When Jennifer and James Crumbley stood trial this year in connection with their son’s 2021 killing of four people at Oxford High School in Michigan, a largely novel legal theory of prosecution was put to the test.

Never before in the United States had two parents faced charges for the role their neglect of their child’s mental health played in a school shooting. Prosecutors alleged the two displayed criminal indifference to warning signs that their 15-year-old son was mentally unwell — they ignored their son’s texts describing hallucinations; they refused to pull him from school hours before the shooting when school officials showed them a violent and disturbing drawing their son drew, which depicted the gun they had purchased for him four days earlier.

“This is about parents who largely ignored their son, neglected … his cries for help. And then bought him a gun,” said the prosecutor in the case.

The jury was convinced, convicting the parents and sending each of them to prison for more than 10 years.

While prosecutions like these are rare, the philosophy behind them is catching on across the country. That includes Maryland, The Baltimore Sun reported last week, as prosecutors and legislators look for ways to tackle juvenile crime and the rise in school shootings.

Gov. Wes Moore last year signed into law Jaelynn’s Law, which established new penalties for adults whose negligent gun storage allows firearms to end up in the hands of minors. And Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates has not shied away from charging parents for enabling their children’s crimes. After his office in April charged 20 juveniles in a spree of carjackings and robberies, he stressed that parents owe restitution for such crimes and may even face jail time on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Why are we now seeing law enforcement and the legal system turn their focus to the parents of suspects after crimes are committed? Americans have always been known for our devotion to individualism. To put someone on trial for failing to prevent another person’s crime would seem a refutation of that pillar of the American psyche.

Perhaps we’re witnessing an inevitable change to a legal system that has increasingly come to endorse a collectivist understanding of crime and culpability. Recent years have seen a wave of criminal justice reforms across the country as prosecutors, judges and legislators acknowledge that root causes in the home and community environment influence criminality, offering greater leniency to those who commit crimes, particularly juveniles. The necessary implication of this understanding is that those influences on juveniles, in many cases the parents, should bear some responsibility for the crime. Accountability cannot simply be taken away; it must be given to someone else.

While it’s undeniable that negligent parenting can put children on a downward path, there are dangers inherent in a criminal justice system that focuses too rigidly on holding parents accountable. The Soviet Union, whose criminal code stipulated punishment of the family members of a “traitor to the motherland,” was an extreme case. But we also don’t want to see parents in jail who failed to keep their kids out of trouble not because of any willful negligence but because of the parents’ own challenges, for instance, to their finances or health. Imprisoning or fining them will do nothing to improve their child’s situation. And, of course, the importance of a parent in a child’s life does not negate the existence of free will. Plenty of criminals have come from attentive and caring homes, just as many great and moral men and women have come from chaotic and uncaring ones.

Fortunately, many of the recent prosecutions of parents have been reserved to those whose role in their child’s crimes was indisputable. The Crumbleys’ disregard for their son was shocking. State’s Attorney Bates’s recent conviction of William Dredden, who participated in an assault and shooting in West Baltimore with his 15-year-old son, was unimpeachable.

Raising a child is an enormous responsibility. Parents should understand that they’ll be expected to treat it as such. It’s up to our policymakers and courts to enforce that expectation while preserving the interests of personal liberty and, imperatively, the child.