By Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
Justice in the American system often means banishment through incarceration, parole, probation, or the sex offender registry. Millions are condemned, never to return to our communities, or never to return whole. And for those who do return, we make sure the mark of their worst mistake follows - most just a Google search or background check away from never hearing back from a prospective landlord or employer.
Those who commit crimes as children are not immune from this monstrous system of state control. And like the rest of our criminal justice system, children of color bear the brunt of extreme sentences, despite the fact that black and white children commit most offenses at similar rates.
But the tide is turning. Slowly.
"We're witnessing a moment that is not so much a 180 degree change as it is a 360 degree circling back," Marsha Levick, Deputy Director and Chief Counsel of the Juvenile Law Center recently told me. "When the juvenile justice system was first established in the United States in 1899, the impetus was the intuitive understanding that we needed to treat children who commit crimes differently than we treat adults."
In recent years the U.S. Supreme Court has carved out a ceiling of punishment for people who commit crimes as children. They can no longer be executed, automatically sentenced to life without parole, or sentenced to life without parole at all in non-homicide cases, thanks to court rulings made between 2005 and 2012. And those who were sentenced automatically to life without parole are now eligible for resentencing, thanks to a 2016 decision.
Sentencing children to spend all or most of their lives in prison runs counter to the volumes of research that show the transient nature of adolescence. Brain imaging scans have shown that youth are more impulsive than adults, and that the brain is not fully developed until the age of 25. In fact, the United States is the only country in the world that sentences children to die in prison.
For thousands of children who were condemned to die in prison, they now may have the opportunity to be free because of the Supreme Court's decisions.
One of those eligible for resentencing is Joe, who was sentenced to life without parole for a murder he committed when he was 14. (As Joe has an active legal case, his name and identifying details have been changed.) Joe's story is shared in my documentary play, "Life, Death, Life Again: Children Sentenced to Die In Prison," which will be performed on May 17 at Passage Theatre at the Mill Hill Playhouse in Trenton.
Joe's home was plagued by instability and abuse. When Joe was four or five years old, his father went to prison for molesting Joe's sister. His mother, he told me, was loving but had a temper.
In ninth grade Joe got into an argument with a friend, who threw a soda at him.
"I left the school, trying to walk away from the whole thing. I really didn't want to fight with him," said Joe. "I stole a car to joyride. I drove around, just to clear my head a little bit."
Joe crashed the car and fled the scene. Fearing he would be sentenced to two years in a juvenile detention facility, he decided to go on the run. He broke into a home and saw a car in the garage.
"I kind of got fixated on the car like, 'Dang, I can use this to try to get away,'" said Joe.
He picked up a gun he found in the house and walked around. Then, he saw the homeowner. She said she was going to call the police.
"My first response was to shoot. I shot her," he told me "I was crying. I told her I was sorry."
After Joe's arrest, he was tried as an adult and sentenced to die in prison.
"The hardest part was being away from my family, being away from the people I love," Joe said. "Over the years that kind of got easier. I guess you get used to something. It's like, like losing a limb, eventually you get used to it. You get to walking and moving around like you were born that way."
His incarceration has made Joe a stranger to his family.
"Sometimes it feels like the distance between us becomes irreversible," said Joe. "You're the one just sitting on the sidelines watching it cause you're in here while everybody lives and dies and grows old and you're still in the same place, in exactly the same circumstances."
Joe is now volunteering in a program where he mentors versions of himself from about two decades ago -- at-risk youth who visit the prison. He hopes to continue this work, one day, outside the prison walls.
"I want to use every opportunity to make amends for my actions for what I've done to [the victim] and her family," he wrote me. "I have caused so much pain, and that's not who I am."
Joe is not the child he was at fourteen - and neither are most people who cause harm as children, explains the Juvenile Law Center's Levick.
"The odds are wildly in their favor that they will change, they will be rehabilitated, and they will transform with growth and maturity," she said. "So we need to ask ourselves: what is the purpose of our justice system, and what does justice look like?"
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg is the playwright of the documentary play, "Life, Death, Life Again: Children Sentenced to Die In Prison." The play is a verbatim theater piece that shares the stories of people sentenced to die in prison for violent crimes committed as children and a victim's grandson who chose to lead with forgiveness. She is the communications director for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. The views expressed represent her own.