The dangerous myth of juvenile criminal ingenues

An epidemic of juvenile violent crimes endures. Why? The law presumes juveniles are intellectually and psychologically too immature to appreciate the wrongfulness of their violent ways and deserve leniency.

Violent juveniles have what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. characterized as the “bad man’s view of the law.” The justice elaborated, “If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict.” From the bad man’s vantage point, the law is reduced to “prophecies of what courts will do in fact.”

Violent, recidivist juveniles are a crime wave unto themselves. Their recidivism is fueled by law enforcement indulgence: pretrial diversion, rehabilitation fantasies, probation or r