Three Long Island high school varsity football players are being tried as juveniles for… Three Long Island high school varsity football players are being tried as juveniles for alleged sexual assault of their freshman teammates, as reported in a Nov. 13 article in The New York Times.

The ruling, made in Wayne County, in northeastern Pa., upset the freshmen’s relatives, most of whom didn’t supply their full names. Neither the names of freshmen nor the accused were included in the article, because all were juveniles.

In light of the crimes, the ruling made by Judge Robert Conway was fair. The crimes they committed were juvenile – horrible extensions of hazing at its absolute worst. The players are accused of sodomizing their teammates with broomsticks, pine cones and golf balls, and, if convicted as juveniles, may be detained until they’re 21.

Looking beyond the gruesomeness of the crime, Conway’s decision was the right one. If tried as adults, the players could have been imprisoned for up to 20 years.

These kids made mistakes – terrible, brutal ones – and they should be held culpable for them. No one is contesting this.

But prison should not be vengeance – no amount of time behind bars will undo what has been done.

Convicting 16- and 17-year-olds as adults essentially means throwing their lives away – and 20 years in prison at a young age would be just that. As it is, if they’re convicted, they sacrifice high school, college and much of their lives.

Much will be made of who’s responsible for these crimes, if the upperclassmen are convicted. Whenever groups of teen-agers act in inexplicably vile, violent ways, responsibility always rests not only on the shoulders of the teens themselves, but also on their parents, the school district and the other adults supervising them – in this case, coaches, who’ve all been removed, as the football season at their high school was cancelled.

Were these crimes part of football culture and the permissiveness given student athletes? Were they tradition run horribly awry, initiation taken to an awful extreme? Did the accused lack a solid contract delineating players’ conduct and punishment received, so that behavior will never again begin to approach what happened?

Perhaps it is a mixture of all three. As long as the reports remain vague, it’s hard to tell. But it seems necessary for schools to hold athletes to the same standard as all other students – and for the alleged crimes, a few lessons in human decency would have gone a long way.