Spending $21 billion on incarcerating non violent youths or using that to fund our schools and extracurricular activities to keep youth busy? The Justice policy institute website states “Thirty-three U.S. states and jurisdictions spend $100,000 or more annually to incarcerate a young person” Housing an inmate, of any age is expensive, so why are we so quick lock them up and throw away the key so to speak? Especially when we have a lot of youths who because of zero tolerance policies have a lot on their record for doing minor things, such as breaking curfew, or being caught with cigarettes. If you are unfamiliar with zero tolerance policies, they are policies and rules that implement harsh and strict punishments for misbehaviors such as maybe being caught with tobacco products,breaking a city curfew, or having any type of weapon or even something that resembles a weapon. Because of so many zero tolerances policies, these minor infractions lead to big punishments. It is like a vicious cycle almost, because these minor infractions lead to so many juvenile questions we cannot give individual attention to these cases and because these cases do not get individual attention and we generalize we just get more minor juvenile …show more content…
make claims like schools educate, why can not they also educate about making good choices? If school will nott educate them about the dangers of drugs, who will? Those who make such claims are over-looking that as a parent it is your job to educate about drugs and good decision making. As a child D.A.R.E, was something I went through but as me and my peers got older, D.A.R.E became nothing but a joke to us and it was a big inside joke that the biggest druggie in school would wear a D.A.R.E t-shirt ironically. That incident may be anecdotal, but being seeing that the government accountability office has published a report that there was no statistically significant long-term effect on preventing youth illicit drug use, We should do more intervention and not just something like D.A.R.E which, is very ineffective. We need to start putting the money we put into jail to effectively reaching youths. The federal government spends at least two billion on drug-prevention programs, but yet there has been so many studies that they do not work. Some may even argue that they are counter-productive because the make children curious about drugs instead of teaching them of good decisions which ultimately should fall on the