A child is not born thinking about watching a street corner or transporting drugs.
Someone teaches them, someone threatens them, someone decides that this life is worth less than the profit they can get out of it. Evangelina Moreno understood this and that is why she proposed a simple but forceful idea: whoever recruits a minor for crime should face up to 50 years in prison.
The logic is clear. Criminals seek out children because they are easy to manipulate and the law treats them differently. But the real crime does not begin when that child makes a mistake — it begins much earlier, when an adult decides that this childhood is more useful to them broken than whole.
A child should be in school, not watching a criminal’s back. And you, do you think 50 years is the fair punishment for someone who steals another person’s childhood?
