A Crime Doesn’t Make a Child an Adult
· The Atlantic
On the morning of October 3, 2012, a trio of unarmed 16- and 17-year-old boys in Elkhart, Indiana, banded together to commit a burglary in their neighborhood. To avoid a confrontation, they planned to hit a vacant home. After some dogs scared them off their first target, the teens called two more friends, who were 18 and 21, to help them break into another neighbor’s house, which seemed empty. But the homeowner, Rodney Scott, was asleep upstairs, and when he heard the intruders, he thundered down with his handgun and began firing. One teen dashed out the door, another was already outside, and the others scrambled into a bedroom closet. As Scott was calling 911, the closet door opened and 21-year-old Danzele Johnson fell to the floor, dead, shot by Scott.
The other four—16-year-old Blake Layman, 16-year-old Jose Quiroz, 17-year-old Levi Sparks, and 18-year-old Anthony Sharp Jr.—were arrested and charged with felony murder in the perpetration of a burglary, since their crime had resulted in Johnson’s death. Although three of the defendants were juveniles, all four were tried as adults, owing to an Indiana mandate for offenders who are at least 16 and charged with murder. After the teens either pleaded or were found guilty, they were each sentenced to at least 50 years in prison.
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These sentences proved controversial, not just because charging unarmed teens in a death they didn’t directly cause seemed bizarre, but also because the prosecution of juveniles as adults has long raised questions about justice and due punishment. Layman, who was sentenced to 55 years in prison, appealed the decision, arguing that the punishment was “cruel and unusual.” In 2015, Indiana’s Supreme Court agreed, ruling that the sentence was “disproportionate” given “what we now know about adolescent brain development and the impact it has on a juvenile’s susceptibility to engaging in risky behaviors.” The judges reduced the convictions to simple burglary and ordered the lower courts to resentence the offenders accordingly. In 2022, the state signed into law a range of reforms designed to divert more young people from the criminal-justice system. But Indiana prosecutors can still charge children as young as 12 as adults.
Despite years of reforms, neurological studies and other research, and steep drops in crime, the question of how to justly and effectively handle juvenile offenders is far from settled. Lawmakers across the country have lately been working to make juvenile sentencing stricter. These efforts, spurred by spikes in crime during the pandemic and high-profile anecdotes of violence among teens, aim to undermine decades of trying to rehabilitate minors and keep them out of prison. In April, Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe, a Republican, signed a bill into law that will allow more minors to be tried as adults. “If a juvenile is going to act like an adult and commit a crime like an adult, they need to understand that those, unfortunately, have consequences,” Kehoe said at the time. The House passed legislation last year—yet to go before the Senate—that targets teen offenders, including a bill that allows 14-year-old juvenile defendants in the District of Columbia to be tried as adults for various crimes and potentially sentenced to life without parole.
Decades of studies have found that in many cases, incarcerating juveniles is counterproductive, in part because these young offenders have higher rates of rearrest than those who are diverted from prison. Both juvenile crime and arrests have plummeted in tandem by about 75 percent since peaking in 1995, according to FBI data. Yet whenever crime ticks up, as it did across the board from 2021 to 2023 (before falling again in 2024), calls to crack down on young deviants resonate more with lawmakers and the public than efforts to expand access to therapy, mentors, and job training do. Addressing the root causes of crime does not provide the same catharsis as sending a child to adult prison.
In 2024, a number of states rolled back juvenile-justice reforms to make penalties harsher for young offenders. Tennessee enacted a law that permits prosecutors to try minors as young as 15 as adults for shoplifting or stealing firearms. Kentucky passed a law that cleared the way for prosecutors to charge teens as young as 15 as adults for using firearms in certain felonies, including manslaughter, robbery, and some kinds of assault. North Carolina mandated that 16- and 17-year-olds charged with serious felonies start in adult criminal court.
Louisiana first stopped automatically prosecuting 17-year-olds as adults in 2019, but ended this reform in 2024. The state’s new Republican governor, Jeff Landry, ran a tough-on-crime campaign that appealed to residents who were alarmed by a rise in crime across the state during the pandemic. Yet crime-data analysts have noted that Louisiana’s crime wave was in keeping with a national trend, whereby rates went up in 2020 and began coming down in 2023, and that the share of murders committed in the state had actually started to fall in 2019. The law has not acted as a deterrent to juvenile crime; rather, an analysis of prisoners housed in Orleans Parish correctional facilities found that youth incarceration has gone up since it took effect in 2024. Whereas the number of kids in juvenile facilities dropped, the number of kids in adult facilities rose—and kept rising.
