Just Mercy

Children going into audlt prison

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Do you mean this as a theme discussion? As one of the EJI's main focuses, the charging and sentencing of children as adults arises several times throughout the memoir. Stevenson comments that the fear and anger in the 1980s and early 1990s that fueled mass incarceration led to black and brown children being labeled as “superpredators” by criminologists. New laws led to harsher sentencing for juvenile offenders, but by 2000 the juvenile population had increased while juvenile crime rates decreased, thereby disproving the superpredator theory. Stevenson details how constitutional challenges he brings to the Supreme Court lead to the mitigation of sentences for children serving adult sentences.