(children - sense of right and
 wrong, and juvenile justice)

Source:  Time, August 24, 1998 v152 n8 p64(3).
 
    Title:  For they know not what they do?
   Author:  Jon Cloud
 
 Abstract:  The conventional wisdom that kids achieve a reasonable
understanding of right and wrong by age 7 is disputed by some psychologists. A
rash of serious crimes, including murder, by pre-pubescent kids has renewed
interest in such issues, which underlie the juvenile justice system.
 
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

When and how do children know right from wrong? And how can we devise a
punishment to fit their crimes?

When I was about seven, I stole a box of green Tic-Tacs from the grocery
store. I was a stupid little thief: my mom heard them ticking and tacking in
my pocket as I helped carry the Cheerios inside. She promptly drove me back to
the store, where I had to present the candies and an apology to the manager.
Later, my father shared some words of wisdom (which I don't recall) and some
hard licks from the Big Black Belt (which I do).

Did I know right from wrong? Had I reached some "age of reason"? I don't know.
As the child of Southern parents, I did know my dad would whup my butt if I
stole, but I'm not sure I grasped the finer points of private property, owner-
ship, capitalism, whatnot. I just wanted the Tic-Tacs and thought I could get
away with them.

In the 1890s, it was just such crimes--petty theft, truancy--that led the city
of Chicago to create the nation's first courts for kids. It was a wildly prog-
ressive idea for a time when many children still worked long hours. True, more
than a bit of bigotry fueled the reform--it was thought that the good people
running the juvie courts could rehabilitate the immigrant urchins. But the
children themselves were still seen as children, incapable of real culpability
because they couldn't reason right from wrong.

A century later, a juvenile-court system devised in a more peaceful era must
cope with atrocities altogether more vicious. The city of Chicago shuddered
last week not just at its new horror but at the not so faded memories of mur-
dered five-year-olds, one tossed from a window by a 10-year-old boy and his
11-year-old friend in 1994, the other beaten to death five months ago,
allegedly by two other children, one of them nine. These are crimes that hor-
rify and bewilder, crimes that tempt us to think that if kids are capable of
such evil, they must be punished without mercy.

But is to do evil necessarily to know it, to consciously call it forth? As the
little boys who allegedly molested and murdered Ryan Harris begin a long and
harrowing journey through the judicial system, their legal fate will preoccupy
armies of lawyers and reporters. But it's worth taking note of their moral
fate too: when babies kill babies, do they understand the meaning of their
actions? And what do we do with them now?

On Feb. 12, 1993, after they threw more than 20 bricks at two-year-old James
Bulger's head and after they kicked him, tore off his lower lip, stripped him
and possibly molested him, 10-year-old pals Robert Thompson and Jon Venables
left the raggedy corpse on train tracks in Liverpool. Like many an English
lad, Thompson knew the train times by heart, according to the New Yorker, and
he might have thought the murder would appear accidental.

A continent but perhaps not a world away, in Richmond, Calif., two years ago,
a six-year-old boy--six!--sneaked into a neighbor's home apparently looking to
steal a tricycle. A month-old infant named Ignacio Bermudez Jr. began crying.
The six-year-old is accused of taking the baby from his bassinet, putting him
on the floor and kicking his head. Ignacio's skull was fractured in four
places; he will probably never walk.

What Thompson, Venables and the never identified six-year-old have in common
is not just their youthful violence. All of them seemed to understand, at
least formally, that what they were doing was wrong. That's what the placement
of Bulger's body on the tracks suggests; and the prosecutor of the
six-year-old says three doctors concluded that the boy was able to discern
right from wrong in the abstract. Similarly, in 1989, after nine-year-old
Cameron Kocher shot Jessica Carr, age 7, with a rifle after an argument over
Nintendo in their hometown in northeast Pennsylvania, the boy hid the spent
cartridge. And after Robert ("Yummy") Sandifer, 11, killed a 14-year-old girl
in Chicago in the late summer of 1994, he spent days eluding police before
fellow gang members executed him.

Kids know it's wrong to kill. They know it's right to put their toys away.
Yes, they know even at seven, unless they have a disability. Seven has tradi-
tionally been considered the age of reason, a rough turning point in moral
development. For more than a century, English common law has held that chil-
dren under seven cannot commit crimes (but that those over seven can). "There
used to be an old expression, 'Give me a child till he's seven, and I'll give
you the adult,'" recalls Brian McSweeney, a vice chancellor of the Archdiocese
of New York. There's more than a grain of truth in that maxim.

But while most psychologists agree that young children can grasp very basic
concepts of right and wrong well before adolescence (when they seem to ignore
right and wrong), most also say those concepts aren't well developed for kids
under 10. Kyle Pruett, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Yale Child
Study Center, illustrates this point with a test: "Tell a seven- or
eight-year-old, 'Johnny broke one teacup throwing it at his sister. Sara broke
eight teacups helping Dad load the dishwasher. Which kid did the worse thing?'
The average seven-year-old will pick Sara because she broke more. By 11, they
have it sorted out that intentionality is part of the moral system. Not when
you're seven."

Seven-year-olds for the most part have little or no understanding of other
higher-order concepts necessary to turn right and wrong into Right and
Wrong--most significantly, death and remorse. "They know people die, but they
don't know what it means," says Carl Bell, a University of Illinois psychiatry
professor who has worked with troubled urban kids for two decades. "I've
talked to seven-year-old kids who think when you're dead, you're just hanging
out somewhere." And Paul Mones, a Portland, Ore., lawyer and a leading expert
on young murderers, says, "Kids are naturally egocentric. Kids can be told
they will go to hell, but they don't really think they'll go to hell. When
kids lie about stealing a cookie, they don't feel bad like an adult."

