I grabbed Dustin R.'s from the middle of the pack at random.  I'm with anon.  I've known a lot of kids in juvie.  Heck I've known a lot of bright teenagers who don't have Dustin's mastery of grammar  nor a vocabulary this well developed. 

BUT Dustin knows if he truly wrote it or not.  If in fact he did, then he should be proud that he could fool so many people.  I hope the sentiment is genuine, whether the writing is or is not.  We need more trouble youth to learn their lesson early and move on.  You can never have too many pillars of the community.

(Joseph's seemed real.  Maybe these kids deserve more credit that we give them.)

Dianne Hardisty, editorial page editor, writes -- Good morning. In the way of an explanation. Each year, we work with the courts to publish articles in the Opinion section connected with Law Week. This year's Law Week theme: Kids and the Courts.  We were sent four articles written by a judge, probation official and two attorneys talking about how kids interact with the courts -- on criminal matters as well as "protective" actions.

Also in the submissions were these nine articles submitted by the staff at Crossroads and signed with first names and initials. Interestingly, your concerns about authenticity are exactly why we require letters to the editor to be signed by the authors and have verification information. We actually call and verify that the names are real and the people who "signed" the letters did, in fact, write them. True, a clever, determined person can beat the system. But that doesn't usually happen and we give it our best shot -- short of requiring a DNA sample.

We declined to publish in the Opinion section the juvenile letters attached to this posting -- not because we doubted their authenticity. Rather, because they were not signed with the authors' names and people, like yourselves, could justifiably question them.

We did think posting them had merit. It might provide a look from the "inside." As to their polished appearance, I would suspect staff at Crossroads helped clean them up in the same manner as the staff of the Opinion section cleans up letters to the editor. The intent is to understand the author's point of view, not to see if he or she could pass the English portion of the high school exit test.

I hope this helps explain the posting. No, it certainly was not a slow news day. We just felt this would be the best handling of these Crossroads letters.

Sorry to say, the letters didn't have a ring of truth for me either.  It sounds like the kids were writing for a specific audience.  Or, were being coached on how to describe their multiple incarcerations with the goal of inferring  that they have (finally) been rehabilitated.

It's hard to separate truth from fictiion in adult communication, much less in teens.