The Origins of Our Book “Sentencing Youth to Life in Prison: Justice Denied”

 

            How did I decide I wanted to write this book “Sentencing Youth to Life in Prison: Justice Denied”?

            It is sometimes difficult to remember exactly what leads an author to write a particular book. However, I think my motivation to write this book goes back more than 30 years to my very first book. But the motivation, I believe, is also related to my experiences as a parent, my work as a psychologist with parents and children, and my years as a parent trainer – both inside and outside of the juvenile court.

            I wrote my first book in 1990 at a time when parents thought almost exclusively about punishment as the only acceptable way of responding to the misbehavior of children. It was a time when spanking and physical punishment of children was still used by a majority of parents, although research about the deleterious effects of spanking and hitting kids was creeping into conversations about discipline and many mental health experts recognized that corporal punishment was psychologically unhealthy.

            What I intended to do in my first book – as well as several subsequent books – was to address the issue of discipline and how the concept of discipline could encompass so much more than punishment and hurting children. So, I wrote about how parents could bring about changes in their children  -- in effect teaching them emotional and behavioral regulation – and I did this as a time when discipline was seen in a very limited way. One specific question I addressed back then was this: Could you teach children to be self-disciplined without severe or harsh punishment?

            My answer to that then – just as it is now – is, yes, you can teach children to be self-regulated without employing harsh discipline or causing pain.

            Now, with that as a background, what my co-author and I wanted to do in this new book is to look at the issue of harsh treatment of juvenile offenders. That is, we wanted to write about whether juveniles who have committed, or been involved in, violent crimes have to go to prison for a long time. More to the point, do they need to go to prison for life?

            In this book, we explore the history of how we treat juveniles in this country and we                        particularly examine the history of how we deal with juveniles who commit violent offenses – offenses that bring harm to others. We found that for much of America’s history there is a sad failure to take into consideration the youthfulness and immaturity of children and teens.

            We point out that while the invention of the juvenile court in 1899 was an attempt to handle juveniles as children who were different from adults, we go on to note that as a society we have gradually blurred that distinction of dealing with juveniles differently from adult criminals. And that’s how the automatic juvenile life without the possibility of parole sentences came about.

            In this book, we contend that the U.S. Supreme Court in Miller v. Alabama in 2012 was right in ruling that automatic juvenile life without the possibility of parole sentences are unconstitutional, but we also argue that there has to be a better response to juvenile crime than locking up juveniles with adults for decades – sometimes for a lifetime.

            As to whether we are successful in conveying what we wanted to in this book, we’ll let others decide that.