By Marcy Mistrett and Mariana Espinoza

At the turn of the 21st century, it was estimated that 250,000 children every year were charged as adults in the United States. By 2019, that number had dropped 80% to 53,000. This drop is to be celebrated and is the result of legislative changes in 44 states and the District of Columbia, as well as federal funding incentives. However, there is still much work to be done.

The children that remain exposed to the adult criminal legal system are overwhelmingly youth of color. The vast majority serve short sentences in adult jail or prison and return home by their 21st birthdays, the age at which services can be extended to in the youth justice system in the vast majority of states; indicating that many youth could be served, more appropriately, by the youth justice system.

This brief reviews the history, harms, pathways and trends that treat children as if they were adults.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2022. 10p.

By Anne-Marie Day

The custodial estate for children aged 10–17 years across England and Wales faces a number of challenges. This article focuses on the perceptions of Resettlement Officers in two Young Offender’s Institutions (YOIs) in England on the challenges of their role: successfully reintegrating children from custody into the community using ‘Constructive Resettlement’ approaches. The findings will present a range of internal barriers encountered by Resettlement Officers that leave them feeling isolated, invisible and misunderstood. Finally, implications for future policy and practice will be considered.

Youth JusticeOnlineFirst, February 17, 2025

By The Children's Commissioner (UK)  

