THE Supreme Court’s
decision this week to ban mandatory life sentences without the
possibility of parole for offenders younger than 18 is an emphatic
rejection of the “get tough” juvenile justice policies of the 1980s and
1990s, which punished children as if they were adults. Writing for the
majority, Justice Elena Kagan’s
clear statement not only recognized the political and biological
principle that children are different from adults but at last also
inscribed it into constitutional law.
Treating children differently from adults may be a radical idea, but
it’s also an old one, predating the American Revolution. The political
philosopher John Locke argued that children’s lack of reasoning
capacity, which disqualified them from participating in government, also
made them less culpable for their criminal acts. By the turn of the
20th century, progressive child advocates embedded the principle that
children are different from adults — and thus require individualized
handling of their cases — into the foundation of the world’s first
juvenile courts.
This is an op-ed from the NYTimes. Tom
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