While Karter’s stabbing of Jason Robinson is not in dispute, the penalty for the crime is. Karter was tried and convicted as an adult, sent to prison for the rest of his life, with only the possibility of obtaining his freedom after serving fifteen years. At the time of Karter’s sentencing, the United States was a country that set controversial boundaries where childhood ended and adulthood began in terms of criminal responsibility.5 Until 2005, the US was the only nation that still sanctioned the death penalty for youth.6 Unlike 194 other countries, the United States, along with Somalia and South Sudan, were the only ones (and still are) not to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty designed to protect children from a variety of abuses—including forbidding a life sentence without the possibility of parole.7
At the time of Karter’s arraignment, prosecutors could suggest, and even insist, that sixteen-year-olds were incapable of change, ignoring what science has since proved: that teenagers are not little adults, psychologically, physically, or socially.8 Teens who killed could be transferred to the adult system, where they would mix with the general prison population—that is, if they weren’t kept in solitary confinement, to protect them from rape and other bodily harm. Notably, these imprisoned youths were often refused the benefit of education or therapy, programs that are more available in the juvenile system; nor were they protected from psychological harm.
Today, more than twenty years later, we have learned that it is wrong to treat kids as if they were little adults, no matter what crime they may have committed. Yet many of the same policies that impacted Karter Reed back in the 1990s continue to affect incarcerated youth today. On average, approximately 250,000 youths are currently processed in adult courts each year, a large number for drugs, burglary, theft, and property crimes, as well as for violent acts.9 While the age of adulthood in all states but New York and North Carolina (as of 2015) is eighteen, juveniles as young as twelve in Colorado can be tried as adults for capital crimes.10 Of the 250,000 facing adult imprisonment, the Sentencing Project reported in 2013 that 10,000 had been convicted of crimes that occurred before they turned eighteen, and subsequently resulted in life sentences behind bars.11 These are boys and girls, barely having earned their driver’s license, too young to vote, too young to legally buy alcohol or cigarettes, who are locked away with adult men and women. This, in spite of the fact that 90 percent of juveniles, even those convicted of murder, grow out of criminal behavior as they age.12
Part of what makes this practice unconscionable is that teens who are convicted and sentenced as adults actually have higher recidivism rates than those sentenced to juvenile jails; that is, they are rearrested and returned to prison more frequently.13 It is not that juvenile jails don’t have their problems too, but teens in adult prisons suffer dire consequences. They are thirty-six times more likely to commit suicide than those in juvenile detention facilities.14 They are one hundred percent more likely to face physical assault by staff than those in juvenile placements.15 They are often labelled “felons” for life, receive less support from families, and far less in the way of counseling, medical care, and education; and when they’re released, finding jobs is more difficult.16 Putting young people in state prisons essentially silences them, or as Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Jay Blitzman wrote, “Most committed juveniles do not have access to prisoner rights projects, institutionalized methods of legal redress, or other advocacy; their association with court appointed counsel, in most instances, ends when they are sentenced and the lawyer has filed for his/her reimbursement.”17
Karter Reed at sixteen was a pretty ordinary figure—slight build, dirty-blonde hair, meticulously groomed, wearing the style of the era in baggy pants and an oversized shirt. A skateboarder who often bombed with girls, he was being raised by his mother Sharon; his father, Derek, was in prison for dealing cocaine. In his own words, Karter was a “good kid.” He wrote in 2008, “I didn’t drink, smoke, sell, or use drugs. I’d never been suspended from school, wasn’t in a gang, and certainly wasn’t known for getting into fights. I occasionally made the honor roll, and usually had perfect attendance. I often babysat my two little sisters, and had been an altar boy, and was poised to become the first in my family to attend college.”
Because of his youth, Karter Reed at age sixteen was not so different from many of the other 250,000 young people who today face adult courts. Their criminal responsibility is real, but it must be framed by age, as well as how race and class have impacted the US punishment system. In The Growth of Incarceration in the United States, scholars Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western, give us insight into Karter’s crime, writing that such acts must be “embedded in the context of social and economic disadvantage.”18 However, the kind of harsh sentencing that Karter faced as a young white man—in his case, a life sentence—has been meted out most unfairly to youth of color across the US.19 At every step of the process, beginning with arrest and ending with whether or not a juvenile will be held in an adult state prison, blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans receive harsher treatment than whites. Black youth comprise 62 percent of those sent to adult courts, and are nine times more likely to receive an adult prison sentence than white defendants.20 In spite of the fact that states have been collecting data on these inequities since 1974 through the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, most have still not taken the important extra step to address preventing racial injustice in our punishment system.21
Although Karter is not a person of color, his story is still important, as it is deeply rooted in the landscape of juveniles facing harsh sentencing and punishment. The researcher and activist Nell Bernstein found that “between 80% and 90% of all American teenagers in confidential interviews acknowledge[d] having committed a delinquent act serious enough under the law to get them incarcerated.”22 Karter’s crime was no simple delinquent act, but his story shows the universality of young people swept up in the madness called “tough on crime.” Karter faced a justice system where a Massachusetts juvenile judge once said: “You ask why detention is so high. Some judges would say they use it as a teaching tool for kids.”23 However, as studies have shown, such “lessons” have backfired: sending juveniles to adult prisons doesn’t make us safer.24
Karter’s trial occurred almost twenty years before Miller v. Alabama, the 2012 decision in which the Supreme Court declared that sentencing juvenile murderers to life behind bars with no possibility of parole violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The importance of Miller to Karter’s case—and to many others—is that juveniles often take plea bargains so they won’t end up in prison for life, or face jury trials where the prosecutor seeks a first-degree murder conviction. Under Miller, the mandatory sentence of life without parole is no longer required by law for juvenile first-degree murder.25 In spite of this ruling, as of 2015, fourteen states still set no minimum age in their bylaws for trying and sentencing children as adults.26
Joshua Rovner, State Advocacy Associate at the Sentencing Project, has pointed out that of the fourteen states that allow the sentence of juvenile life without parole (JLWOP), not all use it, including New York, Maine, and Rhode Island.27 But some states changed their laws after Miller, adding many years before parole eligibility, and could be seen as out of compliance with a ruling that inferred that young people have the capacity to change.28 Requiring a boy or girl to serve a minimum of forty years before they become parole-eligible hardly seems in the spirit of giving juveniles a serious chance at release.29 This is the case in Texas and Nebraska. Almost as bad are the thirty-five years required by Florida, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana. (The international standard for incarceration of juveniles for the most serious crimes is ten or fifteen years