This report aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of the educational journeys of children in secure settings. It examines their experiences before and during their time in custody, reflecting these in their own voices so that they are central to educational reforms and interventions. This report is based on analysis of: • quantitative administrative data covering the 950 children and young people educated in England then held in secure settings in England and Wales for any period of time between September 2017 and August 2022; i • qualitative interviews with 13 children and six staff members in youth secure settings in England and Wales conducted between June and July 2024; • the education policies as of September 2024 of seven out of the 14 secure settings that accommodate children on remand or sentenced in England and Wales; and • 390 responses from The Big Ambition survey received September 2023 to January 2024 from children in secure settings in England. ii This report found that children in secure settings often had severely disrupted experiences of education, with many recounting a poor experience of school and a multitude of challenges before entering a secure setting. Many children expressed that they wished they had had greater support at school. Some core challenges included: • History of poor attendance: 77% of children in secure settings were persistently or severely absent in their most recent year at a state-funded school  • Disproportionate additional needs: Children in secure settings were five times more likely to have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) compared to pupils in state-funded education and 1.5 times as likely to receive Special Educational Needs (SEN) Support; • Experiencing child poverty: Almost nine out of every 10 children in secure settings grew up in areas with above-average levels of child poverty; • History of exclusion: 25% of children in secure settings had experienced a permanent exclusion. By contrast, there were only eight permanent exclusions per every 10,000 pupils in state-funded schools in 2021/22.6 While staff in secure settings worked hard to provide a high-quality education, this report highlights the serious challenges they face delivering education. This included: • Restrictions on education choices: Children are often assigned to educational pathways based on who they could associate with safely rather than their interests or educational ability; this makes it difficult to engage children in class when they all have different levels of ability and may not have any interest in the subjects they’ve been assigned. • Limited continuity and ability to plan: A large proportion of the children are serving short sentences or on custodial remand, which can limit continuity and progress in their education. For children on custodial remand, they do not know how long they will be in custody for which can lead to their education being disrupted at short notice. • Staffing shortages: It is difficult to recruit qualified and suitable teachers capable of providing the necessary educational support and high-quality education to children with diverse and complex needs. Recommendations The Children’s Commissioner’s ambition is for every child to be prevented from being affected by violence and criminality and able to fulfil their full potential. This means that every child must grow up in a loving, homely environment with access to high-quality education, including those who need secure care. To achieve this, a number of structural changes are needed across the whole system. These were outlined in The Big Ambition7 and include: • A unique childhood identifier so that no child falls through the gaps in support; • Clear, reliable, long-term funding streams for children, based on consistent measures of local need; • A joint children’s workforce strategy to ensure those working with children are caring, professional and equipped to do their jobs, with a strong pipeline into senior leadership roles; and • The Department for Education to assume direct responsibility for the delivery of core services for children. The recommendations in Section 4 of this report have been separated into two parts. The first looks at preventative measures. It outlines the necessary changes to the school system to ensure that children are better supported at school. The second outlines that the current secure setting system is not fit-for-purpose and needs a complete redesign. While the number of children in secure settings is a very small proportion of all children, the challenges they face and often the long-term implications for public services of those challenges means reform of the youth secure estate should be considered a priority. Key recommendations for the broader education system include: • Recommendation: The government should introduce a single child plan to coordinate all multi-agency support for young people. This plan should be regularly reviewed at least every year and should always be updated if a child moves local authority. This plan should give schools the ability to commission support services from health and social care when children’s attendance starts to deteriorate. Alongside this, the government should introduce national thresholds for children’s services support, with a statutory offer of Early Help. • Recommendation: Children’s support services should be delivered on school sites to provide the targeted early help that young people need. This could include, but is not limited to, educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service practitioners, social workers, youth workers, school nurses, health visitors, family liaison officers and Family Hubs. The nature of the support should match the needs of the children at the school. • Recommendation: Exclusions should always lead to an intervention. When a child is removed from the classroom, whether through internal exclusion, suspension, permanent exclusion, a managed move or implementation of a ‘part time timetable’, this should be an opportunity to learn about the child’s underlying needs. A child’s needs should be assessed and a plan to address any underlying issues should be implemented, jointly agreed with the child, school, local authority, and where applicable with the alternative provider (AP). Key recommendation for the youth justice system include: • Recommendation: An ambitious national reform that re-designs the secure care system to prioritise treating children who offend, first and foremost, as children in need of specialised support. The Department for Education (DfE) should be responsible for the delivery of all core services for children in the youth justice system and there should no longer be continued attempts to reform an unsatisfactory youth justice estate that fails to meet these children’s complex needs. This new system must be based primarily upon a therapeutic model of care developed by DfE and NHS England. It must be delivered in smaller, homely settings close to where children live and there should be a clear, time-bound plan to phase out all Young Offender Institutions (YOI) and Secure Training Centres (STC). Key interim recommendations for the youth justice system In the meantime, a number of interim recommendations are necessary to better support children currently in secure settings. These measures aim to support children’s educational experiences and care while the broader systemic reforms are developed and implemented. • Recommendation: Every secure setting must have a Youth Council where children can serve as representatives, meeting monthly and providing feedback to staff. This ensures that every child has a formalised process for expressing their voice on issues that matter to them. The views of each Youth Council should be shared to the Ministry of Justice and the Children’s Commissioner’s Office on a quarterly basis to amplify their voices and advocate for the creation of policy change that is informed by their insights and lived experiences. • Recommendation: The youth sentencing framework should be amended to prohibit sentences with custodial periods that are less than 12 months. Instead, multi-agency community-based interventions should be used to address the underlying causes of offending for children. Alongside this, strong sentencing guidelines and safeguards must be established to prevent up-tariffing. • Recommendation: Vocational education pathways provided by secure settings must always include genuine opportunities for children to undertake traineeships and job trainings in the community. Children must have the opportunity to complete all courses within a pathway to achieve a recognised qualification. Every pathway must have a direct link to how it will support their lives outside of a secure setting depending on their sentence length and how it meets regional employment and skill needs. An educational staff member role should be created that is focused on connecting local employers with children completing vocational pathways. • Recommendation: The governors of secure settings should be included in the procurement and commissioning process of education providers by the Ministry of Justice. The contract should also be amended to enable secure settings to have greater flexibility and authority to coordinate the work of education professionals with residential care, health and psychology staff to ensure a holistic and individualised approach that supports the progress of every child. Secure settings should also be able to draw upon the teaching expertise of local schools, academy trusts, colleges and alternative provisions. This might include enabling local teachers to teach at a secure setting or supporting children to continue with their existing educational courses to maintain continuity in their learning and facilitate a smoother transition back into the community  

London: The Children's Commissioner, 2025. 89p.

