Last month, a mother and her 17-year-old son were sentenced in events related to the accidental shooting of an unnamed 11-year-old boy. By sheer “dumb luck”, according to the judge sentencing the shooter, the 11-year old survived and is expected to fully recover.
But this was no ordinary gun accident: the 17-year-old, Hendricks, shot his younger brother while firing at another man during an altercation. The shootings took place at a drug operation run out of the family home, led by Hendricks but with knowledge of his mother, Elizabeth Johnson. Her guns – left freely accessible to Hendricks – were used in the shooting.
Bizarrely, in a request for lenient sentencing, Hendrick’s attorney presented the COVID-19 pandemic as the source of Hendricks descent into drug use and crime. Before COVID, Hendricks was reportedly “on a good path in life”, attending school and playing basketball. Unsurprisingly, the judge responded that the pandemic “doesn’t translate to operating a drug house and shooting people when you’re mad at them.”
What does lead to serious antisocial behavior at such a young age? This case, like so many others, involves a family well known to Child Protective Services (CPS). The family had 16 prior reports of alleged abuse or neglect since 2013 – in other words, the 11-year-old victim was known to the agency since infancy. Crime and child maltreatment often go hand-in-hand, with both social ills concentrated among families with at least one of the so-called toxic triad: substance abuse, mental illness, and domestic violence.
Hendricks, at age 17, was still a minor when he shot his brother. He had been the alleged victim on some of those 16 CPS reports over the last 12 years. This is no surprise: Our jails and prisons are filled with victims of childhood abuse and neglect. A history of child maltreatment is among the most common mitigating circumstances cited by defense attorneys requesting leniency in sentencing for defendants, but it was not raised in this case. Hendricks, likely in part due to his age, received a relatively short prison sentence of 20 months.
The mother, Johnson, received a mere slap on the wrist. She was initially charged with three felonies in relation to the shooting and drug operation, including a charge for child neglect. Yet, she was offered a generous plea deal. She pled no contest to a single charge of maintaining a drug trafficking residence; in exchange, all other charges were dismissed and she was not sentenced to any jail time.
Criminal cases of child abuse and neglect are rarely prosecuted and when prosecuted often receive more lenient sentences than comparable crimes against adults. Women, especially, tend to receive minimal sentences for child maltreatment.
Operators within the criminal justice system may believe that they don’t need to aggressively prosecute child neglect. After all, CPS exists to protect children from parental maltreatment. But in recent years, CPS agencies have shown a reluctance to intervene. Nationally, foster care entries dropped by a third in less than a decade. CPS currently determines more than 85% of investigated reports of maltreatment to be “unfounded” – meaning that there was not enough evidence to conclude that maltreatment had occurred. Indeed, of the 16 reports pertaining to the family of the 11-year-old, several were not investigated at all and only 1 was substantiated – a report of sexual abuse by an unnamed party.
At least temporarily, the unnamed victim was placed in foster care. Whether he remained there or returned to Johnson’s care is unknown; whether he will follow the path of his mother and brother or break the cycle is yet to be determined. Despite common rhetoric about the “foster care to prison pipeline”, recent research suggests that foster care prevents maltreated children from sliding into delinquency and crime. Although discourse about crime often devolves into a zero-sum debate about protecting public safety versus reducing incarceration, progress toward both goals may be possible with a better response to childhood neglect.