Picture a youngster that you love dearly, perhaps 11 or 12 years old. It might be your child, grandchild, or the child of a close friend. Now, think of him in an orange jumpsuit, with handcuffs on his wrists, his ankles bound by shackles, and weighed down by as much as 26 pounds of chain. It would break your heart.
These restraints are automatically used in many states, even for children who face minor charges and pose no safety or flight risk. Some of the juvenile cases involve nothing more serious than skipping school, running away from home, violating curfew, or being incorrigible: so-called “status offenses.”
Even the youngest defendants are brought to court weighed down by chains. Girls, who comprise about a third of juvenile justice cases nationally, are shackled the same as boys. In some places, the children are shackled to each other so that if one trips the others fall like tenpins.
USA Today described the scene as a 14-year-old girl entered the courtroom: “Handcuffs pin the teenage girl’s wrists together. The cuffs connect to a heavy chain around her waist so she can’t raise her arms. Another chain connects her ankles, shortening her step as she shuffles into the courtroom. When she shifts in her chair, the shackles clink.”
Shackles are heavy. They make it impossible to walk properly, climb steps, use the restroom, or eat. Being shackled is a humiliating experience. Humiliation is not an unfortunate side effect of shackling, but the very reason our justice system does it. But it takes a toll on the youngsters. Being shackled can cause physical, emotional, and psychological harm.
“We’ve represented children who are 8 and 9 years old,” a law professor, Mary Berkheiser, told a reporter for Las Vegas CityLife. “The marshals have wrapped the belly chains around them two or three times. Sometimes they trip over the leg irons. The whole principle of juvenile court is to recognize that these young people are works in progress.”
Berkheiser said, “We really need to help them become better adults. Certainly they need consequences, but some of them also need counseling and mental health treatment. We need to make sure we’re not bringing down the hammer so hard that they’re squashed.”
Some have the tragically mistaken notion that treating children harshly will “teach them a lesson.” Humility is a virtue. Humiliation, however, is something altogether different. It is more likely to destroy character than to build it. Most adult defendants aren’t chained or handcuffed. So why does the system treat 90-pound 12-year-olds worse than hardened criminals?
Of course, there are some juveniles who pose such a danger that they need to be shackled. But before placing children in chains, a judge should make a determination that a safety or flight risk exists based on evidence. The vast majority of children pose no risk.
Several states have adopted common-sense shackling rules, and their juvenile courts have been safe. New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Massachusetts have modernized their practices by enacting laws that severely restrict the use of juvenile shackling.
The experience of Miami-Dade County, Fla., is instructive. In the five years after it stopped automatically shackling juveniles, more than 20,000 youths appeared in the county’s juvenile courts without shackles. None escaped. No one was harmed.
It is important that juveniles be held accountable for their actions. But humiliating children does not improve their behavior or help them make restitution. Shackling undermines the basic human dignity of these young people and the dignity of the justice system itself. The sooner we limit this harmful practice, the better.
Pat Nolan is director of the Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the American Conservative Union Foundation. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
