Cara H. Drinan: The War on Kids: How American Juvenile Justice Lost its Way

Excerpt

In The War on Kids, legal scholar Cara Drinan seizes the recent changes made by the Supreme Court on the juvenile justice landscape to argue for steps that can be taken to correct juvenile sentencing practices in the last fifty years. In each chapter, she uses personal stories of individuals who were caught in the penal shifts of the juvenile justice system in the last few decades to illustrate her argument for a radical shift in how we punish children and youth. She begins the book with the story of Terrence Graham, whose case went up all the way to the Supreme Court in Graham v Florida (2010) where the Court held that a juvenile convicted for a non-homicide offense cannot be sentenced to life without possibility of parole. Terrence’s story serves as a fitting introduction to how the U.S has shifted from the nation that recognized the need for juvenile justice that is independent from the adult criminal justice system to waging a war on children and adolescents through punitive approaches to justice. …