Sixteen

by Charlie Spence

They seemed larger than me that day, the rain drops, as they fell from an endless gray sky. They illuminated the headlights of oncoming traffic in an iridescent and blurred shine. The display of colors seemed only to intensify the fear and magnify the pain I felt inside about yet another tragedy taking place in my life. I sat there dressed in an orange jumpsuit, feet shackled together and a waist chain tightly secured around my midsection to restrict my arms firmly to my sides. The sheriff’s van traveled at what felt like the speed of light, never allowing me to collect my thoughts before arriving at my next destination: life in an adult institution at the age of sixteen. The words compassionately spoken by the sheriff that day have never left the confines of my soul, “I didn’t even start to get it together until I was twenty-five,” he said. The sheriff will never understand the extent to which his words thrashed about my heart. Had I been tried and convicted as a juvenile, I would have been given a better chance at
rehabilitation and a second chance in society at the age of 25. I feel even more strongly now than I did back then, that trying juvenile offenders as adults and sentencing them to life in prison is immoral.

In the year 2000, the people of California voted and passed Proposition
21. This allowed for juveniles as young as fourteen who are accused of
a serious crime to be tried as adults at the discretion of the District
Attorney trying the case. Prior to Proposition 21, juveniles accused of
such crimes were given what is called a “707(b) hearing” in front of a
judge, to determine if they met the criteria to be tried as an adult. Before the 707(b) hearing was introduced, only in rare and extreme cases of violence were juveniles tried as adults.

It is easy for me to understand the feelings of one who is opposed to my position. Juveniles do commit crimes that are serious and are considered to be “adult crimes.” The juveniles that receive life sentences are certainly not receiving them for petty crimes; it is not as if the fourteen year old shoplifter is locked up and the key is then thrown away. I would agree too, that most juveniles have a sense of right and wrong from an early age. Surely children know that they are not supposed to take cookies out of the cookie jar unless given permission by their parents. On a greater scale most adolescents know it is wrong to smoke, use drugs, cheat or steal, and, therefore, know it is wrong to commit crime, period. But it seems only fair that if we are going to take into account the social development of morality within these children, then by that same token we should also consider their mental development and take into account the neuroscience and the high likelihood of rehabilitating these same children.

According to a newspaper article published in the L.A. Times, and a
study conducted by the University of San Francisco’s Center for Law and Global Justice, there are 2,387 juvenile offenders that have been given life sentences here in the United States. To understand this prodigious number, and contemplate the depraved nature of this practice, consider that Israel, the only other country in the world to hand out such sentences, is a far and distant second with seven. According to the study, Israel has not handed out such sentences since 2004. While the populations in these two countries widely differ, these statistics seem to suggest that Israel uses such sentences in extreme cases only. It should be noted that of the juveniles sentenced to life without parole here in the United States, 51% of those sentences were issued to first-time offenders. It is alarming that we are willing to sentence, at a staggering number, our youth offenders to life with or without parole considering that juveniles have the highest
capacity for rehabilitation.

Senator Leland Yee of San Francisco-San Mateo, whose background
is in child psychology, states, “Children have the highest capacity for
rehabilitation. The neuroscience is clear; brain maturation continues
well through adolescence and thus impulse control, planning and
critical thinking skills are not fully developed” (Los Angeles Times,
article by Henry Weinstein). Other studies support this same finding:
The San Francisco Center for Law and Global Justice study asserts,
“Psychologically and neurologically, children cannot be expected to
have achieved the same level of mental development as an adult, even when they become teenagers” (Sentencing Our Children to Die in Prison:Global Law and Practice). A perfect example of an immature brain is a fourteen-year-old child, with whom I became acquainted in Juvenile Hall, who had been asked by a peer to beat up a homeless man for twenty-five cents. This child, having never been accepted by a peer group before, proceeded to beat up the homeless man. The subsequent and tragic outcome of the situation was the homeless man died from his injuries and the child was given life in prison, all because he acted on an impulse to be accepted by friends and lacked the critical thinking skills of a fully developed mind. Had this been a mature adult who had been asked to beat up a homeless man for twenty-five cents, I find it hard to believe that he would have done it.

Juvenile offenders should be punished for serious crimes they commit,
but as juveniles in juvenile facilities. The oldest that children can be tried as minors is seventeen, an age that allows for eight years of time in which they can serve their punishment and in which we have an opportunity to rehabilitate them*. Age sixteen allows for nine years and so on. By placing our youth in adult facilities with life sentences, we are giving up on them. According to www.centeronjuvenilejustice.com, fifteen to twenty-one year olds make up 13% of our prison population and together they make up 22% of all suicide deaths in our institutions. Juveniles are 7.7 times
more likely to commit suicide in adult facilities than in juvenile facilities. Whereas only 1% of juveniles reported rape in the juvenile system, that actual number is nine times higher in the adult system. It is not just about these numbers, though. At what point do we brand a person for the rest of his or her life for the worst thing they did as a child?

The lack of mental maturity and development within the minds of
juveniles is what set the stage for a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in
which the court determined that it is unconstitutional to execute a person under the age of eighteen. In their majority opinion, the court cited research saying that the mental capacity of juveniles was not the same as that of adults (Roper v. Simmons). Here, the highest court in the United States is acknowledging that juveniles lack careful and exact evaluation and judgment, as well as the ability to control sudden spontaneous inclinations or urges because of their undeveloped minds. Perhaps this is the reason why juveniles are not allowed to choose for themselves whether or not they can go watch an R rated movie until the age of seventeen. They cannot vote until age eighteen, buy a pack of cigarettes until age eighteen, or buy alcohol until the age of twenty-one. The contrast here is drastic; by one means we are suggesting that a seventeen year old teenager is only entering a mature enough mental state to choose whether he or she wishes to watch an R rated movie, yet by another we are suggesting that he or she is mature enough to understand the full consequences of a crime they may commit.

Obviously, we as a society recognize the difference between the mental capacity of juveniles and adults too, or we would not have constructed laws based on the age of an individual as a determining factor for conduct. It seems unfair that we only want to recognize the difference in mental development between adult and child up to the point when the child exercises bad judgment. I hate to think that we are so cruel as a society and a country that we would rather place our children in prison because of poor decision making with an immature brain, for a crime they are convicted of, than try to rehabilitate them while their mental capacity for reform is at its pinnacle.

*Editors’ note: A juvenile “life” sentence ends at age 25.