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“Since the late 2000s,” writes Dana Liebelson today in the NYR Online, “states have increasingly moved away from trying and incarcerating kids as adults in the justice system.” However, as with so many other progressive efforts, the movement against imprisoning children alongside adults has foundered during the Trump era:
Last September several House Democrats joined with Republicans to pass legislation that would lower the age at which certain youths in D.C. can be tried as adults, from sixteen to fourteen.… It is one of several bills waiting in the wings of the House and Senate that would cause teenagers and young adults to serve longer sentences and acquire criminal records that follow them long after they’re released.
Several state legislatures across the country, for their part, have overturned laws that keep children under the age of eighteen from being sent to adult prisons or are discussing doing so, despite the fact that crime rates are dropping nationwide. “The consequences of this attitude can be nightmarish,” Liebelson attests. “Over a decade ago, I reported on teenagers who were physically and sexually abused while housed with adult prisoners in Michigan. According to interviews, documents, and videos I obtained, some had been restrained until they urinated on themselves, or gassed with chemical spray; a number had attempted suicide.”
Below, alongside Liebelson’s essay, are five articles from our archives about the juvenile justice system.
Dana Liebelson
The Return of the Teen Crime Panic
A push to try more kids accused of crimes as adults reflects a backlash to decades of successful advocacy.
David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow
The Crisis of Juvenile Prison Rape: A New Report
Nationally, fewer than half of the corrections officials whose sexual abuse of juveniles is confirmed are referred for prosecution, and almost none are seriously punished. Although it is a crime for staff to have sex with inmates in all fifty states, prosecutors rarely take on such cases. As children’s advocate Isela Gutierrez put it to The Texas Observer, “local prosecutors don’t consider these kids to be their constituents.” A quarter of all known staff predators in youth facilities are allowed to keep their positions.
—January 7, 2010
Hilary Mantel
Killer Children
When children kill other children, we come close to wishing for a Sadean solution. They come near to the top of the list of what society would prefer not to think about. We cannot kill them, but how can we bear for them to live among us?… We would, if we could, launch them on dark waters of forgetfulness; simply rub them out, as monstrous blots. But since they cannot be made to disappear, we unite in moral panic. Their acts, their persons, provoke a hysterical vigilante reaction. The bereaved family’s desire for revenge is vented again and again through the national media. Their private suffering becomes a public spectacle.
—May 20, 1999
David Brion Davis
The Crime of Reform
“For anyone caught on the fringes of this correctional web, such as juvenile delinquents on probation, the violation of petty rules could lead toward increasingly confining incarceration.… Progressive reforms probably increased the average length of prison sentences while extending state surveillance and control over more people through such discretionary devices as probation, parole, and juvenile courts.”
—June 26, 1980
Peter Schrag
A Blow Against Sadism
The American system of juvenile justice is one of those festering national scandals which occasionally attract public attention—generally after an especially odious case of injustice or brutality—and then sink back into the hidden corners of routine neglect and abuse.… Juveniles have been given some of the rights of due process guaranteed adult defendants in criminal cases; but they still fall under the shadow of a legal doctrine in which the court, the probation officer, and the correctional institution are supposed to protect and “treat” those who come under their jurisdiction and formal criminal proceedings are regarded as inappropriate.
—October 31, 1974
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Dropping Out
Delinquents…have a crude and distorted but not unreasonable sense of some of the traditions of the law. But this is just what gets them into the most serious trouble, not only because they kid themselves about what the law really means, but—and more importantly—because the ordinary code of criminal justice does not apply to them and they cannot claim its safeguards. This, in itself, is a sufficient and perfectly rational basis for a pervasive sense of injustice, which is exacerbated by the delinquent’s need to rationalize his own miscreant behavior.
—March 25, 1965
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