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The Rebellious Child                                                                                    

Posted at: May/22/2010 : Posted by: mel

Related Category: The Law,

I have boys and between them and their friends I feel like I see the “Rebellious Child” more than enough. Don’t worry, this is not about my kids, this is about the law. I guess I should begin with a short story as it were “ripped from the headlines”.

There is little doubt that Terrance Graham was a wayward, rebellious child. At 16, he helped rob a restaurant in Florida and was sentenced to a year in jail and three years’ probation. But Graham violated that probation when he was 17, and, with two older accomplices, they burst into a man’s home and robbed him at gunpoint. For that crime he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in jail without any chance for parole.

Terrance’s age and location are crucial to this story. The United States is the only nation where people can spend a lifetime in jail for noncapital crimes committed as juveniles. In recent years Florida has become the epicenter of this distinct penal practice with more people like Terrance Graham locked up than any other state.

And now I yell “not anymore!” The Supreme Court ruled on May 17 2010 that denying the possibility of parole to someone so young is an unconstitutional infringement of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Please don’t think I am getting soft. I believe in a tough criminal justice system. I believe that for each prisoner in our penal system we are trying, or should be trying to accomplish one or more of the following three goals.
a.) Punish the felon through incarceration
b.) Protect society from future threats from this felon
c.) Offer in some cases the opportunity for rehabilitation while confined

For the majority of our felons we are realistically only able to accomplish the first two from the above list.

This Supreme Court decision marks a breakthrough for our collective understanding of what it means to be a child. An earlier and just as important court ruling in 2005 banned the execution of juvenile offenders. Decades of research have taught us that adolescences brains do not have a fully developed ability to determine right from wrong or make “moral & ethical judgments”. I would suspect that this is why armies have been dominated through the millennia by boys 17-20 years old. These same boys 17-20 years old are far less likely to question the morals of their situation as opposed to just following orders and charging into the fight.

This court decision legitimizes the argument that adolescents lack the judgment and impulse control of adults and therefore cannot be held as culpable for the crimes they commit. Does Terrance Graham need to go to jail, absolutely! Society needs to be protected from Terrance and Terrance need to be punished. But by the time Terrance reaches 25-30 years old it is very likely that he will be an entirely different person. The culture of the prison system may have turned him into a harden felon for life, or he may with supervision be able to re-enter society. I can’t make that decision here, but this is why we have parole boards.

The prison reform laws of the 1960’s introduced “rehabilitation” into the criminal justice system as one of its key tenets. I don’t believe that everyone in prison today is capable of rehabilitation, but we need to recognize that some prisoners still have a chance to be better citizens than they currently are.

After years of scientific research expanding our knowledge of brain development our judicial system has finally recognized that a death sentence or life without parole for adolescent capital crimes is “cruel and unusual punishment”. It is important to not deny these adolescents the opportunity to reform. As one insightful speaker said “The court recognized that kids aren’t yet the people they will become.”

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