
No doubt by now you’ve already seen or read the story about the young woman who was disrespectful to the Florida judge while receiving her bail and had the book thrown at her to the tune of 30 days in jail and bail set at $10,000 for a prescription drug infraction.
I know that many people view this as proper justice and a case of a disrespectful young woman getting what she deserves but if you watch the video carefully you’ll see that the disrespect began with the judge and not the young woman.
She was a first time offender on an illegal prescription drug charge and she wasn’t behaving seriously enough for his liking so instead of releasing her on her own recognizance which would have been standard procedure for an 18 year with no prior offenses, he set her bail at $5,000 and dismissed her with an unprofessional “Bye, Bye, you can go now.” To which she simply responded, “Adios”.
Even I know that means goodbye. Does it mean goodbye disrespectfully? Simply because it is a Spanish word? Ironically, Judge Rodriguez-Chomat thought so and called her back to increase her bail to $10,000 and then dismissed her with the same, although much more sarcastically spoken, “Adios”. That led to the young woman giving the judge the finger and a verbal expletive which led to the judge calling her back again and then ordering her to spend 30 days in jail for contempt.
As an educator and an adult who can attest to having had classrooms filled with 20 or more students, exactly like this young woman in Florida I have absolutely no doubt that he started it. Why? Because as a professional and an educated adult and a person with an extreme amount of power…he is the one who should definitely know better. In fact and whether he likes it or not, that’s precisely part of his job.
But even if you disagree with me consider the fact that at the average price of $31,000 per year to keep some one incarcerated in a county, state or federal jail in the USA that judge just cost us all about three grand! And multiply that by our world record prison population of over 2 million citizens and you have an annual cost to the tax payers of over 74 billion dollars.
And if you then consider the fact that over 7million adults are under correctional supervision including probation, parole, jail or prison (fully 3% of our population) then the total costs are even more staggering.
Yes, over the last 40 years or so there has been a staggering shift in the way that people behave disrespectfully to one another and we teachers know that there is nothing funny about being disrespected… but when this happens on almost every television show on the air these days there is always an accompanying laugh track to keep us amused.
Unfortunately for the young woman in the Florida court room she tried to add her own laugh track to the proceedings which just made matters worse for her. Curiously enough I have noticed over the years that no one, not teenager, nor adult, professional or non, likes being insulted in any way shape or form …
Yet everyone on Television seems to enjoy it, including the audiences. Why is that?
It seems to me that we have a love/hate relationship with disrespect in this country. We like to be disrespectful and we hate to be disrespected…and it’s costing us upwards of 70 billion dollars a year and destroying millions of lives…and because it really isn’t funny there’s not a laugh track to be heard.
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Tags: education, law enforcement, life, musings, prisons, teaching