… being a citizen of the United States.
The estimated number of juveniles serving life without parole in the United States is 2,574. The number of prisoners given life without parole for nonhomicide offenses is 111—77 of them are in Florida. Nine is the number of people serving life-without-parole sentences for crimes committed at age 13. And two is the number of 13-year-olds serving the sentence for nonhomicide offenses. Oh, and one is the number of countries that allows life without parole for teenagers.
Dahlia Lithwick of Slate Magazine has the details.
Interesting juxtaposition of this and the following post. When do you throw away the key or administer (nice euphemism) the lethal injection? Somewhere in there lies part of the answer to the answer to the question “What makes a society?”
I agree about the embarrassing part–on so many levels I can’t even count them any more. We have such potential, too, if only we would realize it and rise to the occasion.
On the other hand, there are people out there who have at young ages done things so horrible it curls even my gray hair.
I have never been able to offer so much as an hard and fast opinion, much less a solution, when it comes to this issue.
There are people in this world who are so broken, so lost, and yes, so evil, they should not be allowed to roam free. Some of these people are very young. Some of these people cannot be rehabilitated, and some of these people are CERTAIN to re-offend upon release.
What do we do with them?
Do we just resign ourselves to trying to fix them while we have them, release them into society at 18 or 21, dismiss their future victim(s) as necessary sacrifice(s), and hope we can find them, convict them, and lock them away permanently at a later date, when they’re finally “adults?”
I’ve always said the only way to address this is by honestly and actively addressing the underlying problems that result in violent and criminal children, but that’s obviously not going to happen, so what next?