During this year’s legislative session, nearly every state has considered some form of juvenile-justice legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislators database.
Where enacted, get-tough policies threaten the “rehabilitative backbone” of a separate juvenile justice system, write University of Missouri criminologist Angela Collins and University of North Carolina criminologist Maisha Cooper in a new paper, “Juvenile Waivers as a Mechanism in the Erosion of the Juvenile Justice System.”
In recent decades, juvenile-justice advocates have worked to expand access to rehabilitation and provide alternatives to incarceration. Reform-minded efforts continue in some states. But other state legislatures are moving in the other direction, debating bills that would toughen potential penalties for children as young as 10, Stateline reports. “Criminal justice advocates warn that strict new policies could roll back previous overhauls of the system,” wrote Amanda Hernandez earlier this year, for Stateline.
Data also shows that more punitive policies like juvenile transfer to adult court usually affect minority youth more heavily, as illustrated in a newly released fact sheet from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which shows that judicial waivers increased by 107% for Black youth between 2005 and 2021. That’s far more than for Hispanic or white youth, Collins and Cooper note.
When there is a public perception that youth crime has increased, juvenile waivers are seen as “an easy solution,” they write. Juvenile records are also becoming less confidential in some states and juvenile proceedings are being opened to the public in some places. That flies in the face of a more rehabilitative focus, which relies upon sealed records and closed proceedings, Collins and Cooper contend.
Waivers were originally designed for juveniles who had “exhausted al their options” in the juvenile system and were seen to be unchanged by the rehabilitative efforts of the system. Under that framework, prosecutors had to convince a judge to waive a juvenile to adult court. Now, often prosecutors can just file the paperwork to transfer the teenager. In some cases, the defendants are not even teens. In Wisconsin, earlier this year, a 12-year-old defendant who was 10 at the time of the alleged crime, was waived to adult court.
If sent to adult prison, juveniles have less access to age-appropriate education and treatment and are more than eight times as likely to commit suicide and five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, though federal law requires any inmates under 17 to be sight-and-sound separated from adult inmates.
In some jurisdictions, juveniles are being waived into adult court first-time and nonviolent offenses. Louisiana and North Carolina recently lowered the age of criminal jurisdiction for teenagers. Collins and Cooper argue that, to preserve the juvenile justice system, there should be stricter guardrails that only allow the most violent juveniles to be waived into adult court. “Those juveniles are the ones who waivers were originally created for,” they argue.
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