On 25 June the Supreme Court of the United States took a bold step into the 21st Century. It was on that date that they decided the sentencing of youth offenders to life without parole was cruel and unusual punishment.
This ruling is a truly momentous one, a step into the modern age for a juvenile justice system that seems to have lost its way over the years. There are, however, many more issues that still need to be addressed. One of the first and foremost among these is the propensity for racial profiling. The fact that African Americans tends to outnumber members of all other ethnicities when it comes to juveniles sentenced to life without parole is a disturbing statistic.
The Sentencing Project puts that stat under a microscope with their new report, the first-ever survey of juveniles serving life without parole.
Politics365 had a recent piece by Larry Miller, a man known for his work on The Philadelphia Tribune. Take a look at it:
The study, The Lives of Juvenile Lifers: Findings from a National Survey, determined that along with the racial disparity was a tendency on the part of judges to impose sentences without judicial discretion, and the defendants were generally exposed to excessive levels of violence in their homes and communities, high levels of physical abuse, and significant social and economic deprivations.
According to the report, a third of the more than 1,000 defendants surveyed were raised in public housing, 18 percent were not living with a close adult relative before their incarceration and some reported being homeless. More than half witnessed weekly violence in their neighborhoods and less than half were attending school at the time of their arrest. More disturbing is the proportion of African Americans serving juvenile life without parole sentences for the killing of a white person: 43.4 percent. Conversely, white juvenile offenders with Black victims are only about half as likely to receive a sentence of life without parole.
These findings support the growing body of work on the subject that has been accumulating since the 1980s. The direct impact of early life experiences is obvious. The disproportionate sentencing is a problem whose treatment is long overdue. The battles for equality that brought us figures like Dr. King are not finished; they just don’t grab as many headlines these days.
“The large number of individuals sentenced to juvenile life without parole represents the dismantling of the founding principles of the juvenile justice system,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project in a press release. “These youth were failed by systems intended to protect children.
Many juveniles sentenced to life without parole first suffer from extreme socioeconomic disadvantage, and are then sentenced to an extreme punishment deemed unacceptable in any other nation. Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs, the cases behind the ruling involved Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson, both of whom were sentenced when they were 14 years old. Miller was convicted of killing a man in Alabama; Jackson was convicted of being an accomplice in a robbery that ended in murder in Arkansas.”
Here in the U.S. we excel at incarceration. In Louisiana we have the highest rate of prisoners to population in the world, triple that of Iraq. We lock up more of our citizens nation-wide than any other developed country. The list goes on and on.
The problem is that incarceration is not the answer- something shown by every reputable study done over the last three decades or so. We’re great at locking people up; what we need to be is great at rehabilitating them.
