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Such harsh treatment for youth offenders cannot be
squared with the most fundamental tenets of human rights law. International
standards recognize that children, a particularly vulnerable group,
are entitled to special care and protection because they are still
developing physically, mentally, and emotionally. States are required
to offer a range of alternatives to institutionalization. The imprisonment
of a child should always be a measure of last resort, focused on
the child´s rehabilitation, and for the shortest suitable
period of time. While incarceration may be proper for youth convicted
of very serious crimes such as murder, this report argues that
a sentence of life without the possibility of parole is never appropriate
for youth offenders.
The dramatic increase in the imposition of life without
parole sentences on child offenders in the United States is, at
least in part, a consequence of widespread changes in U.S. criminal
justice policies that gathered momentum in the last decades of
the twentieth century. Responding to increases in crime and realizing
the political advantages of promoting tough law and order policies,
state and federal legislators steadily increased the length of
prison sentences for different crimes and expanded the types of
offenders facing prison sentences. They also promoted adult trials
for child offenders by lowering the minimum age for criminal court
jurisdiction, authorizing automatic transfers from juvenile to
adult courts, and increasing the authority of prosecutors to file
charges against children directly in criminal court rather than
proceeding in the juvenile justice system. The United States thus
abandoned its commitment to a juvenile justice system and the youth
rehabilitation principles embedded in it.
"Adult time for adult crime" may be a catchy phrase,
but it reflects a poor understanding of criminal justice principles.
If the punishment is to fit the crime, both the nature of the offense
and the culpability or moral responsibility of the offender must
be taken into account. As the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly
recognized, the blameworthiness of children cannot be equated with
that of adults, even when they commit the same crime. Most recently,
in Roper v. Simmons in 2005, the Court ruled that the execution
of child offenders was unconstitutional, finding that juveniles
are "categorically less culpable" than adult criminals. The ruling
noted that juveniles lack the "well-formed" identities of adults,
are susceptible to "immature and irresponsible behavior," and vulnerable
to "negative influences and outside pressures." Neuroscientists
have recently identified anatomical bases for these differences
between juveniles and adults, establishing the behavioral significance
of the less developed brains of children.
Life without parole sentences for child offenders—meaning
there is no possibility of release during the prisoner´s
lifetime—effectively reject the well-established principle
of criminal justice that children are less culpable than adults
for crimes they commit. As the father of a teen offender serving
life without parole pointed out to us: "I´m a former cop.
I´m a true believer in law and order. But my son was a child
when this happened. He wasn´t thinking like an adult, and
he wasn´t an adult . . . how is it that the law can treat
him as if he is one?" The anguish and anger of a victim´s
family and friends may well be the same whether a murder is committed
by a child or an adult. But justice requires a sentence commensurate
with both the nature of the crime and the culpability of the offender.
For supporters of life without parole sentences,
the immaturity of child offenders is not a good enough reason to
abolish the sentence. They argue that the punishment also serves
to deter future crime. But does youth deterrence actually happen?
Research has failed to show that the threat of adult punishment
deters adolescents from crime. This is not surprising, given the
well-documented limited abilities of children, including teenagers,
to anticipate the consequences of their actions and rationally
assess their options. Few adolescents are likely to be able to
grasp the true significance of a life sentence. One twenty-nine-year-old
woman serving life without parole told a researcher for this report
that when she was sentenced, at the age of sixteen:
I didn´t understand "life without" . . . [that]
to have "life without," you were locked down forever. You know
it really dawned on me when [after several years in prison, a journalist]
came and . . . he asked me, "Do you realize that you´re gonna
be in prison for the rest of your life?" And I said, "Do you really
think that?" You know. . . and I was like, "For the rest of my
life? Do you think that God will leave me in prison for the rest
of my life?"
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