Sentencing Youth to Life in Prison

Justice Denied

Kathi Milliken-Boyd, James Windell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000530339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

This book analyzes the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court rulings deeming juvenile life without parole (LWOP) sentences to be cruel and unusual punishment. These Court decisions brought about controversy and resistance in the criminal justice field, while at the same time providing hope for those 2, 300 people who never thought they had a chance to experience life as an adult outside prison. By looking in depth at the lives of some of the individuals serving life terms, and understanding both the prosecutors who oppose review and resentencing of juvenile lifers and those who are sincerely following the Supreme Court's guidelines, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of the issues – as well as the people – involved in the sentencing (and potential resentencing) of juveniles to life without the possibility of parole.

The authors provide unique, perceptive and straightforward profiles on some of the prisoners who were ultimately sentenced to LWOP after being involved in criminal offenses committed before their 18th birthdays. The book poignantly features the experiences of young people who did not commit a murder yet were still sentenced to life terms, but also delves into the perspectives of the families of victims of juvenile offenders, prosecutors on both sides of the issue, psychologists who have interviewed many of the juvenile lifers and advocates for change in the way juveniles are treated by the criminal justice system.

The decisions in Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana clearly demonstrated that the Court's view of juveniles evolved over decades to reflect advances in our understanding of the unique characteristics of youth and their involvement in juvenile crimes. This book takes the position that the sentence of life without the possibility of parole for youth is wasteful of both human lives and scarce public resources. The authors write about the human concerns on both sides of the question, and, ultimately, allow readers to make their own decisions about how society should best handle juvenile offenders. This engaging ethnographic treatment will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, corrections, juvenile justice, and delinquency; practitioners working in social policy; and all those interested in a criminal justice system capable of positive outcomes for involved youth.

PART I Children Getting Life

1Condemning Children to Die in Prison

DOI: 10.4324/9781032067209-3

Where were you on June 25, 2012? Do you even remember?

For most people, the day passed unremarkably, but for approximately 2,500 people incarcerated across the U.S., it was a time for hope.

On that day, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without the possibility of parole for violent juvenile offenders.

Between the years 1984 and 2012, more than 350¹ Michigan youth were condemned to a lifetime in an adult prison. Only Pennsylvania, during the same stretch of time, would send more juveniles to adult prisons. This was all going on when juvenile crime, although rising in the 1980s, began to dramatically drop starting in 1993. Even by 1995, the violent crime rate in America had decreased by nine percent and would continue to drop until 2019.

Despite plummeting juvenile crime statistics over nearly three decades starting in the early 1990s, many states – besides Michigan and Pennsylvania – were sending kids into adult prisons for life without the possibility of parole sentences. These were essentially death sentences. None of the teenagers given these sentences were never, ever supposed to leave prison – except in a coffin.

Given the fact that America has an extensive juvenile court system, how did it come about that the juvenile court was bypassed for young offenders and so many of them were given these lifelong sentences in adult prisons?

In order to answer that question, we need to look at a brief history of our country’s love affair with harsh prison sentences and our traditional methods of dealing with violent juveniles – especially those who are black or brown.

America Develops a Correctional System

As America was developing its criminal justice system, which included the correctional system, in the early 1800s, there was no distinction made between children and adults. All were, for the most part, treated equally when it came to violations of the law. In general, approaches to American colonial corrections were patterned after the practices in Great Britain.

Although England used hanging for various crimes, American colonists preferred corporal punishment, fines, and confinement. But, following the Revolutionary War, and into the 19th century, penitentiaries – seen as places where criminal offenders could do penance and reflect on their evil ways – replaced many other forms of punishment.

It was during the 19th century, as Oliver and Hilgenberg point out, crime was beginning to be seen as a problem that should be addressed by the government.² For one thing, it was thought that the government should build more penitentiaries because – many people at the time believed – prisons could help solve the problems of crime. The first prison was Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened outside of Philadelphia in the 1820s. This modern (for its time) facility reflected some of the new ideas of the reformers. That is, in Eastern State Penitentiary, solitary confinement and productive work for inmates were emphasized. At that time prison was viewed as a place that allowed for control of inmates, but at the same time it was seen as a more humane facility to house offenders.

