Julian Ford is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and director of the Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice within the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.
Adolescents differ from adults in many ways. Our laws reflect this in not allowing minors to purchase alcohol or tobacco, serve on a jury, sign a contract, and so on. But Connecticut still sentences adolescents to extremely long and sometimes life sentences, with no possibility of parole.
Current state law violates U.S. Supreme Court rulings and ignores what science tells us about the developing brain. For the third year in a row, the legislature has a chance to correct this by passing the so-called “Second Look” bill. The proposal, formulated by a non-partisan commission, creates a mechanism for people convicted as minors to seek parole after serving the majority of their sentences.
Adolescents tend to be more impulsive, more influenced by peers, and more likely to take risks. The pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps us exercise judgment and weigh the consequences of our actions, is not fully developed until well into our 20s, whereas areas in the “emotional brain” that trigger stress reactions are fully developed by adolescence. Thus youth are developmentally susceptible to having their brains in effect hijacked by stress reactions that interfere with the most basic requirement of self-control: the ability to stop and think. This means that the behaviors of an adolescent are not necessarily predictive of how the same person will act in adulthood.
See the complete story at CT News Junkie.
Leave a Reply
You must Register or Login to post a comment.