Charles "Chuck" Colson, the Watergate crook who was the Special Counsel for President Richard Nixon, got religion in prison and founded the Prison Fellowship which is now lobbying hard against life prison terms for juvenile criminals.
Kathryn Wiley, a Prison Fellowship official, has been writing letters to the editors of newspapers that have had editorials or op-ed pieces relating to the U.S. Supreme Court’s deliberations as to whether life sentences for juveniles constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
In letters published several days ago by the Washington Times and the Houston Chronicle, Wiley wrote: Studies show that children are different from adults and therefore should not be treated the same as adult offenders. These same studies show that the overwhelming majority of them grow out of criminal activity and are amendable to rehabilitation. That's why the answer to crime isn't locking kids up, especially in adult prisons, for the rest of their natural lives.
In the Chronicle, Wiley wrote: Professor Ellen Marrus of the University of Houston Law Center is correct in stating that “the juvenile justice system was never intended to treat children as miniature adults.”
Wiley labeled the sentencing of juveniles "to 40, 50, 60 years behind bars" as cruel and unusual punishment. That assertion is absolutely absurd when one considers their extensive criminal history and the serious crimes those juveniles were convicted of.
Professor Marrus was right when she said that “the juvenile justice system was never intended to treat children as miniature adults,” but only because our juvenile laws were originally enacted for children who were deemed delinquents in need of supervision. Those juvenile laws were intended to deal with mischievous children who were shooting out windows or street lights with bb-guns, who were petty thieves and shoplifters, who hung around on the streets all hours of the night and who were truants or run-aways.
The juvenile laws were never intended to deal with “children” that are vicious malicious gun-toting thugs who murder, rape, burglarize and commit armed robberies without regard to their victims. Those youths are out-and-out dangerous criminals, not the delinquent children our juvenile laws were designed for.
Let’s put the issue of life prison terms for juveniles into its proper perspective, something Kathryn Wiley, Professor Marrus and the editors clamoring for a Supreme Court decision outlawing those sentences have failed to consider. There are a total of 109 inmates in America’s adult prisons who were sentenced to life terms when they were juveniles. Every year there are several hundred thousand juveniles in this country who are charged with committing crimes. 109 out of several hundred thousand doesn’t even register on the Richter Scale.
77 of those 109 life termers were sentenced by the State of Florida alone. Let’s put that in its proper perspective as well. With all the juveniles that get charged with crimes in Florida, that number is probably less than one percent of the total when one considers that the 77 were charged over a period of many years, not all at the same time.
So what are Wiley and all the other do-gooders getting all riled up about? We are not sending a bunch of kids to prison for life. We are sending a few incorrigible sociopaths to prison for life and that’s where these dangerous criminals belong. Public safety demands it!
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