About that "affluenza."

Those who think the rich teenager — who, driving drunk, killed 4 persons — should have gotten a harsher punishment than 10 years probation are focusing on the expert testimony he presented in his favor. A psychologist named G. Dick Miller testified that having grown up in affluence, "He never learned that sometimes you don’t get your way... He had the cars and he had the money. He had freedoms that no young man would be able to handle."

Miller used the term "affluenza" — a portmanteau of "affluence" and "influenza" — to refer to the young man's psychological deficit.

Affluenza, Miller acknowledged to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday, is “not a medical term.” The psychologist said that it means “You have too much and you don’t know how to distribute it.” At Cooper’s prompting, Miller acknowledged that the boy was “a spoiled brat.”

The affluenza claim rightfully strikes the most absurd note since Dan White’s infamous 1979 “Twinkie defense.” Psychologists have loosely used the term for years to describe the emotional pitfalls unique to children raised in affluent settings.

Of course, psychologists will have a lot to say about the afflictions of rich people, since rich people are more likely to have money to throw into long, luxurious sessions with psychologists. And rich people have the money to put on a strong defense in a criminal trial, replete with expert testimony framing their deficiencies in the most compellingly sympathetic form.

It's the judge's responsibility to give this testimony the weight it deserves. The problem here is not that rich people have money to dump into a strong defense in a criminal proceeding or that psychologists have coined a catchy/cutesy term for the woes of the rich. It is the judge — Texas State District Judge Jean Boyd — who is accountable for anything that went wrong in the case of Ethan Couch. And we don't know the weight she put on Miller's testimony or the notion of "affluenza."

I don't know how Boyd has treated other teenagers. Perhaps she's deeply informed about the deficiencies of the teenage brain and has shown mercy to a great many poor and working class teenagers and her sentencing of Couch is — within her record — a model of equal treatment of the rich and the poor. Maybe she knows the research that has led, for example, to articles like this — "Developmental Psychologist Says Teenagers Are Different" — in the New York Times.

That's a 2009 interview with Laurence Steinberg, "a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia... one of the leading experts in the United States on adolescent behavior and adolescent brain biology." He says:

I’m not one of those people who labels adolescence as some sort of mental illness. Teenagers are not crazy. They’re different.

When it comes to crime, they are less responsible for their behavior than adults. And typically, in the law, we don’t punish people as much who are less responsible. We know from our lab that adolescents are more impulsive, thrill-seeking, drawn to the rewards of a risky decision than adults. They tend to not focus very much on costs. They are more easily coerced to do things they know are wrong. These factors, under the law, make people less responsible for criminal acts. The issue is: as a class, should we treat adolescents differently?

Asked whether the criminal justice system is "beginning to take these differences into account during sentencing," Steinberg says:

It’s been coming up in cases. I went to Washington in November to watch the oral arguments in two related cases before the Supreme Court that ask: should someone who committed a crime as a teen be subjected to life imprisonment without a chance for parole, ever?

With these cases, and another in 2005 where the high court threw out the death penalty for adolescents, I was scientific consultant to the American Psychological Association on its amicus brief. What we said in the death penalty case — and now — was that we have considerable evidence showing that adolescents are different from adults in ways that mitigate their criminal responsibility. But since 2005, there’s been a lot of new scientific evidence supporting this position.

At the link you can see links to the U.S. Supreme Court cases and descriptions of the neuroscience research about the teenage brain.

Speaking of brains: Let's try to think clearly about this case and the larger context. Don't get too distracted by the word "affluenza" — which no one said was an actual disease. Don't impulsively slot this into a class warfare template. Remember that the criminal defendant has a right to present the evidence in his favor. And the responsibility for sentencing lies squarely with the judge, but don't succumb to impulsive emotion as you judge the judge.

"Once there was a fight in the classroom, it was just you and that person who had a fight; now on social media, it’s 500,000 people looking at this fight."

"Why are you creating a unit to incriminate and criminalize what they’re doing and lock them up?"

A criticism — by the founder of an organization that works with teenagers — of the NYC police strategy dealing with gangs:

The strategy seeks to exploit the online postings of suspected members and their digital connections to build criminal conspiracy cases against whole groups that might otherwise take years of painstaking undercover work to penetrate. Facebook, officers like to say now, is the most reliable informer.