By Raul Armenta

Despite accounting for 12 percent of the U.S. population, young adults ages 18 to 24 accounted for nearly 20 percent of the people arrested for all causes in the United States in 2019, and have a higher probability of being reincarcerated than older age groups when they leave jail or prison.1 California is a microcosm of these larger incarceration trends, with young adults overrepresented in its criminal legal system and likely to be reincarcerated after being released.2 In Los Angeles (LA) County, approximately 9,000 young people have been referred to probation, with a disproportionate number of Black and Latino young people affected compared with their White peers.3 Significant evidence indicates that young adults have not yet reached a state of full neurological and cognitive maturity, shaping their decision-making.4 This fact may partly explain their overrepresentation in the legal system. Yet these young people are routi nely processed by the same courts as older adults, overlooking their level of neurocognitive development―that is, their thinking and reasoning skills―and the extent to which they are able to make well-informed decisions. Additionally, young people’s involvement in the criminal legal system often leads to their growing distrust of the system when they perceive court outcomes as unfair.5 Various programs aim to reduce the involvement of young adults in the criminal legal system. These programs take into account the implications of standard court processes outlined above for young people as they attempt to implement the latest understanding of cognitive behavioral treatment, which asserts that helping young people change patterns of thoughts and emotions can support desired changes in behavior. Young people tend to respond pos the population they serve, including past involvement in the criminal legal system—who understand and respond appropriately to their different values, attitudes, and beliefs. Credible messengers also provide a sense of community and belonging that are critical at this stage of development.6 Programs employing credible-messenger mentors show promise for reducing reincarceration among young adults entangled in the criminal legal system.7 Youth Overcoming (YO!) is one such program aiming to serve young people who have been arrested, convicted, or incarcerated. It receives funding from the Senate Bill Community Corrections Performance Incentives Act (SB 678) and Assembly Bill 109. The LA County Justice, Care and Opportunities Department (JCOD), in partnership with the LA County Probation Department, invested these funds in YO! as a replacement for other programs for young people that were based on adult models of rehabilitation.8 MDRC conducted an exploratory study of two YO! program locations as part of a larger project that includes several implementation and outcome evaluations of JCOD’s reentry programs.9 This brief presents the findings from that study. It examines how program leaders, staff members, and participants experience the program, and describes successes and challenges across both program locations that could potentially inform program refinement and expansion going forward.

New York: MDRC, 2025. 12p.

By Kathy Hampson, Anne-Marie Day

Children who offend generally receive community sentences, to help them overcome difficulties whilst naturally addressing offending behaviour; however, children can also receive custody, which has a plethora of known harms. Children’s rights instruments call for custody to be reserved as a ‘last resort’ response to extremely serious offending. However, in England and Wales this is demonstrably not the case, meaning that children still receive short custody orders (in the form of a Detention and Training Order [DTO]) for relatively minor offences. We argue that legislative change should abolish the DTO because of the harms custody wreaks, from several different perspectives (their rights, moral treatment of children, sentencing guidelines, practical and financial considerations), to leave the use of custody only possible for very serious offending, and thus reaching the goal of ‘last resort’.

The British Journal of Criminology, 2025, XX, 1–18p.

By Haley Walker,

This article explores the intersect between mentally ill youth and the juvenile justice system. Mentally ill youth are disproportionately represented at every stage in the juvenile justice system due to their symptoms being mistaken for delinquent behavior. This stems from the legislators

reforming the juvenile justice system from rehabilitative to punitive over the years in an attempt to hold delinquent youth accountable for their actions. Federal statutes have been enacted and federally funded programs have been implemented that seek to address the mental health crisis in today’s youth and keep mentally ill youth out of the juvenile justice system. This article discusses the goals, regulations, and guidelines set forth by these statutes and programs along with the shortcomings that are faced when they are actually put into practice. This article then gives suggestions to improve these statutes and programs based on current research that has proven to be successful

