Each year in New York state, about 50,000 16 and 17-year-olds are prosecuted as adults, since the legal age of responsibility in New York is 16. Most of them, about three-fourths, committed misdemeanors, such as shoplifting, or were found to be in possession of marijuana, and are largely black or Latino teens.
During his State of the State address on Wednesday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo acknowledged this startling statistic and pledged to revamp the state’s age of criminal responsibility, so that 16-year-olds won’t be charged as adults, and 7-year-olds will no longer be charged as juveniles.
Only one other state, North Carolina, has a similar law. The other 48 states have laws in which the age of criminal responsibility is older than 16, which is why Cuomo’s announcement was welcomed by many.
Benjamin Todd Jealous, former president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Rosario Dawson, actress and the co-founder and chairwoman of Voto Latino, applauded the announcement and penned a joint column asking U.S. law enforcement officials to stop charging kids as adults.
“Now that the federal courts have spoken on ‘stop-and-frisk,’ many people think teens in our community have less to fear from the criminal justice system,” Jealous and Dawson wrote. “Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Far worse can happen to a child after being stopped.
“Teens are far from perfect, and they certainly are not always innocent,” the duo wrote, attempting to convince the public to support a law in the State Legislature that would raise the age of criminal responsibility. “A teen’s brain develops well into his or her 20s, and as cognitive skills improve, so does impulse control. As a result, teens are often unable to focus on the consequences of their behavior.”
While the push to keep teens from being locked behind bars may sound like a “weak on crime” ideology, Jealous and Dawson argue that there are several benefits to raising the age of criminal responsibility, since teens are highly receptive to influence and intervention.
“Far more than adults, they can unlearn delinquent behavior, respond to interventions, and learn to make responsible choices. Study after study affirms this.
“From arrest to cell, the experience of being prosecuted as an adult does violence to the life of a child. Parents are not notified of court proceedings — or even of the arrest itself. Children can be questioned without parental consent or presence. They are held in adult correctional facilities where they share rooms with real adults, the kind who put them at high risk for both sexual abuse and violence.
“Perhaps because of this, corrections officers often place children in solitary confinement, trading one kind of violence for another: the documented emotional damage that comes from prolonged isolation. Is it any surprise that compared to their counterparts in juvenile facilities, these children are 36 times more likely to take their own lives?”
In addition to the harsh conditions these teens endure while living behind bars, other consequences of having such a young age of criminal responsibility are that these kids often lose their right to vote, have unsealed criminal records that negatively affects their ability to get a job or student loans and disqualifies them from living in public housing or obtaining housing subsidies.
If that is not reason enough to change the law, Jealous and Dawson said that the “tough on crime” approach isn’t successful, and point out that children held in adult facilities are 34 percent more likely to continue living a life of crime.
“Children are different from adults, as the Supreme Court has concluded three times since 2005. We can no longer sentence children to death. Neither can we throw away the key on teens by imposing life-without-parole sentences for non-homicide offenses. Nor can we forgo judicial discretion and impose mandatory life-without-parole sentences on child offenders.”