The Rights of Children in the United States - Just This Side of Somalia

http://counterpunch.com/


The U.S. is the only United Nations member-state except Somalia that has neglected to ratify the UN's 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. In February 2001, George W. Bush explicitly objected to its "human rights-based approach"-which, among other things, prohibits prosecuting and incarcerating children as adults because their minds are too immature to form "criminal intent."

Indeed, the U.S. stands alone in its rush to sentence children to a lifetime in prison without the possibility of parole, and is home to more than 99 percent of youths serving this sentence worldwide. According to a joint 2005 study by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the U.S. had 9,400 prisoners serving life prison terms for crimes committed before the age of 18, of which 2,225 were serving life without parole. Of those, 16 percent were between 13 and 15 years old at the time they committed the crimes for which they were convicted.

More than 100,000 children are currently incarcerated in local detention and state correctional institutions across the country. "Zero tolerance" advocates would have us believe that the number has skyrocketed because our nation is overrun with teenage predators committing an unprecedented number of heinous crimes. But statistics belie this explanation. The murder conviction rate for youths fell from 2,234 in 1990 to 1,006 in 2000, a drop of almost 55 percent. Yet during that same period, the percentage of children receiving sentences of life without parole more than tripled, from 2.9 to 9 percent.

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Not all children are treated equally. Race and class loom large. As the Times noted, "there is a stark difference among arrests of children by race -- one that gets sharper as the children get younger." The young targets of "zero tolerance" arrests nationwide are overwhelmingly Black, Latino and Native American. In 2000, according to the Suffolk University Law School Juvenile Justice Center (JJC), African-American children-who made up just 15 percent of the U.S. juvenile population-were 46 percent of those incarcerated and 52 percent of those whose cases ended up in adult criminal court. Black children are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites, while Latino and Native American children are placed in correctional institutions at two and a half times that of whites.

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These racial disparities are not limited to Southern states. The JJC reported in 2003, "As juvenile crime in Massachusetts has decreased eight years in a row, the rate at which judges are ordering detention of youth increased by 40 percent he proportion of minority youth in total detention admissions has increased annually from 2001, for both boys (from 57 percent to 60 percent in 2003) and girls (from 49 percent to 54 percent).
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we women have let our children down by letting the suits disregard them

:kick: