]A story in today’s L.A. Times, Poetry As Art And Threat says a 15-year-old honor student got four months in juvinile detention because he wrote a poem that another student took as a threat.
Young George Julius T. (last name withheld because of his age), a shy new student at a San Jose high school, showed a poem he had written to a girl in his honors English class and asked her if the school had a poetry club. The last line of the poem read, “For I can be the next kid to bring guns and kill students at school. So parents watch your children cuz I’m back.”
This boy had no history of violence but apparently had a difficult situation at home. There was no specific threat in what he wrote, and no person singled out for threat, yet a judge decided that the poem constituted a criminal threat.
Did the school system and the courts get carried away in the wake of Columbine and violate this boy’s First Amendment rights, or were the authorities right in treating the kid like a felon and pitching him into “juvie” with the hard cases?
My feeling is that he should have received counseling, or at the very least an interview by a psychiatrist to determine whether his poem really constituted a threat. A lot of teens harbor violent fantasies but are nevertheless non-violent. I think what was done will only heighten the boy’s alienation without doing anything to ameliorate it. What say all you wise dopers?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Azael *
I would agree with the school authorities that something should be done. But I think the “something” should be to investigate exactly what this kid’s story is and why he’s so alienated. The knee-jerk “pitch him in jail” attitude I believe benefits no one, and may be a violation of the First Amendment. The matter is before the state Supreme Court now, as it is certainly not cut and dried.
And you’re right, a lot of (if not most) people are morons.
I can see how such a poem would arose concern, but not to the point that criminal charges are necessary. The problem, though, is that, post-Columbine, a precedent has been set in schools that says anything which seems like it may result in violence should be treated as concrete evidence that violence is forth-coming. Point a finger at a teacher and it could be construed as representing a gun and, much more sinisterly, your intention to kill that teacher. Figuartive langauge and behavior has been lost in the place where we learn what “figurative” means, all due to a climate of fear.
Reading the LA Times article (I had to register; am I going to get oodles of spam now?) brought up an issue that worries me: irrationality in the courts concerning cases like this. Another boy painted a picture of himself, killing a police officer. He is convicted but it is overturned because the picture was produced as part of a class assignment. The case in the OP, however, resulted from a poem produced during the student’s free time, so it must be an actual threat. WHICH MAKES NO FREAKING SENSE.
Under the law cited in the article, the threat must be specific; it was in the overturned case, but not in OP’s case.
From the article:
. In the OP’s case, the threat was inferred by the student George showed the poem to; she never specifically received a threat, just a sinister sounding poem which was never directed at her.
It’s late, though, and I can’t keep a train of thought going well.
Geez…thank god I had the foresight to burn all of the poetry I wrote during my adolescent-angst phase, otherwise I might be in the same sort of situation.
If anything, chucking the kid into detention is going to make him REALLY antzy and with a serious grudge to bear against the established order.
What the hell are they thinking? It’s POETRY (however bad) for gawdsakes. It’s one of the privileges of being a teenager…writing lousy ‘I HATE THE WORLD AND THE WORLD HATES ME’ type stuff is par for the course isn’t it?? His only ‘crime’ is that he let someone else read it…most of us were sensible enough to keep it to ourselves.
I really fucking worry about this planet sometimes. :rolleyes:
Absolutely. It’s more scary that this happens at high school. Do they think that all the great poets wrote about how they really felt/acted, etc. or is there just a chance that writers adopt personas. For instance, Browning wrote about strangling his lover with her hair (Porphyria’s Lover)…I don’t think he actually did it - he was making a general point about possessiveness.
And, as said above (kambuckta) part of being a teenager is hating the world and expressing that independence - so even if he is writing what he felt doesn’t mean he is an actual threat. Well - he might be NOW of course!!