Remember “wilding?”  It was the hot word in crime in 1989, after the police and media announced that youthful predators were running amok and taking over the nation, all coming from the  Central Park Jogger case.  It became one of the driving forces in the 1990s movement to prosecute youth like adults and imprison them in adult institutions, where they would rot like the predators they were. 

Except they weren’t.  Turns out that the “wilding” youths in the Jogger case were innocent, and their convictions were vacated in 2002.  The word “wilding” hasn’t been uttered in a decade.  What remains, however, is the detritus of bad law and policy.  Naturally, politicians rushed laws onto the books, and prosecutors charges babies like grownups, and judges boomed harsh words as they condemned them to eternal damnation for their evil youthful predator ways. Except it was nothing more than a fashion trend.

The  New York Times has an editorial on the changing vision, the recognition that legislatures made a “tragic mistake.”

Prosecutors argued that harsh sentencing would protect the public from violent, youthful predators. But it has since turned out that most young people who spend time in jails and prisons are charged with nonviolent offenses. As many as half are never convicted of anything at all. In addition, research has shown that these young people are vulnerable to battery and rape at the hands of adult inmates and more likely to become violent, lifelong criminals than those who are held in juvenile custody.

Why the times chose to cherry pick prosecutors is unclear.  Prosecutors don’t pass laws.  Prosecutors don’t impose sentences.  Shouldn’t there be someone else in this system, maybe a neutral person, to stand between the prosecutor and an excess of zeal or myopia.  I know, we could call that person a “judge.”  But I digress.

A new study by the Campaign for Youth Justice, a Washington advocacy group, shows that state legislatures across the country are getting the message. In the last five years, the authors say, 15 states have passed nearly 30 pieces of legislation aimed at reversing policies that funnel a quarter of a million children into the adult justice system each year.

It’s important that there be a good, solid study in support of this cause, because without it, legislators, judges and those particularly evil prosecutors would be wholly unfamiliar with the concept of youth.  Young people.  Children.  How would anybody know that they aren’t just smaller versions of “violent . . . predators” likely to be raped and abused in adult prisons and to come out, at best, worse.  Who would have suspected?

Is it really 250,000 children a year who are shuffled through the adult criminal justice system?  Children. Kids.  Since the juices started flowing in our child predator mythology in 1989, we have finally begun  to realize that this great system, the best mankind has ever created, is pointlessly and ineffectively destroying the lives of 250,000 a year in 2011? 

What do we tell all these kids who did something stupid, something childish, because they are children who think like children, behave like children, and yet get punished like adults, whose lives have been ruined? 

Sorry?  Never mind?  My bad? 

Who gives them back their lives, the chance to realize what they did was wrong, and go back to school and become nuclear physicists, physicians, prosecutors?  Where is their chance to grow up and have a wonderful life?  It’s gone.  Go to prison for being a dumb kid and that’s it.  Game over.

And what do we learn from following knee-jerk fashion changes in the criminal justice system?  Who is today’s bogeyman, the hemlines go up and it’s sex offenders, or down and it’s drunk drivers, or pants are back style and it’s school children who point fingers as if they’re guns.  Wait, are we back to violent child predators again already?

For crying out loud, do we never learn about leaping blindly into the next baseless trend in crime, finding some new target upon whom to heap our frustration with our own lives and blame for the end of civilization?

The misery of life compels people to find someone to hate, to blame for all the bad things we suffer.  It never seems to solve anything, and almost invariably makes things worse, once we get past all the inflammatory rhetoric that makes us hate them in the first place.  All too often, as with the Central Park Jogger case, the impetus turns out to be complete and total nonsense, a lie that was too easy to grab hold of and use to generate fear, loathing and votes.  As soon as complacency sets in, we find a new group to hate and blame.

Maybe, if the New York Times editorial is correct, we can go back and undo the damage that we’ve caused over a generation by admitting that we totally blew it.  But what about those quarter of a million kids who we’ve condemned to prison in our zeal to find someone to blame?  We can’t give them back their lives.  We can’t give them back childhoods to enjoy, laughing and playing.  Even though no one has yet said it, maybe a nice sincere apology will help?

We can’t change the fact that their first kiss was from a 43-year-old man in the next cellblock, or that it didn’t stop at a kiss. 

Does that image disgust you?  I hope so. Maybe it will provide a reason to pause before the next hemline is raised and someone else is pointless harmed to prove conclusively what a great system we have.  There’s nothing we can do to undo the damage after the mistake has been made.