“We typically see, and we’re certainly seeing it now, an eagerness—it’s not even anxiety; I call it ‘eagerness’—of state legislatures in particular to appear to be tough on crime, and the easiest way to do that is with children,” Laura Cohen, a law professor at Rutgers University, told me. Youth offenders, Cohen said, have no natural lobbyist constituency, which makes them a relatively easy target.
Harsher penalties do little to deter crime or prevent recidivism among young people. We know this because amid the rising crime rates and rightward political shift of the 1980s and ’90s, lawmakers in almost every state passed legislation that either allowed or required juveniles to be prosecuted in adult court for various crimes. That period saw “an explosion of incarceration” that included juveniles, Josh Gupta-Kagan, a clinical-law professor at Columbia Law School, told me. States also passed a spate of “auto-charging” laws that eliminated judges’ discretion and automatically placed certain youth defendants in adult court. Across the country, about half of all states and the District of Columbia still have auto-charging laws on the books.
A number of studies in the new millennium found that these measures had done little to dissuade young people from pursuing or returning to crime. As crime rates dropped from their early-’90s peak, progressive reformers successfully rolled back some of those provisions. In the landmark 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court ruled that sentencing people to death for crimes they committed as minors is per se unconstitutional, overturning statutes in 20 states and changing the fate of more than 70 felons who were on death row at the time for crimes they had committed as minors.
“Raise the age” laws also took off; 11 states diverted 16- and 17-year-old offenders to juvenile court by raising the minimum age of offenders eligible to be tried in adult court to 18. After Massachusetts raised the age of adult prosecution from 17 to 18 in 2013, the state saw a 56 percent drop in juvenile arrests and a 75 percent decrease in arrest rates of 18-to-20-year-olds. Likewise, in the six years after Connecticut implemented 2012 legislation that raised the age of adult prosecution to 18, arrests of children aged 17 and under decreased by more than half. Opponents of raise-the-age laws couldn’t argue that they weren’t working.
[Keith Humphreys: America’s incarceration rate is about to fall off a cliff]
But climbing crime rates during the pandemic “took some of the momentum out of” the juvenile-justice-reform movement, Gupta-Kagan said. This despite the fact that national youth arrests for violent crimes are historically low, and the violent juvenile crime rate in 2021 was three-fourths of the 2012 rate and one-third of the 1995 rate. The country now finds itself in a state of “equipoise,” Cohen said, whereby progressive reforms remain in place in most jurisdictions but are being dismantled in others, mainly in Republican-led states. It’s “a classic example of bad cases making bad law,” Cohen said, referring to the kind of high-profile crimes that rile up the public. She also blames “a shift in political winds” as the country lurches to the right.
Los Angeles handily demonstrates this pendulum swing. In 2020, the newly elected Los Angeles County district attorney, George Gascón, vowed to “immediately stop prosecuting children as adults,” only to shift his position in 2022 to allow prosecutors to transfer juveniles to adult courts in the “most egregious cases.” This was in response to the public furor that arose after Hannah Tubbs, a 26-year-old trans woman, was sentenced to two years in a juvenile facility for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl years earlier, when Tubbs was not yet 18 and identified as male. By 2024, the incoming D.A., Nathan Hochman, pledged to eliminate the “pro-criminal blanket policies” of his predecessor and has given prosecutors yet more discretion in how they try juveniles.
According to Peter Moskos, an instructor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of Back From the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop, the recent conservative backlash is a natural consequence of progressive overreach in juvenile-justice reforms. Moskos is particularly concerned about the push to focus strictly on rehabilitating young criminals rather than punishing them. “We need some accountability,” he told me. “The left won’t talk about punishment at all.”
Supporters of laws that allow prosecutors to try juveniles as adults argue that the laws hold minors accountable for illegal and sometimes horrifying behavior. “Violent criminals shouldn’t be let off the hook just because they are under the age of 18,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee insisted during House debates over the Violent Juvenile Offender Accountability Act she introduced late last year, which has yet to advance to a full vote. The Republican sponsor of Tennessee’s recent law, State Senator Brent Taylor, told the Nashville Banner that he supported the legislation because “we have to make crime illegal again!”
