He spent eight months in a juvenile detention heart. Mr. Rice, now 31 and an advocate for at-risk youth, believes that if he had been white, he would have been supplied remedy. “It was the criminalization of my childhood,” he mentioned. “My habits was crying for assist — not handcuffs.”
In Massachusetts, within the three years for the reason that new legislation took impact, there was no uptick in prison exercise by youngsters, based on Sana Fadel, the deputy director of Residents for Juvenile Justice, even because the juvenile courtroom system’s caseload has dropped by 40 %. Reasonably, youngsters are being dealt with by way of supportive applications that concentrate on delivering social providers, she mentioned.
“The authorized system might be 100 years behind, as a result of the same old check is, ‘Do you perceive that that is proper and that is flawed?’” mentioned Jane Tewksbury, who labored in Massachusetts as a prosecutor and later served as commissioner of the state’s youth providers division. “A 4-year-old might say that, however that doesn’t imply in the event that they stabbed someone with a pencil that they really know what’s occurring.”
Court docket proceedings may also be incomprehensible for young children. When Debbie Freitas, a lawyer based mostly in Lowell, Mass., introduced an 8-year-old shopper earlier than a Justice of the Peace in 2018 for bringing a butter knife to highschool, the kid exclaimed: “‘Oh, wow, are we going to see the president?’” Ms. Freitas recalled. “They’re so younger they don’t perceive the very fundamentals of what’s going on.”
Information of the arrest in Brasher Falls surprised residents, mentioned Mark A. Peets, the supervisor of the City of Brasher. “You’ll be able to’t fathom a 7-year-old being arrested; you watch all these ‘true crimes’ on TV, and also you simply by no means consider a 7-year-old,” he mentioned.
However alongside the collective grief for the sufferer, he mentioned, is a way that such a younger perpetrator too should need assistance.
“There’s proper and flawed, however there has received to be some type of social service protocol,” Mr. Peets mentioned, “some type of method to deal with this with out him being handled nearly like an grownup.”