -- they're slaves. Which ignores the fact that shackles are commonly used when criminal defendants are being transferred to prevent them from fleeing. Perhaps Ellis would like that chain between handcuffs to be eliminated to allow detainees more freedom while in custody.
ELLIS: A young man told me, he felt like he was in a cage and that's what they do to animals, they put chains on animals.
Gasp! Jail cells look like cages! Eerily reminiscent of prison too.
ELLIS: It was very humiliating, it was demoralizing. He said it was something that he hopes, it had never happened to him before and he hopes it never happens to him again.
From there Ellis resorted to editorializing about the need for more "services" and "education," oblivious to the fact that Baltimore ranks second only to New York City in spending per student among the nation's 100 largest school districts --
ELLIS: But it is tough treatment -- once you get picked up and swept up in the juvenile justice system, there aren't a whole lot of kid gloves that are being used to treat these kids with. And that's one of the reasons why so many people are saying we've got to do the right thing. People have got to be, uh, providing the kind of services and the kind of education and the kind of guidance that these kids need so they don't get caught up in this, because it's a very difficult system and it can be very demeaning for a young person to go through.
Surely without intending to do so, Ellis's reporting reassured many viewers that not everything in Baltimore is broken. Looks like its criminal justice system is working the way it's supposed to.
