(Darrin Klimek/Getty Images).
Recent high-profile cases involving juveniles have reignited a difficult conversation in our region about youth crime, accountability and public safety.
Victims do not suffer less because the person who caused the harm was 16. Families deserve to have that harm recognized, and communities have every right to expect protection. At the same time, a 16-year-old does not become fully developed because the charge is serious.
Two things can be true at the same time.
Too often, our response is framed as an either-or choice: accountability or rehabilitation, public safety or the needs of the young person. That is not how the problem works. These concepts are not mutually exclusive.
Understanding why a young person committed an offense is not the same as excusing it. It is how we determine what has to change. Two young people may face the same charge but arrive in court through very different paths. One may be following peers. Another may be dealing with untreated trauma, substance use, anger, fear or an escalating pattern of violence. Those differences do not erase responsibility. They help us decide what response is most likely to prevent another person from being harmed.
Young people may know an action is wrong while still lacking the mature judgment, emotional regulation and resistance to peer pressure that adults are more likely to possess. Those capacities continue developing into early adulthood. The law may assign adulthood on an 18th birthday. Human development does not.
That matters for emerging adults between 18 and 25. They are old enough to receive the full weight of adult punishment, yet many are still developing in ways that affect decision-making and self-control. Treating them exactly like older adults may give us a clear legal line, but it does not guarantee safer communities.
Some young people will require secure confinement. Public safety may demand it. But confinement cannot simply be a place where time passes. If we are serious about what happens when they return, those settings must provide individualized assessment, treatment, education, family engagement, employment preparation and meaningful reentry planning. That requires trained staff, stable funding and programs designed for this population. Research on emerging-adult programs points to the need for a broader continuum of care, not a courtroom acting alone.
Most young people prosecuted in adult court will eventually come home. They will live in our neighborhoods, work beside us and raise families in our communities. The condition in which they return is part of public safety.
Parents of victims want assurance that another family will not endure what theirs has. Parents of accused young people want to believe their child can become more than the worst thing they have done. Those hopes are not incompatible.
Accountability should require young people to face the harm they caused. It should also place them in systems capable of reducing the likelihood that they will cause that harm again.
That is not softness. It is what serious, lasting public safety requires.
This article was originally published by Missouri Independent and is republished by MetroSTL under a Creative Commons license. The reporting is the outlet’s; please support them.