Would You Send Your 17-Year-Old To Jail?

From this week’s PCP:

EDITORIAL: A Wrenching Decision
Being a parent sometimes demands the toughest choices

Richard and Angela Watkins love their daughter. So they sent her to jail last weekend.

Rather than take custody of the intoxicated 17-year-old after the Highland Park Department of Public Safety busted her for underage drinking, they opted to have officers handcuff her, cart her off, and lock her up for the night.

Sending a child away, forcing her to stand alone as she’s incarcerated — even for just one night, even in the relative safety of the Highland Park jail — must be a wrenching act for any parent. But the Watkins felt they had to “do the right thing,” as the mother told one of our editors.

We applaud their decision.

The Watkins’ daughter was not unconscious on the floor — as her mother had feared she would be — when the cops arrived at a home on Westway Avenue in the early hours of Sunday morning. But she and more than a dozen other teenagers at the scene had clearly spent the night consuming a large number of alcoholic beverages.

Most the kids fled the house quickly, according to the police report, including the 18-year-old hosting the party in his father’s absence. Many bottles and cans of beer and wine, empty and full, were found throughout the backyard and inside the house.

After submitting to a breath test that showed her blood-alcohol level to be .069, the Watkins’ daughter became “unruly and uncooperative.” That’s when her parents decided that if she was choosing to partake in these adult activities, she could accept the adult consequences.

It was the Watkins themselves who brought those consequences down on their daughter, as it was they who alerted police about the party.

Their concern for her safety, and for the safety of other children present, overrode the parental instinct to protect their child from suffering.

Since this newspaper began to publish the names and addresses of parents who fail in their duty to supervise the actions of their children with regard to alcohol use, we’ve heard from many readers — especially those whose homes have hosted the parties and those whose teenagers were ticketed for drinking.

The Watkins’ actions stand in stark contrast to the majority of those who call or write to us. Rather than declining to speak with our reporter, Mrs. Watkins decided it was her parental obligation to do so. In the past, some have threatened our paper with lawsuits for reporting on these matters of public record, or even offered bribes to keep them out of print. Mrs. Watkins expressed her support for our decision to cast a light on the dangerous activities of these young people.

She chose to do these things even though it will identify her daughter as having been drinking at the party. Our own policy is not to print the names of high school students who are charged with underage drinking, so the teenager could have remained relatively anonymous were it not for her mother’s actions.

We support Angela Watkins in her conviction that her daughter is better served by facing the full consequences of her choices than by quietly sweeping mistakes away, as some would have us do.

This community deserves courageous parents like the Watkins, parents willing to openly discuss the difficult problems their children face in confronting the pressures of modern teenage life.

One of the best lessons children can receive is that actions have consequences. We hope that Dean Flowers, whose home played host to the party, is finding a means of his own to teach this lesson to his son.