Department of Justice Report: Trying Juveniles as Adults Does More Harm Than Good

A new Department of Justice report (Juvenile Transfer Laws: An Effective Deterrent to Delinquency?; hat tip to the ACLU Blog of Rights) has documented that laws prosecuting juveniles as adults, stamped in bold print in every right-wing demagogue politician's political playbook, don't actually help anybody. The New York Times' assessment of the report is spot on:

The value of specialized courts for young people is underscored in a new report from the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. After evaluating the available research, it concludes that transferring juveniles for trial and sentencing to an adult criminal court has increased recidivism, especially among violent offenders, and has led many young people to a permanent life of crime.

But even the Times fell for faulty reasoning. As part of its editorial in support of the report's findings, the Gray Lady adds in this nugget:

Young people who commit serious, violent crimes deserve severe punishment. But...

No judge is qualified to decide what criminals deserve, and no punishment is fine-tuned enough to deliver it to them. The purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the general population from criminals, and to reduce criminal recidivism through a mix of rehabilitation and deterrence. That's the best we mortals can do. A criminal justice system that takes it upon itself to play God will soon find itself in the business of building Hells, and the foolish and shortsighted strategy of throwing the book at juvenile offenders inevitably results from this sort of thinking.

Lawmakers, in other words, need to stop locking criminals away because they deserve to be locked up and focus instead on locking criminals away because we deserve to have them locked up. That's a much more sensible approach to the problem of crime. Americans need to be protected, not avenged.

Related: The Eighth Amendment