Second Chances
October 29th, 2009by Mike
The Supreme Court will soon hear a series of cases on whether or not juveniles can be sentenced to life without parole for crimes that aren’t murder.
Personally, I think it is silly to sentence a juvenile to life without parole for any crime.
Take this quote, which is actually a defense of the practice by the National District Attorneys Association: “permanent incarceration for the most violent, hardened juvenile offenders is by no means ‘cruel.’”
Let’s think for a minute about the phrase “hardened juvenile”. A juvenile is someone who, by definition, lacks maturity. They are still growing and developing. They are still changing and learning right from wrong. These things are implicit in the word.
Hardened, on the other hand, means that you’ve stopped growing or changing. It means you are set in your ways.
It is semantically impossible to be a “hardened juvenile”. You give life without parole as a punishment to someone because they have acted so heinously that they have forfeited their right to ever live in society again. It is an implicit statement that “because of your past, society can never again trust you in the future”.
But every child, every juvenile, deserves a chance to set themselves straight. Every juvenile deserves a chance to earn back that public trust.
So if you think a 17 year old or a 16 year old is old enough to make decisions that will effect the rest of his life, then by all means give out life without parole sentences to those people. But then you should also let them vote and marry, smoke and drop out of school. Because you’re either mature or your not, old enough or your not.
But no 13 year old–as is one of the kids whose cases the Supreme Court is taking up–is mature enough to make those decisions. And every man should be given the right to earn back any public trust that he lost when he was 13–to demonstrate that as a man he has learned the lessons that he didn’t know as a boy.
November 4th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
This is a case where it makes sense to think in extremes not in generality. There are some people who are true sociopaths, and may reveal such through their behavior as a child — i.e. through extreme acts demonstrating indifference to authority or morality. You might say, maybe people like that exist by why no parole, but that’s not a great objection because the action itself is a better screen than a parole board hearing. I don’t share your view of second chances and don’t think there’s a great harm done by holding a person responsible for the rest of their life for doing something horrible.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:22 am
“There are some people who are true sociopaths, and may reveal such through their behavior as a child — i.e. through extreme acts demonstrating indifference to authority or morality.”
But how bad does an act have to be–and at what age?
I’ve never met a two year old who exhibits consistent respect for authority or morality. But I think you would agree that two years old is too young, and the vast majority of two-year olds grow out of it. I’ve met plenty of ten year olds who lack respect for authority and morality, some of whom have exhibited some very violent behavior. All of them are now grown, but I know that not all of them are in jail.
So what does a child have to do, and by what age, to be considered beyond redemption in your mind?
November 6th, 2009 at 2:51 am
Yeah, agreed, its not an easy line to draw, but (1) clear cases do exist and (2) at least initially you were not arguing that we should not give life in prison without parole to kids because its impossible to administer a system which distinguishes those who are deserving from those who are not, your argument was that no kid is deserving. I don’t think you get a lot of mileage in support of that argument by claiming a standard is difficult to state precisely.
Also, I think the present view of children as morally under-developed is a relatively recent one in history. Alexander ruled at 16, Nero at 17, Motzart debuted at 5, Pascal had performed major proofs by 11. Is it not that providence provideth both child genius and child daemon?
November 6th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Mike,
At some level I agree with what you’re saying (at a lot of level’s I agree, actually). However, I get nervous when dealing with absolutes and not allowing for extreme outliers.
November 6th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
“Also, I think the present view of children as morally under-developed is a relatively recent one in history. ”
That’s sort of my point, actually. If you think kids are old enough to make life-altering decisions, then let them make life altering decisions. But deciding a kid is old enough to fully understand the consequences of a crime he commits, but not old enough to fully understand the issues in an election or the consequences of getting married is logically incongruous.
As for the idea that it’s hard to draw clear lines: if you’re destroying the life of a child, then you’d better be pretty darn sure about what your doing. Are their clear cases? Sure, there are 17 year old murderers who can and should be treated like adults.
But remember that the case here involves a 13 year old rapist. 13 year old boys, with few exceptions, haven’t finished puberty yet. And the crime here is awful… but it isn’t murder. So is this a case that is so clear cut that he should “obviously” be tried in adult court and sent to a maximum security prison for the rest of his life? I disagree.
The Law needs to draw a line somewhere to say “that one is an adult, that other one is a kid”. But there is no way that 13 belongs on the “adult” side of the line.
November 6th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
“That’s sort of my point, actually. If you think kids are old enough to make life-altering decisions, then let them make life altering decisions. But deciding a kid is old enough to fully understand the consequences of a crime he commits, but not old enough to fully understand the issues in an election or the consequences of getting married is logically incongruous.”
-In some instances we prefer bright line tests for capacity. What is the alternative to a bright line test for marriage or elections? An inquiry into capacity in those instances is distasteful because no one wants the state to tell people that they, their neighbors, or their family members lack the capacity to vote or marry. In these situations, we’re willing to ignore obvious evidence that suggests someone lacks capacity and bestow a right anyway, partly because we don’t think there’s a lot of harm to bestowing in error. There’s no bright line rule that when you turn 18 you can drive because there’s a public-safety objective that’s better served by licensing-exams.
The question for me is why, when a 13 year old or a fifteen year old does something that makes us think “wow this is not a kid who just misjudged, this is a human who lacks the faculty of judgment altogether,” why, then, are we willing to ignore clear evidence and let the person out of jail. What is so uncomfortable about pointing to a person’s action and saying, “this person is evil.” These days we don’t talk that way, we say “ill-formed” or “misguided” or some other euphamism. I don’t understand the impetus to deny that someone who does real evil is evil. My hunch is that this shift is rooted in declined importance of after-life thinking (i.e. redemption after-death) … we want redemption but we’re impatient for it to happen now. The thought that some people’s souls are unredeemable is disturbing and incongrous with our increasing ability to revive the physical body.
I should say, the example I’ve had in mind is David Ray Harris (interviewed in the film the Thin Blue Line, who ackowledges that he himself had believed from a young age that he was bad to the core, that he always knew he would commit a gruesome crime and he didn’t much care. His conduct in interviewes makes it fairly clear that he is not redemptive, he is nonplused by is own crimes and close to ambivalent over the fact that another man has been wrongly convicted for a crime he’s comitted.
I also think we have a basic disagreement over how bad the harm is of getting the judgment wrong. You write “if you’re destroying the life of a child you better be pretty sure…” First, I’d quibble with the description — I would not call a 13-year-old rapist a child (conferring innocense) and its hard to discuss “destroying the life” because the question we’re talking about is really 25 years in jail or life. More than my quibble, its hard for me to understand why we let guilty people out of jail. The best I understand it is in the sense that the person has paid their debt to society (i.e. arising from a notion of proportionality). Its definitely not because we think they’re rehabilitated (just very few people actually think along the lines of “a second degree murderer takes 25 years to rehabilitate, but it only take 10 years to rehabilitate someone for manslaughter.” I don’t think its terrible to hold a guilty person for longer than they deserve, and its worse to let someone go free early (particularly when they pose dangers).