Congress and state legislatures should address the issue by strengthening juvenile justice policies and financing programs that keep youth out of adult jails.

Image Credit... Katherine Streeter

David Fassler

Burlington, Vt., July 28, 2009

The writer is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont.

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To the Editor:

Judging children as children, not as adults, is a policy that I supported as a New York State judge, and one that I advocate as the executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City. Your editorial underscores the problem of charging children under 18 with adult crimes. Far too many children are being treated in the adult system, which results in unacceptable recidivism and increasingly violent crimes.

As a judge, I channeled as many children as possible out of the system by placing them in community-based programs that provided monitoring, counseling and mentoring. A mentor has the ability to open the child’s world to beyond his or her immediate surroundings, making the young person less susceptible to peer pressure, the primary motive for juvenile crime.

It is clearly time for New York State to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 18 from the current age of 16 (and even in some cases 13 or 14). This way, children under the age of 18 would initially be directed to the family or juvenile court system, where providing social services is the focus.

A youth of a suitable age could be transferred to the adult court only after a due process judicial hearing in which a child is found not to be amenable to the programs or sanctions available in the juvenile court or in circumstances where the public’s interest would best be served by prosecution in the adult court.

The goal of a thriving, humane society should be to build bridges of opportunities for our children, not to burn them.