Too young for life without parole

It's time for the United States to take a new look at imposing this too-harsh sentence on children who commit major crimes.

In 1646, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the Stubborn Child Law, decreeing that teenage boys who disobeyed their parents could be put to death.

What a difference 3 1/2 centuries make. In our enlightened age, mothers and fathers study manuals for techniques to make children more compliant. And many of us are well acquainted with the critical mass of neuroscience establishing that adolescence constitutes a time of diminished responsibility, when the brain's frontal lobes — the seat of judgment and impulse control — are still developing.

All too many U.S. criminal courts and state legislatures, however, have yet to get this memo.

Today, according to Human Rights Watch, 2,570 U.S. prisoners convicted of major crimes committed when they were 14 to 17 years old are serving sentences of life without parole. (Some 300 of them are in California.) In recent years, as other industrialized nations have adhered to international human rights conventions, the United States has become the world's only nation to impose such sentences for minors, say researchers at the University of San Francisco School of Law.

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New Study Confirms Cruelty, Racial Bias of Juvenile Justice System

More than 2,500 juveniles in the United States are serving life in prison without possibility of parole. The U.S. is the only country in the world where this sentence is handed down to minors, and a new report from The Sentencing Project confirms what prison reform activists have long argued: These individuals, who were as young as thirteen when they committed the crimes for which they are incarcerated, are likely to have lived in poverty, witnessed violence and been the victims of physical and sexual abuse as children.

The report, "The Lives of Juvenille Lifers," is derived from the first-ever national survey of juvenile inmates serving life sentences. Almost 1,600 individuals responded to questions about their circumstances prior to conviction and their experiences in prison.

Among the report's findings were that:

• One in three of the respondents were living in public housing prior to incarceration.
• 79 percent reported witnessing violence in their homes.
• Almost half (46.9 percent) of those surveyed experienced physical abuse, including almost 80 percent of girls.
• One in five reported histories of sexual abuse, and 77.3 percent of female prisoners reported abuse as girls.

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Here is the link to the report: The Lives of Juvenile Lifers Tom