Kiddie prisons

A 14-year-old Pennsylvania girl who helped torture and hang a playmate will spend six months in juvenile detention, then go free. Two Arkansas boys, ages 10 and 12, are convicted of five schoolyard murders and will be locked up until they’re 21 if their state builds a special jail for them, 18 if not. Two Chicago boys, real boys of just 7 and 8, are charged with the murder of an 11-year-old girl. Illinois has no place to put them other than back home or in a psychiatric hospital

Thus a lifetime of unimaginable tragedy transpired in a mere 24-hour period this week. The big question, of course, is why kids kill. The most plausible answer — because they live in a society that increasingly tolerates, even celebrates, violence as entertainment, especially fantasy-laden violence without remorse or repercussions — is an observation, not a solution.

The immediate question, the one that must be answered and acted on, is what to do with these kids. Not in the larger sense of what to do to make right these young lives gone so horribly wrong, but what actually to do with them. Where to put them after they kill. Where to lock them up and for how long.

With each of these killings, and with all those other killings too numerous to list here, the affected state legislature reacts by talking tough about juvenile crime. The standards for prosecuting kids as adults are lowered, it gets tougher for a murderer to walk out of the youth center at 18. If one can ignore the high probability a child in prison will be raped or commit suicide, this “adult crime, adult time” position may be fairly easy to take when the blood is on 16- or 17-year-old hands. It gets tougher at 14, 12 or 10. At 7 and 8 it gets absurd.

Teresa Wolfe, who tightened the noose around the neck of a victim she deemed too chubby and slow to live, will spend the next six months with other kids who committed lesser crimes. She’ll probably watch a lot of TV. Then she’ll go home because Pennsylvania doesn’t know what else to do with her. For the massacre of four classmates and a teacher in retaliation for an unrequited schoolboy crush, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden will languish until they’re 18 or 21. Then they’re out, ready or not. Those two little boys in Chicago, the ones who confessed to killing an 11-year-old girl for her new bike? Who knows?

Restoring the innocence of childhood, slowing the destructive influences that devalue compassion and elevate crassness, is a monumental task. It may, in fact, be far easier to build kiddie prisons. Just so it’s understood they can’t be built fast enough.