12th, June 2025

Entry Title: The Kids Who Mistook Handcuffs for Bracelets

Filed Under: Generational Curses & Courtroom Eulogies

Dearest Diary,

There’s a lie circulating on the algorithm again : that the system is broken.

Correction: The system is working exactly as it was built.

It criminalizes what it doesn’t care to understand and cages what it was never willing to save.

This isn’t about my docket.

It’s about every one of theirs.

Because I have seen the full cast of forgotten youth.

The boy who holds a Glock tighter than he’s ever been held.

The girl whose “runaway” label hides the fact that she’s being trafficked from couch to curb to cop car.

The thirteen-year-old who believes a mugshot means manhood.

The fifteen-year-old who thinks her body is currency, and survival is her only art form.

This is what happens when the village forgets its role and the courtroom becomes the orphanage.

Let us proceed with the evidence:

Black girls are the fastest-growing group in youth incarceration.
60% of girls in juvenile detention are survivors of sexual violence.
Many are not charged with crimes, they’re detained under “status offenses”: running away, truancy, or being labeled “incorrigible.”
Translation? They were failed first. Then punished for reacting to it.

I’ve reviewed case files where the trauma is louder than the charges.

Where a girl was locked up for “prostitution” at age 14, despite being too young to consent to anything under Texas law.

Where a boy faced more time for petty theft than his uncle ever did for abuse.

And still, society only asks, “What did they do?”

Never “What was done to them?”

Let’s be clear:

You can’t arrest your way out of generational neglect.

You can’t cuff a child into healing.

And you can’t keep throwing melinated brilliance into cages and pretending it’s justice.

To every young soul reading this, especially the ones no one has written poems for yet:

You are not what they’ve called you.

You are not too broken.

You are not too fast, too loud, too angry, too much.

You are surviving in a world that gave you none of the tools and all of the consequences.

But survival isn’t the ceiling. It’s the starting point.

You deserve more than cages.

More than case numbers.

More than hashtags written after your life goes viral for all the wrong reasons.

I remain, as ever, Unmoved by statistics, but permanently wrecked by what they represent.

This entry is a fictionalized satire. Any resemblance to actual people, events, or lawsuits is entirely coincidental, but structurally inevitable.

Tag someone raising a revolutionary. Tag someone still healing. Tag someone who made it out.

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