ryann meer

I am a public defender and I have posted about this a lot. Here are some of these posts.

How Does Court Work?: An Explanation of WTF is actually going on in the courtroom and the jails.

Part 1: Police Investigations: How do cases start? Why are police so bad at investigations??

Part 2: Bail and Arrest, or: So You've Stumbled On the Philosophical Problems Inherent in Paying Money to Get Out of Jail

Part 3: What is Trial & How?, including preliminary hearings, what makes a jury "grand," and how trials work

Part 4: Punishment, Rehabilitation, Deterrence & Incapacitation: Why Prison

Part 5: Probation and Parole, which is for some reason considered an "act of judicial grace" by the case law

Juvenile Law: I had no idea when I wrote these that any of these posts would be popular but some have proved to perform like absolute bangers on Tumblr. Mind-boggling.

What is funny about being a juvenile defender is that I never really liked children

How to interview children (people really fuckin vibed with this one for some reason)

Children, discomfort, and the Internet (minors are OK to interact with me and ask all kinds of questions)

A Succinct Summary of Why I Hate CPS

Public Defending in General

Yes, I defend people you hate, that's the point

How do you defend Those People?

My Bookshelf

Yeah, this is absolutely possible.

It truly depends on the place. Some juvenile courts are really great; some are garbage. They tend to have a lot of commonalities within states, because states all have the same law, but there are still HUGE gaps just in judge style.

I'd say with most of the judges I've been in front of, they would take it pretty seriously if a kid said they wanted to be in detention rather than in the program they'd been sent to. Detention is commonly known as not being a picnic.

But a different judge could see it totally differently. It also will depend on their perception of the kid -- male or female, black or white? If a Black girl, a judge is, in my experience, a lot more likely to come down hard and demand more maturity and penalize behavior more heavily. If a white girl, she might be listened to more. If a Black or brown boy, there'll be questions about gang activity and potentially questions about transfer to adult court a little more often. If a white boy, a lot depends on family involvement and, tbh, socioeconomic status, but he'd probably at least be looking at a psych eval...

Those motherfuckers are sticky as fuck. They're worse than the tar-sap-stuff you get when you climb pine trees. Even the special soap doesn't get rid of 'em. You don't even notice when it gets on you. Even people just standing near me a lot have been known to stick to my principles. (There are those on Tumblr who can attest.)

How to say this. Something that might be similar to this has happened near me relatively recently, and I'd love to talk more about it, but duckduckgo knew EXACTLY what I meant when I did a little searching and I don't feel like it's a good idea.

So I'm gonna have to keep my responses a little more general. Sorry about that!

Kids commit crimes for many reasons, some of which are in fact this complex.

You don't need a troubled teen camp to find abuse in teen facilities.

Probably the most abusive place I've seen is in my former jurisdiction and it was a straight up long-established military school with alumni and everything.

Several (maybe even many) times in my career a kid has told me they would rather be in detention than at home or in the placement where they're put by social services. That is always a sign of a huge huge problem. I don't think I've ever failed to get them what they ask for.

Yes, things do happen to help these kids, but also things happen to hurt these kids. The juvenile justice system is supposed to help but it's always being pushed towards looking more like the punitive adult system. This contradiction in identity is always a problem.

I would say without data (as in: could be totally wrong) that I think runaways/escapes are not as much of a problem as they once were. The reason is, I just don't think kids are as self-sufficient as they were in like the 80s or 90s. They weren't out wandering the streets when they were seven years old falling in culvert creeks and bothering their neighbor-friend's older siblings. They can't hitchhike. A kid hanging around alone now sometimes just gets the cops called on them for no reason. Society says that children must be supervised at all times.

I also haven't had many escapes that I've dealt with in my career.

That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if this specific scenario did happen,

My therapist almost sent me to a juvenile detention center. The only reason that she didn't was because having six months of therapy was a requirement before I could go to the center, and my mom and I moved away before the six months could be completed. What do you think could've happened to me if I went to a juvenile detention center? Would I have ever had access to a lawyer at any point in the process? 

And this is why Oppositional Defiant Disorder is fake fake fake!! It depends on reports from adults, and adults are eager to portray themselves as entirely reasonable and teenagers as just crazy idiots.

When the ODD label gets slapped on a child, parents have no responsibility apparently for when a child habitually responds badly to authoritarian control. Nor do teachers, or systems; disabilities are suddenly irrelevant or their very existence is doubted.

