Rehabilitation. Just a Bygone Word?

"But most of all I feel terrif[ied] even now when I leave the house[.] I pause for a moment before I go out the door and say a prayer before I leave. I know that not all the people in the world are bad[;] it's just the ones that do bad to others.

Living is a good thing, going to work [has] been ok so far, but when I think about what the defendant did to me with the gun pointed at my stomach I thought . . . 'This is it[.] No one around to see this.'

Dear Judge Richter. I hope and I wish you will give him everything you can give him by law and that it will give him time to think about what he did to me, and possibly someone else he may have hurt."

-- A handwritten

victim-impact statement, Oct. 2

It's easy to overlook a crime victim if there's no body or blood on the floor -- or if the victim lives to tell about what happened. Just another case of someone someplace at the wrong time. One more sad example of life in a city where the bad are bolder than the good and the victim is an afterthought.

Not this time.

Last Monday morning, 17-year-old Douglas Chambers was sentenced to two consecutive 50-month terms in prison -- a little more than eight years -- for several armed robberies that he and an accomplice committed over the summer. Tried and convicted as an adult, Chambers is likely to be incarcerated until he is in his mid-20s.

At the time of the June robbery spree, he was just 16.