Rochelle Riley
America will have to care for its kids
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that America can no longer kill its young, we can't take the easy way out anymore.
The court's decision to abolish capital punishment for juvenile offenders means that we must find other ways to raise all of our children so that none of our children become offenders who commit the worst of crimes.
It means we'll have to focus more on prevention and intervention instead of punishment and execution, community nurturing instead of community rejection.
It means we cannot pretend that we're not all responsible for America's children.
Oh, you know what I'm talking about. We work hard and set our individual rules and standards and make sure that our own children do well. Then we send them out into a world where those children we've watched become frustrated and enraged and out of control are waiting for them? And only then do we become concerned?
73 lives saved
We know these children. They walk around like time bombs waiting to go off, and we pay attention only enough to make sure they don't explode near our lives.
The problem with that logic is you can't always tell when a bomb will explode. And children aren't born as bombs.
The majority of the court believes that executing juvenile offenders, even if we wait for them to grow up before we kill them, is cruel and unusual punishment, especially since social scientists say that children are too immature to bear the same level of accountability as adults for their actions. Every other country in the world grasped that idea long before the United States did.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote: "From a moral standpoint, it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor's character deficiencies will be reformed."
"Our determination," Kennedy added, "finds confirmation in the stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty."
The court's action saved at least 73 lives, including that of the defendant in the case that prompted their ruling — Christopher Simmons. He was 17 when he kidnapped a woman from her house and threw her into a river. He's now 29. But what might he have been if someone had gotten to him before he was 17?
2.3 million kids to help
To consider how many children are arrested in America, let's just compare it with the number of children who are doing something else.
Law enforcement agencies arrested an estimated 2.3 million juveniles in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Juveniles accounted for 17 percent of all arrests and 15 percent of arrests for violent crimes. The number of juvenile arrests for murder was 1,360, down from 3,840 in 1993.
So, let's see — that's 1,360 arrests for murder and 2.3 million arrests overall.
What else did 2.3 million children do in 2002?
While about 2.3 million children were being arrested, about 2.4 million were enrolling as first-time freshmen in the nation's colleges.
I wonder what might have happened if we'd paid attention to those future juvenile offenders sooner?
Rochelle Riley is a columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Comment by clicking here.
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