Children Don't Belong in Prison

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It's a sad commentary on American society that approximately 200,000 children under the age of 18 are sent directly or transferred to the adult "justice" system every year. Just par for the course in a country that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, I suppose, but shameful nonetheless.

Does trying, sentencing, and punishing children and adolescents as adults produce any kind of positive, productive results? Somehow, temporarily "disposing of" young criminals and "raising" them in lock-up (often with release around age 21) doesn't sound like an ideal solution. Suddenly, some states across the US are starting to re-think their approach to dealing with these children who have, more often than not, already been neglected, abandoned, or abused by their own parents, families, and society at large. States are rethinking and, in some cases, retooling juvenile sentencing laws. They're responding to new research on the adolescent brain, and studies that indicate teens sent to adult court end up worse off than those who are not: They get in trouble more often, they do it faster and the offenses are more serious.

"It's really the trifecta of bad criminal justice policy," says Shay Bilchik, a former Florida prosecutor who heads the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University. "People didn't know that at the time the changes were made. Now we do, and we have to learn from it." Since the early 1990s, kids as young as 10, 11, and 12 have been tried and punished as adults. The general legislative attitude has been "If you do an adult crime, you should be treated like an adult criminal." Those are the words of Jay Hoffman, a Democratic state legislator who had a hand in toughening Illinois juvenile justice laws in 1994, soon after two Chicago boys, aged 10 and 11, dropped 5-year-old Eric Morse to his death from the 14th-story of a vacant public housing apartment. The youngest in United States history to be jailed for murder, they were sentenced to lock-up in a maximum-security juvenile prison, with their release required by the time they turned 21.

Then there was Nathaniel Abraham who, as a sixth grader, shot and killed 18-year-old Ronnie Lee Greene, Jr. Abraham was tried as an adult but sentenced as a child. He ended up being sentenced to eight years of juvenile detention with a mandated release at age 21.

Then we have Lionel Tate, who, at age 12, killed 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick by "imitating professional wrestling moves" he had seen on TV. He was tried as an adult, convicted of first-degree murder, released after three years in prison and given year of house arrest and 10 years of probation. He violated his house arrest when he was discovered outside of his home and in posession of a knife. Soon after that, he was arrested for robbing a Domino's Pizza delivery guy at gunpoint, for which he received a 30-year sentence.

Last, there's the case of Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was locked up at age 16 for an armed carjacking. He was sentenced as an adult and spent more than eight years behind bars, most served in adult prisons.

These days, some states are beginning to reconsider life without parole for teens, as well as focusing on raising the age of juvenile court jurisdiction. Better yet, some are even "exploring ways to offer kids a second chance, once they're locked up—or even before." The net was thrown too broadly," says Howard Snyder, director of systems research at the National Center for Juvenile Justice. "When you make these general laws ... a lot of people believe they made it too easy for kids to go into the adult system and it's not a good place to be."

"There has been a huge sea change ... it's across the country," says Laurie Garduque, program director at the MacArthur Foundation, which has worked extensively on juvenile justice reform. "It certainly helps that there has been a decline in juvenile crime and delinquency." It seems a promising and long overdue step toward rationally dealing with people and situations that are not one dimensional, but often hugely complex. Children who commit criminal acts are symbols of society gone awry: oftentimes victims of poverty and neglect, they represent larger issues in their neighborhoods, cities, and cultures. Mindlessly treating them with the concept of "adult crime, adult time" and throwing them into a prison system that greatly lacks rehabilitative programs is a grave disservice to the country as a whole.

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