As he announced the deployment of National Guard troops to the streets of our nation’s capital, despite crime being at historic lows in Washington, President Trump also called for prosecuting 14-year-olds as adults in the city. His top prosecutor for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, has slammed the city’s more recent efforts at youth justice reform, one-upping Trump by calling for trying 12-year-olds as adults and for repeal of the District’s Youth Rehabilitation Act.
The subtext of that idea is obvious: adult crime for adult time.
A similar bipartisan moral panic gripped the nation in the 1990s, when Princeton Professor John DiIulio called America’s youth “a rising tide of juvenile superpredators” who were “fatherless, godless, and without conscience,” claiming that “all that’s left of the Black community in some pockets of urban America is deviant, delinquent and criminal adults surrounded by severely abused and neglected children, virtually all of whom were born out of wedlock.” Far from being shunned for these racialized pronouncements, DiIulio was elevated by President George H.W. Bush to be the nation’s first “Faith Czar” and his superpredator epithet was echoed by then-First Lady Hilary Clinton.
DiIulio’s forecast of doom and gloom were way off as crime by young people had already begun what would become a decades-long decline; he has even admitted and apologized for its consequences. The Trump administration’s fear mongering is far less defensible because we now have abundant evidence that locking kids up with adults is abysmal for both public safety and human decency.
But maybe the president’s approach isn’t about crime at all. As he recently noted, “I think crime will be the big subject of the midterms and will be the big subject of the next election … I think it’s going to be a big, big subject for the midterms and I think the Republicans are going to do really well.”
The president’s eagerness to adultify high school freshmen reminded me of the deplorable conditions for juveniles I witnessed when I visited adolescent solitary confinement in New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail as a city official in 2014. It was shortly after U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara issued a scathing 79-page report describing a “deep-seated culture of violence” against youth in Rikers. New York was then one of only three states where 16- and 17-year-olds were uniformly tried and jailed as adults.
Adolescent solitary confinement — a practice increasingly banned nationally and in Washington, D.C., due to its debilitating impact — was so full on the day I toured that there was a waiting list to get in. This meant that if young people were sent to 60 days in “the hole,” they had to wait for an opening. Even if one accepts the notion that youth should ever be in solitary, this Kafkaesque approach is exactly the opposite of the swiftness behavioral scientists (and parents) say matter in curbing misbehavior. It was merely punishment for punishment’s sake, outcomes be damned.
None of the youth had been out of their cells in over 24 hours, a violation of not only human rights standards, but of the city’s departmental policy. I asked one youth why, and he informed me that they were awakened pre-dawn and offered a solitary walk in what he called a “dog run,” an entirely fenced in narrow walkway, as their recreation. Better to sleep one more hour in his lonely cell, he felt.
The tour (and all of the facility’s programs, including school) was interrupted numerous times by what the kids called “the turtles” — flying squads of correctional officers with baseball bat-length batons, helmets and body armor reminiscent of the cartoon-character “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” — for even minor misbehavior. One turtle-involved shut down involved a single girl refusing to return to her cell.
So Bharara’s findings that Rikers staff used solitary confinement and unnecessary force at “an alarming rate” came as no surprise. He also found that staff took youth to secluded areas outside the view of video cameras for beatings and that the violence was so bad in the jails that some youth actually requested to be isolated.
The wounds experienced by youth in adult prisons don’t only harm them, they potentially hurt the rest of us as well. Physical and sexual abuse of adolescents in adult prisons and jails is significantly higher than in juvenile facilities and life expectancy is lower, meaning that adult imprisonment literally kills kids. Not surprisingly, research summarized by the Centers for Disease Control found that “the adult criminal justice system typically increases rather than decreases rates of violence” among youth tried as adults. Researchers who interviewed youth in adult and juvenile facilities quoted a young person who had been in both explaining why:
“When I was in juvenile programs, they were telling me that I am somebody and that I can change my ways, and get back on the right tracks. In here, they tell me I am nobody and I never will be anybody.”
Buoyed by research like this, states around the country passed legislation to reduce the number of youth tried as adults. Between 2000 and 2022, half of all states passed laws reducing mandates that young people be tried as adults for certain alleged crimes. From 1997 to 2022, there was an 84% decline in the number of youth confined in adult jails and prisons nationally. Contrary to what tough-on-crime rhetoric predicts from such lenient treatment, youth crime actually fell nationally by 80% from its peak in 1996 to 2020.
We have also learned a lot in this period about what is effective. During my tenure at the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services, we launched the Thrive Academy to help reduce the alarming rate of gun violence by and against youth under our supervision. With the help of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, we examined 30,000 case files spanning more than three years and targeted credible messenger mentoring, stipends for performance, education and employment assistance, and youth and family relocation, if necessary. Nearly two years later, none of the Thrive youth — who were at highest risk of gun violence in the communities with the greatest number of youth killings — were killed and fewer than two percent were nonfatal shooting victims. Four out of five had no new gun charges against them.
I am concerned that some of this progress has slowed or even reversed, and Trump’s bombast won’t help. My home state of Maryland incarcerates more youth in our adult prisons per capita than every state except Alabama, at a rate twice the national average and at an annual cost of around $20 million. Yet legislation to return the decision as to whether a youth should be tried as an adult to judges, rather than having it be automatic — which was sponsored by State Sen. William Smith, the chair of the Judicial Proceedings Committee and supported by the Attorney General and the state’s last two chief judges — failed to even come out of committee last year, despite record declines in youth homicides here. To his credit, he has vowed to reintroduce that legislation this year.
Despite the lowest number of shootings and murders in New York City in recorded history this year, legislation to require all youth accused of a violent felony to be tried as adults has been introduced. And it’s a change that New York’s Democrat Governor, Kathy Hochul, has indicated she is willing to consider.
Within 100 days of taking office in 2014, Louisiana’s Republican governor was able to pass a raft of tough-on-juvenile-crime laws, including one lowering the age of Louisiana’s juvenile courts to 17.
The two decades preceding the pandemic gave the lie to Trump’s notion that we need to lock up more kids to be safe from crime. Youth crime and incarceration can and did decline dramatically and simultaneously. Rather than reach for bromides following shocking crimes, policymakers should follow evidence about what works to help young people get back on the right track.
