No child is unworthy of care: Young people deserve better from the legal system
Children shouldn’t bear the burden of a deeply flawed system that too often villainizes rather than supports
By Jasmine Richardson-Rushin, Attorney at the National Center for Youth Law
Think about your favorite performers. Or people who, due to their intelligence or skill, inspire or fascinate you. Do you judge them by their initial attempts in their field?
Do you eternally write off musicians for their earliest mistimed or off-key notes? Do you forever judge athletes based on their youngest, untrained performances? Would you turn down a plate from a celebrated chef just because that same chef took regrettable flavor risks with their first dishes? Do you feel those early miscues should have made these people unworthy of further investment and support?
The reasonable answer to all these, of course, is no. You now admire these people because they were given the space and grace to learn, grow and better themselves as they pursued their passions.
If we can acknowledge and collectively support this growth in all other facets of life, we should demand the same from our juvenile legal system, which can have an outsized impact on a young person’s future.
Children, daily, are written off and subjected to extended suffering due to the failings of a deeply flawed and unjust juvenile justice system. Young people, simply for exhibiting normal behaviors of youth, are routinely criminalized and further harmed by a system that could and should be supporting their growth and development as humans.
It’s outrageous that children are still routinely charged and sentenced for behaviors that are consistent with their age and development. It’s unconscionable that these charges can stick with young people into adulthood and have massive negative impacts on their future, like precluding them from opportunities for housing, education and employment.
No child should be forced to carry this unreasonable burden. Every child deserves a childhood.
I’ve seen up close the human devastation that results from criminalizing children for child-like behaviors. Having worked as an assistant public defender, I’ve also seen far too many times how “contacts” with the criminal justice system and prior adjudications effectively vilify youth — particularly Black, Brown and Indigenous youth, who are over-policed, over-charged and over-represented in the legal system — and deem them as unworthy of care.
A case involving a young man named James still stands out to me as one of the more memorable and agonizing cases of my career.
I “met” James just shy of his 15th birthday. By “met,” I mean I was given his file, a manila folder with his charges written across the front in large red letters. Due to the nature of the charges, James was being held in a secure facility awaiting hearings. I would later find out that prior to this contact, James had been committed to the Commonwealth of Virginia and sent to a secured juvenile detention center in South Carolina. All before reaching his teens.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I met James, but when this barely 5-feet tall, maybe 100-pound boy with big bright eyes came and sat in front of me, my heart broke.
It took weeks to gain his respect, and more than a month to see the smile or hear the laugh that I would soon grow to love.
James’ charge at the time was a major downgrade from his prior conviction. Given this, and the fact that the new charge was among his first “contacts” with the justice system since leaving detention a year prior, I could have typically argued for diversion or for his case to be placed on a STET docket, which would have precluded it from being classified as a criminal conviction and made it likely to be dismissed in less than a year if certain conditions were met.
Unfortunately, neither of these options was available to James.
Most of his peers, in the same situation, would have been released to their parents pre-adjudication, at worst with a 24-hour ankle monitor. James, due to his prior childhood convictions, was instead deemed a danger to the community.
He was deemed unworthy of care.
My time advocating for James should have been entirely focused on the sufficiency of the charges filed against him and the often brutal conditions he faced in confinement. But before I could even get to these points, I had to fight for the court just to see him.
Every. Single. Hearing.
He wasn’t the allegations against him. He wasn’t his “points.” He was a young kid who, after years of abuse, neglect and abandonment, had become who he was to survive.
Still, with multiple legal-system “contacts” — no matter that they were less serious in nature — the court just “could not extend grace.” It meant nothing that James was doing extremely well in secured facilities. I rarely won any motions or cases for him, and any mitigation seemed to fall on deaf ears.
To this day, James’ case sticks with me. Often sweating through my suit, I fought hard to argue that despite his convictions, James was a truly good kid. He just needed help. If we didn’t help him, I argued, we were failing him.
The court didn’t agree.
James’ story, sadly, isn’t uncommon. Too often, children aren’t afforded the luxury of being children. They aren’t allowed to make mistakes. Young people from Black, Brown and Indigenous communities are routinely adultified and over-policed, issues that have them entering the legal system earlier and remaining longer than their white peers.
We can’t continue to criminalize youth for the “nature of the offense,” for “having a record,” for “doing the same thing and not learning from it,” and simultaneously continue to turn a blind eye to a system that, foundationally, targets them and sets them up for cycles of system-involvement.
Our current system isn’t working. The health, safety and well-being of our young people demand that we make major changes, beginning with respecting children’s rights to be children. Blaming a child for the failures of our legal system is no less ridiculous than denying them future music lessons because they didn’t sound like Beethoven after their first.
Our children, who will shape our collective future, deserve support, not condemnation.
Jasmine Richardson-Rushin is an Attorney on the National Center for Youth Law’s Justice and Equity team. Jasmine works on policy reform to eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as juvenile fines and fees through the Debt Free Justice Campaign.
