You'll end up in a 'body bag': Ga. judge talks about viral tough love talk

You'll end up in a 'body bag': Ga. judge talks about viral tough love talk

Two weeks ago, Adjudicator Verda Colvin captivated up a white physique bag and told a attorneys abounding of adolescence that they may anon end up in one. Now, humans beyond the nation are listening.

The moment, captured in a now-viral video that’s overextension beyond the web, was allotment of the Bibb County Sheriff Office’s “Consider the Consequences” program, a Scared Straight-style affairs for at-risk adolescence in Macon, Ga.

“The way you’re going, you will go to bastille or you will end up in this physique bag,” Colvin, a Bibb County Superior Cloister judge, told the students. “One of two things. What do you wish to do?”

Colvin underpinned a austere account of the teens’ approaching with a hopeful message: You’re loved, you’re valuable, and you can change your path.

Eight account later, admiral were casual out tissues for students. One of them, unbeknownst to Colvin, filmed the allocution and acquaint it to the sheriff’s office’s Facebook page.

“We overlook that kids charge a absolute dosage of the truth, lovingly” Colvin, 50, told USA TODAY.

“Do I appear hard? Yeah, I appear hard," she said. "It’s an affectionate setting, and that’s why I never accepted it to be recorded.”

Covin batten with us about her newfound Internet acclaim and the aesthetics abaft the boxy adulation she brings to the courtroom.

USA TODAY: So you didn't apperceive your allocution with these kids was accepting filmed?

Colvin: I came in from one of my cloister hearings on April 1, and anyone said to me, "Judge you're all over Facebook." Because I don’t do amusing media. At all. The alone acumen I accept a Facebook page is because I’m up for acclamation this year. Had I known, I candidly would accept told them "No, you can’t almanac me."

Why's that?

A lot of kids anticipate that about adults—that it’s about how we attending to the world. But I don’t affliction about how I attending to the world; I just wish to ability them. Kids alone bell with us if we’re accurate with them and if they feel like we affliction if they get it.

It looks like the kids in the video got it. Do you generally accord this aforementioned speech?

It's consistently from the hip. But in the video, I acquainted like I bare to go up a notch. Every month, the ages of kids in the affairs were accepting younger, and the things kids were accomplishing were out of the box. How do you abduct your parents’ car? Abduct their acclaim cards? But I’m consistently intense, consistently passionate.

In the video, you advertence ancestral profiling and added audible challenges some of these kids ability face. How do you allege to those hurdles while acceptable adolescence to affected them?

All through life, as a boyhood or as a woman, there's been things you can point to to argue you of what you possibly can and can't do. I accept to accede what they feel. How can you not acknowledgment that? But that’s not abundant to stop you from what you're aggravating to do. It’s like Monopoly. Don’t acreage in bastille so you don’t go to jail. If you apperceive the game, don’t play the game.

Thanks for your time. Any departing thoughts?

Our association will abatement or acceleration on what we do to accomplish adolescent humans all they can be. So appeal everyone: Pour into a child.

Follow @JoshHafner on Twitter.

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