Horowitz: Juveniles are treated like adults for everything but committing heinous crimes

Prominent leftists are using the shooting of knife-wielding Ma'Khia Bryant as a platform to reveal what we always knew they felt about juvenile violent criminals. They believe that juveniles stabbing with knives is just an example of kids being kids. At the same time, they refuse to allow kids to play outdoor sports without masks because of a virus that doesn't affect them.

Hence, what we are dealing with today is not liberal, socialist, or even communist. It is a demonic de-civilization agenda aimed at flipping natural law perfectly upside down. This means treating children like adults in terms of culpability, responsibility, and maturity, except for those juveniles who commit unspeakable crimes.

Some people might have been shocked when prominent leftists like Valerie Jarrett and Jen Psaki insinuated that Bryant was just having a typical teenage fight and that police should have broken it up without bloodshed. They basically implied that the police should have allowed her to stab the victim.

"She was a child," press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday. "We're thinking of her friends and family in the communities that are hurting and grieving her loss. We know that police violence disproportionately impacts Black and Latino people in communities and that Black women and girls, like Black men and boys, experience higher rates of police violence."

What she refused to mention is that Bryant was about to stab another child who happened also to be black. Just two days before, in Cincinnati, a 13-year-old girl was accused of stabbing another 13-year-old girl, who happened to be black, and killing her with nothing more than a pocketknife. Do the leftists now believe that the Cincinnati outcome was better than the Columbus case because the perpetrator in the former was not stopped?

Well, this sentiment is not an anomaly. As I've chronicled in great detail over the years, juvenile criminals are getting increasingly more violent, yet are let out on our streets even after committing the worst crimes. In the same city of Columbus, a 17-year-old accused of murder while out on parole was just released on low bail.

More recently, a pair of unnamed juveniles allegedly shot a man at the Hotel Pergola in New York City on April 15 and were charged with attempted murder, assault, and criminal possession of a weapon. Yet according to the New York Post, they were cut loose without bail at their arraignment. At a time when Trump supporters who were charged with nothing more than trespassing on public property are held without the possibility of bail, juveniles charged with attempted murder are released without any bail. This is not an exception, but a feature of our juvenile system that has essentially chalked up all crime, including the most violent shootings and beatings, to kids being kids.

This is the problem with the media. They begin the criminal justice discussion at the point of police encounters and wonder why so many juveniles are encountered by police and why, under the worst circumstances, some of them are shot in a confrontation. What they never ask is why so many juveniles are committing so many violent crimes that are just as devastating as when they are committed by an adult. Were they to ask that question, they'd easily discover the answer in the lack of deterrent – with so many juvenile violent criminals never spending a day in jail.

Our criminal justice system has essentially legalized all forms of crime for children. The same people who think that 16-year-olds should vote, get a sex-change castration operation, or consent to an abortion also believe that they should not stand trial for murder.

Already in 1981, when juvenile crime wasn't nearly as bad as it is today, President Reagan's Task Force on Victims of Crime observed the asymmetry of the standards to which we hold juvenile criminals culpable relative to the burden borne by victims.

"The criminal justice system is disturbingly inconsistent in the way it treats juvenile victims and juvenile victimizers," wrote the commission in its recommendations. "This divergence exists, in part, because society has developed two independent systems based on widely divergent presuppositions. If a child is a victim, that child is expected to come to an adult court, open to the public, and behave like an adult, speak like an adult, comprehend like an adult, and meet adult standards. The motivation underlying this treatment is the protection of adult suspects against the testimony of children, who are considered less trustworthy or accurate than adults."

Now contrast that degree of responsibility to juvenile criminals in the justice system.

"The juvenile justice system, on the other hand, begins with the premise that those who have not reached adulthood cannot be truly held accountable for their actions; they do not intend to do harm and will reform if shown the error of their ways. As a result, in many jurisdictions even violent and frequent dangerous conduct is not considered criminal, and is evaluated behind closed doors. Society is paying a tremendous price for this system. The Task Force suggests that the different treatment of juvenile victims and juvenile victimizers be carefully reevaluated."

Well, 40 years later, not only has this dichotomy not been reevaluated, it has been exacerbated. The only consistency is that victims of crime always lose in our system. Today, a child is like an adult for everything from COVID culpability to sex education but is just being a kid when trying to kill someone. Welcome to the de-civilization dystopia awaiting us if we don't fight back now. The only question for Republicans is how much of civilization are they willing to destroy just so they won't be called racist?