Sentencing kids: There but for the grace of God

The truth about life sentencing of youths without the possibility of parole lies in every adult’s childhood

Of all the crimes that keep us up at night and haunt our waking hours, it’s murder that is the hardest to accept, and the one that cannot be undone.

So a part of all of us may understand Jones v. Mississippi. The new Supreme Court decision allows sentencing juveniles to life sentences without any possibility of parole.

We imagine, if we were in the position of murder victims’ families, we would want to throw away the key, too -- no matter how young the perpetrator might be.

American law is supposed to be based on facts, however. Revenge, or any other emotion, should not be involved.

The Supreme Court recognized in four cases between 2005 and 2012 that youths deserve a slim chance to try to grow up to be better people, even if they do it in prison. 

“Youth is more than a chronological fact. It is a time of immaturity, irresponsibility, impetuousness and recklessness. It is a moment and condition of life when a person may be most susceptible to influence and to psychological damage,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote nine years ago in Miller v. Alabama. 

Justice Anthony Kennedy had made it clear in 2005 in the majority opinion in Roper v. Simmons that the Court recognized that criminals under 18 are much more likely to be rehabilitated, since they “are more capable of change than are adults, and their actions are less likely to be evidence of ‘irretrievably depraved character.’”

Five years later, in Graham v. Florida, he wrapped it up: “Life in prison without the possibility of parole gives no chance for fulfillment outside prison walls, no chance for reconciliation with society, no hope. Maturity can lead to that considered reflection which is the foundation for remorse, renewal, and rehabilitation. A young person who knows that he or she has no chance to leave prison before life’s end has little incentive to become a responsible individual.” 

A new Supreme Court majority, led by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, left precedent behind in Jones last week. The Court now allows judges to lock in life sentences for young murderers while admitting there is no way for those judges to know if they’re incorrigible or not.

We don’t need Supreme Court justices to tell us whether young criminals should be allowed the chance of becoming better people. That goes double for Kavanaugh, who famously insisted, for himself, that youthful criminality doesn’t even count.  

All we need are memories of our own lives. As kids, many of us often acted like animals. And not in a good way.

As a boy, I vandalized a fleet of earth-moving equipment, intending to punish developers of a huge vacant lot behind our old apartment. I resented losing the big free open space and its urban wildlife. 

I stuffed bulldozers' batteries and radiators with sand, and I released mice inside their cabs. I let air out of tires. I felt heroic, though I was endangering the lives of the heavy equipment operators.

I imagined being publicly congratulated by fans of land preservation. I was as deluded as those who stormed the Capitol Jan. 6 and seemed to expect acclaim from a grateful nation. Unlike them, I was still in grammar school.

I loved that vacant lot. It had a 12-foot-high abandoned water tank with an 8-inch rim topping the perimeter. We boys would chase each other around the top, running as fast as we could go. 

One kid fell, and I thought he was dead. But he got up, turned around and went home, never looking back.

We called him a coward and raced around like maniacs again.

The first of my friends to smoke marijuana dug a big hole in the shadow of the old water tank. He then thickly covered a thin sheet of plywood with dirt, and carefully drew it over the hole with himself underneath.

I think he figured that he could fire up a joint in there and keep inhaling the same smoke, so it would be like getting high inside of a big bong. 

The plywood snapped in half, setting off a chain reaction collapse that left him buried up to his nose. 

A block away, there was a boarded-up building rumored to be stocked with taxidermy. I broke in to see.

A man emerged from the darkness. He asked me, not unkindly, “What did you want to look at?” Not you, I thought. I ran away. 

One time, I missed out on a brilliant youthful criminal enterprise. Some friends rode their bicycles to a shopping center’s wishing pond, carrying shovels on their shoulders and buckets on their handlebars. They planned to scoop up the pennies and nickels in a blitzkrieg daylight raid.

Maybe they were right about being able to get away before the police arrived. They hadn’t yet heard about mall cops, however.

Most of us turned in pop bottles for the deposits. When we didn’t collect enough, we stole bottles from people’s porches. We figured if you didn’t return the bottles right away you deserved to lose them. Kid code. 

We boys fought with each other frequently, over real or imagined slights or over nothing at all. For years, there was rarely a time when at least one of us didn’t have a shiner.

Fair fights were not necessarily part of the deal. There were sucker punches and attacks from behind. 

Every weapon we found, we tried. Knives, hammers, hatchets, bats, rusty old guns, batons, bottles, bricks, pointy shoes. One kid stabbed me through the left hand with a pair of scissors. Another used a tree branch to leave a jagged scar all the way across my forehead. 

I tossed the contents of a small box of detergent into the face of another boy, sending him to the hospital, where a doctor saved his vision. I had thought I was being funny. 

All this, and more, from someone who grew up as “a good boy” whose behavior was sometimes mentioned as an example to others. And the others weren’t incorrigibles, either. Our parents tried to bring us up right. We went to school every day and had enough to eat. Most of us were members of faith communities.  

We were just boys who weren’t men yet. We did stupid things because we hadn’t lived long enough to get smarter, and because we hung around with other boys who weren’t any more evolved. Some had rougher lives, and inspired rougher behavior in the rest of us.

My admissions may sound familiar, or you may remember your childhoods as more sensible. If it’s the latter, let me prod your memory.

There’s little point in asking yourself whether you shoplifted. A better question: how much? 

Maybe you stole liquor from adults. Cigarettes, too. 

You may have stolen fruit from trees or farmstands, broken windows in old factories, smashed pumpkins at Halloween, jumped turnstiles at train stations, sneaked into movie theaters, thrown water balloons off roofs, peeped in windows, cheated at cards. 

You might have demeaned other children, and even bullied adults who were helpless to do anything about it.

You may have been one of those kids who found things before they were lost: bicycles, baseball gloves, dolls, hats, tools. Dogs.

Usually, childish bad judgment shows itself in such relatively minor violations of the social contract. The Supreme Court recognized in previous decades that bad judgment can get a lot worse when there’s pressure from child abuse, poverty, hunger, illiteracy or racism.

We can tell ourselves that we were very different from youthful killers. Maybe so. 

But few of us were little angels.

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