Inspired by the Supreme Court’s embrace of developmental science in a series of Eighth Amendment cases, “kids are different” has become the rallying cry, leading to dramatic reforms in our response to juvenile crime designed to eliminate the incarceration of children and support their successful transition to adulthood. The success of these reforms represents a promising start, but the “kids are different” approach is built upon two flaws in the Court’s developmental analysis that constrain the reach of its decisions and hide the true implications of a developmental approach. Both the text of the Court’s opinions and the developmental and neuroscientific research on which the opinions rely reveal that the developmental approach is not coherently defined by the legal line between childhood and adulthood. This lack of alignment has led to calls to extend the age of juvenile exceptionalism to young adulthood. But extending the exceptionalist frame obscures the central role that immaturity plays in most offenders’ full criminal careers and preserves a destructive fiction that youthful offenders are a distinctive, more sympathetic, and less corrupt subset of the millions of people charged with committing crimes. This Article argues that the developmental approach, followed to its logical conclusion, calls not for an age extension for juvenile exceptionalism but rather for a wholesale remaking of the entire criminal justice system in line with an abolitionist vision.

受最高法院在一系列第八修正案案件中接受发展科学的启发，“孩子是不同的”已成为口号，导致我们对旨在消除对儿童的监禁并支持他们成功过渡的青少年犯罪的应对进行了重大改革到成年。这些改革的成功代表了一个充满希望的开端，但“孩子是不同的”方法是建立在法院发展分析中的两个缺陷之上的，这些缺陷限制了其决定的范围并隐藏了发展方法的真正含义。法院意见的文本以及意见所依据的发展和神经科学研究都表明，儿童和成年之间的法律界限并没有连贯地定义发展方法。这种缺乏一致性导致呼吁将少年例外论的年龄延长到青年期。但是，扩展例外论框架掩盖了不成熟在大多数罪犯的整个犯罪生涯中所起的核心作用，并保留了一种破坏性的虚构，即年轻罪犯是被指控犯罪的数百万人中的一个独特、更富有同情心和更少腐败的子集。本文认为，遵循其合乎逻辑的结论的发展方法不是要求延长少年例外主义的年龄，而是要求按照废奴主义的愿景对整个刑事司法系统进行全面改造。但是，扩展例外论框架掩盖了不成熟在大多数罪犯的整个犯罪生涯中所起的核心作用，并保留了一种破坏性的虚构，即年轻罪犯是被指控犯罪的数百万人中的一个独特、更富有同情心和更少腐败的子集。本文认为，遵循其合乎逻辑的结论的发展方法不是要求延长少年例外主义的年龄，而是要求按照废奴主义的愿景对整个刑事司法系统进行全面改造。但是，扩展例外论框架掩盖了不成熟在大多数罪犯的整个犯罪生涯中所起的核心作用，并保留了一种破坏性的虚构，即年轻罪犯是被指控犯罪的数百万人中的一个独特、更富有同情心和更少腐败的子集。本文认为，遵循其合乎逻辑的结论的发展方法不是要求延长少年例外主义的年龄，而是要求按照废奴主义的愿景对整个刑事司法系统进行全面改造。