There’s little doubt among legal experts that Colton Harris-Moore’s best bet to avoid a lengthy prison term is to mount a defense that highlights his troubled upbringing and plays down the bravado of his two years on the run.

That’s already started.

His defense attorney, John Henry Browne, said on national television that the “Barefoot Bandit” isn’t interested in making money from his story. Harris-Moore didn’t have fun on the run, his lawyer said. He was lonely and scared.

Now, at 19, Harris-Moore could be facing years, if not decades, behind bars. Experts believe a trial — if no plea agreement is reached — is months away, at best.

Legal experts suggest that a successful defense likely will focus more on arguing for a reduced sentence than on challenging the facts in the dozens of crimes Harris-Moore is linked to.

HeraldNet: Defense options limited for Colton Harris-Moore

Update: From the Seattle PI:

He said Harris-Moore had a message for the public.

“He’s concerned that kids will think this is fun, and he wanted us to say publicly that it was not fun. He was scared to death most of the time he was on his ‘lark’,” said Browne. “It was not enjoyable … he was living in port-a-potties at times.”

perhaps his most benign nickname is the most telling. Long before stealing boats and planes made him a marvel of elusiveness, an Internet antihero, Mr. Harris-Moore, 19, was suspected of stealing cookies and frozen pizza from the Kostelyk family, a few gravel roads from the squalor that was his home, a trailer on a dead end here, barely an hour from Seattle. The Kostelyks had waterfront property and a freezer full of food. He lived inland and had nothing.

“We called him ‘Island Boy,’ ” recalled Linda Johnson, whose mother, Maxine Kostelyk, was among Mr. Harris-Moore’s first suspected victims. “He came back over and over again — frozen pizza, cookies, ice cream. He was a tall boy, and he was growing.” [...]

An examination of his early life and troubles suggests a picture far less cinematic. According to court and public documents and dozens of interviews, Mr. Harris-Moore was nobody’s hero, not even his own. On the contrary, whether he was hiding in the Kostelyks’ tree house, watching for delivery of the high-powered flashlight the police believe he ordered with a stolen credit card, or flying solo to the Bahamas in a stolen Cessna this month, isolated in the tiny cockpit for more than a thousand miles — Colton Harris-Moore, for much of his life, was alone and hungry.

That was true even as he was being celebrated by thousands of fans on Facebook.

“He says he’s not into any of that,” said Monique Gomez, a lawyer who briefly represented Mr. Harris-Moore in the Bahamas. “He just wants to get this behind him.”

New York Times: ‘Barefoot Bandit’ Started Life on the Run Early

(Thanks Joe!)

Great stuff on value of creativity, its neuroscience, and how it can be taught:

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.” [...]

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Newsweek: The Creativity Crisis

See also:

The 6 Myths Of Creativity

Teachers hate creativity?

The Neuroscience of Jazz Improvisation

In recent decades, it began to seem as though America’s proud tradition of venerating great outlaws might have been lost. We’d grown to accept — and secretly admire — corporate-thievery. Our renegades and outlaws, once admired for their boldness in the face of tyrants, were recast in popular culture as degenerates. The logic went that by breaking the law — written to protect the powerful corrupt — they acted against society itself. Now we know nothing could be further from the truth. Thank God Colton Harris-Moore, the “Teenage Jesse James,” is winning back the hearts and minds of all those people who forgot the allure of a goodhearted outlaw.

VBS Blog: THE BAREFOOT BANDIT STRIKES AGAIN

The South Dakota crime spree started after Harris-Moore apparently left the Northwest, donating $100 to a Raymond animal hospital and stealing a $450,000 yacht on his way to Oregon, then reportedly stealing more cars as he made his way toward Idaho.

A few days after Harris-Moore’s trail went cold in Boise, Idaho, on June 12, authorities in South Dakota noticed an unusual series of incidents:

• A vehicle with Washington state license plates was found abandoned in South Dakota, according to a local news station.

• A vehicle was reported stolen from the Spearfish, S.D., airport and another was stolen from the Yankton airport on Tuesday.

• One or more homes were burglarized in the same area, not far from the airport.

