Edward Humes Quotes

#1. These kids are already hard. They don't need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They've lost that. That's what we need to give back to them.

Edward Humes

#2. There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean.

Edward Humes

#3. They do horrible, unchildish things because they they have had very horrible, unchildish lives.

Edward Humes

#4. It's not like they can take anything from me,' he says later, back with his homeboys in Juvenile Hall. 'Ain't got nothing to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.

Edward Humes

#5. We are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.

Edward Humes

#6. The fundamental question Juvenile Court was designed to ask - What's the best way to deal with this individual kid? - is often lost in the process, replaced by a point system that opens the door, or locks it, depending on the qualities of the crime, not the child.

Edward Humes

#7. Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.

Edward Humes

#8. Is it always in the interest of the public safety to seek the prosecutor's traditional solution
the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid's lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?

Edward Humes

#9. There are two theories of evolution. There is the genuine scientific theory; and there is the talk-radio pretend version, designed not to enlighten but to deceive and enrage.

Edward Humes

#10. from a child in danger to a dangerous child

Edward Humes

#11. Officially, he was no longer a victim, he was a criminal

Edward Humes