In Texas, you have to be 16 years old to get a drivers license, 18 years old to smoke a cigarette or buy a lottery ticket and 21 years old to have a legal right to a margarita.
Lawmakers created these restrictions in the best interest of the nation’s youth — to protect minors from the decisions they are unprepared to make for themselves. But when it comes to crime and punishment, lawmakers seem callously indifferent to the effect certain forms of punishment have on juveniles. For instance, in Texas one must be only 14 years old to be tried, and sentenced, as an adult.
“From Time Out to Hard Time,” a study released last July and directed by Michelle Dietch of the University’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, examines the way courts throughout the nation handle juvenile sentencing. The report concluded that the current system treats far too many children as adults. Every state allows juveniles to be tried as adults, and more than 20 states permit children as young as 7 years of age to be tried in adult courts.
Juvenile court judges send about 80 children ages 13 and under into adult courts per year, according to the report.
In adult facilities, youth face much higher risks of physical and sexual assault and suicide than they would face in juvenile facilities, according to the report. Children who are convicted and sentenced as adults are much more likely to become violent offenders than children tried as juveniles. They are also more likely to end up in jail a second time. While the study does not prove causality, the correlation is significant enough to merit concern, the report continued.
Many argue that if children can commit crimes like adults, they can be tried like adults. But criminality is not an adult characteristic. Minors actually have a less-developed understanding of the consequences of their actions than their adult counterparts. When minors commit heinous crimes, they are not proving their adulthood, but indicating deep-seated problems accented by immature minds.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, which held that children who commit crimes when under the age of 18 are not eligible for the death penalty. As The New York Times wrote, “Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on compassion, common sense and the science of the youthful brain when he wrote that it was morally wrong to equate the offenses of emotionally undeveloped adolescents with the offenses of fully formed adults.”
Even if the ability to commit a particularly disturbing crime somehow demonstrated unusual maturity, courts would be sending excessive numbers of minors to the adult system. The decision to treat children as adults is not based on the seriousness of their crimes. As H. Thomas Wells Jr., president of the American Bar Association, wrote in The New York Times, “The data suggest, for example, that children 13 and under who commit crimes like burglary and theft are just as likely to be sent to adult courts as children who commit serious acts of violence against people.”
And the number of children judged to have broken their ways into adulthood is growing.
“Between 1985 and 1997, this country doubled the number of youths in adult prisons,” Wells wrote. “By 2001, we were trying 200,000 juveniles in adult courts each year. It’s time we enact reforms.”
According to the study, “on a single day in 2008, 7,703 children under age 18 were held in adult local jails and 3,650 in adult state prisons.”
That is more than 10,000 children facing unnecessarily high risks of assault and suicide, 10,000 kids who are more likely to commit violent crimes than the minors placed in the juvenile system.
There is a reason the law treats minors differently from adults — fundamental differences in development between minors and adults — differences that violent acts do not erase.
