A Crime Doesn't Make a Child an Adult(theatlantic.com) |
A Crime Doesn't Make a Child an Adult(theatlantic.com) |
The article’s focus on moral culpability also overlooks the key purpose of the justice system: protecting society from criminals. In that respect, the age actually creates a bigger risk. People who start engaging in criminal conduct at an earlier age more likely to engage in criminal behavior as adults: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/youth-justice-involvemen... (“Continuity of offending from the juvenile into the adult years is higher for people who start offending at an early age, chronic delinquents, and young people who commit violent offenses.”). If you look at the curve of when violent conduct occurs, it peaks from ages 13-25. And it’s actually about as high at age 13 as it is at age 25, with the peak around 18-19.
A more rational and less emotional sentencing system would be harsher on teenage offenders while reducing sentences overall. If someone is committing violent crimes at age 15, that signals an increased risk of violent criminality for the next decade. Short sentences will mean that person will keep victimizing society repeatedly over that period. On the other hand, multi-decade sentences are counter productive. Violent criminality drops sharply after age 40.
punishment is a prerequisit to rehabilitation
This does not align with my understanding of the research, e.g. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur... ?
> "Unfortunately, so far, the existing empirical work has not had a central place in policy, legislation, and political discourse (Loughran 2019, Nelken & Hamilton 2022). Unsurprisingly, scholars have been frustrated that their insights on, for instance, the inconclusive evidence for the deterrent effect of incarceration on violent crime or the evidence that treatment can help to rehabilitate have not had sufficient impact (Cullen et al. 2011, McGuire 2013).
> Empirical research has failed to sway policymakers and political leaders for many reasons, too many to cover fully here. For instance, one can broadly think about high levels of punitiveness in certain cultures and jurisdictions, such as the American context (Kleinfeld 2016, Muenster & Trone 2015). Moreover, there has been a penal populism where politicians have sold the public on a simplistic discourse that they need and want strict punishment against crime (Roberts et al. 2003, Windlesham 1998). Added to this is the discriminatory and racist framing of crime as part of a dog-whistle political strategy (Haney-López 2015). Another problem is a more general aversion to science, and a populist politics that drives on simplicity instead of nuanced, evidence-based policy (Huber et al. 2022). These headwinds foster a more challenging set of conditions not just for altering policy but even for the bare minimum of having robust and legitimate conversations about effective and ineffective punishment."
Or, for a lengthier investigation and many citations and projects, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-end-of-violence-gary-sl... ?
("Twenty-five years ago, I sought out Gary Slutkin while searching for a solution to the gun violence we experienced in Los Angeles. I got far more than I hoped for. The methods he describes in his groundbreaking new book helped reduce our gun violence to historic lows and save thousands of lives.”—Charlie Beck, former chief of police, Los Angeles Police Department")
And Thomas “all men are created equal” Jefferson raped his slaves[0], and then enslaved the resulting children, but we don’t do that nowadays either, because I guess some things changed since 200+years ago?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery
Looking at the past for wisdom on how to treat young adult/people is very dangerous...
> People who start engaging in criminal conduct at an earlier age more likely to engage in criminal behavior as adults
this is not quite what the citation means. I am also very curious on how these study correct for cofactors .People who start a life of crime early are probably not comming from the best conditions in term of life circonstances. Which in it self is also a strong predictor.
> A more rational and less emotional sentencing system would be harsher on teenage offenders while reducing sentences overall.
No, that would be the fear based emotional response. The ration response would be to simply measure whether or not harsher sentencing have a better outcome. Instead of prehemtively jailing people based on dubious stats.
I do NOT concede that as the KEY purpose. And when you call "protecting society from criminals" the key purpose of the justice system you wind up with the horribly broken mess that is the US justice system.
Yes, A purpose of the justice system is to remove from society those who cannot be trusted.
But another purpose of the justice system should be to rehabilitate those who can be. And the US justice system is HORRIFIC at that. If anything, the US justice system is a net negative on rehabilitation. The way the US system throws everybody together does more to let old criminals teach new ones their tricks than any improvement from any rehabilitation program can counteract.
Whereas someone who has committed 30 petty thefts and then gets arrested, locked in a cage, and guarded by armed agents of the state, is extremely unlikely to commit another theft as long as he remains locked in the cage.
And he's also extremely unlikely to get shot to death by e.g. a store owner trying to protect his property from theft - another important function of the criminal justice system is protecting criminals from ordinary people using violence against criminals in order to protect their own lives or property.
Every year that a criminal is incarcerated is a year that they CANNOT kill an innocent citizen, rob a home or store, desecrate or vandalize the community, shoot up fentanyl in the streets, or do any number of things.
Every year we refuse to incarcerate criminals, is another year that regular citizens are forced to live in prison like conditions. Just like we see people "tribing up" by race in prison, forcing the youth to live in an open air prison is one of the direct causes of the rise in racism in today's youth.
