APA Fellow James Garbarino has become something of an emissary to the criminal justice system on behalf of men who committed heinous crimes when they were young. In his 25 years as an expert witness, Garbarino, a developmental psychologist and prolific author, has helped the courts parse the research that shows that teenagers are not able to make decisions in the same way adults can.
Neuroscientists and developmental psychology researchers have shown that the human brain doesn’t fully mature until possibly the age of 25; certainly no 16- or 17-year-old should be viewed as an adult for sentencing purposes, says Garbarino, a professor and the Maude C. Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois.
In his work as an advocate, mostly in Illinois and Florida, he believes he has represented applied developmental psychology, and “in some small way, elevated the quality of the debate.”
His new book, Miller's Children: Why Giving Teenage Killers a Second Chance Matters for All of Us, looks at some of the imprisoned killers resentenced since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama, which struck down mandatory life sentences for juveniles, and Montgomery v. Louisiana, which in 2016 applied that decision retroactively to men who killed as juveniles who were already serving those sentences. Some men, though not all, have had their sentences reduced. Garbarino has been involved in about 50 cases in the past five years.
He credits the timely 2003 publication of "Less Guilty by Reason of Adolescence," by Laurence Steinberg and Elizabeth Scott, in American Psychologist, for laying the groundwork for advocacy, demonstrating that teenagers feel everything intensely, that they aren’t fully capable of grasping the consequences of their actions, and that the influence and even the presence of their peers can short-circuit their moral thinking. Garbarino adds that amicus curiae briefs from the APA and other groups, beginning in 2004 with Roper v. Simmons, have carried the psychological research into the courts, so officials could understand that the brains of young offenders are very much works in progress.
In 2005, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Roper, a case involving a 17-year-old who had murdered a woman during a robbery, that capital punishment was an unconstitutional penalty for crimes committed by juveniles. Five years later, in Graham v. Florida, the court struck down mandatory life sentences without possibility of parole for juveniles for any crime other than murder, setting the stage for Miller and subsequent decisions.
Now, "it's an ongoing process," Garbarino says. "One would hope that, eventually, they're going to rule discretionary life without parole unconstitutional as well” for juvenile offenders. The next frontier may be to raise the age "of all these issues from 18 upward. That seems to be one of the emerging topics.” California, often a bellwether, has already expanded a youth parole program to include inmates who were up to 25 when they committed crimes. The age was 18 just six years ago, says Garbarino.
"If human brains don't fully mature until age 26, then we're wrong to consider 18 a bright line — you’re protected one day before your 18th birthday, but one day after, you’re vulnerable to being executed or sent to prison for life without parole,” he says.
Garbarino, who studied with Urie Bronfenbrenner, an influential developmental psychologist, as a PhD candidate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has studied violence in the lives of children since the mid-1970s. In 1988, he got the chance to go to the Middle East as part of a human-rights fact-finding mission, to talk with Palestinian children growing up in the West Bank and Gaza. He’s been to war zones all over the world since then, but he soon came to understand that many American children have violent, terrifying experiences as well. Sometimes, those children become violent themselves.
“Most juvenile killers are best understood as untreated, traumatized children acting out through adolescent bodies,” Garbarino says. “There is a growing awareness of the role of trauma not just as a consequence of violence, but as a cause.”
However, “it’s still pretty shocking how unusual it is for most traumatized kids to really be dealt with as trauma victims in need of support,” he says; “many interventions don’t match up.” There is a “primitive streak” in American culture, punitive and moralistic, that pushes interventions away from enhancing healing toward judgment and punishment, he says.
A majority of the convicted killers he has met, once they’re old enough to process what they’ve done, don’t want to be “that monster,” Garbarino says. “Some of them are motivated to rebuild from the ground up.”
That’s why Miller’s Children was “much more uplifting” to write than some of his other books. “Miller’s Children is almost all about success stories of resilience and even the ability to transcend adversity and become remarkable,” he says.
Many men imprisoned as boys take up reading; some turn to philosophy. “Studying philosophy can give you a kind of resource to face an existential crisis,” Garbarino says, and can be transformative for these men. "They find big ideas, which can be very powerful for them." A number of inmates have talked with him about Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankel's 1946 book about his internment at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.
Since the Miller decision, Garbarino has made freeing men incarcerated under the previous guidelines a priority. It’s troubling work, but his own spiritual life sustains him, he says. He’s also learned to focus on these tragic stories when he’s working on them, but leave them behind when he’s done.
Some prisoners are able to watch lectures Garbarino has published on YouTube. On his last birthday, he got a card from a group of prisoners in Oregon. "It was the best present I got," he says.
He’s also proud of a recent note he received from a judge who said he'd read everything Garbarino had written, and that it helped him understand the brains of young offenders — and the more forgiving trends in sentencing. Some of that thinking has already “filtered down to the lower courts,” to defense teams, and to the training of judges, Garbarino says.
His work has taken him on something of a tangent of late. In addition to his work with the men he wrote about in Miller’s Children, he’s begun to teach a class at Loyola on the psychology of globalization. But then, he says, during his entire career, when a door has opened, and it has appeared to lead someplace he might want to go, he's walked through it.
APA Fellow James Garbarino wants courts to understand the psychology behind juvenile killers so they can make more informed decisions about a defendant's guilt and punishment.
