Harsher Penalties for Juveniles are Counterproductive - The Atlantic

On the morning of October 3, 2012, a trio of unarmed 16- and 17-year-old boys in Elkhart, Indiana, banded together to commit a burglary in their neighborhood. To avoid a confrontation, they planned to hit a vacant home. After some dogs scared them off their first target, the teens called two more friends, who were 18 and 21, to help them break into another neighbor’s house, which seemed empty. But the homeowner, Rodney Scott, was asleep upstairs, and when he heard the intruders, he thundered down with his handgun and began firing. One teen dashed out the door, another was already outside, and the others scrambled into a bedroom closet. As Scott was calling 911, the closet door opened and 21-year-old Danzele Johnson fell to the floor, dead, shot by Scott.<br>The other four—16-year-old Blake Layman, 16-year-old Jose Quiroz, 17-year-old Levi Sparks, and 18-year-old Anthony Sharp Jr.—were arrested and charged with felony murder in the perpetration of a burglary, since their crime had resulted in Johnson’s death. Although three of the defendants were juveniles, all four were tried as adults, owing to an Indiana mandate for offenders who are at least 16 and charged with murder. After the teens either pleaded or were found guilty, they were each sentenced to at least 50 years in prison.<br>These sentences proved controversial, not just because charging unarmed teens in a death they didn’t directly cause seemed bizarre, but also because the prosecution of juveniles as adults has long raised questions about justice and due punishment. Layman, who was sentenced to 55 years in prison, appealed the decision, arguing that the punishment was “cruel and unusual.” In 2015, Indiana’s Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the sentence was “disproportionate” given “what we now know about adolescent brain development and the impact it has on a juvenile’s susceptibility to engaging in risky behaviors.” The judges reduced the convictions to simple burglary and ordered the lower courts to resentence the offenders accordingly. In 2022, the state signed into law a range of reforms designed to divert more young people from the criminal-justice system. But Indiana prosecutors can still charge children as young as 12 as adults.<br>Despite years of reforms, neurological studies and other research, and steep drops in crime, the question of how to justly and effectively handle juvenile offenders is far from settled. Lawmakers across the country have lately been working to make juvenile sentencing stricter. These efforts, spurred by spikes in crime during the pandemic and high-profile anecdotes of violence among teens, aim to undermine decades of trying to rehabilitate minors and keep them out of prison. In April, Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe, a Republican, signed a bill into law that will allow more minors to be tried as adults. “If a juvenile is going to act like an adult and commit a crime like an adult, they need to understand that those, unfortunately, have consequences,” Kehoe said at the time. The House passed legislation last year—yet to go before the Senate—that targets teen offenders, including a bill that allows 14-year-old juvenile defendants in the District of Columbia to be tried as adults for various crimes and potentially sentenced to life without parole.<br>Decades of studies have found that in many cases, incarcerating juveniles is counterproductive, in part because these young offenders have higher rates of rearrest than those who are diverted from prison. Both juvenile crime and arrests have plummeted in tandem by about 75 percent since peaking in 1995, according to FBI data. Yet whenever crime ticks up, as it did across the board from 2021 to 2023 (before falling again in 2024), calls to crack down on young deviants resonate more with lawmakers and the public than efforts to expand access to therapy, mentors, and job training do. Addressing the root causes of crime does not provide the same catharsis as sending a child to adult prison.<br>In 2024, a number of states rolled back juvenile-justice reforms to make penalties harsher for young offenders. Tennessee enacted a law that permits prosecutors to try minors as young as 15 as adults for shoplifting or stealing firearms. Kentucky passed a law that cleared the way for prosecutors to charge teens as young as 15 as adults for using firearms in certain felonies, including manslaughter, robbery, and some kinds of assault. North Carolina mandated that 16- and 17-year-olds charged with serious felonies start in adult criminal court.<br>Louisiana first stopped automatically prosecuting 17-year-olds as adults in 2019, but ended this reform in 2024. The state’s new Republican governor, Jeff Landry, ran a tough-on-crime campaign that appealed to residents who were alarmed by a rise in crime across the state during the pandemic. Yet crime-data analysts have noted that Louisiana’s crime wave was in keeping with a national trend,...