22(2) Marq. Ben & Soc. Welfare L. Rev. 147 (Spring 2021)

By The Southern Poverty Law Center

When it comes to Georgia’s approach to its youth legal system, the past is prologue. Policies that emphasize youth incarceration over rehabilitation have political roots going back decades in the state. Rather than providing young people with needed services, this approach has led to vast racial disparities, systematic school pushout, well-documented harms meriting federal intervention, and significant fiscal waste. This report explores the policies and practices of Georgia’s youth legal system, as well as the political culture that undergirds it. Georgia has a youth legal system that is designed to incarcerate and punish, not restore or rehabilitate children.

• Georgia has a history of “tough on crime” laws, even though youth crime decreased by 80% in the state between 2000 and 2020. • Georgia is one of the few states in the U.S. that prosecutes 17-yearolds as adults and prosecutes children as young as 13 as adults for certain offenses – detaining them in adult facilities. • Georgia’s youth detention facilities have a well-documented history of physical and sexual abuse – including the death of three teenagers within weeks of each other in 2022. • Georgia’s Macon Youth Development Campus for incarcerated girls is the fourthmost sexually abusive detainment facility in the U.S., according to a national survey. 4 Georgia has a school-to-prison pipeline that is fueled by a reliance on zero-tolerance policies and alternative schools. • While Black children in Georgia’s schools make up 37.5% of students, they also make up well over half of all out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and assignments to alternative schools. • Several Georgia alternative schools, designed to educate students deemed too “disruptive” for traditional school, have dropout rates higher than their graduation rates. • Georgia’s zero-tolerance policies often lead to the suspension of students for minor infractions like vaping, which produced over 22,000 disciplinary actions in the 2022-23 school year. • Only 4.8% of incarcerated children educated in Georgia’s detention facilities tested as “proficient” or better on their 2022-23 end-of-grade assessments, with 29.9% dropping out of school that same year. Georgia’s youth legal system is fiscally wasteful and disproportionately impacts Black children. • Black youth in Georgia are more than twice as likely to be charged with an offense compared to their white counterparts, and more than three times as likely to be charged in court as an adult. • Black youth make up 35.5% of youth in Georgia, but comprise over 60% of all youth court referrals, delinquent adjudications, youth that are incarcerated, and youth sentenced in adult court. • Georgia spends $217,517 annually to incarcerate a child in its system, only to produce a threeyear recidivism rate of 35.1%.Policy reforms in Georgia should commit to a system designed to disrupt the schoolto-prison pipeline, reduce harm to children, and rehabilitate young people in a costproductive way. The Southern Poverty Law Center recommends: 1. Georgia should raise the minimum age of youth incarceration and prosecution to at least 14 years old, while ending the practice of charging and prosecuting 17-year-olds as adults. 2. Georgia schools should enforce fair and consistent due process hearings and end the use of zero-tolerance policies. 3. Georgia should make nonviolent offenses, especially technical violations and minor drug offenses, nonjailable for children. 4. Georgia should prohibit the assessment and collection of court fines and fees against children. 5. Georgia should create more opportunities for diversion and invest greater resources in community-based alternatives to incarceration. 6. Georgia should ban the practice of incarcerating youth in adult facilities and sentencing youth to life without parole.

Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2024. 26p.

By Richard Mendel

A detailed analysis of news coverage at six media outlets in the Baltimore area during the first half of 2024 finds that they have been providing their audiences with skewed and misleading information about youth crime. Problematic coverage has been more frequent at the four local TV news stations analyzed than the two newspapers reviewed and especially prevalent on one local station, WBFF Fox45.

For decades media scholars have noted that local news coverage is often sensationalized and framed in ways that heighten public fears of youthful offending. And this tendency has continued since the outset of the pandemic. This coverage has likely contributed to a shift in public opinion toward tough-sounding policies that conflict with the evidence on what works to reduce youth crime and promote youth success. Indeed, problematic coverage appears to have been a factor behind the bipartisan passage of a juvenile justice bill in Maryland in April 2024 that rolled back evidence-based reforms enacted only two years earlier. The new law imposes harsher responses on youth that are not grounded in research and that are likely to worsen crime, damage young people’s futures, and exacerbate the Maryland youth justice system’s already severe racial and ethnic disparities.

