Right idea, wrong approach
Raising the age of criminal responsibility in New York was a good step, but the follow-through has been sorely inadequate.
Seven years ago, New York was an outlier in handling young offenders. Besides North Carolina, this was the only state that routinely treated 16- and 17-year-old criminal offenders as adults.
That changed in 2017 with the passage of “Raise the Age” legislation. It was an enlightened act that recognized that people’s brains and decision-making capacity are still developing in their teens and even well into their 20s.
Raise the Age was about taking a smarter, age-appropriate approach to juvenile justice. Most cases involving 16and 17-year-olds — felonies as well as less serious charges — were to be handled in Family Court, and offenders provided with mental health support, substance abuse treatment, education and training programs. Cases in many circumstances would be sealed so that poor judgment and impulsive acts of youth didn’t result in lifelong criminal records.
The idea — much like the changes to New York’s bail laws in 2019 — was sound and commendable. But as we saw with bail reform, the follow-through for Raise the Age has been deficient.
As an audit by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office found, the number of youths in the nine detention centers run by the Office of Children and Family Services’ Division of Juvenile Justice and Opportunities for Youth has soared by 74 percent overall, and by 200 percent in the three secure facilities. There is absolutely no surprise there. These were predictable outcomes of a law that shifted more youth from jails and prisons to juvenile facilities.
What remains surprising, and deeply disturbing, is that the state didn’t devote the resources that were so obviously needed to accommodate the change.
The audit found staffing shortages — as high as 38 percent in secure facilities — and huge increases in overtime. In a high percentage of cases, youth coming into the facilities aren’t assessed and screened to determine their physical and mental health needs — the very things staff needed to know to provide appropriate services. Staff were not widely trained on critical things like restraining youth, crisis management and CPR.
The state blames pay rates for its thin ranks, and both the staffing shortage and the COVID-19 pandemic for its failure to keep up with training. Those are credible reasons, to be sure. But they no more let the state off the hook in its responsibility than Raise the Age gave teens a pass to commit crimes without consequences.
Yes, there is a cost to doing this right — such as raising pay to levels that attract sufficient numbers of job applicants — but there’s an arguably greater cost to getting it wrong. Putting young offenders in facilities that aren’t well-equipped to supervise them and that don’t have the capacity to assess their needs makes it likely they’ll be sent back home little better than when they went in — if not worse.
And it creates a potentially dangerous environment for everybody — the youth and the overworked, undersupported adults charged with running these facilities. …
Ms. Hochul and her fellow Democrats who fully control the Legislature have taken much heat from Republicans for their criminal justice policies, much of it fearmongering based on flimsy evidence at best. But passing reforms and then not providing state institutions and employees with the funding and support needed to make those reforms work? That’s entirely on the Democrats.
And most importantly, it’s a recipe for recidivism rather than rehabilitation, an injustice to young people who were supposed to come out of this system with a better chance in life.