ABSTRACT
Inconsistency in Connecticut’s treatment of minors under its laws in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was perhaps most obvious in prosecutions of children charged with theft, burglary, and arson. Especially in crimes dealing with the theft or the destruction of private property, the legal system was far more interested in protecting the rights of the property owners than in safeguarding the rights of the children accused. Despite Swift’s assertion that the authorities treated children convicted of theft with less severity, early prosecutions of children charged with crimes against property in Connecticut revealed colonists trying to reconcile their desire to protect their possessions with their changing view of the responsibility of minors for their actions. In the face of the increasingly common reform rhetoric concerning the responsibility of children for their criminal actions, those factors ought to have resulted in a milder sentence in the 1840s.
