JUVENILE JUSTICE IGNORES DEBT TO SOCIETY

The judge in Jonesboro, Ark., looked at two boys standing in his courtroom, ages 12 and 14, and said: "Here the punishment will not fit the crime." The judge was about to hand out the severest punishment possible under the law for murder by a juvenile: detention in a juvenile center until age 21 -- or sooner, if juvenile authorities determine otherwise.

And when Mitchell Johnson, 14, and Andrew Golden, 12, are eventually released from juvenile detention, they will be adults with no criminal records whatsoever, despite the fact that they fired a volley of shots outside their school March 24 that left four students and a teacher dead.

There are other, even more incomprehensible, situations where children become killers, but the law has no way of making the punishment match the crime -- at least not in the adult sense of American justice where mandatory sentencing results in long prison terms for crimes far less heinous than murder.

In Chicago, two boys, ages 7 and 8, stand accused of killing a 7-year-old girl, intensifying the national debate over how to punish children who commit serious crimes.

Since the late 1800s, many states have had special courts for juveniles. This provided for a legal system separate from -- and certainly not equal to -- the criminal courts where accused adults were tried, convicted and sentenced. Juvenile courts have long been places of secrecy and closed records, all intended to protect youngsters whose capacity for moral decisions has been deemed undeveloped.

For more than a century, English common law has held that a 7-year-old has the ability to make moral judgments and could be held accountable in some way for criminal actions, even though the American juvenile-court system pretty much limits that accountability to detention with a clean slate at age 21.

Meanwhile, children even under the age of 7 are more and more involved in brutal crimes. Almost every legal system that has been devised gives such youngsters a high degree of innocence regardless of the criminal behavior.

Is this justice? Is there no accountability or responsibility in these cases?

Many cities have adopted ordinances that make pet owners responsible for the misdeed of their wayward animals. Yet the American justice system assigns no responsibility for crimes committed by youngsters under a certain age.

In general, juvenile criminal activity is a legally mandated mystery to most of us. Highly publicized murders by children are just a part of the vast criminal world of underage youths. And for the most part, we have no idea how extensive the crimes are nor any sense of the punishments being handed out -- other than the fact that young criminals get clean records when they become adults.

It's time for this to change. The secrecy of juvenile justice should be lifted. The legal system must come to grips with a system of punishment for young offenders that sends the same message an adult criminal receives: There is a debt to society to be paid.