The Supreme Court and Juvenile Incorrigibility Jurisprudence

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on Civil Rights & Citizenship

Abstract

In the 2021 case Jones v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment did not require sentencing courts to find a juvenile "permanently incorrigible" before imposing a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Although many viewed the decision as a departure from the Court’s recent jurisprudence in cases like Roper v. Simmons (2005) and Graham v. Florida (2010), which restricted states from meting out harsh juvenile sentences, this paper adopts a broader historical perspective on the evolution of juvenile incorrigibility doctrine. This perspective reveals how mid-twentieth century jurisprudential and political developments established groundwork that began incrementally transforming juvenile incorrigibility from a tool used exclusively in juvenile courts into a punitive instrument of criminal punishment well before the Jones decision.

Juvenile incorrigibility doctrine originated as a principle used in the juvenile courts that began emerging in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. During this period, notions of incorrigibility had eugenic implications that legal practitioners often used to harshly punish individuals in the criminal justice system who were deemed genetic inferiors. However, juvenile courts were designed to keep children deemed incorrigible out of the prison system where adults were held, instead channeling them towards reform schools designed for juveniles. These institutions were not benevolent – they were also led by eugenicists who endorsed abusive treatments. But the doctrine in its original form was disconnected from criminal law, and in the early twentieth century federal courts routinely held that findings of juvenile incorrigibility could not be used to sentence juveniles to prison terms on the grounds that juvenile court proceedings did not constitute criminal trials. However, the juvenile justice system underwent a series of reforms in the mid-twentieth century as lawmakers sought to make juvenile justice institutions more procedurally fair. Federal laws like the Youth Corrections Act (1950) and the Juvenile Justice Prevention and Delinquency Act (1974) along with Supreme Court decisions like In Re Gault (1966) and In Re Winship (1970) increasingly subjected juvenile courts to the same due process standards applied to criminal courts. These well-intentioned reforms permitted juvenile courts to operate much more similarly to criminal courts, meaning that increasingly harsh criminal punishments for juvenile “incorrigibles” could now be justified behind claims that juvenile courts were being held to higher standards of due process. The new procedural rigor ascribed to juvenile justice decision-making was thus interpreted as giving juvenile courts valid authority for channeling youths deemed “incorrigible” into prisons for criminal treatment. Often-overlooked Supreme Court decisions like Dorsyznski v. US (1974) and Ralston v. Robinson (1981) adopted expansive interpretations of juvenile incorrigibility that justified lengthy sentences for juveniles behind prison walls on the grounds that their incorrigibility warranted adult treatment and criminal penalties.

Contrary to perceptions that Jones v. Mississippi constituted a dramatic shift in the Court’s jurisprudence prompted by the conservative remaking of the Court, this paper illustrates how the decision was aligned with deeper historical trends in the development of juvenile punishment. The Court’s rebranding of juvenile incorrigibility doctrine from a tool exclusively used in juvenile courts into an instrument of criminal punishment reflected much broader and sustained historical developments in American politics and jurisprudence that have been incrementally transforming juvenile courts into sites of punitive criminal justice since the mid-twentieth century.

Author

• Anthony Grasso, Rutgers University