(Newswire.net — April 25, 2017) — Due to an increase in violence over the past several decades, many states and courts have made the determination that some juvenile offenders are so egregious that they should be charged as adults. When you are charged as an adult, the law is much less lenient. The problem is that although juveniles can commit heinous crimes, charging them as adults might not be fair.
Many studies show that the brain of a juvenile and an adult work very differently, as does the decision-making process responsible for deciphering right from wrong. Lawmakers in Missouri, Texas, New York and North Carolina are debating whether 16- and 17-year-olds should face charges in juvenile or adult criminal court.
In the last decade, seven states have raised the definition of juvenile versus adult, which has sent half of the youth offenders from adult criminal court to instead appear in juvenile court. That means that those who were tried in adult court have been given a second chance in juvenile court. When you are on trial in a juvenile court, there is a much greater chance that your punishment will be less or that you can escape prosecution altogether. The reason that the states made the change is because when a youth goes to the adult criminal justice system, they flow into adult prisons, which is a recipe for disaster.
The governors of North Carolina and New York who raised the age of definition as an adult have made an excellent choice, and this could be a great example for more to follow. A new report released by the Justice Policy Institute indicates that when the shift was made, the outcomes for the youths improved overall, as did public safety, without the juvenile courts being overwhelmed, which is what opponents of the measure surmised would happen.
Even with the positives involved in changing the age, the process of completely overhauling the youth system and juvenile justice doesn’t alter with just one change in the penal code. It is likely that there are going to have to be many changes in the juvenile criminal justice system to create a real and lasting change.
Those states that changed the age have done so without increasing court or rehabilitation costs. Many legislatures feel that the next part is to take the money that they anticipated would be spent on those increases, to reinvest in juvenile programs that better serve the community in an effort to stop crime and violence before it happens. Breaking the cycle of poverty and low socio-economic hardship might be the best way to take a crack at curbing juvenile violence, rather than punishment after the fact.
The reason for the reevaluation of the age of juvenile vs adult crime is that juvenile crime in many states has begun to either plateau or decrease according to juvenile attorney groups. The hope is that if they can put more funds toward making conditions better, the justice system won’t have to absorb the cost of housing or rehabilitating juveniles in the first place.
Another reason that states who raised the juvenile age were able to keep costs down is because they invested in better forms of rehabilitation programs. Keeping a more fiscally sound budget, they worked hard to figure out what worked and to eliminate the things that didn’t. Instilling probation instead of prison and diverting youths from adult court were all ways that they were able to reduce costs and save both the juvenile system from overload and save the adult criminal system money and resources.
Unfortunately, the money spent for corrections budgets isn’t being reinvested properly to deal with the crime and abuse that leads to criminal offenses. Very little of a state’s budget goes to programs targeted at prevention and to foster healthier communities. Child-serving agencies are some of the most underfunded programs in the nation. Things like health education, work options, housing and other human services are the first place where cuts are made, but they are most critical to saving juveniles from becoming offenders to begin with.
Statistics show that a youth is less likely to re-offend if they are remanded to the juvenile court system versus the adult. Not ready for the consequences and conditions of the adult prison, they typically come out less well-adjusted than when they were sentenced to prison in the first place. Spending the best of their formative years behind bars, they never learn how to be a productive member of society and are predisposed to commit crimes in the future.