Yesterday, as I posted here, the Third Circuit sided with a juvenile detention center that was sued for its practice of strip searching children.

Today in the news is this disturbing story from Texas about a 14 year-old boy named Ahmed. Ahmed made a homemade clock and brought it to school, but found himself arrested when the principal suspected his clock was a bomb, “despite the fact that the ninth grader repeatedly told both teachers and the police that his project was not, in fact, a weapon.” In a photo of him in handcuffs, you can see him wearing a NASA t-shirt, bless his nerdy little heart. As he later described, “I was taken to a juvenile detention center, where they searched me, they took fingerprints and mug shots of me, and they searched me until my parents came and I got to leave the building.”

I have no idea whether that Texas detention center has the same strip-search policy as the Lancaster County center. But imagining that boy, and all the other boys and girls like him, being strip searched, bend-over-and-cough, makes me sad.