The War on Kids Post #2

In my last post, I addressed the irony of America inventing the juvenile court and then both exporting that concept to the world and abandoning it domestically. Today I want to unpack the realities of my claim that there has been a war on kids since the late 20^th century. Let me acknowledge that, to some readers, the concept of a war on kids in America today may sound misguided or dramatic. After all, educators complain of helicopter parents and so-called free-range parents may face prosecution for granting their children liberties that were commonplace in my childhood. However, even as some children in America are more coddled and protected than ever before, I stand by my claim that the U.S. has waged a war on kids.

This is what the war on kids looks like. On any given day, there are approximately 50,000 juveniles being held in American correctional facilities, thousands of whom are in adult jails and prisons. While some hold themselves out as camps, academies or training facilities, these are correctional institutions; 89% of them are locked and many employ handcuffs, leg cuffs and restraining chairs, as well as solitary confinement. At the same time, we are not reserving detention for the most serious juvenile offenders. Nearly a quarter of youth in juvenile facilities have only been charged with a technical probation violation or a status offense. Schools, with police officers in the halls and zero-tolerance policies on the books, have become a gateway to the criminal justice system. In at least 22 states it’s a crime to disrupt school in ways that may have earned a student a trip to the principal’s office a few decades ago. Preschoolers, yes, preschoolers, can face suspension and expulsion for age-appropriate behaviors. This is deeply problematic, as suspensions, especially repeated ones, increase a student’s risk of dropping out of school and coming into contact with the criminal justice system.

Moreover, as I mentioned in my first post this week, our laws have cemented the notion that kids, once accused of a crime, may be treated as adults. Prosecutors routinely remove kids from juvenile court and charge them in adult court on the basis of the legal fiction of transfer laws. Youth in adult court are subject to mandatory sentences that today many of us would agree are too harsh even as applied to adults. Juveniles can be housed in adult correctional facilities, despite being the most vulnerable to physical and sexual assault in those locations. Until 2005 we were the only nation to execute people for juvenile offenses, and today we are the only developed nation in the world that still sentences children to die in prison.

Perhaps most discouraging, the war on kids has taken its greatest toll on the nation’s most vulnerable kids – those in poor, minority areas that are under-resourced and heavily policed. Black youth are more than twice as likely as white youth to be arrested, and, even as overall youth detention rates continue to decline, black youth are five times as likely as white youth to be detained. Similarly, poverty shunts children into the criminal justice system who would never be there if they had the financial resources to pay for private counsel, a diversion program, or even an ankle bracelet. Finally, when one looks at youth serving the most extreme sentence on the books, life without parole, approximately half were physically abused and nearly 80 percent witnessed violence in the home. Thus, like most wars, the war on kids has had its greatest impact on poor, minority and otherwise vulnerable communities.

In my next post, I’ll address recent Supreme Court decisions regarding juvenile sentencing and their implementation at the state level.