EVERY PARENT’S NIGHTMARE…NEWSDAY, July 23, 2011
By Andrew Malekoff
I have not been able to stop thinking about Leiby Kletzky, the 8-year-old boy taken from a Brooklyn street corner earlier this month and brutally murdered. My boys are now in their 20s and they are not Hasidic Jews, but there is something about Leiby's photo that reminds me of them when they were children.
I get chills when I recall a day when I took my boys to the multiplex theater at the Sunrise Mall in Massapequa. Darren was 3 and Jamie was 7. After a movie, we went downstairs to Nathan's for hot dogs and French fries. When we were finished, Jamie told me he thought that he left his Batman toy in the theater upstairs.
Thinking I would offer him a bit of independence, I said, "Do you think you can go get it and then come back down?" He said yes and stepped on the upstairs escalator. Darren and I waited. After a few minutes, I thought he might be having a hard time at the theater. My eyes scanned the mall. When he didn't return after perhaps 10 minutes, my worry turned to fear.
I picked up Darren so that I could move quickly (or was it so that I wouldn't lose him, too?) and I started to search. Jamie wasn't at the theater. I was frantic and looked into every store. I was sweating profusely and my heart seemed to beat through my chest. My imagination took me places I had never been before; places like the one that found Leiby Kletzky.
Then I approached a mall staff member, who led me to the security office. The security man spoke to someone on his walkie-talkie. After just about a minute, Jamie walked into the security office with a staff member. I picked him up and hugged him for a long moment.
For me, it was a moment of profound relief. Jamie seemed happy that we were together, but not upset. The time we were separated was not the eternity to him that it was to me. (He even found his toy.) I think I had emotional blinders on and don't recall if I even asked where Jamie was located.
Sometimes I remember that experience for no reason immediately evident to me. Other times it is triggered by a news story with a bad ending. Recalling those 20 or 30 minutes brings back some of the same physical sensations: The hair on my neck stands on end, a chill runs up my spine and my heart pounds.
Maybe I can't stop thinking about Leiby Kletzky because of that frightening experience at the mall. If those moments had turned into a lifetime of what the Kletzkys now face, I don't know how I would have survived. Yet, somehow, people do survive traumatic grief. Maybe it is their faith.
I heard that there were children in Leiby's close-knit community who questioned the presence of God when the boy's fate became known. How could they not? And, while I ask myself this same question that a child asks his parents, I can only hope there is a better place somewhere beyond our world that isn't so capricious and merciless to even the most innocent and precious among us.
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
IF YOUR CHILD IS NOT HEALTHY, MY CHILD IS NOT SAFE
IF YOUR CHILD IS NOT HEALTHY, MY CHILD IS NOT SAFE
Andrew Malekoff © 2010
Gladys Carrión, Commissioner of the New York State Office of Children & Family Services, oversees 26 juvenile detention facilities that hold close to 2,000 kids under 16 who have committed criminal acts. In a 2008 interview with New York Daily News, she stated that over 80% of the adolescents in this system have serious mental health problems that go untreated. Carrión described the network of juvenile facilities as a “pipeline to prison.” The system damages children and families and fails to make our neighborhoods safer.
Sara Montalbano, a social worker at North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center, who specializes in mental health counseling for delinquents and juvenile offenders and their families, has worked with a wide range of adolescents. “On one end of the spectrum,” she explains, “there are kids who were arrested for punching a hole in the wall at home. On the other end, there are kids who set fires and committed assaults and murders.” Montalbano asserted that, “There are not adequate resources to help these children and families on either end of the continuum.”
In an exposé by New York magazine (Feb. 10, 2010), it was reported that a US Department of Justice investigation found that employees in several New York State juvenile detention facilities were “restraining kids so often and with so much force that kids had endured concussions, broken teeth and broken bones.”
Since her appointment in 2007, Commissioner Carrión has closed 9 juvenile residential facilities. This has been replaced, in part, with alternatives-to-prison prevention programs that include psychiatric support and family therapy. However, historically elected officials have hesitated to support “pay now or pay later” prevention programs.
“The fundamental problem with elected officials,” according to Lee Staples, clinical professor at the University of Boston School of Social Work, “is that they almost always choose to ‘pay later’ because when the bill comes due, they frequently are no longer in the same office. They are resistant to ‘paying now’ for fear of losing the immediate votes of angry taxpayers.” This is a structural problem that works against almost all preventive programs. Add in “the paradox of prevention,” whereby the general public no longer sees a pressing problem when social programs are successful, and those same programs suddenly are at risk.
