While waiting at an airport, a coworker pointed out something strange: a teenaged girl who was handcuffed (hidden under a jacket) and accompanied by a man and woman who were almost certainly not her parents and also did not appear to be police officers. My coworker stated that this was a legal, albeit unusual, arrangement, in which rich parents will hire people to either retrieve runaways or transport their children to reform schools, against their will. The minors in this case are not being detained for the purpose of delivering them to the police (as they haven’t commited any crimes), but are simply recalcitrant or otherwise screwing up. Is this legal and if so, how? IANAL, but I assume it is legal, because I can’t imagine how airport security would let a handcuffed person through, but I cannot figure out how this works. In US law, is there a different standard for non-police detention of minors vs. adults? Are minor children legally bound to obey their parents? Are parents legally bound to support their minor chlidren?
Here in Hawaii, where the differing counties are separated by water, all transportation of offending (runaway, felons) minors are done this way. I don’t see how this would be different elsewhere, where car transportation ain’t practical?
Felons I can understand, although shouldn’t it be the police or department of corrections doing the transporting? I mean, if a felon needs to go from, say, the county jail to the state prison, the police wouln’t call in some kind of contractor to do it, right? Also, is running away a crime? The more I hear on this, the more ignorant I get.
It makes logical sense to me. The chain of actions that lead from a minor traffic stop to death or forceful imprisonment are rather short if a person just refuses to comply with the legal system at all. Likewise, parents are required to support minor children or come up with legal solutions (usually for the older ones) to break that bond. They have to be ultimately responsible for them. There is the occasional child that just doesn’t respond to time-outs, groundings or other typical punishments at all. In those cases, the options available to the parents may be a rather short list especially if the child hasn’t committed a crime or demonstrated a diagnosable mental disorder.
The parents may have no choice but to forcefully confine them to their room (common) or forcefully take them to a place for help. There is the occasional child like this. My cousin is one even though his older siblings turned out great. Early drug use seems to have scrambled his brain and the legal system hasn’t been a great help in solving the problem rather than just taking him away for a few days. My aunt and uncle had to do whatever they could just to keep him from self-destructing when he was a minor.