ODD: fuck that child, in particular, but like clinically.

Okay, if you were in America, your therapist could not have just sent you to a juvenile detention center. There are a couple things that could have been happening here that you misunderstood or that were not explained to you. (People also tend to stop explaining things to kids diagnosed with ODD.)

Your therapist could have been referring to a youth mental health facility. Some of these are locked and do look and feel a lot like juvenile detention centers, and the locked facilities also do a lot of work with kids that are involved with the juvenile justice system.

Your therapist could have been threatening/offering to file something in court that could have ended up with you in detention. This could either be criminal charges (how dare you assault your mother);

Or it could have been an alternative civil type of case that's very common but called many different things in many different states. The civil charge is basically "hello I would like a judge to help me parent my child" and historically involved determinations of "incorrigibility." Now it's usually something involving determining if the child is at risk or in need of services or something.

Youth Mental Health Facility: this would have been undoubtedly the potential worst and also the potential best of the three options, depending utterly on how garbage your mom was going to be and what facility you ended up in. Those mental health facilities are rife with horror and abuse, as you might expect from anywhere containing a whole population of people who are habitually not believed and who have extremely limited legal rights.

Depending entirely on who is staffing the place and how vigilant and focused they are, their leadership, their ability to set goals and keep the kids first, some of those facilities... actually... are pretty good. I actually think architecture might have an influence on this too: if it looks more like a prison, it's going to end up with the staff acting more like it's a prison. I toured one of our higher-security locked youth facilities before, and they were super eager to show me their classrooms, their counseling rooms, and then... a blank hallway painted friendly colors, with a room coming off of it that had padded walls. I was like "wtf is this" and they were like, this is actually the pacing hallway! If kids are having a meltdown, they can come here any time with a staff member and yell and punch the wall and have a talk about it!

Court Filing: If you got a criminal charge, you would have gotten someone like me (ideally; the access to decent lawyers for youth is. spotty at best) and (ideally) a guardian ad litem, an attorney to look out for your best interests. This would be because your parent was the "victim" of the charge and so might not be looking out for your best interests. I actually ask for a GAL to be appointed on any case where I suspect the parents might be doing some Fuckery.

If the case was criminal, you also possibly would have gone to detention very briefly on arrest but whether you stayed there would have depended on the jurisdiction, the judge, and the lawyers. My experience overwhelmingly would say: probably you would not be staying in detention for a push unless your mom refused to have you back at home.

If you got a civil case, you would have gotten an attorney who's not quite like me. As a public defender, I specialize in criminal defense and I have the backing of my office and lots of training. Attorneys for civil cases for kids (which can still end up with them in detention) vary wildly in experience, commitment, general intelligence, and whether I have ever low-key wanted to throttle them.

Either way, you probably would have gotten stuck going back to court pretty regularly for a while to prove that you could shape up and be better (TM). During this process, you would have to behave orders of magnitude better than, just for a random example, the President of the United States, under constant provocation, with no right to privacy or autonomy, and the penalty of detention if you failed.

So: I had a pretty non-violent upbringing. Though it wasn't without disruption and trauma, it wasn't violent and I didn't experience much death and loss close to home. I also had an upbringing that left me pretty ignorant of the world at large. I didn't encounter anti-Black racism, and the media myself and my family consumed was purposefully diverse (like the middle Star Treks).

Now, I always had a drive to Do Justice. Naturally, I was attracted to police work first, because of the impression that copaganda had left with me. I thought that was how to do good and protect people.

Because, on the surface, the threats that I understood existed in America came from criminals and guns and violence. How could it be any other way? What I saw on TV was Bad People doing Bad Things and police putting things to Rights.

When did I learn that the causes of violence were so complex? Not until I was boots-on-the-ground meeting abjectly poor people and promising to defend them, earning their trust, hearing their stories, and coming to understand them. And even on top of that, really feeling out the shape of the criminal justice system and its numerous traps, which I have sketched out for Tumblr in the How The Justice System Works posts, took even longer. It took years of seeing and experiencing things firsthand and hearing from every person involved and realizing how complicated the truth is and following common threads anyway.

At this point, I've spent a literal decade learning this system. My knowledge and understanding of the juvenile "justice" system particularly in my state... like, I'm definitely in the top 100 experts, probably in the top 50, and maybe in the top 25. (A terrifying realization.)