Specifically, this analysis of local news coverage in Baltimore reveals:

Disproportionate focus on crimes committed by youth. All six local media outlets in Baltimore, but especially TV news stations (and particularly Fox45), highlighted crimes by young people far out of proportion with their arrest rates.

Misleading representation of youth crime trends. Whereas the available data on youth offending rates in Baltimore show a mix of trends, most of them favorable, all six local media outlets repeatedly asserted a recent spike in youth crime and violence.

Failure to support assertions of rising youth crime rates with accurate and representative statistics. All six of the news outlets often made or echoed claims about rising youth offending rates either without providing statistical evidence, or – when they did offer statistics – doing so in problematic ways.

Widespread use of fear-inducing rhetoric about youth crime. All six outlets published stories that included rhetoric suggesting that youth crime in Baltimore was rampant or out of control.

Fox45, relative to other news outlets, was much more likely to air sensationalized coverage highlighting youth crime incidents and perceived leniency in the justice system. Each of the problems described above were an order of magnitude more intense on Fox45. On that station, viewers were presented with a steady stream of often lengthy stories offering graphic footage of youth crime incidents as well as sharp and fear-inducing rhetoric from select victims, witnesses, experts, and community residents.

The tone of the Fox45 coverage, and to a lesser extent the coverage at other news outlets, fostered an atmosphere of panic around youth crime during Maryland’s 2024 legislative session. The problematic media coverage in Baltimore (the state’s largest city and home to the State Senate President and the Speaker of the House of Delegates) likely contributed to a bipartisan rush to toughen juvenile justice policies that is unsupported by the evidence of what actually works to reduce youth offending and maintain community safety.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2024. 16p.

By Amber Farn and Michael Umpierre

Authored in partnership with the Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators (CJJA) and with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew), this publication provides an overview of research related to length of stay and lessons learned from the Length of Stay Policy Academy hosted by CJJR and CJJA in 2020 with support from Pew. The report features length of stay efforts from the jurisdictions that participated in the Academy, including Bexar County, Texas; Idaho; Maryland; New York City, New York; and Oklahoma, as well as other states that have led related initiatives such as Arkansas, Illinois, and Utah. Policymakers.

Washington, DC: Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University, 2023. 33p.

By Hazel Kemshall

HM Inspectorate of Probation is committed to reviewing, developing and promoting the evidence base for high-quality probation and youth offending services. Academic Insights are aimed at all those with an interest in the evidence base. We commission leading academics to present their views on specific topics, assisting with informed debate and aiding understanding of what helps and what hinders probation and youth offending services. This report was kindly produced by Professor Hazel Kemshall, summarising key learning for practitioners and organisations in relation to risk management. Practitioners are often required to make decisions in challenging situations with incomplete information, and it is thus important to pay attention to the potential influence of subjective biases and individual emotions and values. To minimise error and ensure that decisions are balanced, reasoned and well-evidenced, practitioners need to seek and critically appraise information, and adopt an open, honest and reflective approach….

Manchester: HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2021. 16p.

By Katie Hunter

This thesis is concerned with the overrepresentation of black and minority ethnic (BME) children and looked after children, in the youth justice system in general and the secure state in particular, in England and Wales. In the period 1993 to 2008, youth justice was characterised by a process of extensive penal expansion. Since 2008, however, the child prison population has fallen dramatically. The decline has been linked to pragmatic cost reduction as well as an increase in diversionary measures which keep children out of the system altogether. However, BME children and looked after children have not benefited from this decline to the same extent as white children and non-looked after children. The contraction in the system has served to intensify existing inequalities. This thesis interrogates the nature and extent of the overrepresentation of these groups. It employs a mixed-methods approach which involves analyses of secondary data and in-depth interviews with 27 national youth justice and children’s services professionals. This thesis builds upon and extends previous research, it determines that BME children are criminalised through ‘institutional racialisation’ which operates on micro, meso and macro levels. The thesis signals policing as having a particularly powerful influence on the levels of BME children in the system. The weight of these findings lie precisely in the fact that they are so longstanding. …

Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 2019. 307p.

