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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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He's not making them worse, he's reducing the 'excuses' progressive DAs and judges have. ...Ideally you want all of them on programs as soon as possible so that when they inevitably fail, they can't so easily be 'put on a program'.

If that was how it would work out, it'd be great. But I'll tell you what will happen; back when I worked in local education, there was (still is) a programme for early school leavers (the idea is you get the kids who drop out of full-time education before legal school-leaving age and get them into a programme that will give them some basic life skills, some training, and steer them towards doing job courses rather than hanging around idle and getting into petty crime. They get paid a training allowance to make sure they attend).

The problem is, as soon as some budding Napoleon of Crime ended up in court, the first thing their lawyer did was plead with the judge that Junior Capone here was going to turn his life around and had a place on said course, so sending him to jail would ruin all his chances.

Very often the little tyke had no such place, because we didn't want him, because we knew he had damn-all interest in turning his life around. But judges love to show off that they're not the bad old judges of the past and even if they're middle/upper-middle class and well-off, they're down with the youth and the underprivileged, so this often worked.

So then we'd get lumbered with someone only interested in weed (they'd smoke right outside the front door of the building), porn (guess what they went looking for with access to computers during IT training classes), and easy money, who had no intention of doing anything but going back to their life of petty crime once the programme was finished. They had terrible attendance and no interest at all in learning anything, and indeed would spend class times winding up others to cause a melt-down so the staff were busy dealing with the results of that and Junior could skive off.

So I'm forecasting that even for adults, it will be a case of "yes, Your Honour, my client was sent on three different programmes which he failed to complete or even attend, but this time it will be different if you give him a chance on this new programme!"