From raising the age at which children may be tried in adult court to re-examining the conditions under which they can be held in custody, jurisdictions across the country have considered ways to address the unique needs of children and young adults in the criminal justice system.But there is still progress to be made. As Monique Morris explored in her 2019 documentary Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, children and young adults of color—especially Black children—as well as LGBTQ youth are disproportionately impacted by justice system contact.In 2019, states on the Pacific Coast took actions to address these concerns and reform their juvenile justice systems.
California made changes to fundamentally alter the philosophical underpinnings of the state’s juvenile justice system from a focus on punishment to a focus on support and assistance, with the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, vowing at the beginning of 2019 to “end juvenile imprisonment . . . as we know it.”Newsom announced he was moving the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice out of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation—which has a history of harsh treatment of children in its custody—and into the California Health and Human Services Agency in order to focus on rehabilitation over punitive detention.
The new Department of Youth and Community Restoration, to be established in July 2020, will include a training institute for corrections officers and an internal oversight division.Advocates mostly hailed the decision, noting that “when the systems are connected to agencies that have an emphasis on health, healing and a connection to resources that can assist in that . . . they are able to do a better job.”However, a few have cautioned that the move needs to be more than “simply a change in the letterhead.”The reorganization will be bolstered by the January 2020 implementation of a 2018 law that sets the minimum age for prosecution even in juvenile court—except in cases of murder and rape—at 12 years old.
Newsom signed a number of other bills into law that are anticipated to decrease youth involvement in the criminal justice system, including limiting school suspensions, providing avenues for cases to be returned to juvenile court, expanding the upper age limit for juvenile detention to age 24, and increasing access to educational opportunities for incarcerated youth.But he vetoed a bill that would have increased the fees that counties must pay the state to send youth to state detention.Proponents had hoped that stiffer costs for incarceration would encourage counties to keep justice-involved youth out of state detention and near their homes and communities, improving their chances for success.In vetoing the bill, the governor indicated that he agreed with the principles behind it, but thought it would undermine the proposed Department of Youth and Community Restoration.
Advocates hope the overhaul will help the state in its efforts to decarcerate the long-troubled youth justice system, which is still feeling the effects of Proposition 21, a “tough-on-crime” initiative pushed through in 2000 largely thanks to efforts from the California District Attorneys Association.From 2003 to 2018, more than 11,500 youth aged 14 to 17 were tried in adult court under the auspices of Proposition 21, with the effects being felt particularly by Black and Latinx communities.Proposition 21 was passed largely in response to a perceived “crime wave” in the mid-1990s that had already ended by the time the legislation hit the books.Between 1980 and 2016, arrests in the state declined by 84 percent for juveniles while decreasing much more slowly or even increasing for other age groups.This has left youth detention centers largely empty.
Some cities in California have been independently reforming their youth justice systems. In August in Los Angeles, the Board of Supervisors voted to convene a Youth Justice Work Group to determine which department in the county is best placed to assist justice-involved youth currently overseen by the probation department—or whether an entirely new agency should be established for this purpose.And in San Francisco, both the public defender and the district attorney supported a measure passed in June to close the city’s juvenile hall, which was 65 percent empty in June.In lauding the decision to decarcerate, advocates noted that while the city’s population is only 5 percent Black, 60 percent of the children held in juvenile hall are Black.
Other places on the West Coast made juvenile justice reforms in 2019. King County (Seattle), Washington, continued its drive to reduce youth detention to zero.There has already been success: a 25 percent drop between 2017 and 2019 in the number of youth held on any given day, and a 24 percent drop in total admissions of youth to detention.In addition, the county had 35 percent fewer referrals to the juvenile legal system for low-level or misdemeanor offenses over the same time period.The county’s strategy calls for a series of steps to reduce youth justice involvement, with the first being to address institutional racism and bias in the system: in 2018, youth of color were 6.6 times as likely to be detained as white youth.The remaining objectives are to prevent justice system contact, divert youth who are already in the system to more appropriate resources, support justice-involved youth to improve family and community relationships, and align the multiple systems with which youth are in contact to improve their odds of accessing the right resource at the right time.As part of the initiative, the county is replacing its current youth detention center with a facility that it describes as “more developmentally appropriate”—but which opponents say is still a jail.
And in Oregon, the state corrected its course on youth justice, retracting an initiative approved by voters more than two decades ago in the midst of the “tough on crime” era that mandated adult charges for anyone 15 or older who was accused of certain felonies.In the years since, Oregon has had the second-highest juvenile incarceration rate in the nation.A 2018 report showed that the measure was three times as likely to impact Black youth—who were indicted on these charges at a rate five times higher than their percentage of the population—and that Latinx and Native American youth were also disproportionately represented in the system.In July, Governor Kate Brown signed into law a bipartisan youth justice reform bill that, among other things, eliminates the practice of automatically prosecuting 15- to 17-year-olds as adults if they have been accused of serious crimes such as rape, murder, robbery, and assault.The law, which went into effect January 1, 2020, creates a presumption that these youth will be tried in juvenile court and requires prosecutors to request a hearing before their cases can be heard in adult court.
The new law, which was backed by leaders from the Oregon Department of Corrections—but opposed by the Oregon District Attorneys Association—also eliminates life without parole sentences for juveniles.Anyone convicted of a crime committed when they were younger than 18 will get a chance to seek parole after 15 years, and juveniles will also be given the opportunity for a second look hearing halfway through their sentences to determine whether they can be released from prison under community supervision.The law also adds a level of judicial review before transferring young people to adult prisons.
Oregon’s action continues a national trend of reducing the number of young people under 18 who are handled as adults in the criminal legal system. After years of work by the national “Raise the Age” movement to set 18 as the age of criminal responsibility in all 50 states, nearly every state handles youth under 18 in juvenile court, although most such laws have conditions under which children may still be tried as adults.Michigan joined these states in 2019, voting to raise the age of who is considered an adult in the criminal legal system from 17 to 18. Anyone under 18 will be treated as a minor in juvenile court and receive the rehabilitation services that are offered in the state’s juvenile justice system; prosecutors, however, may still charge juveniles as adults for certain violent offenses.The Michigan law leaves only three states—Georgia, Texas, and Wisconsin—that have not acted to raise the age to 18.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, advocates are hopeful that the transfer of young people to the adult system is just one of many issues that a new task force will review in Maryland.In 2019, Governor Larry Hogan signed Senate Bill 856/House Bill 606 establishing the Juvenile Justice Reform Council (JJRC).The JJRC will “[use] a data-driven approach to develop a statewide framework of policies to invest in strategies to increase public safety and reduce [youth recidivism], research best practices for the treatment of juveniles who are subject to the criminal and juvenile justice systems, and identify and make recommendations to limit or otherwise mitigate risk factors that contribute to juvenile contact with the criminal and juvenile justice systems.”