Being pro rehabilitation is completely at odds with trying kids as adults with the way the current American prison complex exists. He's going to get little to no serious rehabilitation on the very high chance that he will intentionally return to the prison system (after harming more people) where corporations that actively lobby to prevent prison changes will continue to profit off of him.
It's akin to saying "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" when you need to be fiscally liberal to even enact liberal social policies on a systemic level in the first place.
To be clear, there are
multiple studies that show children tried as adults have higher recidivism rates than children with similar charges tried in juvenile court. Trying children as adults statistically does not work, in fact it makes the problems worse. There's plenty of evidence that trying children in juvenile court and giving them a proper education with proper rehabilitation actively helps prevent them from entering the prison system as adults. Trying children in juvenile court reduces crime, in essence, because children tried as adults are extremely likely to return to prison via committing a crime shortly after getting out.
This study was an interesting read, a lot of things that I didn't know/had misconceptions about in there. My main takeaways:
- That teens in the juvenile centers felt more positive about them and were generally treated better/given access to counseling educational services (which should be the case in both prison and in juvie if the goal is rehabilitation and not incarceration. But it's not.)
- That the teens in adult systems were brutalized, taught crime, and made more cynical about the systems.
- That teens tried in either system got similar sentence lengths regardless.
- Even the teens tried as adults and placed on probation had higher recidivism rates than those just placed in juvenile. (That, to me, tells me that the problem is more about the lack of education and counseling services in general.)
I was curious about how it mentioned that a good chunk of teens tried as adults were unaware that it was even an option/would happen to them, which made me curious enough to look up if there were any similar, more updated studies. Instead I found a whole lot of studies talking about the juvenile recidivism rates overall, which are also not great unless you happen to be in Missouri which apparently has a rehabilitation-based system in place.
So now we have: two systems that need to be changed, one system that is statistically better than the other for kids (I admit you are right here), though the recidivism rates are still high unless it happens to be a juvenile facility with the proper care systems in place (which are RARE).
And kids that are committing crimes yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So... what do we do? I can already imagine the outrage if these teens had been sentenced to juvenile. And then whoever did the sentencing gets replaced with someone who promises to be "tough on crime". You could also argue that a high profile case like this resulting in juvenile sentences might worsen the problem with teens expecting lenient sentencing for similar crimes, since the data is iffy on how much impact knowledge on potential sentences has on teenage offenders.
I guess, in a meta way, education is the answer to all of it: to people like me calling for punishment for crimes, for people considering committing crimes, and people who have committed crimes in general. I don't know how you make huge societal gains on those fronts, especially with republicans pouring billions into dismantling education as a concept, but posts (and studies in particular) like the ones you and others in this thread made help. So thanks.
On a side note, I'm utterly baffled how many people here are repeating right wing talking points about prison. Y'all realize the "tough on crime" thing is a right wing talking point right? It legitimately has no scientific or statistical basis that being "tough on crime" helps compared to rehabilitation and therapy, hence why we jail the most people and still are one of the worst countries for crime. I mean "tough on crime" legitimately originated to unfairly jail youth and folks of color on purpose.
Talk about Republicans ignoring reality and using feels over reals...
What can I say? I don't know if it took hold because of effective societal messaging or because of my natural inclinations, but if I hadn't taken the time to read that study you linked I don't think I would have budged at all. And I'm literally someone Republicans would love to have behind bars just because of my skin.