Juvenile Justice: Can young criminals be reformed? A growing number of states think so--but not everyone is convinced.

AuthorStoffers, Carl
PositionCover story

Noah Schultz's life was spinning out of control. At 17, he was already immersed in drugs and gangs in his Portland, Oregon, neighborhood. When someone cheated him on a drug deal, Schultz decided to get revenge, tracking the man down and beating him with a pistol, causing severe bruising to his face.

That night in 2009 would be Schultz's last day of freedom for more than seven years. Within 24 hours he was arrested, charged with assault as an adult, and held on $500,000 bail. He was transferred between multiple adult jails, where he endured extensive time in solitary confinement--for his own protection, he was told.

"I couldn't believe what happened so quickly," Schultz says. "I'm sitting in this jail with a bunch of grown men thinking: How did I get here? How did this happen?"

Schultz's case is far from uncommon. He was housed in adult jails after his arrest because Oregon is one of 27 states where prosecutors can charge 16and 17-year-old offenders as adults if they choose. (Six states* automatically charge 16-year olds and/or 17-year-olds as adults.)

But recently, some states have begun making it harder to charge juveniles as adults and started to focus more on rehabilitation. New scientific research and several Supreme Court rulings involving juveniles and crime have prompted the states to act, reversing a "tough on crime" philosophy that led to harsher penalties for young people who commit serious crimes.

"Legislators have finally started to realize that treating juveniles just like adults does more harm than good," says David DeMatteo, a professor of law at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

However, some victims' rights groups and lawmakers are pushing back against the trend, arguing that the worst criminals deserve harsh punishments no matter how old they are.

"Prison penalties fairly and systematically applied means less crime," says U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former Republican senator from Alabama and an outspoken critic of changing the juvenile and adult justice systems.

Punishment, Not Rehabilitation

The idea of treating juveniles differently in the justice system has a long history. In the early 1800s, special facilities to deal with juveniles were created in cities like New York and Chicago. These "reformatories" housed kids deemed "juvenile delinquents" (see "Key Dates, p. 10).

The creation of the first juvenile court in 1899 in Illinois marked the beginning of the modern-day juvenile justice system. Most states created their own juvenile courts in the following decades. These courts were staffed by judges and prosecutors who were trained to use methods such as probation, restitution to victims, and occasionally incarceration to rehabilitate young people in trouble.

This system remained largely unchanged for most of the 20th century. But in the 1980s, juvenile crime rates-especially for violent crimes--began to increase drastically, in part because of a nationwide crack cocaine epidemic. This led many politicians, community leaders, and police officials to demand action.

The government's response was to crack down on crime, passing legislation in the early 1990s that targeted juveniles and made it easier for prosecutors to seek stiff penalties in court.

"Once we got the harsh laws and sentencing guidelines, the system became about punishment and not rehabilitation," says Christina Gilbert, an attorney at the National Juvenile Defender Center, an organization dedicated to juvenile legal defense.

Supreme Court Rulings

The shift toward punishment led to a ballooning juvenile prison population in the 1990s. And by 2000, juveniles were regularly being sent into adult systems for crimes ranging from drug possession to murder, further stressing overcrowded prisons.

But in the new century, authorities began to rethink their approach. In several cases from 2005 to 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that both the death penalty and mandatory life sentences were unconstitutional for juvenile offenders, citing the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment. "

The high court's rulings also took into account new scientific research, including findings that the areas of the brain that deal with decision making, impulsiveness, and consequences are often not fully developed until people are in their 20s.

Studies have also shown that adolescents are more likely than adult offenders to respond to interventions and grow out of delinquent behavior. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote of adolescents' "diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change" in the 2012 majority opinion banning mandatory life sentences for juveniles.

Counseling & College

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