Operation Crew Cut melds intelligence gathered by officers on the street with online postings, allowing the department to track emerging conflicts in a neighborhood before they erupt into violence and, when shootings do occur, to build conspiracy cases against those responsible. But the scrutiny online has raised concern that idle chatter by teenagers might be misinterpreted by the police.

We're told that opposition to the "stop and frisk" tactic has led to this, but I find that a little hard to believe. Why wouldn't the police use both approaches if they could? Also, I wonder what the police are really doing, since publicly revealing a tactic is itself a tactic. From the above-linked NYT article:

Officers follow crew members on Twitter and Instagram, or friend them on Facebook, pretending to be young women to get around privacy settings that limit what can be seen. They listen to the lyrical taunts of local rap artists, some affiliated with crews, and watch YouTube for clues to past trouble and future conflicts. Party announcements posted to social media draw particular attention: officers scour the invitation lists, some of which explicitly include members of opposing crews, beseeching them to “leave the beef at home,” said Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor, who heads a police unit focused on social media and youth gangs.

Presumably, the idea is to deter criminal activity by creating the impression that the police are everywhere. That's very easy to do, once everyone's gone on line for their friendship (and criminal conspiracy). I wonder how many police department employees have jobs that consist of reading kids' Facebook postings and analyzing rap lyrics. Do you think that's creepy/offensive surveillance or clever and important work? Do you think it's a good anti-crime tactic to paranoia amongst vast swaths of NYC teenagers who might otherwise socialize on line?

"I am as troubled by the use of the word 'woman' to describe the 18-year-old object, briefly, of a 53-year-old’s affections..."

"... as I am by the use of the word 'lover' to describe my 18-year-old self, in the context of that relationship."

Writes the 59-year-old Joyce Maynard on the occasion of a documentary movie about the now-dead J.D. Salinger.

IN THE COMMENTS: T J Sawyer said:

"His was a seduction played out with words and ideas..."

Sounds like Maynard is making a strong case for withdrawing the voting privilege from 18-year-olds. Or at least the distaff portion.

(Do I need to explicitly mention 2008 and 2012?)

"Washington Post’s ‘second look at statutory rape’ click-trolling inspires #WaPoPitches."

"Is the Washington Post getting into Slate’s business of click-trolling, or do the paper’s editors really think it’s time for a national conversation on sex between teachers and underage students?"

A 13 year old says "Facebook is losing teens lately, and I think I know why."

"It wasn’t the Facebook it was when I was seven."

It got complicated — it was just kind of like, "We liked it the way it was. Why are you changing it?" it was just kind of like, "We liked it the way it was. Why are you changing it?"

Remember when "change" was the watchword of the young?

Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

Oh my god this is good but I just can't help chuckling at her repeated references to "a facebook." I think she and her grandmother have more common ground than she imagines.

And, quoting the teenager's last line (in italics):

I love Facebook, really I do. I hope they can make a comeback and appeal to my peers. I think it's a great idea for a website, and I wish Facebook the best of luck.

I know this wasn't necessarily meant as a big 'and to close, fuck you, Zuckerberg" but it sure is fun to read it that way.

And:

Facebook's destiny is to be AOL. That is the ultimate end of all walled gardens.

Have you heard of the high school club called The League of Aspiring Gentlemen?

There are 50 members at Eau Claire Memorial High School (here in Wisconsin).

The teenage boys dress up — shirts, jackets, ties, slacks — and "learn what it was like to be a gentlemen" ("fashion, taste, manners, etiquette, style and... the finer things in life").

Club founder club Alec Baca explained that the club members remain aspiring gentlemen, because "To declare oneself a gentlemen would be rather ungentlemanly."

I was sent to that link by David Blaska, who commended the League (and complained about some non-League types here in Madison.

"The headteacher of a Cambridge sixth form has defended an exam question which gave teenagers a raunchy description of sexual intercourse."

"Cambridge exam board OCR asked AS-level Latin candidates about Ovid’s Amores, in which the poet tells his mistress she can sleep with other men."