Kids' egocentrism helps explain why they can do something they know to be
wrong, immediately try to cover it up, but then fairly quickly get back to the
business of being children. Hence after they left Bulger on the tracks,
Venables and Thompson went into a video store near Thompson's house and
watched cartoons on the telly. As Carr's mother tried frantically and futilely
to save her daughter, Kocher went back to playing Nintendo ("If you don't
think about it, you won't be sad," he reportedly told other kids, who were
crying). And in Chicago last week, the seven- and eight-year-old boys
suspected of killing Harris went home afterward to play with a dog and watch
TV.

Bell reasons that what those boys are alleged to have done may not necessarily
be so abnormal. "This could have been some real innocent stuff. Kids throw
rocks all the time. But the other issue is these kids could have been in a
youthful predatory mode; kids who have been preyed upon before, victimized
before, sometimes act that behavior out," he says. Of their apparent sexual
assault on Harris, he says, "Kids at the age of seven and eight are forever
doing little kinky, polymorphously perverse things--voyeurism, exhibitionism,
cross dressing, anal and oral experimentation."

That may be going a little far--playing doctor is not the same as playing with
a corpse. But Bell's thinking suggests that what young killers lack is not so
much a sense of right and wrong as something much more fundamental--a sense of
self-control. "Kids endlessly have--and often play-act--fantasies of being
great warriors," says Ted Becker of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
"But most kids don't have this inability to control themselves in the real
world." The 20 or so U.S. kids under 10 who are arrested for committing
homicide each year are abnormal, in other words, but they're abnormal in a
much more childish way than we admit when we pretend they had criminal intent
and charge them with murder.

So if these little angels are just angels who happen to lose control of
bricks, rocks and high-powered rifles too often, how do we teach them
self-control? Last week Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, now 14 and 12,
were found "delinquent" for blasting away at fellow students outside their
Jonesboro, Ark., school in March, killing five and wounding 10. They got the
maximum punishment possible for kids their age: they will be confined by state
juvenile authorities until they turn 21. But it's worse than it sounds:
Johnson's father was horrified at the thought that his boy would be sent to
the Alexander juvenile facility, a place where abuse and molestation are said
to be rampant.

It's hard to determine the reasons--other than revenge--for sentencing
Mitchell and Drew to several years of this. "Punishment won't do anything,"
says Alan Kazdin, chairman of Yale's psychology department. "Punishment never
teaches what to do, [and only] sometimes what not to do." Some very young kids
don't even understand they're being punished. "Even in jail, kids want their
candy bars, their pillows and pajamas," says lawyer Mones. "They wonder where
their cheeseburgers are." It's also crucial to realize these kids will get out
someday. "The important thing to do is not to trash these kids," says Carl
Bell, "with disregard for their need for attachment, school, mental health
evaluation and support."

Last week Chicago officials struggled over how to handle the seven- and
eight-year-olds in court. Would they have any idea what's going on? Not
really. John Burris is the Oakland lawyer who defended the six-year-old
accused of kicking Ignacio Bermudez Jr. "The prosecution in this case took the
position that he was going to make the six- year-old responsible," Burris
says. "But while the prosecutor was ranting and raving, this kid was drawing,
sitting on his mother's lap, sleeping. He referred to me as the 'tall man.' He
didn't understand what I did."

Similarly, no matter how many cop shows they watch, seven-year-olds can't
understand Miranda rights. In an important case in 1986, the New York supreme
court issued a ruling that made it more difficult, at least in that state, to
question very young children suspected of crimes. Three years earlier, a
seven-year-old Queens boy named Julian B. had allegedly pushed two-year-old
Reggie Clegg from the roof of an apartment building. Under questioning, Julian
admitted that he had shoved Reggie from the roof after an argument over a toy
car. But the court found that the police hadn't made a necessary "extra
effort" to explain to a seven-year-old what his rights were. Still, even if
they had illustrated with a Barney doll and all four Teletubbies, he probably
would not have understood. That's what being a child means.

In the past five years, most states have made it easier to charge and punish
children as adults. Thirteen-year-olds are therefore getting mandatory
life-without-parole sentences, and there's nothing appellate courts can do to
help them. We have effectively discarded these lives. Should we make
11-year-olds eligible for life behind bars? Nine-year-olds? Seven-year-olds?
We are inching closer and closer to a moral line.

TOO YOUNG TO KILL--AND TO DIE

CAMERON KOCHER, AGE NINE On a school snow day in 1989, Kocher was playing
Nintendo at a neighbor's home in northeast Pennsylvania. A parent halted the
game because the kids had made a mess, and Kocher went home. Angry, he took a
rifle from the family gun cabinet and shot Jessica Carr, age 7

JAMES BULGER, AGE TWO In February 1993, Bulger was separated from his mother
in an English shopping center. A security camera showed Jon Venables and
Robert Thompson leading the boy away. The 10-year-olds were later found guilty
of his gruesome murder. Bulger sustained 42 injuries

ROBERT ("YUMMY") SANDIFER, 11 A gang member, Sandifer was supposed to kill
rivals but hit Shavon Dean, 14, instead, in summer 1994. He eluded author-
ities, but police found him shot in the head two weeks later, apparently by
gang members worried that he would rat on them. Two brothers were convicted of
his murder
 
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