Should The Juvenile Age For Criminals Be Raised To 21?
A handful of 18 year olds, a 14 year old, and a 17 year old were recently arrested in Springfield Massachusetts in connection with a shooting that left an officer hospitalized.
Currenlty, the age of adulthood is 18. That means if you’re 18, you are charged as an adult.
Juveniles are afforded more protections when it comes to sentencing, for example, life imprisonment has been held to be unconstitutional for not only juveniles, but also 18 ,19, and 20 year olds.
Most crimes in Massachusetts are committed by people between the ages of 18 – 35, with a minority of crimes being committed by juveniles (this percentage hovers around 7% or less.)
Emerging adulthood is a life stage characterized by changes in person-context cognitive, emotional, physical, and social domains, and the ultimate pathway achieved by the emerging adults during this stage is determined by the ongoing, dynamic, and reciprocal interactions between the individual and their environment. It was initially defined by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, PhD from Clark University in 2000.
In addition to being studied by psychologists, emerging adulthood evokes some common sense principles that most of us can readily recognize.
18 – 20 year olds are obviously inexperienced in almost all aspects of life. I remember when I was 19 I took out my first credit card for $500.
I spent it in a weekend. Then I had to forfeit a huge sum of my paltry CVS salary to paying it back each month. Now, as a 29-year-old man, I’m more aware of the consequences of my actions and am not so impulsive (or at least not as impulsive as I was back then.)
If a 19 year old is arrested for fighting, it’s not as embarassing as it would be if you heard your 50 year old neighbor got into a bar fight.
That’s because when we see a 19 year old making impulsive and bad decisions, we usually cut them a little slack.
This is why we impose safeguards for emerging adults when it comes to drinking and smoking. In order to drink and (with the enactment of the new FDA regulations) buy tobacco products, you have to be 21. Do some degree, we understand that emerging adults can’t make fully informed decisions given their adolescence.
But if you’re charged with a crime you’re essentially treated the same as a fully fledged adult.
A Call For Reform
In Massachusetts, “Raise the Age MA” is trying to pass legislation that will change the age of adulthood to 21.
According to Raise the Age MA, both the Juvenile Court’s and the Department of Youth Services’ caseload have been consistently declining, even with the inclusion of 17-year-olds in September 2013 and passage of the 2018 Criminal Justice Reform Act which heavily invested in the prevention of young people’s legal system involvement. Not only can the juvenile system absorb this new cohort of youth, the system also has the expertise, policy and programmatic infrastructure to effectively intervene with these older adolescents. The legislation gradually increases the age of juvenile jurisdiction over five years to ensure the system can fully absorb 18-year-olds, then 19-year-olds, followed by 20 -year-olds over that five-year implementation period.
The organization further posits that under our current system- sending older teens into the adult system- is making things worse.
Most young people can be held accountable and be on track for rehabilitation, particularly with developmentally appropriate interventions. However, exposure to toxic environments like adult jails and prisons can actually increase offending. The Pathways to Desistance study conducted a seven-year study of young people who have been adjudicated for serious, violent offenses to identify the factors that are tied to their desistance or persistence in offending and found that of all the factors they studied two stood out: (1) belief in the legitimacy of authority and (2) meeting adolescent developmental milestones on time.
What do you think?