Dogfighting and deterrence

USA Today has a profile of a project by animal advocates to teach inner city kids not to put their dogs in fights. Programs like these are an important corollary (or corrective) to the push for harsher sentences for animal cruelty offenders. As the article points out, a huge portion of dogfighters are kids. It's difficult to imagine a 10-year old being deterred by, say, a cruelty offense being elevated from a misdemeanor to a felony. And high profile convictions don't do much either:

The [Michael] Vick case hasn't deterred young urban tough guys. "It actually generated more interest among urban youth," Grim says. Suddenly, kids who had believed dogfighting was only a ghetto or rural Southern sport saw rich role models were involved. "They thought, if (Vick) does it, it's cool."

The fact that Vick got prison time and that dogfighting is a felony doesn't stop them because they reject both as establishment punishment leveled against the disenfranchised, Grim says.

One problem with our cruelty laws is that they, like the rest of our criminal laws, are more likely to be enforced against disempowered individuals (poor folks, especially poor people of color) than against large-scale animal users, whose practices are shielded by weak cruelty statutes or lack of prosecutorial interest. These programs look to be a better way of dealing with the problem than harsher sentences, especially for juveniles. When cases are prosecuted, judges should consider effective anti-dogfighting programs as a condition of probation or supervision.