By Tim Bateman, Anne-Marie Day and John Pitts

Although there are some important limitations with the data, the available evidence demonstrates conclusively that children who are in the care of the local authority are consistently over-represented among those who come to the attention of the youth justice system. A similar disproportionality is also evident within the children’s custodial estate. While it appears that the relationship is long-standing, it has only recently become the focus of policy attention which has begun to explore some of the reasons for the patterns discernible in the figures (see, for example, Schofield et al, 2012: Laming, 2016). In particular, an independent review of the relationship between the care system and the criminal justice system, led by Lord Laming, commissioned an extensive exploration of the available literature that provides a useful baseline for future research (Staines, 2016). The current review aims to provide a context for research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, that aims to identity the particular pathways of looked after children into, through and leaving custody and to establish in what ways, and to what extent, these might differ from those of children who do not have care experience. It does not accordingly aim to replicate the earlier work identified in the previous paragraph; instead the intention is to draw on previous reviews, and relevant additional material, through a lens that focuses on the existing evidence base as it relates specifically to the likelihood of children being incarcerated, to their subsequent custodial experience and to the provision of effective resettlement once they have been released.

Luton: University of Bedfordshire, 2018. 37p.

By Zhen Zeng, E. Ann Carson, and Rich Kluckow

Juveniles (persons age 17 or younger) arrested or convicted for a criminal offense may be housed in juvenile residential facilities or in adult jails and prisons, depending on state statute, judicial discretion, and federal law. This report details trends for juveniles who are held in adult facilities. Key Findings ƒ The number of juveniles incarcerated in all U.S. adult prisons or jails declined from a peak of 10,420 in 2008 to a low of 2,250 in 2021. In 2021, local jails had custody of 1,960 juveniles while state and federal adult prisons held 290. The percent of the total jail population who were juveniles declined from 0.9% in 2002 to 0.3% in 2021. The percent of the total prison population who were juveniles declined from 0.2% in 2002 to 0.02% in 2021. In 2021, 87% of juveniles in adult correctional facilities were held in local jails and 13% were held in prisons, compared to 66% in local jails and 34% in prisons in 2002, the earliest year for which comparable data are available for both populations

Just the Stats Series. Washington DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice 2023. 5p.

By Richard Mendel

As The Sentencing Project documented in Why Youth Incarceration Fails: An Updated Review of the Evidence, compelling research proves that incarceration is not necessary or effective in the vast majority of delinquency cases. Rather, incarceration most often increases young people’s likelihood of returning to the justice system. Incarceration also damages young people’s future success in education and employment. Further, it exposes young people, many of whom are already traumatized, to abuse, and it contradicts the clear lessons of adolescent development research. These harms of incarceration are inflicted disproportionately on Black youth and other youth of color. Reversing America’s continuing overreliance on incarceration will require two sets of complementary reforms. First, it will require far greater use of effective alternative-to-incarceration programs for youth who have committed serious offenses and might otherwise face incarceration. Second, it will require extensive reforms to state and local youth justice systems, most of which continue to employ problematic policies and practices that can undermine the success of alternative programs and often lead to incarceration of youth who pose minimal risk to public safety. This report addresses the first challenge: What kinds of interventions can youth justice systems offer in lieu of incarceration for youth who pose a significant risk to public safety?1 Specifically, it identifies six program models that consistently produce better results than incarceration, and it details the essential characteristics required for any alternative-to-incarceration program – including homegrown programs developed by local justice system leaders and community partners – to reduce young people’s likelihood of reoffending and steer them to success.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2023. 33p.