After the opening of Eastern State Penitentiary, other new prisons were built around the country, including Auburn Prison and Sing Sing, both in New York, and Jackson Prison in Michigan. At that time, Americans were convinced that prisons were the best way of dealing with criminals – reflecting that belief a prison-building boom took place that lasted well into the 20th century. It can be said that this flurry of new prisons suggested that America had developed a coherent theory of corrections; that theory was that incarceration was the best way to prevent crime, and prevention would come about by rehabilitating offenders inside these new penitentiaries. As Samuel Walker points out in his book “Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice,” the intent in the 1800s was that prisons would rehabilitate offenders by creating a better environment for them by housing them in a place where they would no longer be subject to harmful influences. Instead, in a prison they would be turned into better human beings because of the prison discipline, which consisted of solitude, silence, hard work and religious study.

This would be the prevailing approach for several decades until various prison wardens and reformers made the observation that this kind of prison discipline just did not work. In fact, it seemed to make inmates worse.

While this recognition of the ineptitude of prison discipline was slowly taking place in the second half of the 1800s, there was at the same time a growing concern that juvenile delinquency was a problem and that children needed to be dealt with in a unique way. At first, that meant wayward and neglected children were sent to live in houses of refuge, which were little more than prisons for children and seemed to be simply institutions for confining troublesome and undesirable youth. Still, it was widely acknowledged that children were different from adults and needed their own special court to handle those neglected, abused and delinquent youngsters. That led to the development of the first juvenile court in Illinois in 1899.

The promise of the juvenile court was that children would receive individualized treatment in their own court and would not be housed with adult offenders or be subjected to an adult prison. Prior to the advent of juvenile courts, the age of criminal responsibility in the U.S. ranged from 7 to 12 years of age.

Harsh Sentences for Juveniles

Judge Julian W. Mack, writing in the Harvard Law Review in 1909, pointed out that before juvenile courts, the criminal law did not differentiate between adults and children. This meant, he explained, that juvenile offenders were “huddled together” with adults in jails and workhouses.

The harsh handling of kids who committed crimes was imported to America from English common law. In England, the tradition was to punish children between 7 and 14 just as they would punish adults – as long as they appeared to understand the difference between right and wrong. As a result, children as young as 10 were put to death in England during the 1700s. But the emergence of the juvenile court seemed to free us from the English tradition. In the years after 1899 and that first juvenile court in Cook County, Illinois, a movement toward mercy and reduced culpability swept across the country. This led Arthur Towne, the superintendent of the Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to wonder if New York should follow in the footsteps of other states and increase its age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18. In 1920, Towne stated that adolescence continues through age 25 and that treating 14–16-year-old teenagers as adults “simply flies in the face of present-day psychology and the hard facts.”

New York didn’t adopt Towne’s suggestion and continued to charge many middle teenagers as adults – until the law was changed in April 2017. But between Towne’s advocacy for treating kids differently in the 1920s and the present day, prosecutors lobbied for more discretion so they could decide whether adolescents should be tried in juvenile court or adult court. In Illinois, as in other states, the prosecutors gained greater discretion. The Illinois Supreme Court in several decisions removed some of the juvenile court’s power, handing it over to the state’s attorney who could decide in which court a juvenile’s case would be tried.

Well before the 1980s and 1990s, prosecutors decried the leniency of juvenile courts and sounded alarms for a dangerous new class of murderous youth. That juvenile courts were going too easy on young people was the watchword from many directions. And the criticism that juvenile courts failed to hold kids responsible for their bad behavior started early on. For example, the Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court in 1935 stated that juvenile courts were intended to deal with “bad boys and girls who have committed no serious crime.” Instead, the juvenile court of his day was protecting “highly dangerous gunmen and thieves, or even murderers.”

The creation of the juvenile court meant that the U.S. was acknowledging that children were less culpable than adults, and kids should be diverted away from adult prisons. But it didn’t take long for the juvenile court to come under fire because prosecutors and others thought that juvenile courts were mollycoddling youthful offenders – as reflected by what the Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court said. By the 1980s and into the 1990s, the power of juvenile court judges was curtailed while the power of prosecutors and criminal courts was enhanced – allowing teens like Kevin Boyd Jr. to receive life sentences.

Kevin Boyd Jr. was one of the 2,500 people in prisons across the country who had been given a life without the possibility of parole sentence. You will learn much more about him in the next two chapters.

