There is something dangerously wrong with this nation’s criminal justice system when prosecutors are more interested in showing how tough they are and scoring political points than they are in being fair and reasonable. Justice cannot truly be measured by rates of conviction and lengths of prison terms. The process is at least as important as the product. Justice is not served if the goal is simply to nail the perp and send them away for as long as possible. While criminal offenders ought be held accountable for their misdeeds, the process of determining accountability must ever be thoughtful and balanced, guided by reason rather than emotion. When histrionics and hysteria enter the fray, or when a thirst for vengeance—whether the public’s or the state’s—holds sway, justice is tainted. And then the integrity of the system begins to crumble, leading to misguided policies and practices that serve no one well.

From the New York Times:

Juvenile Injustice

The United States made a disastrous miscalculation when it started automatically trying youthful offenders as adults instead of handling them through the juvenile courts. Prosecutors argued that the policy would get violent predators off the streets and deter further crime. But a new federally backed study shows that juveniles who do time as adults later commit more violent crime than those who are handled through the juvenile courts.

The study, published last month in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, was produced by the Task Force on Community Preventive Services, an independent research group with close ties to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After an exhaustive survey of the literature, the group determined that the practice of transferring children into adult courts was counterproductive, actually creating more crime than it cured.

A related and even more disturbing study by Campaign for Youth Justice in Washington finds that the majority of the more than 200,000 children a year who are treated as adults under the law come before the courts for nonviolent offenses that could be easily and more effectively dealt with at the juvenile court level.

Examples include a 17-year-old first-time offender charged with robbery after stealing another student’s gym clothes, and another 17-year-old who violated his probation by stealing a neighbor’s bicycle. Many of these young nonviolent offenders are held in adult prisons for months or even years.

The laws also are not equally applied. Youths of color, who typically go to court with inadequate legal counsel, account for three out of every four young people admitted to adult prison. [full text]