Few among us want to be remembered for what we did in high school.
But too many people haven’t been able to escape their childhood mistakes — including many who faced hardships no average teen would recognize.
It’s called the school-to-prison pipeline, and awareness of it is starting to change how we treat young juvenile offenders.
The purpose of having separate juvenile courts is to allow early mistakes to remain in childhood, but it hasn’t always been that simple. With juvenile crime rising a couple of decades ago, the thinking was that harsher penalties would deter offenders.