By  Anne-Marie Day, Tim Bateman and John Pitts

  It is well documented that children in care – those looked-after by the local authority – are over-represented in the youth justice system.1 In recent years, the relationship between care and crime has begun to receive increasing academic and policy attention, culminating, in 2018, in the government publishing a national protocol to reduce unnecessary criminalisation of children in care and improve the criminal justice responses when they do enter the youth justice system. The use of child imprisonment has fallen dramatically over the past decade, but the experiences of children confined in the secure estate has worsened, leading to widespread acknowledgement that the incarceration of children is damaging and counterproductive and that existing provision is not fit for purpose. Looked-after children who come into contact with the justice system are seven times more likely to be detained than their non-care equivalents, but little is known about the factors leading to such over-representation or the differential experiences of children in care while in detention. This report bridges that evidence gap by considering the relationship between care and imprisonment. The research on which it draws, across the nine local authorities in the South and West Yorkshire Resettlement Consortium (SWYC) area, explored the pathways of looked-after children into, through and out of the custodial estate. A comparative approach allowed the identification of the extent to which those pathways differ for children in care and those who are not.

Bedminster, UK: University of Bedminster, 2020. 79p.

By Josh Rovner

The Sentencing Project, in its national survey of life and virtual life sentences in the United States found 1,465 people serving JLWOP sentences at the start of 2020. This number reflects a 38% drop in the population of people serving JLWOP since our 2016 count and a 44% drop since the peak count of JLWOP figures in 2012.1 This count continues to decline as more states eliminate JLWOP. In five decisions – Roper v. Simmons (2005), Graham v. Florida (2010), Miller v. Alabama (2012), Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016), and Jones v. Mississippi (2021) – the Supreme Court of the United States establishes and upholds the fact that “children are constitutionally different from adults in their levels of culpability”2 when it comes to sentencing. Differences in maturity and accountability informs the protections of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment that limits sentencing a child to die in prison. Research on adolescent brain development confirms the commonsense understanding that children are different from adults in ways that are critical to identifying age-appropriate criminal sentences. This understanding – Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy called it what “any parent knows”3 – was central to the recent Supreme Court decisions excluding people under 18 from the harshest sentencing practices. Starting in 2005, Roper struck down the death penalty for people under 18…...  

Washington DC: The Sentencing Project, 2023.  6p.

By Christina A. Sorenson

Screaming Into The Void: Youth Voice in Institutional Placements is a report written by 2019 Soros Justice Fellow Christina K. Sorenson. This comprehensive report includes a personal anthology, a historical analysis, a review of the current state of affairs, an in-depth look at Pennsylvania, and a 51- jurisdictional research survey of youth grievance protections in institutional placements across the dependency and delinquency systems. The historical analysis is limited but essential to understanding the current system's failures and the need for system re-imagining.

The regularity of out-of-state placement necessitates a national perspective. The complicated intersection of federal and state laws exists ostensibly to protect the children we incarcerate. However, the research in this report unequivocally proves that nationwide, our oversight systems systematically dis-empower youth, hide abuses and limit liability.

Organized around three core components: See Youth, Hear Youth, and Protect Youth, this report weaves an existing analysis of protections across the county with multi-disciplinary recommendations and approaches. Finally, there is a curriculum developed by expert Antonio Thomas, to help jurisdictions work directly in partnership with youth to develop youth-centered grievance protections.

The purpose of this report is not to offer an answer, a model, or a template for grievance protection. Instead, the history, state statutory and regulatory review, and curriculum aim to supply the resources necessary for policy-makers and advocates to empower and include local youth with lived experience in imagining and implementing effective youth-centered grievance protections.
Philadelphia: Juvenile Law Center, 2023. 108p.

