Juvenile incarceration

A lot of people don’t realize that minors, unlike adults, do not have the right to a jury trial when they are accused of committing a crime. (The right to a jury trial is in the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution is usually considered kind of a big deal by lawyers.)

Here’s the reasoning: The goal with minors who commit crimes is rehabilitation, not punishment by incarceration. As such, minors don’t have to worry about “defending” themselves in a court of law from those who would seek to deprive them of their liberty as a penalty for their criminal acts. So minors don’t get jury trials because they don’t need them.

So what do they do with all the minors that, were they adults, would be put in prison? Roughly speaking, those whose crimes would land an adult in jail go to Juvenile Hall; those whose crimes would land an adult in prison go to “youth correctional facilities.”

In practice, almost no rehabilitation goes on at these institutions. At best the kids are just left to their own devices, but too often the kids are actively mistreated by the guards (called “counselors”). Every few months or so there’s another story in the paper about some innovative form of abuse: the latest was about how the youth facility guards made certain kids fight each other so the guards could wager on the outcomes of the matches. Parents complain, but who listens to parents who have raised juvenile delinquents?

For all practical purposes, these kids are in prisons--and badly-run prisons, at that. And they never even got a jury trial.