[jirdperson]

I did read the article (I’m not sure what you mean by “it is terribly biased”). I don’t think anyone here is questioning the logical chain of events that led to this girl’s incarceration (I.e. arrest -> probation -> violation -> incarceration). Presumably, anyone participating in this forum is able to read.

The reason this is newsworthy is that the punishment seems completely out of proportion with the “crime.” That remains true whether you consider the crime to be not doing schoolwork (her teacher said, by the way, that her performance was similar to most of her other students) or fighting with her mother (pulling her hair and biting her finger) and stealing a fellow student’s cell phone.

What’s worse, although she was supposedly incarcerated for not doing her schoolwork, her caseworker filed a probation violation after she went back to sleep after checking in for the day - not even bothering to check whether she was keeping up with her academic requirements. Her caseworker also admitted that they knew nothing about the her educational disability or the accommodations she received because of it. Further, in response to Covid—19, the court that decided to lock her up was supposed to be hearing only “essential emergency matters,” and the governor of her state had encouraged courts to send children home. Despite this, her case (based on a misunderstanding) was apparently deemed an “essential emergency matter” and her presence in the outside world considered risky enough to defy the governor’s recommendation.

To me, this seems like an incredibly callous miscarriage of justice facilitated by ignorance, incompetence, and negligence at multiple levels. The fact that some authority has the power to exercise their authority in a certain way has no bearing on whether that exercise of power is morally justified, else we’d consider the actions of history’s most oppressive regimes just.