Understanding required on-the-ground knowledge. It wasn't just viewing individual acts -- this crime, that police shooting, this prosecution, that mental health call -- and reaching conclusions. It was knowing where the training comes from. What the rules are. What the "gold standard" is. And even smaller things too: what the police sergeant says before he sends everyone out on patrol. The in-jokes. The sideways glances. The shorthand.

It's not that I think I need a master's degree to understand the Middle East (though to put together enough history to really get to causative roots, someone might need one). It's that my experience of the Israel-Palestine conflict is a whole lot of people Confidently Stating what they believe to be the Truth on Tumblr, combined with individual journalistic pieces. Lads and ladies, I've read the individual journalistic pieces on the criminal justice system, and they are the tiniest of windows, and they don't explain anything. I just don't trust all these sources of information!

Not that I think this information is necessarily wrong -- though, of course, it might be. Let's say everything I've seen and heard relates truthful facts, such as they are. Knowing that certain acts took place is only the first part of understanding a conflict. It's barely enough to start understanding who's responsible for even just that one act!

I think young people especially have a very difficult time with this. They haven't had the experience to really settle in one place and start to Understand how a system works, any system. There's nothing wrong with them; they're still growing. They don't know yet that when you open yourself up to points of view that are truly, absolutely foreign to yourself, you learn truths you didn't even imagine existed.

Today, when I see a kid shoot another kid, I don't see a little gangster criminal who needs to be locked up. I see a tragic trend of young black people in my city feeling like they need to carry a gun for protection, and the natural escalation that occurs from that point. I see causation that involves a world of violence and risk for them, where they do not trust the police and where owning a gun and having a gun is glorified. And I think it's pretty common now to acknowledge that gang violence is something that is perpetuated by the actions of the police and solidified by systemic barriers to economic freedom and progress. It's nice that the broader understanding has made it into the story so I don't have to explain it from jump every time.

But I'm just lacking that understanding when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Reading books will only go so far. (Which, I do still read books, but like. I understand the limitations therein.)

I simply cannot attain the level of understanding that I have for my clients with an overseas conflict. Not without without, like, a huge learning curve, and abandoning a place where I truly believe I am doing good.

I don't know their ground reality. I haven't held their hands and looked into their eyes and listened to their voices. And don't tell me "there are documentaries" -- I was a film production major on top of a poli sci major and I've done documentary filmmaking. I know how easy it is to make even a neutral event into propaganda. And there are so many people who want to make propaganda out of Israel and Palestine.

So, yeah, truth is complicated. My kid-who-shot-another-kid example: I'm drawing from a real life case here. My client was obviously not without blame. Brought the gun. Pulled the trigger. Took a human life. That is murder. It affected so many people. It removed a person from the world forever. War-related violence is also not okay!!

(In fact, at this point, I think I've come down pretty hard against violence of all kinds. From the state especially.)

And, even setting All This Shit aside, I think judgment and blame are impediments in a peace process.

So, while I can make some pretty simple statements, the majority of my judgment is reserved. That's just how it's going to be. Not because I'm pro-Jewish. Not because I'm pro-Arab. Not because I'm picking a side. Because of who I choose to be. I choose to be this.

I want Palestinians to be able to thrive without the oppressive and traumatic infliction of state violence. I would also like my Jewish friends here to be able to thrive without fear of a shooter breaking into a house of worship and killing their friends and family.

Careful, the wrong answer will make me judge your moral character as a horrible human being despite evidence to the contrary.

It’s cool, I actually answered it on your ask because I liked yours the most. You weren’t really the one giving me shit about it.

Mention of the Armenian genocide did actually remind me of the Dark Side of Democracy, which I hadn’t thought of in a while. Unfortunately it seems to not be on my shelf so I guess if I read it again I’ll have to find another copy from when I had it in undergrad.

I’ll also say, and this is not specifically about Israel and Palestine: though I feel this area is a minefield of stupid purity tests, I acknowledge that there is real power in calling something what it is. I often feel like I have that power as a public defender — I use real words while police officers and prosecutors use set phrases and meaningless words like “altercation” or “neutralized” or whatever. This is also why I try not to use words like “bad” or “good” because they’re basically meaningless. The bananas I got from Walmart are bad. I’d rather use a more precise word…

Was it Pablo Neruda? — There’s a poet’s phrase that encompasses this in a way I’ll never forget. I think it’s: “The blood of children ran through the streets simply, like children’s blood.”