• In one of the burglaries, police say a man who fits the description of Harris-Moore occupied a home while the family was on vacation. The family came home and surprised him in their house, and the man fled the scene.

KATU: Is ‘Barefoot Bandit’ Harris-Moore in the Midwest?

Lots more Harris-Moore stuff at Colton Harris-Moore Fanclub

Maybe… (emphasis mine):

. RESULTS: Controlling for age, physical maturity, and mother’s education, a significant curvilinear relationship between intelligence and coital status was demonstrated; adolescents at the upper and lower ends of the intelligence distribution were less likely to have sex. Higher intelligence was also associated with postponement of the initiation of the full range of partnered sexual activities. An expanded model incorporating a variety of control and mediator variables was tested to identify mechanisms by which the relationship operates. CONCLUSIONS: Higher intelligence operates as a protective factor against early sexual activity during adolescence, and lower intelligence, to a point, is a risk factor. More systematic investigation of the implications of individual differences in cognitive abilities for sexual activities and of the processes that underlie those activities is warranted.

U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health: Smart teens don’t have sex (or kiss much either)

I must be missing something because it looks to me like both higher and lower IQ teens were less likely to have sex. So doesn’t that mean being average is a risk factor?

(via Barking up the wrong tree via Dangerous Meme)

(Photo credit: castledweller / CC)

See also:

Smart Kids more likely to be heavy drinkers

Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.

Congratulations! Your children are well on their way to believing that is better than everybody else.

Surprised? So were authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman when they started researching the issue of kids and race for their book NurtureShock. It turns out that a lot of our assumptions about raising our kids to appreciate diversity are entirely wrong.

Read More – Wired: How to Raise Racist Kids

(via Monstrrrous)

Interesting polling data on my generation:

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials — the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium — have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.

They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.

Their entry into careers and first jobs has been badly set back by the Great Recession, but they are more upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures as well as about the overall state of the nation.

Read More – Pew Research: Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

(via Theoretick)

See also: Generational Differences.

Georgia State University Criminal Justice experts Timothy Brezina, Volkan Topalli and economist Erdal Tekin, have released a unique study that indicates that although young criminals are aware of the risks of violent injury, death or punishment, the possibility of a shorter life span encourages them to focus more on the “here and now.”

“It turns out that if you boil it all down the more you think you are going to die young the more likely it is that you are going to engage in criminality and violence,” Topalli said. “This is the opposite of what most people think, because most people think that if you think you’re going to die soon you become depressed and you wouldn’t commit crimes.”

The research “Might not be a Tomorrow,” is among the first Criminal Justice studies to simultaneously include one-on-one offender interviews with an econometric analysis of nation-wide adolescent data to provide a better understanding of why young people tend to pursue high-risk behaviors associated with immediate rewards, which include crime and violence.

Science Daily: Might Not Be a Tomorrow: Youth Anticipate Early Death

“Most people think that if you think you’re going to die soon you become depressed and you wouldn’t commit crimes.”

What? Does anyone actually believe that? How are these results the least bit surprising?

Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses.

They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.

“We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years. [...]

s, bright colors, and not many words — became a staple of baby life: According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.

Despite their ubiquity, and the fact that many babies are transfixed by the videos, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under 2.

New York Times: No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund

A follow-up to this post day before yesterday about the troubled teen industry.

The Cult That Spawned the Tough Love Teen Industry

Mount Bachelor, the school mentioned previously, was a CEDU school prior to being purchased by Aspen. CEDU is a first generation offspring of Synanon, the original abuse-as-therapy cult.

For Their Own Good

A Business Built on the Troubles of Teenagers

A web site for abuse survivors

Mount Bachelor Academy regularly uses intensely humiliating tactics as treatment. For instance, in required seminars that the school calls Lifesteps, students say staff members of the residential program have instructed girls, some of whom say they have been victims of rape or sexual abuse, to dress in provocative clothing — fishnet stockings, high heels and miniskirts — and perform lap dances for male students as therapy. [...]

But because the programs are privately run, what happens within their walls is largely a mystery. No one knows whether the programs succeed or fail. [...]