By Patricia Soung

The dramatic growth of prison populations in the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century, as well as the problems of over-policing and police misconduct, have been well documented and decried.1 But the related expansion and problems of community supervision receive far less attention. Across the nation, reform efforts have increasingly included a focus on probation, especially juvenile probation, as an actor that both jails and polices youth in the community while also trying to rehabilitate them and promote their well-being. This Article studies the juvenile probation system, with a focus on California as one important system aiming to both surveil and care for individuals. It draws together two frameworks: 1) law and policy which describe the juvenile probation system as intended, and 2) juvenile probation practices and attitudes which reveal the day-to-day translation of the system’s formal intentions. Ultimately, where a system’s approach to rehabilitation and accountability become synonymous with or too reflexively able to adopt surveillance, containment, and punishment orientations, its ability to deliver meaningful help and support through that same system is improbable. Thus, this Article discusses the need in the United States to reform, dismantle, or replace probation with youth development-focused systems and uses Los Angeles as an example of a government already doing this important work

.112 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 549 (2022).

By Ben Finholt, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi, and Kristen M. Renberg 

Life without parole (LWOP) is “an especially harsh punishment for a juvenile,” as the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Graham v. Florida. The United States is the only country in the world that imposes juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) sentences. Many of these individuals were sentenced during a surge in LWOP sentencing in the 1990s. In the past decade, following several Supreme Court rulings eliminating mandatory sentences of LWOP for juvenile offenders, such sentencing has declined. This Article aims to empirically assess the rise and then the fall in JLWOP sentencing in a leading sentencing state, North Carolina, to better understand these trends and their implications.

We examine the cases of ninety-four North Carolina juveniles, aged thirteen to seventeen at the time of their offenses, who were sentenced to JLWOP. Of those, forty-nine are currently serving LWOP sentences. In North Carolina, JLWOP sentencing has markedly declined. Since 2011, there have been only five of such sentences. Of the group of ninety-four juvenile offenders, forty-four have so far been resentenced to non-LWOP sentences—largely pursuant to the post-Miller v. Alabama legislation passed in North Carolina. These JLWOP sentences are primarily concentrated in a small group of counties. A total of 61% (fifty-seven of the ninety-four) JLWOP sentences in North Carolina were entered in one of the eleven counties that have imposed more than three JLWOP sentences. We find a path dependency to these sentences: once a county has imposed a JLWOP sentence, it has a higher probability of imposing a JLWOP sentence again in the future. In contrast, homicide rates are not predictive of JLWOP sentences. We question what goals JLWOP serves, given what an inconsistently used, uncommon, geographically limited, and costly sentence it has been in practice. In conclusion, we describe alternatives to JLWOP, including the model adopted in states such as California and Wyoming, in which there is periodic review of lengthy sentences imposed on juvenile offenders.

110 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 141 (2020).

By Ashley Nellis and Niki Monazzam

  Beginning at age 18, U.S. laws typically require persons charged with a crime to have their case heard in criminal rather than juvenile court, where penalties are more severe.1 The justification for this is that people are essentially adults by age 18, yet this conceptualization of adulthood is flawed. The identification of full criminal accountability at age 18 ignores the important, distinct phase of human development referred to as emerging adulthood, also known as late adolescence or young adulthood.2 Compelling evidence shows that most adolescents are not fully matured into adulthood until their mid-twenties.3 The legal demarcation of 18 as adulthood rests on outdated notions of adolescence. Based on the best scientific understanding of human development, ages 18 to 25 mark a unique stage of life between childhood and adulthood which is recognized within the fields of neuroscience, sociology, and psychology. Thus, there is growing support for providing incarcerated people who were young at the time of their offense a second look at their original sentence to account for their diminished capacity. A 2022 study found similar levels of public support for providing a second look at prison sentences for crimes committed under age 18 as for those committed under age 25.4 This brief proceeds in three sections: • Analysis based on a newly compiled nationally representative dataset of nearly 30,000 individuals sentenced to life without parole (LWOP) between 1995 and 2017. • Research review on adolescent brain development revealing that emerging adults share more characteristics with youth than adults. • Judicial, legislative, and administrative reform updates in nine jurisdictions: California, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Vermont, Washington, Washington, DC, and Wyoming.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2023. 22p.