I wanted to write on the topic of Juvenile Justice, and a recent case sparked a perfect transition into the topic. To read the full story, you can click the link (if you do, I encourage you to read the comments): http://www.abc15.com/content/news/northernarizona/story.aspx?content_id=923deeda-30b6-47fe-88ae-8f9792672491
If you don’t want to, that’s OK; I’ll give a quick summary. An eight –y ear old boy has been arrested on two counts of murder for killing his father and his father’s friend with a .22. Allegedly the murder was pre-meditated- this is not a case of a kid who gets a hold of dad’s gun and it goes off: it was planned. The kid also shot each victim in a different location, so some time passed between each murder. The Police Chief wants to try the accused as an adult.
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As a society, we are quick to see youth as victims- not as perpetrators.
Interning in the Juvenile division of probation over the summer I met, interviewed and shook hands with young people who were adjudicated for both sex abuse and violent crimes- crimes that make our hearts heavy and our stomachs hurt. It’s easy to channel our hurt feelings as anger at an adult that took advantage of a child- but when a child takes advantage of a child, who do we get angry at? The parents? Chemical imbalances in the brain (whether real or imagined)? Video Games? How about Eminem?
I want to hear what y’all think about our current Juvenile Justice system, how we should treat youth in the system, or what you think should be done about this case (psychological tests haven’t come back yet on the kid, nor has there been any evidence of abuse by the father or the friend)
Hope everyone is having a happy and healthy week…
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15 comments:
Hey Renee... Great Topic. yes i had heard about this story, and was suprised that they wanted to charge an 8 year old boy as an ADULT! You bring up a great point that "as a society we are quick to see youth as victims not as perpetrators". When I first heard about the case the first few things that ran through my mind were was the child abused by the father? Its sad that we think this way but as a society we dont view children as mentally capable to commit such horrific acts without there being some type of abuse or outside influence. With this specific case I feel that we have to evaluate his psychological tests. Because if there was a chemical imbalance there is nothing in the best interest of this child being served behind bars. This child is only 8 years old, and if he is put behind bars at this age he might develop the idea that this is a healthy lifestyle. Also once he is released he might be so accustomed to living behind bars that it could lead to him being re-incarcerated. I feel that he should be put into various programs to maybe help alter this irrational thinking. Was it irrational thinking? Because from the article the father did teach him how to use a gun for hunting. So how much blame should we put on this child when at 8 years old hes being taught how to hunt. I am more then sure the Juvenile System will not serve the therapy this child may need.
There is no doubt that this is a sad and unfortunate and complicated event that has happened. In addition to knowing whether this eight year old boy is psychologically stable, I would also want to know if there is any influence from the mother coaching the boy to commit this heinous crime. After all, the circumstances under which the father had attained full custody could be a factor.
I personally think an eight year old should not be tried as an adult and that this is a case for jury nullification. As an adult today, I cannot remember half the things I did when I was eight. My observation of some eight year old children is that although they may know the actions that they have taken, they do not understand the fundamental implications of those actions and therefore cannot appreciate the consequences of their actions.
I also believe that the father was irresponsible for exposing this child to guns at such a young age. Children are to be protected by their parents, not put in harms way. When this father handed his eight year old child a gun, he undeniably endangered the child’s life. Unfortunately it was his life that was taken.
I see this child as a victim in the sense that his father had forced adulthood upon him and the judicial system is now trying to reinforce that imposition; essentially robbing this child of his God given right to just be a child. I hope he will have the opportunity to have his childhood back.
The juvenile justice system of America is draconian.This brings me back to an amazing report that Human Rights Watch wrote about young adults and teenagers who were given the death penalty for their crimes. However since California banned the death penality, these individual who had spent their years behind bars were given life in prison. It was amazing to read the letters they wrote to the families of their victims. All of them deeply regretted the actions they had committed.
I do not think we can try the child as an adult, even though his action of murdering two people is truly sad. However, I think the father is wrong as Kerry-Ann said for exposing the child to guns. Moreso, I am also interested to find out whether this child was exposed to gunviolence, not in a hunting context but in another context before this incident. Furthermore, I really do not believe this child undersood the ramifications or the scope of the action he was carrying out.
