Letters: A why behind Ukraine; Juvenile legal system would still harm teen
A why behind Ukraine
In February 1990, Secretary of State James Baker promised Mikhail Gorbachev that there would be no further eastward expansion of NATO if he assisted the West in the peaceful unification of Germany under NATO. After Gorbachev upheld his part of the bargain, the United States reneged.
When President Clinton agreed to NATO expansion, George F. Kennan wrote an opinion piece on Feb. 5, 1997, titled, “A Fateful Error.” Kennan warned against expanding NATO, because “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
Today, President Putin appears ready to invade Ukraine, a direction “decidedly not to our liking.” Most Americans, including those in the Biden Administration and America’s mainstream media do not understand why. They do not know, or refuse to acknowledge, that the Obama administration was complicit in a false flag operation that resulted in a coup that ousted the pro-Russian Yanukovych government.
Ivan Katchanovski’s scholarship supports the false flag theory. More significantly Putin believes that a coup took place, which is why he annexed Crimea and supported the Donbas separatists in 2014. His concerns about the ABM systems installed in Romania and Poland, after becoming members of NATO, might explain his insistence that Ukraine never become a member of that military organization.
Juvenile legal system would still harm teen
In his response to the recent fight in SCASD, DA Bernie Cantorna misleads the public by making a technical distinction between the criminal and juvenile legal systems. While the juvenile system does not result in the same collateral consequences as that of an adult conviction, the fact that a young person is facing charges of felony aggravated assault, simple assault, and harassment in the juvenile court system for a school fight will cause serious harm.
As researchers who study the school to prison pipeline (STPP), we know the juvenile legal system contributes to the STPP. The STPP refers to the sequence of steps which typically result when school disciplinary issues (e.g. fights) are criminalized through referral for out of school punishments. It is one symptom of well-documented systemic racism by which young people of color in particular are fast-tracked into the criminal system. As research documents show, students so charged miss multiple days of school to appear in court, even if their cases are eventually dismissed. The experience of navigating the juvenile legal system is traumatic. The return to school rarely includes re-entry counseling programs. These facts contradict DA Cantorna’s suggestion that the juvenile system is restorative. This is a gross misapplication of the practice of restorative justice.
Our position, consistent with decades of research, is that the juvenile legal system is part of the STPP. The DA has absolute control to prevent one of our school district’s students from entering the juvenile legal system by dropping these charges.