How else to explain the prosecutorial passion for charging absurdly youthful offenders as adults?
In 2011, a Pennsylvania judge agreed with a prosecutor's request to try Jordan Brown, an 11-year old boy, as an adult, because ahead of the trial, he "refused to admit his guilt" in the shooting death of his father's pregnant fiancee. While Brown became the youngest kid in the world to be facing a potential sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole, he would not be unusual in the state of Pennsylvania, which leads the US -- itself a country that leads the world in such prosecutions of children as adults -- in having an astonishing 450 people serving life terms in prison with no opportunity for parole who were sentenced as adults for acts they committed as children.
Say what?
One of the fundamental realities about children is that they grow up, and generally, if given a modicum of love and attention, they grow up to be more mature than they were as kids.
That doesn't compute in the US, where what you did is all that matters to the average citizen, apparently. Some 40 of the 50 states allow children to be tried as adults in the United States, making it a pariah among nations in its brutishnish and barbarism.
Politicians -- Democrat and Republican -- campaign on "get-tough-on-crime platforms which have also made the US the most locked-up society in the world, outstripping even police states like China, which despite being almost four times the population of the US, has fewer people behind bars.
In the US, 2.3 million people are in prison, but another 4.9 million are out of jail but still on parole or probation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, meaning they've been in prison already, and are still under the control of prison and police authorities. That's over 3 percent of the US population, counting kids and old people. We lock people up at six times the rate, relative to population, of the average for all industrialized nations. Our lock-up rate is five times Britain's, nine times Germany's and 12 times Japan's, yet we have crime rates far in excess of those more enlightened countries.
America has turned everything in to a crime. We get locked up for actions that rarely lead to prison in other modern societies -- things like writing bad checks or using recreational drugs...or purse snatching. And US prison sentences are much longer than sentences for the same crimes in other more enlightened countries. Take burglaries. In the US, the average sentence for a burglary is 16 months -- almost a year and a half. In Canada, it's five months, and in England, seven months. Of course, we stand out too as having one of the busiest execution programs in the world, trumped only by China and Iran, two countries that are not particularly laudable for the quality of their justice systems.
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