Great post, Renee, and great comments so far. A couple things come to mind, on both sides. The first is that this case makes us take a step back. It is so unthinkable that a kid could do this (keeping aside the question of culpability), that it makes me wonder if the very notion of reality, on which decisions like intent are based, is intact. I read an article a couple years ago where a man and his kids were involved in a car accident, killing someone in the other car. The kids -- around eight years old -- told their dad to "hit rewind" apparently honestly believing that they could alter time in this case like they could on a DVD. I have seen such instances of a disconnect between reality and fantasy in my own young kids (sometimes for the good) and while it would never occur to me that they wouldn't understand that killing is wrong and irrevocable, they are surrounded by transgressions of these boundaries -- in video games, movies/fairy tales, religious stories, etc. Apparently studies show that conscience doesn't develop until age seven at the earliest and yet they are bombarded with blurred reality from birth.
But a part of me has a hard time with this. When I was living in Boston as a grad student, there was a kid-on-kid shooting at a local elementary school. They interviewed friends of the shooter (and presumably classmates of the victim), who told the reporter that the shooter didn't need to be punished but rather needed "murder counseling." While the shooter undoubtedly needed counseling prior to the shooting and would need it in the aftermath, the inadequacy in the juxtaposition between "murder" and "counseling" made it seem like the notion of accountability was really missing here.
I don’t think that an 8 year old is fully developed and has the comprehension of an adult. Even though the crime was premeditated, I don’t think that the child completely understood what he was doing. We also need to look at the factors that determined this murder. From what I have seen on TV the neighbors complained that the child have been abused by his father. I do not know what contribution his friend had to all this. More than that, his father taught the boy how to use a gun. What parents teach a 7 or 8 years old how to fire a gun? This is why I don’t think this child grew in a friendly environment. Plus, it is still the father’s fault that the child had access to a gun. The right to bear arms is not guaranteed to an 8 year old.
Going back to juvenile justice, because most cases of violence involving children as perpetrators do not involve guns, I think, it is wrong to trial a juvenile as an adult. When convicted, this child will be place in adult facilities and deprived of important things necessary for a child’s development. An example is proper education. More than that, he/she would be forced to live among adults that “chose” to involve in criminal activities. I don’t think that these individuals are the right role models for these youth. If children make a mistake at early ages our role as society is to teach them that their actions have consequences. We should teach them better values that would keep them away from criminal activities, not place them in prisons where they learn to become better criminals.
This post is really great Renee! I saw this article a few days ago and I had the same reaction -- How could they try an 8 year old as an adult? Before any questioning I would first check out the child's psychological state of mind and history. How did he interact with other children his age in school? Have his parents treated him as if he were an adult? If his father thought he was old enough to handle a gun, maybe his father and mother also thought he was old enough to be a part of family arguments and fights, which led the child to believe he was old enough to fight back. It is hard to believe that an 8 year old would have the mind to plan and murder his father and friend, but if there were strong instances of abuse (including mental abuse) and instances where the child had difficulty relating to other children, it would most likely become apparent that the child struck out in frustration. I have younger nieces and nephews who are in the same age group as this kid and while they are shockingly more aware of today's world than I was at that age (in terms of music, politics and relationships with their peers), I find it very hard to believe that a child could plan to commit such a hateful action in advance. On the flipside, I do think it would be a lot easier to believe the innocence of this child if it was a spur of the moment action.
I also agree with Octavia, putting this child through an adult trial and then punishing him with adult jail cells would not teach him any lesson. Instead it would ruin whatever chance he has of retaining his childhood and starting life over.
All of your comments have been great.. I wanted to add a couple of things to the mix:
1. If we seem to favor for this kid: psychological testing, an in-depth look at family history/environmental factors, and counseling/ ATI's instead of, ahem, just "giving him the needle"-should we be doing this for all juveniles? everyone?
(What about adult offenders who show the same level of regret as youth offenders serving long terms? Or adult offenders that have also been denied a safe childhood or strong education? )
2. Do the kinds of programs we are talking about for this youth even exist [yet..]?
3. I wonder how many shots were fired/ how many hit.
I posted the same thing on my facebook account, and I made the joke that this kid took down two grown men, when adults often have trouble taking down 1.
I just watched a video of an 11 year old stripping an AR-15 rifle on a towel on the dinner table with dad filming. She was very proud of her time- 53 seconds.
In bed-stuy a young person I know, around nine or ten, was asked to "photograph his life" and he came back with a picture he took, which he labelled : gun and silencer. Clearly, he knows more than I do about guns.