Why stop at criminal, this also true for non-criminal; Let's just jail everyone, then we will all be safer.
That's not to say that I agree with giving minors adult sentences. But it doesn't seem the worst thing about the cases discussed here.
> Yet crime-data analysts have noted that Louisiana’s crime wave was in keeping with a national trend
This is meant to be mitigating? What is this thought process? Who in their right mind is like "okay, a group of people broke into your home at night but your state shouldn't have been so hard on them for what ensued because akshually it was part of a whole nationwide trend at the time."
The modern right absolutely thrives on the fact that so many mostly reasonable people can't see that "play stupid games win stupid prizes" is just another side of the "tolerate anything but intolerance" coin. You can be in favor of showing leniency to kids for dumb, youthful mistakes without taking the doe-eyed approach that every dumb thing someone does in their youth is nothing more than a mistake. And the fact that you yourself made some poor decisions as a youth doesn't mean you have to look at a group burglarizing a house as "well, kids will be kids."
You analogy doesn't not hold, and in manyways point at the root of the issue. The point was to show that harsher punishment did not seems to result in meaningful effect on crime stats. It's fine to want harsher sentencing for some kind of emotional fuffilement, let's just not pretend that is helping in any otherways.
It doesn't help that even just be charged with a crime is now a permanent scarlet letter, even if the person is clearly innocent and charges are dropped.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-17/teens-charged-with-mu...
[1] https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/crime/shocking-foo...
[2] https://www.nine.com.au/australia-news/brisbane-man-stabbed-...
[3] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/three-teens-accused-of-k...
[4] https://thenightly.com.au/australia/victoria/melbourne-teena...
I find it hard to believe they don't know what they are doing when they brutally murder someone. They know they are protected in society and the repercussions are always minor.
I don't know what the solution is, but forming a gang to steal cars, kill people, just doesn't sit right with me without severe punishment.
This is something that drives me up the wall. I'm a pretty lefty guy, mostly, but I am very irritated by "my side" being so weak on crime.
I get it, we don't want to ruin people's lives for being a stupid kid doing a stupid crime, but there has to be some kind of middle ground between "ruin their life forever" and "teach them there are no consequences"
It's ridiculous
Weakness on crime is not a left vs right thing.It's mostly about which kind of crime each side is soft on.
And it is never enough.
Also, importantly, when I look at the right wing conservatives I see criminals in leadership and I see violent criminals down. And whole party supporting them and enabling them.
Would it stop stupid kids from doing stupid kid stuff? No. Would it make minors less attractive to organized crime? Yes.
Most other forms of crime, especially violent, are almost completely insensitive to the harshness of any possible punishment sentence.
If a brain is sufficiently broken that it no longer has the limiter against harming another human being, prison sentences won't do anything to fix that.
But that doesn't much matter - because deterring other children is not a major motivation for the "sentence 'em as adults!" crowd.
I can't remember seeing countries with stronger protections for minors collapsing into a perfect spherical body of criminal children. Good juvenile justice systems are not about the absence of consequences, they usually are about age-appropriate consequences instead. In short: supervision, intervention, and rehabilitation instead of pretending a child is simply a small adult. The idea that only the threat of adult punishment prevents children from “killing and eating you” is so simplistic it is an insult to everybody forced to read it.
If a kid becomes violent usually you have a long history of publicly visible and known smaller, less dramatic events leading up to that. Good social work and educational systems are able to pull children and teenagers out of that spiral, by for example isolating them from destructive family dynamics. All tried and tested, papers written about it, statistics and studies published about the effectiveness.
Countries having problems with criminal minors are usually countries who try to not spend any money on social measures and education. Or put guns into the hands of kids. There aren't many such countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_El_Salvador
Turns out it works.
Wikipedia article makes no obvious mention of correlation between sentencing and deterrence. Linked article, in fact, demonstrates that alternative programs provided almost all the improvement.
However in most cases the incarceration is used as punishment, with the length is related to the seriousness of the crime rather than the likelihood for repeating offenses.
Here in Norway we explicitly separate this, where most sentences are punishment, but some are explicitly for protecting society. In the latter case there is technically no end, just a minimum time and after that periodic reviews to determine if the person still poses a sufficient threat.
It's technically classified as a punishment due to legal reasons, like ensuring human rights and due process are respected.
How does that help, if after incarceration that person become a much hardened criminal both because of the lack meaning pathway to integration, and you know spending years locked up with the worst of society.
> but we don't really have a good understanding of what specific people can and cannot be rehabilitated, or how to go about actually effectively doing the rehabilitation.
Then let's work on that.
And this is another problem--your "justice system" should NOT be where you place your mentally-ill--they belong in a (possibly secure) medical facility and not with rank-and-file criminals. This is yet one more issue with the US system.