The students are 16 or 17 years old. Here's the controversial passage, translated:

“...slip off your chemise without a blush and let him get his thigh well over yours. And let him thrust his tongue as far as it will go into your coral mouth and let passion prompt you to all manner of pretty devices. Talk lovingly. Say all sorts of naughty things, and let the bed creak and groan as you writhe with pleasure. But as soon as you have got your things on again, look the nice demure little lady you ought to be, and let your modesty belie your wantonness. Bamboozle society, bamboozle me; but don’t let me know it, that’s all; and let me go on living in my fool’s paradise.”

Bamboozle, eh? Where was this translated? India? I'm just remembering the "Author's Note" to the novel "The Life of Pi":

When I told a friend who knew the country well of my travel plans, he said casually, "They speak funny English in India. They like words like bamboozle." I remembered his words as my plane started its descent towards Delhi, so the word bamboozle was my one preparation for the rich, noisy, functioning madness of India. I used the word on occasion, and truth be told, it served me well. To a clerk at a train station, I said, "I didn't think the fare would be so expensive. You're not trying to bamboozle me, are you?" He smiled and chanted, "No sir! There is no bamboozlement here. I have quoted you the correct fare."

The (unlinkable) OED on the etymology of "bamboozle":

Appears about 1700; mentioned in the Tatler No. 230 (on ‘the continual Corruption of our English Tongue’) among other slang terms (banter, put, kidney, sham, mob, bubble, bully, etc.) recently invented or brought into vogue. Probably therefore of cant origin; the statement that it is a Gipsy word wants proof.

"Mississippi lawmakers have embarked on a controversial campaign to discourage older men from having sex with teenagers."

"Starting in July, doctors and midwives in the state will be required by law to collect samples of umbilical cord blood from babies born to some women under the age of 16. Officials will analyze the samples and try to identify the fathers through matches in the state's DNA database."

NPR reports today... the same day we hear the Supreme Court's ruling that allows police to routinely collect DNA from anyone who's been arrested.

... Matthew Steffey, a constitutional law professor at the Mississippi College law school in Jackson, said the measure could raise a "hornet's nest" of legal problems. "It is not at all clear that the legislature can deputize health care workers to collect evidence without a warrant," he said.

Here's a news report on today's Supreme Court case:

The police may take DNA samples from people arrested in connection with serious crimes, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The federal government and 28 states authorize the practice, and law enforcement officials say it is a valuable tool for investigating unsolved crimes....

Justice Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that the swabbing procedure was a search under the Fourth Amendment, meaning it had to be justified as reasonable. It was, he said, given “the need for law enforcement officers in a safe and accurate way to process and identify the persons and possessions they must take into custody.”

To identify the persons and put tham into the machine that will match them up with unsolved crimes where DNA has been collected, like all those cases where underage women have given birth.

Shouldn't the states also be collecting some clumps of cells from all the various abortions performed on underaged women? 

"Monona parents whose children repeatedly bully others can now be ticketed by police and fined in municipal court."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

Monona Police Chief Wally Ostrenga... thinks the parent-liability clause will be used sparingly, if at all, and only in cases where parents are obstructive or uncooperative. He hopes the mere threat of a ticket will be enough....

The broader ordinance prohibits any person age 12 or older from engaging in bullying, subject to similar municipal fines. The ordinance defines bullying as “an intentional course of conduct which is reasonably likely to intimidate, emotionally abuse, slander, threaten or intimidate another person and which serves no legitimate purpose.”

Ironic that bullying is defined to include threats and the police plan to use the ordinance to make threats. But the ordinance refers to threats that serve no legitimate purpose. But is there a legitimate purpose to threatening to make parents pay $114 if they don't take action to control the teenagers who express themselves in a manner that the authorities have decided is too hurtful?

“Sometimes you’ll knock on someone’s door and they won’t want to talk to you — their kids are perfect, they could never do anything wrong,” Ostrenga said. “This is for those times when we get the door slammed in our faces.”

So the purpose is, admittedly, to pressure parents to talk to the police. The people who have been declining to speak with the police will now have to pay for the privilege.

