Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Thanks to the reader who sent Dawn a squib from the Baltimore Sun about a 10-year-old boy deemed a "sex offender" in Maryland.

According to The Sun, "the Cheltenham Youth Facility violated standards last year by assigning a roommate to a 10-year-old [!] sex offender who should have been housed alone, according to a state monitor's report. The offender and his 11-year-old roommate were later found 'engaging in a sexual act while locked in their bedroom' on Thanksgiving Day."

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To deal with the horrific situation of a 10- and 11-year-old showing off their peepees (an offense demanding lifetime registration as a sex offender), officials took quick action: "After the incident, roommates were split up at the cottage and bunk beds were placed in a dayroom to handle the overflow. But it didn't work. On December 5, 'staff found one of the youth involved in the Thanksgiving Day incident in the bathroom engaged in a sex act with another youth. Staff failed to properly supervise the youth during bathroom breaks,' the report said."

As Maryland's kiddie cops have found out, trying to keep pubescent boys from molesting each other is a tough, tough job-- to teach them respect, you have to spy on 'em in the bathroom! Quoted in the article was sob sister Heather Ford, a counselor. Heather called incidents like the one involving the 10-year-old "appalling," adding "I believe the institution is so broken that it can't be fixed.... We want it torn down."

Now, Dawn is certain that tearing down kiddie jails (euphemistically titled "service centers, "youth facilities," and the like) would be a good idea, but what concerns Dawn is not the peepee touching, but the violent and brutal atmosphere that pervades such prisons. "Reform" efforts led by the likes of phallophobe Heather do not reassure....