Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

Abstract

In 2012, the United States Supreme Court's decisions in Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs marked a sea change in the sentencing of children convicted of serious offenses. Miller ended mandatory life without parole sentences for youth who committed crimes when they were under the age of 18. The Court looked to the fundamental distinction between youth and adults to impose a categorical bar on mandatory life without parole sentences for adolescents. This article surveys the state of juvenile sentencing two decades before Miller emerged. In the early 1990s, racial stereotypes about the perceived typical juvenile criminal transformed the juvenile justice system and the treatment of child offenders in the United States. The media, lawmakers, and academics helped erase a longstanding distinction between youth and adults, thereby equating the two, and making it palatable to subject children to draconian punishments previously reserved for adult offenders. By looking back at the run up to life without parole sentences for children, we are reminded how stereotypes about race and crime deprived all children of their youth. The article concludes by briefly exploring Miller's implications for the way we treat children in trouble with the law, regardless of their crime. In the end, Miller and the history that preceded it provides advocates with a powerful tool to address the false connections between race, youth, and criminality that reimagined children as adults and helped steer children into adult court. It also provides motivation to change the system altogether-and speak truth to a fiction built on racial bias-so that youth are no longer treated like adults.

First Page

765

Volume

27

Publication Date

2015

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