Children Criminals

Spectator

English common law, which we sometimes loosely follow, has decided children as young as seven have the “moral intelligence and maturity” to tell right from wrong and should be held legally responsible for their actions. Most any parent will tell you, however, seven-year olds don’t always act with moral intelligence or maturity.

In fact, we as a society have long recognized that children’s executive decision-making capabilities aren’t so great and they do not have the physical, mental, or emotional maturity for a host of activities. We don’t allow them to drive, sign legally binding contracts, independently obtain medical care, pierce their ears or get a tattoo or have their own credit card without parental approval, buy a weapon, vote, obtain credit, consume alcohol, join the military... It’s a very long list of prohibitions directed at minors.

But we have a different standard altogether when it comes to alleged criminal acts. Under those circumstances, children suddenly become adults. You know, “do the adult crime, do adult time.”

You might remember when a six-year-old in Virginia shot his teacher last year. Authorities initially suggested he might be charged as an adult, but common sense prevailed and he wasn’t charged at all. (His mother, however, was sentenced to 21 months for a host of crimes connected to her purchase of the handgun used but not for the actual shooting.)

Lionel Tate committed a heinous crime in 2001, battering a six-year-old to death. Tate, 12 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His sentence was eventually reduced when the Supreme Court determined such a sentence for anyone younger than 18 constituted cruel and unusual punishment and was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. But prior to that ruling, we were somehow okay with sending a sixth-grader to prison forever.

We haven’t quite figured out how to deal with violent, incorrigible children, but some states seem willing to give up and simply throw away some young offenders. In North Carolina, for example, children as young as six can be sent to juvenile detention centers. Oh-so-liberal California, on the other hand, waits until children are the ripe old age of 12 before incarcerating them.

Children in prison of one sort or another are far less rare than we might think. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), more than 38,000 people under the age of 18 were arrested for crimes of violence in 2022, the last year for which full data is available. And according to The Sentencing Project, 28,000 of those underage arrestees ended up in jail or juvenile detention centers, and more than 10,000 of them ended up in adult prisons.

This all comes to mind as we suffer through yet another in what seems like an endless string of school shootings, the latest, at least as of this being written, courtesy of a 14-year old. We’ve decided, as is our wont these days, the kid will be charged and tried as an adult, and we’ll charge at least one of his parents, too.

That’s our new dichotomous approach to this ugliness; the kid is an adult, but it’s also his parents' fault, even though they didn’t exactly help plan or participate in the crime.

Dad’s criminality in this case is that he bought the boy the gun that was used in the school shootings, and he somehow should have known how the kid was going to use it. Additionally, there had been prior threats about a shooting at the school, and the son and his parents were questioned at the time, and yet the gun was purchased as a gift for the boy after those threats. (The boy denied making the threatening calls, and he was never arrested because of them or disciplined by the school.)

Our efforts to hold as many people as possible accountable after such hideous crimes is understandable. But the most vengeful instincts of our most deeply wounded citizens are not a foundation for justice.

If we are to assume the 14-year-old shooter did so with adult moral intelligence and maturity making an adult decision for which there should be adult consequences, then also blaming parents becomes a little confusing. He was a “child” until dad bought him a gun (the gun gift was illegal since the boy was too young), and then he became an adult criminal.

There’s no doubt a horrific crime was committed by a 14-year-old, for which he must face severe consequences. But pretending he’s an adult and throwing him into the human landfill that is our penal system solves no problem and accomplishes nothing. It’s not clear criminalizing bad parenting is the solution, either.

Treating kid criminals like adults satisfies our need for retribution but doesn’t create better parents, provide real answers for the latest horror, or prevent the next.

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