Gideon Yaffe: The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility

Excerpt

Gideon Yaffe’s book, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility, is a reflection on leniency toward child offender sentencing. Yaffe articulates the goal of this book as an effort to provide a moral and conceptual framework that can guide criminal justice policy in its application to children. He aims to create a foundation on which thoughtful and just public policy can be built in regard to the application of the law on children. Yaffe starts by explaining that the criminal justice system already gives “breaks” to children, but argues that it does not go far enough in its leniency. Yaffe explains the ways in which children receive leniency through the criminal justice system: barring death penalties, life without parole for non-homicide offenses, and mandatory life without parole in homicide offences; juveniles tried as adults also do not serve time in adult prisons until they reach adult age. However, he goes on to argue that children receive fewer procedural protections than they should. For example, he argues that children should not be tried by jury, and that they are punished more harshly for especially objectionable behavior than they should be. …