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Editor,

My friend Rex Alphin’s letter about the proposed Juvenile Justice Facility presented, unfortunately, a minority view of this project.

While opponents were very passionate at our Board of Supervisors’ meeting last Thursday [Feb. 21], they represented only a small minority of our 37,000 residents in the county and voiced very few substantive objections to the project. Several civic groups, law enforcement officials, professional juvenile justice officers, religious leaders and even, at one time, the Windsor Town Council, supported this project that our supervisors were right to approve.

The facility will be a hallmark of local concern for our youth and our county will benefit greatly from leading the way in the Commonwealth. Placing this center within easier reach by the families of these youth, and sometimes children as young as 11, will make a critical difference in their rehabilitation and eventual, hopefully, return to society. The lives of these youthful offenders will benefit from expert intervention, education, medical care and the solicitude expressed by visiting loved ones.

I entreat all residents of my beloved county to now embrace this chance to host a temporary home for these wayward youth and to give them a second chance for a productive life. It will work wonderfully if the community supports it. It may fail if they do not.

Our supervisors did the right thing. As Edmund Burke famously said some 250 years ago, “A representative owes you, not his industry only,. but his judgement; and he betrays you when he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

 

Albert Burckard

Carrollton