When I stepped down as commissioner of the New York State Office of Children and Family Services in 2013, I was proud of what I and my team — working in collaboration with an array of public agencies and community partners — had achieved. Over the course of seven years, we closed 21 of the state’s notoriously abusive upstate youth prisons, developed a robust network of community-based support, and passed a bill that keeps New York City’s adjudicated youth within the five boroughs. In the process, we helped make the city safer. As the Close to Home initiative went into effect and young people started receiving support in the community, youth arrests in New York City fell by more than half.
As glad as I was of these changes, I always understood that they were fragile. The history of juvenile justice in this country is one of pendulum swings between the goal of rehabilitation and the impulse to punish. Today, that pendulum is tipping back towards the punitive approach that led to a near-doubling of the number of youth behind bars during the 1990s. For those of us who believe that all youth are capable of change with the right support and opportunities — and that large, distant, institutional youth prisons are factories of failure — now is the time to stand together and fight to preserve the progress of the past 20 years.
The scope of that progress is remarkable. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of youth behind bars in this country dropped by 75 percent, going from more than 100,000 to fewer than 25,000. Youth crime plummeted over the same period, underscoring what we know from both research and experience: we don’t need to lock up our kids to be safe.
Bringing this to pass required decades of collaborative effort on the part of formerly incarcerated youth and parent activists, advocates, attorneys and others across the country. At the system level, youth correctional administrators did our part by looking at the evidence, taking the pulse inside our institutions, and working from the inside to move away from youth prisons and towards community-driven models of safety and justice. In 2019, we came together to launch Youth Correctional Leaders for Justice, a coalition of more than 70 current and former leaders of youth justice systems around the country. Many of us have partnered with our communities to develop and implement innovative, community-driven responses that produce far better results than we’ve ever seen from incarceration and other “tough on crime” approaches.
Then came the pandemic, which stripped away school, recreation and virtually every other form of social support. This contributed to a temporary uptick in certain youth crimes and sparked a backlash against the reforms of the past two decades. After a sustained drop, the number of youth behind bars rose slightly in 2022 as several states passed laws dialing back reforms and imposing harsher penalties.
In Louisiana, lawmakers reversed an earlier “raise the age” law, returning 17-year-olds to the adult system. In North Carolina, legislators overrode the governor’s veto to push through a law sending more teens to adult court. In Connecticut, legislators used a temporary uptick in carjackings to toughen penalties in juvenile court. And, after decades of decarceration and falling youth crime, a handful of states have made plans to invest millions of dollars in building new youth prisons or expanding existing ones.
Youth crime has since returned to historic lows, but the backlash is still going strong, fueled by the same kind of racially charged rhetoric that brought us the “superpredator” in the 1990s. Once again, politicians and the media are using isolated incidents to whip up fear and win votes and clicks. And once again, Black and brown youth are bearing the brunt.
Even during the years of reform and transformation, racial disparities in the youth justice system proved intransigent. In 2003, Black youth were 3.7 times more likely to be locked up than were white youth. Today, Black youth are 4.6 times more likely to be incarcerated. I saw what this looks like firsthand when I was commissioner in New York State. At each institution I visited, I saw cell blocks filled with Black and brown children from neighborhoods like the one where I grew up in the South Bronx. This experience showed me the importance of changing not only public systems but also public attitudes. As long as we see Black and brown youth as less than other children — scarier, less amenable to rehabilitation, or simply less deserving of care and understanding — any gains we make are tenuous.
In this volatile moment, my colleagues and I at Youth Correctional Leaders for Justice remain determined to stave off the backlash and sustain and expand on the progress that has been made. Today we released a statement outlining a detailed vision for transforming youth justice. Grounded in evidence as well as our own experience, our vision revolves around four central tenets:
- Whenever possible, divert youth from the formal criminal legal system and support them in their own homes and communities.
- Invest in a diverse array of support that will help young people grow and thrive.
- Strengthen and scale community violence intervention programs to address the root causes of gun violence.
- When safety requires temporarily removing a young person from home, provide a homelike, nurturing, non-prison environment.
Our plan may be detailed but our message is simple: we must keep moving forward. That means caring for system-involved youth in the same way we care for our own children, not giving up on them and putting them in cells.
We’ve tried that route before and we know it doesn’t work. Now is the time to build on the lessons of two decades of transformation, not abandon them and another generation of children.