Was this a freak case, or do we have an army of kids who know how to shoot before they understand there is no rewind button? Are we naiive about how much "little kids" grasp?
Right now I am taking a Juvenile Delinquency course. We have spent all of our time going over theories for why juveniles might commit crimes, but no time going over different methods to deal with juvenile offenders. The very last, and smallest, section of our textbooks mentions a few ways to address juvenile delinquency, and the author's suggestions are weak at best. I think this example is part of the bigger problem: juvenile corrections is not given enough attention. So much of our time is spent focused on the tragedy, the family, the peers, the “why”- all of which are extremely important factors- and not enough time on identifying the proper way to handle the delinquent.
Just as the juvenile court is often criticized for either being too lenient or too harsh, i think this is the way in which we view juvenile offenders- either they are just some "typical" misbehaving youngsters committing status offenses (who deserve a slap on the wrist and some tough love), or they are mentally twisted individuals committing unimaginable offenses (who can never be saved and must be locked away). Those in the middle are lost.
I am currently working on my thesis, which is about the effect of Positive Peer Culture programs on juvenile delinquents. Of course these programs are going to be more effective (or so I am trying to prove . . . ) for certain delinquents. I think it is important to realize that ideally, each reaction (punishment) to the crime would be tailored, just as it would be for adult offenders. But is the justice system capable of spending enough time on each case to determine the most appropriate and helpful punishment/services. It’s likely that the answer is no. So what’s the next best thing? Ahh, yet another issue to which I do not know the answer.
Another compelling topic--thank you, Renee, for bringing it to our attention on the blog. My thoughts run towards what we might do to prevent this sort of thing, not only what to do after the fact.
Three ideas/thoughts come to mind:
1) The social life of dangerous things. Imagine conducting research on the GUN itself--who made/manufactured it? Why? With what materials? For what purposes? How did it move from production to distribution? In what ways did it get circulated--by what mechanisms and for what purposes? What meanings are attached to that object by the different persons who handled it on its journey from production to distribution to consumption/use? Such an exploration might give us a different kind of understanding/ a different perspective on the situation and final outcome. It may also give us some different insight into who (or what) is accountable for the final outcome, and therefore guide us on what to do "after the fact"--after the horrific.
2) Social alienation: is this boy's deed--besides being an act of desperation--a reflection of social estrangement that is socially rooted? In other words, is his estrangement (disconnection from human self) not just a result of his coming from/living in a dysfunctional family but of his coming from/ living in a dysfunctional society? If so, how do we hold "society" accountable? How do we "prevent" such things from happening? How do we organize society in such a way that lowers the likelihood that people will become alienated? If we could work on that a bit, perhaps we wouldn't need to spend so much time and effort figuring out how to bring people back FROM alienation??
3) Prophylaxis (prevention) versus palliation (alleviate suffering after the fact). Rudolph Virchow (19th century German physician-anthropologist and public health advocate) wrote "Our politics were those of prophylaxis; our opponents preferred those of palliation.” Howard Waitzkin (2006 in Social Medicine) explains it as follows, “Two…principles were central to Virchow’s conception of the public health service: prevention and the state's responsibility to assure material security for citizens. Virchow’s stress on prevention again derived mostly from his observation of epidemics, which he believed could be prevented by fairly simple measures. He found a major cause of epidemics in poor potato harvests; government officials could have prevented malnutrition by distributing foodstuffs from other parts of the country. Prevention, then, was largely a political problem: "Our politics were those of prophylaxis; our opponents preferred those of palliation.”
I keep checking back with the blog b/c the comments are so interesting. And thanks, Renee, for yourself writing back to push our conversation further. It makes the blog more interactive when folks comment more than once. The question of prevention v. palliation is an age-old one and we should have a real think about this. Prevention is SO appealing (in health care reform, for example) and makes such self-evident sense. But I can't help also thinking about how much harm has been done in its name: pre-emptive war, the kinds of social policing done when the emphasis is on prevention (this was a huge issue in 19th c. England as the police system was developed).
I really need to respond to Prof Reitz's comment. I do not consider "pre-emptive war" as prevention at all. It's a completely different order of things--and to conflate them is really, really problematic--a distortion, really. To interpret Virchow's notion of "prevention" that way, is to really bring us down a very sorry road.
Dr. Waterston is quite right to insist on the importance of specific contexts here. I am not familiar with Virchow but can imagine that prevention in this medical-anthropological case of course has nothing to do with the kinds of distortions enabled by pre-emptive war theory. But my point is that prevention as a theoretical construct (as the opposite of the theoretical construct of palliation) is both malleable and seductive and can have huge differences and unintended consequences depending on context. Let me give a specific example that shows my thinking. In the late 1700s, early 1800s British politicians and social reformers from many stripes were trying to address a growing crime problem in a rapidly expanding London. So it seemed the time had come for London to have an organized police force, which it not only had never had, but prided itself on the lack of it. They feared a quasi-military force, like in France, would encroach on the individual rights of Englishmen. The theory of preventive policing was born (and the reason why English cops are still unarmed -- unlike American children!). It is a very complicated idea meant to address both the need for increased social control with the need for free-born Englishmen to live freely. (It is in many ways a dance we are doing in our post-9/11 world.) This idea of prevention just got taken up everywhere in Victorian social theory and became a very powerful approach to addressing a range of problems brought on by modernity and urbanization. And there are many reasons to celebrate, say, preventive policing. But advocates of prevention, attempting to forestall the rise of a militaristic police force and make a safer more livable society, enabled a range of measures used in the name of prevention that were hostile to the individual rights of many: groups such as unmarried women/actresses (routinely detained as prostitutes in order to prevent crimes/spread of disease), foreigners who were racially profiled (non-English sailors were thought to be a big part of the spike in crime as England's empire expanded). So in some ways, Dr. W and I aren't talking about the same thing at all. And our association of pre-emptive war theory with the cynical use of it by the Bush administration is not really what I was thinking of either, since theories of prevention, self-defense and pre-emptive war have had a long and curious history. Must sign off blog...
I'm glad so far to have been a fly on the wall in this discussion; the stress is palpable and Renee is the architect of our discomfort (Thank you sir, may I have another?)
The story of the 8 year old is itself so odd that I won't venture a guess about motivation without more information. But I have often found the very idea of intent (on which our criminal justice system is based) to be problematic. In my experience, most violent actors proceed without fully formed intent; some lack capacity (they are not cognitively developed much beyond the eight year old) but most are simply reacting to real or imaginary threats to their self-hood, integrity, or identity, with almost none of the reflection required to form "intent."
All violent people (not just juveniles) seem to fare best when they can receive some sort of multi-modal support, help that addresses a variety of intrapsychic and social needs. I totally get Prof. Reitz's cynacism: the history of prevention is certainly littered with just the kind of profiling (i.e. designating who is"at risk" in the population) that curtails civil liberties.
I do think there are across-the- board preventative programs that work. Did you know that a visiting nurse coming to the home once a week for the first 3 months of a baby's life reduces the incidence of child abuse 50% over the child's lifetime? And since abused children are twice as likely to become criminals (and are also more likely to be the victims of crime) it seems sensible to institute this kind of program in the U.S.
I don't know if we will ever get there.
While I've had a relatively little work on this, part of my job at John Jay's Research center involved me coding juvenile offenses. This was for a project titled "Collaborative Family Initiative", a research study that is currently tracking juvenile's who have been arrested and attempting to involve their families (or other supportive people) in their rehabilitation. From what I have read, many of these children (12-17 year olds) will have had a gun in their possession by the age of 12. However, this is also accompanied by a substance addicted parent, a deported parent, a parent in prison, a parent that abuses or any other combination of parenting that result in a lack of support and guidance.
While not every child with a lack of proper guidance will end up committing a double homicide, a real focus needs to come down on how children are reared. While I have no practical suggestions as to how do this, I do feel that identifying and treating substance abuse in parents is key; parents who suffer from serious addiction often do not possess the ability to take care of a child. As we saw in "The Castle" addiction do not have to come from "street drugs" they can also come from prescribed medications. Thus, in regard to the discussions, I believe that in the instance of juveniles parenting (“prevention”) is paramount. What this means, also, is that more attention needs to be paid to the foster care system.
Personally, I believe that there is a right and wrong way to introduce a child to guns. I know I am going against the grain here, but I do not think 8 is too young to be exposed to guns if it is done properly. Again, doing this “properly” goes back to the parents…. The reasoning behind John Jay’s CFI project is that, statistically, youth who have the support of their families are less likely to recidivate. The issue is that youth who have been arrested often come from families that suffer from the issues I listed above. Where and how can we intervene?
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