I love working with and on behalf of young people. Over the years, I have founded several organizations dedicated to helping youth to develop their leadership skills. Most recently, I launched an organization that is specifically focused on eradicating youth incarceration.

This weekend I was reading through a new report published by the National Center for Youth Law and the Wyoming Chapter of the ACLU. The report suggests that:

Unlike any other state in the nation, Wyoming commonly prosecutes children as adults, often imposing adult sentences for normal adolescent misbehavior. The majority of children in trouble with the law in Wyoming are being processed through adult courts, where they become saddled with adult criminal convictions. Children as young as 8 are being criminally prosecuted for such minor offenses as stealing a pack of gum or skateboarding in a restricted area.

The following sentence from the report really stuck with me:

It is estimated that 85-90% of children in trouble with the law in Wyoming are currently being processed through adult, not juvenile courts where they become saddled with adult criminal convictions for minor misbehaviors.

Even though it takes a lot to surprise me these days, I was stunned at this number of 90% of youth in trouble with the law being processed through adult court in Wyoming. Living here in Chicago, we have the legacy of Jane Addams and her fellow reformers who established the first juvenile court in 1898. The court was to serve as a “kind and just parent” for youth in trouble with the law. Now zero tolerance policies and laws have infused all aspects of American life (schools, workplaces, penal institutions) and we have forgotten that children are children and should be treated accordingly. Chicago is lucky to have people like Bernadine Dohrn and the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University Law School among many others in this city who are fighting to remind people on a daily basis that children demand different treatment from adults in the legal system. It is truly sad to say that this advocacy is needed now more than ever.

A recent column by Karen Heller underscores this reality. She points out that:

The United States leads the world in incarcerating juveniles for life without the possibility of parole. And Pennsylvania leads all states, by far, in a practice most nations condemn as inhumane.

It is only this May that the U.S. Supreme Court finally “ruled that juveniles cannot be sentenced to life without parole (LWOP) for any charge other than homicide, citing the country’s “evolving standards of decency” and the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.” Rather than ending JLWOP completely, they still left open the possibility for such a sentence in the case of homicide. I believe that this is still inhumane as life without parole for a 15 year old who commits a homicide is tantamount to imposing a sentence of death. You have incapacitated the young person for life.

Ms. Heller makes the case much more eloquently than I can:

What does it say about a society that locks up juveniles and says they have no chance for redemption, rehabilitation, and change? Are prisons places to educate, discipline, and reform inmates – correctional institutions – or are they human warehouses to incarcerate people until they die?

I would suggest that prisons are in fact warehouses and that even if folks cannot get on the bandwagon to abolish incarceration for adults, surely they can agree that incarceration for youth is cruel and unusual punishment. Can’t they?  Our treatment of youth in trouble with the law is all the more tragic because research suggests that delinquent youth even if left alone are likely to outgrow this behavior.

In addition, a recent review of the literature regarding whether juvenile transfer laws serve as a deterrent for youth crime finds that “in terms of specific deterrence — in other words, whether trying and sentencing juvenile offenders as adults decreases the likelihood that they will reoffend — six large-scale studies have found higher recidivism rates among juveniles convicted for violent offenses in criminal court when compared with similar offenders tried in juvenile court.” This finding is unsurprising given what we know about prison — that it only teaches people how to become better prisoners. The bulk of the available evidence that exists about whether transfer laws impact would-be juvenile offenders while less clear-cut suggests that these laws have little or no general deterrent effect on this population either.

Ara Oshagan -- Juvies

One of my hobbies is photography.  Photographs can often be more eloquent on a subject than words.  I found a wonderful series of photographs by Ara Oshagan.  The project is called Juvies and the photographs depict juvenile offenders who are being charged as adults in California.  The poignancy of the image above cannot be overstated.  Read this young woman’s words and get a sense of her desperation.  Notice the misspelled words and understand how the educational system has failed her. How we all have failed her…