Last week two Florida teenagers, age 16 and 17, were were prosecuted for producing, directing and promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of children. The kicker of it all is that the individuals featured in the photos were each other. Under Florida law it was perfectly legal for the two teens to engage in sexual intercourse, but apparently documenting the act was just too much.

Confused? Let me explain. The two children were prosecuted on the basis of Florida’s child pornography laws, which are in existence to protect children from being exploited. In this case, neither of the two were exploited. They willingly engaged in a sexual act, and both willingly photographed the incident. The photos were never made public. The boy emailed a photo to the girl, and the girl emailed a photo to the boy. They didn’t do anything wrong in my opinion!

I’d be willing to bet that this whole ordeal was the result of an overprotected, somewhat crazy parent of one of the teens. Otherwise, how would anyone have found out? It’s time for parents to get realistic. Teenagers have sex, and that likely includes your own little angel. Publicly humilating and punishing them for something that is natural is sickening and wrong. And just as wrong as that is the state and the courts that actually try cases like this. The pornography laws are in effect to stop the 50-year-old perverts from exploiting children, not to stop teens from having consensual sex and taking photos of it.

In late 1998, Amnesty International issued a report in which they expose how the United States justice system incarcerates more children than any other country in the world. Amongst their findings in the report are that approximately 200,000 children per ear are prosecuted in general criminal courts, with an estimated 7,000 of those held in jail before trial. Over 11,000 children were also currently being housed in prisons and other adult correctional facilities.

When we think of children being tried as adults, we tend to think of a sociopathic or antisocial child that has committed some kind of extremely violent act. But the reality of the situation is very different. More than half of children whose cases were transfered out of the juvenile courts were charged with non-violent offenses.

Sure, the US is a large country, but proportionately the US still puts far more children behind bars than any other country.

Jason Zeidenberg, policy analyst with the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, said:

“The US puts more of its children behind bars than any other nation on earth. To give you a comparison, the U.S. has more than five times the number of incarcerated children as India, a country of nine hundred million people.”

Zeidenberg went on to describe how the incarceration of children affects their future prospects and liklihood of re-offending:

“Children who have been incarcerated are three times more likely to re-offend within the next year as children who are sentenced to alternatives to incarceration. Such alternatives can include counseling, community service, reparations and a whole host of others. Also, all of these alternatives are much less expensive than incarceration.”

Even more startling in the Amnesty International report is a description of the treatment of children who are incarcerated. They are not treated with kid gloves, and in fact, the use of solitary confinement is a very common practice with youth offenders. Amnesty International’s study also pointed to a study conducted in 1992 which found nearly 89,000 cases in which a child was palced in solitary confinement for more than 24 hours.

Children who end up in juvenile jail far worse off than their counterparts who receive some kind of alternative treatment, but those who find themselves in adult instituations find themselves in an even more bleak situation. These children in adult institutions are five times more likely to be raped, three times more likely to be beaten by staff, and eight times more likely to commit suicide than are children in juvenile institutions.

If you are intersted in reading the report, you can find it here in their feature section on Juvenile Justice.