As we reported on Ash Wednesday, The Philadelphia Inquirer gave OpEd space to three Montclair State University ‘academics,’ in which they argued that the barins of teenagers are not fully matured by age 18, and that they should usually be treated as juveniles for several more years, to give them a chance for rehabilitation. Well, it was just a day later, that the newspaper gave more OpEd space, for two more activists to make the same point:

Locking teens up won’t make our city safer. It will have the opposite effect, and here’s why.

When young people commit nonviolent offenses, they should be able to learn from and make amends for their poor choices. We hope our new police commissioner knows this.

by Donna Cooper and Anton Moore, For The Inquirer | Thursday, February 15, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST

While it is incredibly welcome news that gun deaths in Philadelphia decreased in 2023 from the peaks of the COVID-19 years, there is so much work that needs to be done to prevent people — especially our young people — from going down the path that leads to violence.

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s selection of Kevin Bethel as police commissioner is a good one because — as the former chief of school safety — he has the right mindset and experience to invest in our children. Commissioner Bethel recognizes that the brain isn’t fully developed until a person’s mid-20s, which means young people make reckless decisions at 16, 17, and 18 years old that they would likely never make in adulthood. When those reckless decisions are nonviolent offenses, it is undeniably better to give children and teens the structure to learn from and make amends for their poor choices, not lock them up.

One obvious point: juveniles who are incarcerated are not out on the streets able to commit further crimes.

We have hope that Bethel understands this. He successfully led an expansion of the Philadelphia Police Department’s school-based diversion program, which responds to low-level misbehavior — like marijuana possession or bringing scissors to school — by linking kids to supportive services, instead of arresting them. These alternatives include academic support and mentoring to identify reasons why kids may be acting out. Since 2013, arrests in Philadelphia public schools have gone down by over 90%. (Bethel’s diversion program began in the 2014-15 academic year.) Youth in the program were also less likely to be suspended or arrested within five years after they went through the program than those students who were arrested at school.

We need to bring this same approach of diversion over arrest to the community.

Uhhh, the problem isn’t teens bringing scissors or pot to school; those things don’t get teens arrested on Philly’s streets. The problems are theft, destruction of private property, carjackings, shootings, fatal beatings, crimes which have identifiable victims.

Further down:

And yet, too many people assume that the only solution to stop youth crime is to lock children up long term.

While there are times when detaining teenagers is warranted, it cannot be the first and only response if we really want to end violence, because it doesn’t address the reasons so many kids are committing crimes in the first place.

Actually, it can. The criminal who is incarcerated or not incarcerated is not the only one who is learning a lesson here. The criminal, teenaged or otherwise, who is not incarcerated, who is treated as leniently as Curtis Wallace, Jr, was, learns the lesson that he’ll always get cut a break; that’s not a lesson the article authors have contemplated.

But it’s also the people around the malefactor who learn a lesson, the lesson being either that, hey, Curtis got busted, but was let go, so I’ll get let off, too, or the lesson that, dang, Curtis got busted and drew ten years in the state pen. The teenaged delinquents the authors contemplate getting whatever services and education that they expect might get that, were they to get their way, but the kids around the leniently treated criminal won’t; they’ll only see that their buddy got away with it.

Philadelphia needs to invest in a full array of services, including prevention and community-based services, to stop the cycle of arrest and incarceration. And we have the funds to do it: A recent economic analysis of the Philadelphia juvenile justice system showed an estimated $17 million in unspent funds each year — money that could be invested in evidence-based solutions that actually reduce crime by helping young people understand how to make better choices and make amends with those they’ve harmed.

And there we have it! The authors were very careful not to use the term “restorative justice,” that leftist prosecutors like Larry Krasner and Pamela Price like to employ, but that’s what “make amends with those they’ve harmed” means. And every place the George Soros-sponsored liberal prosecutors have taken power, crime rates have soared. The lessons of leniency have been well learned, as people with bad intentions have learned that they’ve less to fear than before. Even in the semi-deranged brains of the criminals, cost-benefit calculations are made, even if in forms we wouldn’t necessarily see as reasonable.

I have more than once mocked Mr Krasner as having a diabolically brilliant plan to get criminals off of Philly’s streets: keep excusing them and excusing them and excusing them until they commit a crime which gets them locked up for life, or, more efficiently, killed. That has been the result in the City of Brotherly Love. The problem with the authors’ OpEd is that they are taking seriously the notion that crime by juveniles should be excused, better to teach them a lesson.

The authors used the appointment of Kevin Bethel as their starting point, and even concluded with an appeal to him concerning ‘diversion’ of arrests to some sort of better program. But the duty of the Police Commissioner is to police the city. Even if the Commissioner believed in such diversion programs, such programs would be the purview of agencies outside of the Police Department.

We’ve actually seen such a ‘program,’ though not really stated formally, before, as the Broward County Sheriff’s Department kept letting Nikolas Cruz go, time after time, for his misdemeanors and even a couple of felonies. The school board did the same thing, keeping him out of the so-called ‘school-to-prison pipeline.’ Thus Mr Cruz had no criminal record, and was legally able to purchase the AR-15 with which he shot up the Margery Stoneman Douglas High School, sending 17 people to their deaths, and wounding 17 others.

He could have been in jail on St Valentine’s Day of 2018, but the leniency of the left kept him free as a bird. That is what such leniency does.