Parents who are making a good-faith effort to address a child’s behavior would not be ticketed, he said.

City Attorney William S. Cole called the tactic “a tool of last resort” and said he believes it would withstand a court challenge.

I guess there is such "a court" here in Dane County — where Monona, like Madison, is located — and I would feel much more intimidated, emotionally abused, and threatened if I didn't believe — speaking of beliefs — that court would be reversed on appeal.

Update on the case of the 18-year-old lesbian charged with a felony for having sex with a 14-year-old girl.

1. We talked about this case 2 days ago here. There were accusations of selective prosecution under the Florida statutory rape law, which require you to believe that an 18-year-old guy having sex with a 14-year-old girl would not be prosecuted.

2. The parents of the younger girl are upset about getting called homophobic (in the social media), and they defend themselves here. The video is worth watching.

3. Kaitlyn Hunt refuses the plea deal.

"Phonetic description of annoying sounds teenagers make."

Text — in case you didn't memorize all that " Creaky-voiced long alveolar glide with mid front unrounded vowel and glottal stop" business — here. Via Metafilter.

ADDED: And if you enjoyed that guy — whose name is James Harbeck — here are all of this videos. I enjoyed "8 odd sounds from other languages that you could never make except you probably already have":



(Somehow, I found it irresistible to make all these sounds!)

"Activists say authorities are unfairly targeting 18-year-old US high-school student because she is gay."

"An 18-year-old American is facing felony charges over claims that she had sexual contact with her underage, 14-year-old girlfriend...."

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida said [Kaitlyn] Hunt was being criminalised for behaviour that "occurs every day in tens of thousands of high schools across the country, yet those other students are not facing felony convictions … and potential lifelong branding as sex offenders."

An 18-year-old with a 14-year-old is going on every day? Is this charge of anti-gay prejudice cloaking what is really a movement to lower the age of consent (or to widen the age gap covered by "Romeo and Juliet" laws)?

"If a child waits too long to take the pill... a fertilized egg could reach the uterine wall and become implanted, after which the drug is useless."

"You see how the word 'child' keeps getting in the way."

There’s no point debating whether such young girls should be sexually active. Obviously, given the potential consequences, both physical and psychological, the answer is no. 

Potential consequences?

It seems to me that when you're talking about girls under the age of 15, if there is an occasion to buy a morning-after pill, there is an occasion to report a serious crime.

"The real issue we have with admitting that college is not a path to the work world is then we have to ask ourselves why we send our kids to high school."

"There is plenty of data to show that teens are able to manage their lives without the constraints of school."

The book Escaping the Endless Adolescence is chock full of data, and a recent article by my favorite journalist, Jennifer Senior, shows that high school is not just unnecessary, but actually damaging to teens who need much more freedom to grow than high school affords.

"If you are 17 or under, a federal prosecutor could have charged you with computer hacking just for reading Seventeen magazine online..."

"... until today."

It’s not because the law got any better...

Seventeen highlights the absurdity of giving terms of service the force of law under the CFAA. It boasts a readership of almost 4.5 million teen readers with an average age of 16 and a half, and yet, until today, the average reader was legally banned from visiting Seventeen.com. That’s right, for a magazine dedicated to teen fashion, the publisher’s terms explicitly restricted online access to readers 18 and older.

"Just don’t say the Chicago police picked on your child, when we were watching all the assault going on, especially by teen women."

A mob of 500 teenagers, supposedly organized via Facebook, hit the city's elite shopping district.

"Breast-feeding is time-consuming, exhausting and unselfish."

"While I am thrilled that I have been able to breast-feed my son successfully, I become frustrated when his future ability to connect with others is called into question because I text someone during a feeding session instead of staring at a wall in a dark room for 30 minutes straight."

Is texting while breastfeeding any different from reading or watching television while breastfeeding? How bored do you need to allow yourself to get before you can give yourself credit for being a good enough mother? And you'll never be good enough, because the bored-out-of-her-skull mother isn't very good. And let's say you could force yourself to always believe that your children are not only endlessly fascinating, but fascinating in a way that leaves no room for other interests: Would your marriage work out? If not, now, you've hurt those kids. Would the kids truly and perfectly benefit from having a mother who found them endlessly fascinating and utterly fulfilling? I suspect that by the time they turned 13, they'd be telling her she's out of her fucking mind.

