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, ownership, 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 progressive 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 murdered 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 horrify 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 traditionally been considered the age of reason, a rough turning point in moral development. For more than a century, English common law has held that children 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.
–Reported by Harriet Barovick/ New York, Cathy Booth/Los Angeles and Sylvester Monroe/Atlanta
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