JUSTICE
Why Do We Try Kids As Adults?
The history of a bad idea
After the recent mass shooting in Georgia— in which a 14-year-old used his dad’s semiautomatic assault rifle to murder four people at a high school — local officials decided they needed to signal that they were serious.
But how to make it clear that they would not stand for this awful crime? The governor and state legislature might have worked toward passing bills that removed weapons of war from the state. Or they might have moved to require safe storage of guns. But plenty of Georgia officials believe that “firearms are not the enemy,” so they didn’t do anything to reduce the plague of guns in their community.
But still, officials wanted to signal that they were serious. So prosecutors did what the often do. They charged the 14-year-old shooter as an adult.
This is something we see all the time in the American justice system. When a child commits a particularly egregious crime, prosecutors decide to take him out of the legal system that we’ve created for children and put him in the adult courts. Charging kids as if they were adults allows prosecutors to seek much harsher punishments — in the Georgia case, “four life sentences plus a couple hundred years.”