"Why Are Teen Pregnancy Rates So Low in North Dakota? Fracking."

Headline from a story that is not purveying some environmentalist scare.

How does North Dakota do it? “It’s not by having such great sex ed, contraception access, and abortion providers,” Guttmacher senior researcher Laura Lindberg told me, listing off solutions favored in more liberal states. No—North Dakota has one Planned Parenthood in a 700,000 square-mile state. Seventy-five percent of North Dakotans live in counties with no abortion provider. State law mandates abstinence-only education in its schools....

The scare is for progressives who want to believe their anti-teen-pregnancy policies work best. So it can't be that all the policies they've opposed — abstinence only education! — actually work. The theory is presented that North Dakota — with all that fracking — has a booming economy and females delay pregnancy when economic prospects are high (and when there's a plentiful supply of men to choose from).

Now, here's the craftily written last paragraph of the article (which appears at Slate and The Washington Post):

Add it all up—a sparsely-populated state heavy in white men, low in sex education, and bursting with oil—and you don’t find many helpful clues for crafting national policy....

It's important for progressives to exclude the good results in North Dakota, which call into question whether the progressive policies are the correct policies. Time to quote a professor:

“North Dakota is just off-the-charts, demographically,” says June Carbone, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and co-author of Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. The state may prove that white, middle-class teens will probably do OK in the absence of comprehensive sex ed and well-funded reproductive health centers, as “they’ll learn from their families, their peers, their doctors, and the internet.” But that doesn’t change the fact that “the pernicious impact of abstinence-only education is its combination with poverty,” Carbone says. “The best contraceptive has always been a promising future, and North Dakota is one of the few places in the United States right now that is booming."

Off-the-charts, demographically... white, middle-class teens will probably do OK... I can think of a way to translate that into blunter language that would — speaking of scary — sound really awful.

If your teenaged son had nightmares after reading "Beloved" in Advanced Placement English class...

... can you imagine responding by seeking to get the book removed from the classroom, engaging in public activism that included talking about the boy's dreams? Quite aside from the censorship angle, is this any way to treat your son?

IN THE COMMENTS: I said:

The book is a pain to read if you're not into [it]. I would never force anyone to read that book. The writing style is enough to give nightmares.

Robert Cook said:

Oh, rather like THE GREAT GATSBY, eh?

Let me answer that here on the front page, because this is important. Yes. It is like "The Great Gatsby." Neither book should be forced on anyone. It's destructive of the capacity to appreciate exactly what is most notable, the strange locutions. If you are not in the mood to get inside those sentences and luxuriate and ideate, it's a damned pain. If you've been assigned the book and so you feel like powering through it, everything that's good about it will feel like a speed bump. People hate speed bumps. These English teachers who imagine they are serving up delight are making it hateful.

I've said this already, but I don't keep repeating it as I've blogged about isolated sentences from "The Great Gatsby" in my "Gatsby" project. So let me point out one place where I made the point clearly:

My initial motivation was love. I thought of all the high school students — I remember being one — who were assigned this book and made to read the whole thing. That being the task, the really interesting sentences are speed bumps. They're completely annoying. You can't take the time to figure them out. What should be loved is hated. Later in life, I reread the book and enjoyed it, because of the worthiness of individual sentences.

The writing style of "Beloved" is, in my opinion, much, much worse than "The Great Gatsby." Chances are, a high school student will resist the project of reading this material, especially since the teacher might not emphasize the artistry of the style. It may be administered medicinally, by a teacher who wants her presumably bland and cosseted students to vicariously inhabit the condition of slavery. This is a terrible idea. Recommend "Beloved" for optional, outside reading and give the students the 19th century narratives written by Americans who were themselves enslaved. That's real and that's free of the pretensions of poetry.

"'I am Obama!... I have been sent by God to rid the county of drug dealers and prostitutes.'"

From a report about a crazed man in Florida who tried to kidnap a woman and her 4-year-old daughter. According to the headline, the 2 females were saved by "Mystery hero teens."