Opinion Piece

At the age of twelve, a boy named Evan Savoi stabbed and killed his developmentally disabled playmate, thirteen year old Craig Sorger. He is currently serving a twenty six year prison sentence for first degree murder. He was tried as an adult for his crime even though he was legally still a minor. Many would argue that his crime was violent enough to validate his sentence, but what many don’t realize is what a twelve year old can conceptualize. The age of twelve is the very beginning of an adolescent being able to understand that death is irreversible. How can we allow the government to try children for crimes where they don’t understand the repercussions? Evan Savoi is an example of a childhood lost to incarceration in the juvenile justice system.

Currently in America, over twenty states allow children as young as seven to be tried as adults, and in some states this includes sentencing children to life in prison without parole. For all those parents out there, do you believe your child could understand that they had done something so wrong that they need to be punished for years? A seven year old's cognitive ability is at the level of simple mathematics and includes a vocabulary of only several thousand words. A seven year old is at the stage of emotional development where they are only beginning to understand and feel guilt and shame. Although we can not ignore that a child has committed a crime, we can better deal with it by rehabilitating instead of punishing the children. The juvenile justice system in America is obviously in need of reform, and a rehabilitation program would be the most successful and advantageous option.

A rehabilitation program would look very much like a group home setting. Rehabilitation facilities would house thirty to forty children and have live-in therapists available to children twenty four hours a day. The therapists and adults within the rehabilitation program would show the kids the love and encouragement they need and may or may not have had at their home. At the rehabilitation facility, the children would live the lifestyle of an average child while receiving the therapy necessary to become a working member of society. They would each have responsibilities around the facility as well as be receiving an education. They would also have individual therapy sessions to find the core reason why they have committed and or want to commit crimes, so that those issues could be addressed before the child’s release. As a part of the rehabilitation program, the length of their sentence would be contingent on the child’s progress in the program and change in moral.

This rehabilitative approach has been proven to work in Missouri’s juvenile justice system. Missouri has a recidivism rate of about ten percent, which means that only about ten percent of the children who go through the rehabilitation program are rearrested after their release. Currently, the average recidivism rate in the national juvenile justice system is about forty percent. Comparing these two statistics, it seems as though a switch to a rehabilitative program would be the logical solution, but there is even more incentive. A rehabilitation program costs about fifty thousand dollars per year per child whereas incarceration costs one hundred thousand dollars per year per child.

Knowing that it is necessary for the United States government to reform it’s juvenile justice system, rehabilitation is clearly the best way to do so. It is the most cost effective and is the longest lasting solution.

If you would like to help, go to http://www.petitiononline.com/merc1234/petition.html and sign the mock petition to show some of the California representatives that people care about this problem.