Conservatives Suddenly Realize Juvenile Offenders Deserve Leniency

n the United States, juvenile drug offenders are routinely tried as adults, 13-year-old murderers can be (and have been) sentenced to life without parole, and teenagers who text naked pictures of themselves regularly get arrested for child pornography, and forced to spend the rest of their lives as registered sex offenders.

The conservative movement has not, typically, lamented these realities. In fact, the American right played a central role in bringing them into being. Richard Nixon’s appeals to “law and order” helped inaugurate a draconian turn in American criminal justice, one that both parties ultimately embraced, but which Republicans have championed with greater fervor and consistency. And a cornerstone of “tough on crime” policy-making has been to recast juvenile offenders as irredeemable “super-predators”: During the 1990s, virtually every state passed laws enabling prosecutors to try juveniles in adult criminal courts, and increasing potential sentences for crimes committed by those under 18.

The Trump administration has evinced little discomfort with this state of affairs. The president regularly refers to teenage gang members as “animals,” and has, in the past, called for imposing the death penalty on alleged teen rapists. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, meanwhile, has actively made the criminal justice system more punitive toward juvenile offenders. And other right-wing commentators have frequently defended summary execution as a justifiable punishment for a wide array offenses committed by African-American teenagers.

But in the past 24 hours, the right’s thinking on juvenile justice appears to have radically changed: Where conservatives once believed that people who commit violent crimes as teenagers do not necessarily deserve the opportunity to ever reenter free society, many now contend that such people should not (necessarily) be denied the chance to serve on the nation’s highest court.


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/kavanaugh-allegation-conservatives-boys-will-be-boys-juvenile-justice-reform.html