The US Supreme Court has just agreed to take up the issue as to whether juveniles can be sentenced to life without parole (LWOP). The issue relates to a 2004 case, Roper v. Simmons, in which the Court decided to end the use of the death penalty for juveniles. The victory in Roper was signficant, of course, and there has been a subsequent national movement to address the cruelty of sentencing teenagers to prisons for the rest of their lives. Those who oppose the use of LWOP for juveniles cite international standards for justice, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in making their arguments against these severe punishments for children.
I do not object to this movement, but as someone who works daily with young people who are in trouble with the law, and encounter sentences as short as probation, but which often end up imprinting them for life, I hope that the national discussion can begin to focus on the onerousness of our criminal sentences in general, for adults and for juveniles. Not only are the sentences for murder in this country particularly harsh–and Professor Jonathan Simon of Berkeley has been doing work recently to point this out–including those for young people who aren’t necessarily serving life without parole, but who in New York, where I work, have indefinite sentences ending in life. What I’m discovered now is that the sentences for even the most minor crimes–punching someone in the nose, for example–can enmesh a young person in the juvenile justice system for years. They emerge from childhood having experienced the harshest of our state institutions–psychiatric hospitals, group homes, foster homes, residential treatment centers, prisons–with few resources and little human capital to survive in the world on their own.
