Abstract
This essay addresses the question of how lawmakers should think about immaturity in assigning criminal punishment to young offenders. For reasons that have much to do with the peculiar history of juvenile justice policy, basic questions about the culpability of young law violators and the extent to which they can fairly be held responsible for their crimes have received surprisingly little attention in policy debates or in the academic literature. Since the late 1980s, a wave of punitive legal reform has brought many young offenders into the adult criminal justice system. These reforms are worrisome; they have been carried out in a highly politicized climate, driven by exaggerated public fears that seem to be reinforced by illegitimate racial attitudes. In the conceptual void created by traditional juvenile justice policy, important changes in the processing and punishment of this unique class of offenders have proceeded with little attention to the conventional constraints that limit punishment under criminal law doctrine and theory. The goal of this essay is to begin to fill this void by analyzing the culpability of young offenders within a broader framework of criminal law doctrine and theory.