By 1978, prosecutors had seemingly achieved their long-sought goal when the “automatic transfer law” was legislated into existence. This law came about after Willie Bosket, a 15-year-old New York boy was convicted of killing two men on the subway. His hearing was in the juvenile court, and he received the maximum possible sentence of five years. Two days after that hearing, Hugh Carey, the governor of New York, in the midst of a re-election campaign, called a special session of the New York legislature. His intent was to coerce the New York legislature to pass the Juvenile Offender Act. This Act would mandate the automatic transfer of children as young as 13 to adult courts if the charge was murder. Carey succeeded in getting the law passed, and this event became the forerunner of state legislative bodies enacting new laws making it easier to try kids as adults.

The Myth of the Super-Predator

Helping to fuel the frenzy to pass new laws that removed the protections from juveniles was the emergence of the myth of the super-predator. Super-predators were kids who were violent and out of control; rapacious teens who roamed the streets robbing, raping and killing people.

Every state bought into this myth, and nearly every state passed their own version of a series of bills to protect the public from super-predators. The laws that legislators approved not only made it easier to transfer youth to adult courts but they also prevented the sealing of juvenile records, set mandatory minimum sentences for kids and removed such phrases as “rehabilitation” and “the best interests of the child” in favor of terms such as “punishment” and “the protection of the public.” Between 1990 and 1996, 40 states passed these kinds of laws.

Even more statutes were passed between 1996 and 1999. By 1998, close to 200,000 kids were tried as adults and 18,000 were housed in adult prisons. A 1999 report found that when young people were transferred to adult courts and convicted of murder, they, on average, received longer sentences than adults convicted of the same crime.

Juvenile Life without the Possibility of Parole Sentences

The major focus of legislative activities on the state level during the 1990s was to cope with serious offenses by juveniles. And the most frequent strategy by law makers was to increase the transfer of young offenders to criminal courts. The typical way to ease the transfer – usually referred to as waivers – of kids to adult courts was to hand prosecutors the right to make the decision about whether a juvenile would stay in the juvenile court or go to a criminal court. That resulted in nearly every state passing transfer enhancement laws.

Here is a rundown of what several states did in the mid-1990s:

• The Massachusetts House of Representatives voted to require that accused murderers as young as 14 be tried as adults.
• Tennessee eliminated any minimum age for trying some youths as adults.
• Oregon lowered its minimum age from 14 to 12 for trying youth as adults.
• Wisconsin passed a law establishing 10 as the minimum age to try some kids as adults.
• Colorado lowered its age for trying kids as adults from 15 to 14.
• Michigan passed a law in 1996 allowing for juveniles of any age to be transferred to an adult court for a felony crime. Nathaniel Abraham, who you will read more about in Chapter 3, was an 11-year-old Michigan boy who was tried as an adult for murder soon after this law was passed. His feet didn’t even reach the floor as he sat at the defendant’s table in court.

In addition to lowering the minimum age for transfer to criminal courts, states in the 1980s and 1990s passed mandatory sentencing laws. Mandatory sentencing laws remove the options that the judge has in certain cases and requires specific sentences. One common mandatory sentencing law that many states passed was mandatory life without the possibility of parole. Such laws were applied to minors if they were convicted as adults.

Historically, juvenile life without the possibility of parole (JLWOP) has not been consistently applied to child offenders. While banned in most countries, it was not used in the U.S. in any large measure until the 1990s when legislators and the public grew concerned about crimes committed by young people. Rarely were juveniles given JLWOP until get-tough-on-crime laws were passed as a strategy to deal with serious juvenile crime.

On June 25, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that mandatory JLWOP sentences were unconstitutional. But, before 2012, judges often went on record noting that they legally had to impose JLWOP, although sometimes pointing out that the juvenile deserved a lesser sentence. For instance, prior to sentencing a 15-year-old accomplice to a murder case, Cook...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Children Getting Life
• Part II Kathi’s Story about Kevin Boyd
• Part III Which Juveniles Receive Life Sentences?
• Part IV The Voices of the Victims
• Part V The Prosecuting Attorneys
• Part VI Juveniles in Prison
• Part VII Why Do We Treat Vulnerable Youth So Harshly?
• Part VIII Justice Reform
• Appendix
• Index