Unlike the punishment for adults who’ve committed crimes, state and federal laws dictate that the juvenile justice system must provide treatment, rehabilitation and a chance to correct the missteps of youth. Driven by ever-expansive research on the adolescent brain, reforms nationwide aim to keep older teens out of adult courts, jails and prisons.
Now two states are reversing that trend. Citing upticks in violent crimes committed by youth, Republican politicians in Louisiana and North Carolina have passed laws that roll back recent reforms and allow more of these teenagers to be prosecuted as adults.
Michelle Weemhoff, director of advocacy for the National Youth Justice Network, called the new laws in North Carolina and Louisiana “really shocking.”
“The fact that this goes against decades of long-standing research seems irresponsible and unfortunately dangerous,” she said. “It feels like we’re going backwards.”
Reversing a decades-long trend
Critics say the more punitive standards have been fueled more by rhetoric and anecdotal crime reports than hard data. Also in dispute is whether justice reforms have led to increased crime.
According to the most widely agreed-upon measure of statistics, the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System found youth arrests for violent crimes increased 17% between 2021 and 2022. But both the number and the rate of youth arrests for violent crime remain well below previous peaks in the 1990s. Last year’s most recent data show violent crime committed by people of all ages has subsided since last year, in a return to pre-pandemic levels.
“The fact that this goes against decades of long-standing research seems irresponsible and unfortunately dangerous.”
— Michelle Weemhoff, National Youth Justice Network
Over the past decade, almost all states — with the exception of Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin — have moved away from prosecuting older teens accused of crimes as adults. Vermont lifted its age limit in 2022, allowing 19-year-olds to remain in the juvenile justice system where they have access to rehabilitative services.
‘Brutal, survival mentality’ in adult prisons
Inside adult jails and prisons, age-appropriate services and educational options are limited or nonexistent. And children sent to adult facilities often face long-term consequences. Unlike the juvenile justice system, where criminal records are sealed, adults who’ve served time struggle to pass background checks for housing and employment.
A 2018 UCLA report found children jailed in the adult system are at the highest risk of all those detained to suffer sexual abuse, and they are 36 times more likely to die by suicide in an adult jail than in a juvenile detention facility.
Shon Williams, 48, was incarcerated at age 17 and spent 26 years in prison before being released in 2019. Now a re-entry specialist for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, he said that when teens are placed with adults, their well-being suffers.
“Everybody just has this brutal, survival mentality and everything that comes with that — frustration, fights, and rape,” Williams said. “There’s no education in these places.”
“The frustration is that we are playing politics when our children’s lives are at stake.”
— Kristen Rome, Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights
The public also appears to be ill-served by teens sent to adult lockups. A 2007 study for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found adolescents housed in juvenile justice systems had a 34% lower recidivism rate than those detained with adults.
Landmark decisions at the U.S. Supreme Court have hastened reforms nationwide. The 2005 Roper v. Simmons decision drew on the emerging field of neuroscience to underscore why youth with developing brains should not be treated as adults, due to impulsivity and an inability to weigh consequences. Over the next 11 years, three other key Supreme Court rulings dialed back life without parole sentences in many cases, determining that they constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
Legislature overrides North Carolina governor
But in two states, prominent politicians, often relying on anecdotal accounts of youth crimes, say things have gotten worse. Changes to existing juvenile justice reforms, once backed by bipartisan coalitions should be scrapped, Republican leaders said.
Under North Carolina House Bill 834, an expanded number of serious felony charges now automatically treat 16- and 17-year-olds as adults.
Lawmakers backing the bill cited crime data showing an uptick in crimes committed by youth in recent years. Between 2021 and 2022, the state’s Crime Index report found a relatively modest 2% increase in violent crimes and a 10% increase in property crimes committed by youth under the age of 18. A lack of available beds in juvenile justice facilities, and several high-profile homicide cases committed by teenagers also influenced the bill’s passage.
“If you do the crime, you have to do the time, and these kids are committing serious offenses,” bill sponsor Rep. Neal Jackson told North Carolina Newsline. “And it doesn’t matter if you’re 17 and a half or are 18 and a day, you need to be punished for your crime.”
The state’s Republican supermajority passed the bill and sent it to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk. Cooper vetoed the bill in June, stating publicly: “There are cases where sentences would be more effective and appropriate to the severity of the crime for teenagers if they were handled in juvenile court, making communities safer.”
The Republican-led Legislature overrode Gov. Cooper’s veto, and the bill became law at the end of June.
Dawn Blagrove, executive director of the advocacy group Emancipate North Carolina, said she considered the new law a “betrayal” of the hard-fought 2017 reform to raise the age of the state’s legal system for teens — which she considered a success.
But because state lawmakers failed to adequately fund the effort to expand rehabilitative options, publicity of overcrowded juvenile detention facilities and a backlog of court cases led politicians to declare it a failure and roll back the prior reform effort. Now, she said, many more teenagers facing low-level felonies will be funneled into the adult courts and lockups.
“This grossly increases the number of children who will grow into and become a lifelong criminal, or at least, will never be able to get out under the thumb of the criminal justice system,” she said.
Reversed reforms in Louisiana
In Louisiana, the rollback of juvenile justice reforms began with a vow made last year by Attorney General Jeff Landry, then the Republican candidate for governor. In the 2023 legislative session, Republican leaders concerned about youth crime supported a controversial bill that would have made juvenile court records public. While the legislation died in June, Landry pledged that if elected, he would see to it that the law changed.
Indeed, weeks after being sworn in as governor, he signed a package of criminal justice bills into law that lengthened prison sentences, expanded executions, decimated parole options — and required 17-year-old defendants to be treated as adults.
Many of the new laws reversed reforms signed by Landry’s predecessor, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards. Gov. Landry blamed Edwards and policies he signed into law for a spike in violent crime from 2020 and 2021, and highly publicized failures of the state’s juvenile justice system that include institutional violence and escapes from locked facilities.
Surrounded by victims of youth crime in a February speech to lawmakers, Landry said juvenile justice reforms of the prior years had “fast-tracked too many of our teenagers into a life of crime.” He cited several recent crimes committed by teenagers as the reason more punitive measures were required.
“These juveniles are not innocent children any longer; they are hardened criminals,” Landry said.
Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights Executive Director Kristen Rome described the recently passed crime bills as a “quick steamroll” pushed through in a matter of weeks with little debate and no cost estimates. She said the governor’s harsh language represented a return to the rhetoric of the 1990s, an era of tough-on-crime policies when Black and brown teenagers became scapegoats.
Advocates have dubbed Louisiana the “prison capital of the world,” a state with a particularly robust record of incarcerating teenagers. A report released last year by the legal advocacy group Human Rights for Kids found that Louisiana is the state with the highest rate of incarceration for people who committed crimes as minors. Black youth in Louisiana are four times more likely to be incarcerated than their white peers, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Those impacts, youth advocates in both Louisiana and North Carolina say, will be felt for years to come.
“The frustration is that we are playing politics when our children’s lives are at stake,” Rome said. “Youth justice has become a political issue, as opposed to a matter of our collective future, a matter of creating safe communities.”