According to Dr. Staples, “We saw the phenomenon clearly in the city of Boston when gang violence spiked more than a decade ago. Some very effective preventive programs were put in place, violent crime statistics dropped dramatically, the programs were cut and the statistics almost immediately shot back up. It is not so much that politicians cannot learn that prevention really saves money but, rather, they see an imperative to act based on short-term electoral self-interest and immediate budgetary constraints – which, of course, is always present in an underdeveloped social welfare system.”
Closer to home, in 2009, then Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi threatened to shut down 43 community-based youth services that served over 60,000 children and families across Nassau County, to help close a reported $130-million dollar county budget deficit. The impact of eliminating critical prevention services would have resulted in a greater cost to taxpayers - $200,000 per year to lock-up a juvenile in a state residential facility. And, the return on the investment is poor, as almost 90% of those locked up in these settings engage in ongoing criminal activity.
The citizens that fought back to preserve youth services in Nassau County were operating at a higher moral standard than those who were counting votes. Morality aside, though, advocates for youth services have a visceral understanding about the real consequences of not supporting prevention. They are not, as the old insult goes, “bleeding hearts.” If a person supports prevention it does not mean that they excuse criminal behavior.
It does not take a bleeding heart, only a rationale mind, to know that if your child is not healthy, my child is not safe.
This Parenting Plus column by Andrew Malekoff was first published in the Anton Newspapers chain of Long Island on March 25, 2010.
Andrew Malekoff © 2010
Gladys Carrión, Commissioner of the New York State Office of Children & Family Services, oversees 26 juvenile detention facilities that hold close to 2,000 kids under 16 who have committed criminal acts. In a 2008 interview with New York Daily News, she stated that over 80% of the adolescents in this system have serious mental health problems that go untreated. Carrión described the network of juvenile facilities as a “pipeline to prison.” The system damages children and families and fails to make our neighborhoods safer.
Sara Montalbano, a social worker at North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center, who specializes in mental health counseling for delinquents and juvenile offenders and their families, has worked with a wide range of adolescents. “On one end of the spectrum,” she explains, “there are kids who were arrested for punching a hole in the wall at home. On the other end, there are kids who set fires and committed assaults and murders.” Montalbano asserted that, “There are not adequate resources to help these children and families on either end of the continuum.”
In an exposé by New York magazine (Feb. 10, 2010), it was reported that a US Department of Justice investigation found that employees in several New York State juvenile detention facilities were “restraining kids so often and with so much force that kids had endured concussions, broken teeth and broken bones.”
Since her appointment in 2007, Commissioner Carrión has closed 9 juvenile residential facilities. This has been replaced, in part, with alternatives-to-prison prevention programs that include psychiatric support and family therapy. However, historically elected officials have hesitated to support “pay now or pay later” prevention programs.
“The fundamental problem with elected officials,” according to Lee Staples, clinical professor at the University of Boston School of Social Work, “is that they almost always choose to ‘pay later’ because when the bill comes due, they frequently are no longer in the same office. They are resistant to ‘paying now’ for fear of losing the immediate votes of angry taxpayers.” This is a structural problem that works against almost all preventive programs. Add in “the paradox of prevention,” whereby the general public no longer sees a pressing problem when social programs are successful, and those same programs suddenly are at risk.
According to Dr. Staples, “We saw the phenomenon clearly in the city of Boston when gang violence spiked more than a decade ago. Some very effective preventive programs were put in place, violent crime statistics dropped dramatically, the programs were cut and the statistics almost immediately shot back up. It is not so much that politicians cannot learn that prevention really saves money but, rather, they see an imperative to act based on short-term electoral self-interest and immediate budgetary constraints – which, of course, is always present in an underdeveloped social welfare system.”
Closer to home, in 2009, then Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi threatened to shut down 43 community-based youth services that served over 60,000 children and families across Nassau County, to help close a reported $130-million dollar county budget deficit. The impact of eliminating critical prevention services would have resulted in a greater cost to taxpayers - $200,000 per year to lock-up a juvenile in a state residential facility. And, the return on the investment is poor, as almost 90% of those locked up in these settings engage in ongoing criminal activity.
The citizens that fought back to preserve youth services in Nassau County were operating at a higher moral standard than those who were counting votes. Morality aside, though, advocates for youth services have a visceral understanding about the real consequences of not supporting prevention. They are not, as the old insult goes, “bleeding hearts.” If a person supports prevention it does not mean that they excuse criminal behavior.
It does not take a bleeding heart, only a rationale mind, to know that if your child is not healthy, my child is not safe.
This Parenting Plus column by Andrew Malekoff was first published in the Anton Newspapers chain of Long Island on March 25, 2010.
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