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The thing is that racists believe only some kids have bright futures ahead of them, and then do what they can to make it so.
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So establish eighteen as a bright line. Don’t charge kids as adults. Brock Turner was 19, therefore the question of treating him “as a juvenile” is irrelevant.
It is 100% relevant, as an example of the structural racism involved in determining which children get tried as adults, which don’t, and how even some adults get treated as juvenilles due to their priviledge.
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We all have our political priorities, I guess, and sometimes issues have to subordinate themselves, however awkwardly, to those priorities. Perhaps there are revolutionaries somewhere who wish to hang on to the guillotine “as it would be awfully useful in the event of gaining power”
I think you may be missing the point. This is about grown ass, adult, white men being treated as children while actual Black children are viewed as dangerous superpredators. This is the racism built into the system, and why so many states hang on to the charge as adult option.
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If the juvenile justice system exists simply to provide “kiddie” length sentences to the same institutional hellholes that American prisons typify, then yes, one can analogize Mr Turner’s experience to that of a person charged as a juvenile, and draw somewhat deranged conclusions from that. If the system had existed for a different sort of purpose and had the budget and rules to match, this sort of analogy does continual harm to the idea that children need to be treated differently by the criminal justice system.
Being tried as a juvenile has a technical meaning other than being lenient. Questioning has to proceed differently for example. The length of sessions, the nature of the questions, who is there in the room, whether the juvenile accused has support such as a guardian or social worker are issues. The fact that you cannot sentence a child to adult punishment at all (so no jail time) is also an issue. Usually they can be committed to jail as an adult following a report. (ETA when they age out of the juvenile system and their case is reconsidered)
I think you both were using the term in different ways. But I’m familiar with a different legal system so I may actually be talking bollocks.
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I’m sure you are aware of policing of Black youths and how Law treats Black children as if they are older and thus more dangerous. I mention this as, if treating children as children in criminal law is a choice, we know (we have decades of research to prove it) what kinds of children get treated as adults.
Which is why it should not be a choice. I guess though that for many proponents of just such a system the empirical evidence of injustice and discrimination that we know, would in fact be persuasive policy drivers.
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I do want to point out that, if you trace the thread of the conversation back, I raised the issue in support of the idea of a hard limit against prosecuting children as adults, not as an argument against. Maybe that’s the confusion?
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I was under the impression you said that the the rapist Turner was tried as a child, which I don’t believe he was as I understand the term, he was merely treated disgracefully leniently.
But I agree with you: we can’t say children are not capable of acting as an adult but are capable of bearing criminal responsibility in the same way as an adult.
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I said he was functionally treated as a child by the judge when it came to sentencing, rather than as the adult he was. Not that he was legally tried as a juvenille. Nowhere did I say that.
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You see the source of our confusion here I assume.
I’m not saying you didn’t say what you said that you said above, just that surely you can see how we didn’t read that from the above.
I don’t think the rapist was treated as a child in law as that has quite specific meanings. I think it was something else.
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appropos of nothing, here’s a paper that uses CRT to critique “offender characteristic factors”, specifically in regard to Brock Turner.
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Well, they fulfilled that resolution quite quickly!
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“Trust God.” I think we can all agree that this is a sign.
ETA: “Don’t give up your rights.” Her left, however, was apparently expendable.
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Paging schadenfreude thread, paging schadenfreude!
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Do we have one of those?
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