WireTap, a national news and culture magazine, recently published a piece that looks at what may be a gradual shift away from trying kids as adults and throwing them in prison.
The story includes these passages:
Every day roughly 7,500 youth are incarcerated in adult
prison, sometimes for the most minor of offenses. Take, for example,
the Wisconsin case of one 17-year-old girl [PDF] sentenced to over two months in adult jail for stealing a neighbor's bicycle. Or the Florida case of a 17-year-old boy [PDF], likewise incarcerated in an adult facility after stealing a classmate's gym clothes.
Jail is a "terrible, terrible" place, says [Liz Ryan, who directs the Campaign for Youth Justice.] And this is especially
true if you are only 16 or 17 years old: incarcerated youths are among
the most vulnerable of inmates, both physically and psychologically. In
2005, though youth accounted for only 1 percent of inmates, they made
up 21 percent of all inmate-on-inmate sexual assault cases.
And youth locked in adult prisons are a staggering 36 times more likely
to commit suicide than those incarcerated in juvenile detention
facilities.
Across the nation, states are reconsidering and revising the
harsh laws that continue to leave thousands of youth behind bars. In
2006, Colorado eliminated the state's juvenile life-without-parole
sentence.
The New York Times reported that last year Connecticut, which previously tried all 17-year-olds as adults,
revised its law upward
to age 18. Similar moves are being explored in California, Michigan and
Illinois, among other states. Advocates are additionally pushing for
tighter federal protections of youth in the federal
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, currently up for renewal in Congress.
It would be worthwhile to actually see how many children are locked up in your local jails and prisons right now. What are their crimes? How do jails try to separate juveniles from adults?
