As soon as things are sufficiently resolved, that young man needs to get the heck out of Jena.

Yes!!! He really does!!!

I really am glad that he is out!

If you all get a chance to, Dr. Phil will have interviews from the parents of the Jena 6 (being conducted by T.D. Jakes) and will also have some of the other families involved on Monday's show. Its a two-part series that started today.

GRRRRRRRRR! I forgot to DVR this today!:mad: I watched his show Friday and thought it was really good and informative so I was looking forward to its continuation on Monday. Shoot... :(

Interesting NY Times op-ed piece

Jena, O. J. and the Jailing of Black America

I thought it was pretty well-balanced. Made me interested in reading the book.

Clip:

How, after decades of undeniable racial progress, did we end up with this virtual gulag of racial incarceration?

Part of the answer is a law enforcement system that unfairly focuses on drug offenses and other crimes more likely to be committed by blacks, combined with draconian mandatory sentencing and an absurdly counterproductive retreat from rehabilitation as an integral method of dealing with offenders. An unrealistic fear of crime that is fed in part by politicians and the press, a tendency to emphasize punitive measures and old-fashioned racism are all at play here.

But there is another equally important cause: the simple fact that young black men commit a disproportionate number of crimes, especially violent crimes, which cannot be attributed to judicial bias, racism or economic hardships. The rate at which blacks commit homicides is seven times that of whites.

All 6 of them do. There is no way I would even think to stay in Jena.

Mychael Bell is back in jail, this time for juvenile parole violation. I agree with you all. When this is all over he needs to get out of Louisana.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/10/11...ail/index.html

The fight itself was a violation of his probation and probably would have resulted in this sentence anyway if the whole try him as an adult thing hadn't happened.

At least he is in a juvenile facility and not in an adult jail.

I agree that it may be better but sometimes juvenile facilities are just as bad as adult ones.

Maybe so, but for me the bottom line is he violated his probation and this is where he would have ended up anyway. So I hope this doesn't lead to an extension of the Jena protests.

I guess for me I just don't think the whole thing should have gotten the "status" it did in the first place. For folx to have described it as the most monumental protest since the civil rights movement, to me was ludicrous. There is no comparison. Like the Million Man March, too many people went there for the show and to say they went, rather than for the cause. And many didn't even go to either event but just hung around DC or Jena in nearby hotels partying for the night. But then my view it is probably a generational thing.

This is true. I just think that the 10 months he has already done should count toward the 18 month sentence since the adult charges he was orginally held on were thrown out.

But hopefully behind all of this he will learn the importance of self control and thinking before acting.

This is crazy. I agree that if they had just given him this sentence for this reason, none of the hoopla would have happened. It would've made sense and everyone would have moved on. This is like an anticlimactic ending to a bad movie.

That is exactly the point! The charges and subsequent sentences were out of proportion to the crimes committed. I don't think anyone is saying that the students should not have been punished but it appears that the excessive charges stood in stark contrast against the charges or lack thereof for the white students in this particular string of events.

Not a drug violation, so what was it?
 

And this is what makes me glad that I protested. I had no problem protesting on these grounds. All people involoved of all races needed appropriate punishment, and that includes Mychal. But for what it took to get to a sentence that was acceptable and fitting, those 10 months definitely need to count toward Mychal's new sentence. Too much has happened for even a fair sentence like this not to deserve a little lee-way.