W. Dyer Halpern, the chief of the Public and Law Enforcement Integrity Bureau at the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, argued in the New York Post in 2023 that New York State’s 2018 Raise the Age law, which changed the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 years old, “simply created a free pass for violent youth.” In a report published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, Halpern noted that the number of identified shooters under age 18 in New York City had spiked from 30 in 2017 to 85 in 2022. He blamed the law for the city’s rising crime rates among older teenagers during the pandemic.
Other research suggests, however, that the combination of school closures and job losses, particularly in poor neighborhoods, played a large role in the pandemic crime surge. Data analysis conducted by John Jay College’s Research and Evaluation Center in 2023 found that “youth aged 17 and younger still account for a small portion of violent crime in New York City,” and therefore it is wrong to “attribute recent increases in violence to a law that only affected youth under age 18.” Researchers found that violence among youth during the pandemic and afterward “mirrored the scale and direction of trends among adults aged 18 and over,” meaning that raise-the-age legislation did not cause a meaningful jump in violence among affected youth in particular.
Critics of the latest wave of measures to hold young people accountable as adults point to studies showing that young people are statistically less rational and behave with less foresight than adults. “We’ve got developmental evidence, neuroscience evidence, demonstrating in a really compelling, scientific way how adolescent brains really are different than adult brains and how that does impact decision making,” Gupta-Kagan, the Columbia Law School professor, told me.
The prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, planning, and impulse control—is among the last areas of the brain to develop, ensuring that there’s a difference between youth and adult brains that continues into the early 20s. Until then, the amygdala, responsible for emotional processing and threat detection, dominates decision making, which can cause young people to behave more impulsively than adults. Neuroscientific research has also found that teenagers’ brains are much more malleable than adult brains, which makes teens relatively more vulnerable to environmental stressors, such as peer pressure and rejection.
[Elizabeth Glazer: A cheap fix for urban crime]
These neurological differences are taken seriously by the law in other domains. “We don’t let them join the Army,” Josh Rovner, a senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, said of minors. “We don’t let them sign a contract; we certainly don’t let them vote or serve on juries.” Rovner added that although proponents of trying juveniles in adult court claim that their approach would deter crime and reduce recidivism, research suggests that the opposite is true. A 2007 meta-analysis by the CDC found that juveniles who had been transferred to adult courts typically went on to commit more crimes—and more violent crimes—than those who had stayed in juvenile courts, regardless of the severity of the original crime. The authors concluded that “transferring juveniles to the adult system is counterproductive as a strategy for preventing or reducing violence.”
And kids held in adult correctional facilities do not fare well. “Children who are prosecuted as adults and incarcerated with adults are subjected to rates of victimization that are twice or three times that of those who remain in the youth justice system,” Cohen, the Rutgers law professor, told me. Researchers have found that minors in adult jails suffer much higher rates of suicide than those held in facilities that cater strictly to kids. The juvenile brain is still developing, and prison is a harrowing place for that to happen.
Charging juveniles as adults may not deter crime or reduce recidivism, but it is a great way to “coerce guilty pleas out of kids,” Rovner said. Prosecutors are known to threaten minors with adult sentences to pressure them into taking plea bargains to keep their cases in the juvenile justice system. Young people “value the present over the future, and so they’re likely to accept the guilty plea on something that will send them home faster,” Rovner explained. “They don’t understand the array of collateral consequences that will follow them for the rest of their lives.” Although juvenile crime records are generally sealed from the public, they can be accessed by military recruiters, employers that require high-level security clearance, and schools.
Sentencing juveniles to lengthy prison sentences seems primarily motivated by notions of moral accountability, as though children become adults simply by virtue of having done something grievously wrong. But children are defined by their capacity for change, and a justice system that recognizes this “is much better positioned to meet the needs of youth” and deter future crimes than a system that prizes retribution, Cohen explained. This makes charging minors as adults not only cruel but also harmful and ineffectual: Instead of guiding young offenders to make better choices, this more punitive approach denies many of them the chance to become better adults.