Wisconsin was home to many strange laws, some of which sounded like actual riddles. (“Whenever two trains meet at an intersection, neither should proceed until the other one has.”) In Milwaukee, it was technically illegal for a person thought of as “offensive looking” to be out in public during the day or for people to park their vehicle on a city street for more than two hours without a horse leashed to their car. Kids of any age were permitted to drink in bars and restaurants, so long as parents were present. In years to come, hunting licenses would be made available to newborn infants—and in attempted homicide cases, children as young as ten were automatically prosecuted as adults.
Like other U.S. states, Wisconsin began prosecuting children as adults in response to a mid-1990s phenomenon known as the “super-predator,” a term coined by Christian fundamentalist John Dilulio Jr., then a political science professor at Princeton University. In his treatise on the subject, “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” Dilulio claimed to have conducted research showing that children raised in “moral poverty” (racially coded language for predominantly Black urban areas) evolved into sociopathic “wolf packs” of “kiddie criminals.”
“We’re talking about boys whose voices have yet to change,” he wrote. “We’re talking about elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches.… And make no mistake. While the trouble will be greatest in black inner-city neighborhoods, other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems that will spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland.”
Dilulio encouraged states to “build churches” and cited Jesus Christ as a child development expert.
At the time, the juvenile court system treated minors according to the theory that they could be rehabilitated if granted the proper services. But Dilulio claimed superpredators could not be deterred or reformed. The only way to stop them was to take them off the streets. States across the nation rushed to convert their laws, and the super-predator became the grown-up’s version of Slenderman: a terrifying evil that did not actually exist.
Several years after Dilulio popularized the term “superpredator,” it turned out he had made up everything. New York University Law Review described Dilulio’s “research” as a “distortion of statistics and ‘fundamentally unscientific’ guesswork.” Juvenile crime, which Dilulio had warned was on the rise, actually decreased during the mid-1990s by one-third. “His prediction wasn’t just wrong, it was exactly the opposite,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley. “His theories on superpredators were utter madness.”
Brain scans have since corroborated what many juvenile justice advocates already knew: that children and adolescents are impulsive and biologically incapable of making good decisions. Left to their own devices, they will do unconscionable things—and if denied therapeutic intervention, they will keep making the same mistakes. A 2008 Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau report has shown that prosecuting children as adults actually creates higher rates of recidivism, defined as when previously incarcerated individuals commit new crimes following their release back into the community. Almost half of all seventeen-year-olds prosecuted in adult court commit new crimes within three years of their release, a recidivism rate three times higher than that of adult offenders or younger juveniles in the juvenile system.
“If you put young people in front of a driving simulator, they crash more when there are peers next to them; it’s because they’re busy doing stupid stuff. Because their brain is actually excited about all sorts of things and they’re not paying attention … Another way to say it is, the brain of a young person has much more of an accelerator and not very good brakes,” one psychiatrist later testified at Anissa’s trial. “And that’s sort of the basic brain business—the younger the brain, the less ability to stop oneself.”
Decades after Dilulio’s theories were debunked, many states still prosecute children as young as fourteen in adult court. But Wisconsin has taken it further: in attempted homicide cases, the minimum age for adult jurisdiction is ten years old.
After experiencing what he described as a revelation in church, Dilulio expressed his regret to reporters.
“John J. Dilulio Jr. conceded today that he wished he had never become the 1990’s intellectual pillar for putting violent juveniles in prison and condemning them as ‘superpredators,’” wrote Elizabeth Becker in an article for the New York Times, adding, “He tried, he said, to put the brakes on the superpredator theory, which had all but taken on a life of its own.”
“I’m sorry for any unintended consequences,” Dilulio said.
Dismantling the laws built in service of Dilulio’s “madness” has proved politically tricky, in part because doing so would require lawmakers to first explain to their electorate, in places like Wisconsin, that they’d been taught to fear an imaginary evil. No one wants to hear they’ve bought into “fake news.”
“We spend a lot of time reminding people that the superpredator myth was a myth—all that research was discredited, walked back, debunked, disowned—and that it was an enormous miscalculation in the ’90s,” commented Marsha Levick, chief legal officer and cofounder of the Juvenile Law Center. “It really created catastrophic consequences for kids.”
Black children have been disproportionately affected by adult adjudication. As of 2007, Black children in Rock County, Wisconsin, were almost four times as likely to be tried in adult court than their white counterparts. (White children are more likely to have their cases “reverse-waived” from adult court into juvenile court.) Upon their release from prison, where few rehabilitative services existed, such children were considered “felons,” making them unlikely to qualify for any job, which in turn made them more likely to commit crimes in order to make money.
“Initially, the state prisons had a rehabilitative model,” said clinical psychologist Dr. Catherine Yeager, who was interviewed for the documentary Crazy, Not Insane. “So they were teaching people how to read, write, balance a checkbook, get a job, write a résumé.”
By the time Morgan and Anissa were arrested, juveniles in the adult system did not qualify for any rehabilitative services until they were within three years of coming home, which meant they had to be nearing the end of their sentence to even qualify for GED classes.
“So, what are you talking about when you talk about eleven-, twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-olds?” Marcy Mistrett, a juvenile justice advocate who campaigned for decades to keep youth out of the adult criminal justice system, said when asked about such policies. “They’re gonna sit there for ten years”—or potentially sixty-two, in Morgan’s case—“before they can even get a GED class?”
When Tony informed Matt and Angie that their twelve-year-old daughter would be prosecuted in adult court, Angie wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. She felt certain that if Wisconsin harbored laws that sentenced ten-year-olds to adult prison, people would be up in arms about it. She would have heard about it in the news. There would be marches in the streets. Wisconsin kids could not legally vote, drive, or drink (at least not without a parent present). Why, Angie asked, if the law otherwise acknowledged that children behaved impulsively and were therefore too dangerous to be licensed as adults in any other way, had it come to treat certain “serious” offenses as grown-up initiations?
Tony was uninterested in debating the ethics of Wisconsin Statute 970.032. He was a lawyer, not an activist, and the law was what it was. He told Matt and Angie to focus—no more crying—they needed to be strong and work together for Morgan’s sake. He couldn’t change the law, but he could help them navigate it, maybe even beat it at its own game. But they needed to move quickly; they had already wasted enough time waiting patiently in the Waukesha precinct, taking Casey at his word that everything was fine, while he secured a five-hour-long confession from their daughter.
At that point in the conversation, Angie later recalled—much to Tony’s chagrin—“there was a lot of crying about a lot of different things.”