A Shame

Sometimes I think of you and tears fill my eyes to think of the memory you gave my life. You touch me in a place no one ever reached, you gave me reasons and cause to believe. You are my rainbow you color my life, and you are my sunshine. I'm warm in your light. You are my fountain that never runs dry, you are my inspiration, my reasons to try. I'll love you till green grass turns lavender blue, and all the stars from the heavens vanish like dew, when horses and chariots fly like the wind! That's when I'll leave you, I'll love you till then!

--Ito

I'm not sure what Ito did to get himself incarcerated at the Audy Home in Chicago, but I know what some of his peers have done: murder and aggravated assault, and other crimes of that caliber. Ito goes to school at the Home with other boys, all juveniles, all biding their time as they await their fate: some will go to "the county" (Cook County Jail), some to other places to count the days, months, years, as they creep by, sweeping their childhood away like torn off calendar pages.

Before I began learning about the juvenile justice system, I, like many of us, compiled juvenile delinquents into a single category: scary and criminal, unworthy of redemption and irreparable. Shame on me.

William Ayers wrote a book called, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of the Juvenile Court. As I read about the history of the juvenile court system and some of the children he has gotten to know, I realize that I have perhaps set my ideals aside. I may have forgotten to put the person first and his sin after that. These kids are not their crimes. They are children.

Their circumstances are heinous. Most of the children who find themselves in the juvenile justice system have been abused and neglected, the products of poverty-stricken homes. However trite and overasked, it still bears the importance of trying to understand: how in the world can parents treat their children this way? Well, part of the answer is that they were treated that way themselves.

But Ito - the words above words poured out of him. He fell in love with a Home volunteer (who was fired upon the exposure of their affair) and pined for her, an earnest young man trapped in a prison, both of the state and his own misdoings. He also wrote:

I love you not only for what you are but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out. I love you for passing over all my foolishness and traits that you can't help but to see. I love you for drawing out into the light my beauty, that no one had looked quite hard enough to find.

Ito's a boy. A boy who did a terrible thing and has sentenced himself to a life of condemnation for this single action, maybe even one of a dozen, but finally the one to get him in his biggest trouble yet. But behind that bad, the misunderstanding of what the world at large had to offer him, he harbors true beauty and feelings of love, just like the rest of us. So unfair that all he could see, all he was allowed to see, was pain and poverty, abuse and hate, the illusion that real power comes solely from being tough and in charge. Shame on a world that has let this happen to Ito.