Is Prison The Answer For Teenage Offenders

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If rehabilitation is the goal for teenagers who are tried and sentenced as adults, then prison is not the answer.
Gary Scott was arrested at age 15 for second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years to life at age 17. He has served 14 and a half years and is currently at San Quentin State Prison. He works with at-risk youth and is studying toward an associate of arts degree.
Like many states, California allows youth offenders as young as 14 to be transferred from the juvenile system to adult courts. From there, most of the teenagers who are tried as adults and sentenced to life in adult institutions are placed in Level 4 maximum-security prisons that are extremely violent.
This happens even though courts have said that juveniles are different from adults and in some situations must be treated differently. For example, in 2005, the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juvenile offenders because “people under 18 are immature, irresponsible, susceptible to peer-pressure and often capable of change.” However, the justices have not yet applied this same logic when considering the sentencing and housing of juveniles in the adult system.
In my observation, the incarceration of young prisoners in adult prisons has an extremely destructive effect. Young prisoners are more susceptible to negative influences than adults. Facing the reality of their lengthy sentence and potentially never going home makes them seek protection and try to fit in somewhere in their new world. Because a juvenile’s identity is still developing, he or she can potentially adopt negative behaviors that are the norm in a hostile prison environment. The fear of being victimized or assaulted produces a need for security, which leads many young prisoners to rely on gangs and weapons for survival. Young prisoners overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness and hopelessness cannot focus on changing their thinking and behavior, because they are focused on how to survive. Younger prisoners are also at a disadvantage because they are not as mature (mentally and physically) as older prisoners. The suicide and sexual abuse rates of younger prisoners are higher than those of the physically mature. How can rehabilitation be possible in such a dangerous environment?
The only way to change the behavior of young prisoners is to provide them with the opportunity to gain insight into why they think and behave the way they do. If rehabilitation is the goal for teenagers who are tried and sentenced as adults, then prison is not the answer. There should be a different place for youth offenders. Prison is too violent, and the necessary programs that can contribute to young prisoners’ rehabilitation are underfunded. Rehabilitation is more possible in an environment that is conducive to education, where young prisoners can gain insight into their behavior to produce a positive transformation.
When minors commit violent crimes, should they be treated differently from adults? Is prison effective as a punishment or a deterrent for juveniles?
Read More »



Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Lifers



T.J. Parsell, writer and human rights activist



Charles Stimson, Heritage Foundation



R. Daniel Okonkwo, D.C. Lawyers for Youth



Jennifer L. Eberhardt and

Aneeta Rattan, Stanford University



Laurence Steinberg, adolescent brain researcher



Michael Jacobson, CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance


Penelope Gibbs Follow Director of Transform Justice and Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, University of Oxford
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Penelope Gibbs Director of Transform Justice and Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, University of Oxford
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"Once two boys tried to rob me. They were bigger than me, but when I pulled my knife out and acted like a nutter, they decided it was not worth it and left. If I hadn't done that they would have beaten the shit out of me" . Paul aged 21
Everyone should be worried by an increase in police recorded knife crime (carrying or using a knife) of 9% in a year, and that 10 teenagers have been stabbed to death in London this year. But remedies are more difficult to find. The police are enforcers of the law, but they know that more enforcement is not the answer. Bernard Hogan-Howe told a conference recently that knife crime is prevalent both inside and outside outside gangs (75% of young people's knife injuries are not gang related): “The reasons, so far as we can determine by talking to suspects, are self-protection, status, protecting criminal interests – such as a drugs business – and a culture of fear. This can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, where young people equip themselves with a knife and in doing so significantly up the ante of their chances of becoming a knife victim.”  Teenage boys feel they are not safe without a knife and the fear of being attacked is greater than the fear of the punishment if caught.
The police and other practitioners are convinced that until young people's fear of each other is allayed, teenagers will continue to carry knives.
Many MPs are convinced that tougher sanctions are the answer. In 2014 campaigners (including myself) lost a battle against a new law mandating a prison sentence for anyone from 16 upwards who was convicted twice of carrying a knife. Since that new inflexible law was brought in, knife crime has gone up. So the threat of imprisonment is certainly not deterring teenagers and young people from carrying knives. Nor have ever lengthening prison sentences - for knife possession they have almost doubled in ten years from an average of 3.6 months in 2005 to 6.1 months in 2015.
The Sentencing Guidelines Council brought out guidelines on how to sentence knife crime in 2008 (since when prison sentences have risen considerably). Their successor, the Sentencing Council is consulting on new guidelines now. Unfortunately their consultation does not address the key question of how effective different sentences are in reducing knife crime, and the guidelines for under 18 year olds are in their current form certain simply to increase the number of children imprisoned. They propose that the starting point for judges in the case of a child found with a knife (which they have not used) should be a short prison sentence even if there is "minimal risk of the weapon being used to threaten or cause harm" and no/minimal distress.
Most teenagers who are imprisoned end up in Young Offender Institutions, where violence is rife and from which c 70% go on to re-offend within the year. There is no evidence prison deters either the individual or his peers from carrying a knife. Most children found with a knife are now currently given a community sentence, but the new guidelines, if slavishly followed, would lead to more imprisonment. This would be a regressive step given that the numbers of under 18 year olds imprisoned has gone down by two thirds in the last 8 years.
I don't condone carrying knives - far from it - but teenagers who carry knives are afraid, caught in a current of crime from which they can see no way of extricating themselves. We need to throw them a lifebuoy, rather than letting them be carried away by peer pressure inside and outside prison.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/05/when-to-punish-a-young-offender-and-when-to-rehabilitate/prison-is-too-violent-for-young-offenders
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tackling-teenage-knife-crime-prison-answer-penelope-gibbs
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