Mount Bachelor’s executive director, Bitz, says her school uses widely accepted psychological treatments to help children overcome their problems. “We also use a psychodrama-treatment approach designed to do one or both of two things,” said Bitz in her statement, “get a student to embrace qualities of their character (such as beauty or courage) about which they have doubt or assist them in recognizing qualities that are unproductive (such as selfishness or conceit) about which they have little insight.” [...]

“They told me I was dirty and I had to put mud on myself for being raped,” she said in reference to another Lifesteps session. “They basically blamed me for getting raped.”

Bitz dismissed Jane’s story and called it “very suspect” in an interview with the Bend Bulletin, which also spoke with Jane. “We know that some current students have made a conscious decision to lie about our school, hoping that it will be closed as a result, and that they would then be sent back home,” Bitz told TIME. [...]

Synanon began as a drug-rehabilitation program before morphing into a controversial cult and is credited with putting forth the idea that confrontation and boot-camp-style breakdown tactics could cure teen misbehavior and addiction. Synanon’s confrontational techniques influenced est and LifeSpring, which began selling weekend seminars designed to prompt emotional breakthroughs in participants.

Time: An Oregon School for Troubled Teens Is Under Scrutiny

Interesting article on a number of levels:

1) The potential Synanon-inspired abuse of kids right here in Oregon.

2) The implications of the court case for students and school districts.

3) Problems with private schools in general.

4) Problems with public schools, education, and therapy in general.

There’s a follow-up form the author of the article at HuffPo.

(via Metafilter thanks to Trevor Blake)

Text messaging graphic pictures of yourself could soon be legal for teens in Vermont.

Lawmakers there are considering a bill that would make it legal for teenagers 18 and under to exchange explicit photos and videos of themselves – an act that’s come to be known by teens as “sexting.”

Under the current law, teenagers could be prosecuted as sex offenders if they get caught sending graphic sexual images of themselves, even if it was consensual.

WCBSTV: Vermont Lawmakers Look To Legalize Teen ‘Sexting’

Link via The Agitator, pic thanks to Bill Whitcomb.

The American Civil Liberties Union is helping three teenage girls fight back against a Pennsylvania prosecutor who has threatened to charge the girls with felony child porn violations over digital photos they took of themselves.

In a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Pennsylvania, ACLU lawyers accuse Skumanick (.pdf) of violating the civil rights of three girls. The lawsuit says the threat to prosecute minors for child porn “is unprecedented and stands anti-child-pornography laws on their head.”

The lawsuit comes in the wake of a string of cases around the country in which teens have been arrested on child porn charges for making and distributing nude and semi-nude photos of themselves.

Wired: ACLU Sues Prosecutor Over ‘Sexting’ Child Porn Charges

A 14-year-old girl has been accused of child pornography for posting nearly 30 explicit nude pictures of herself on MySpace.

The charges could force the teenager from New Jersey, US, to register as a sex offender, if convicted. [...]

If convicted of the distribution charge, she would be forced to register with the state as a sex offender under Megan’s Law, said state Attorney-General Anne Milgram.

She also could face up to 17 years in jail, though such a stiff sentence is unlikely.

Some – including the New Jersey mother behind the creation of Megan’s Law – criticised the trend of prosecuting teens who send racy text messages or post illicit photos of themselves.

Full Story: Sky News

(via Biohabit)

One of every 50 American children experiences homelessness, according to a new report that says most states have inadequate plans to address the worsening and often-overlooked problem.

The report being released Tuesday by the National Center on Family Homelessness gives Connecticut the best ranking. Texas is at the bottom.

“These kids are the innocent victims, yet it seems somehow or other they get left out,” said the center’s president, Dr. Ellen Bassuk. “Why are they America’s outcasts?”

The report analyzes data from 2005-2006. It estimates that 1.5 million children experienced homelessness at least once that year, and says the problem is surely worse now because of the foreclosures and job losses of the deepening recession.

“If we could freeze-frame it now, it would be bad enough,” said Democratic Sen. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, who wrote a foreward to the report. “By end of this year, it will be that much worse.”

The report’s overall state rankings reflect performance in four areas: child homelessness per capita, child well-being, risk for child homelessness, and state policy and planning.

The top five states were Connecticut, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island and North Dakota. At the bottom were Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, New Mexico and Louisiana

Full Story: AP