In 2022, police in the western New York city of Jamestown arrested the mother of a child who they said was disrupting downtown businesses. About a year later, they hauled in another mom whose children allegedly hurled rocks and damaged property. Then last August, officers in Utica arrested the mother of an 11-year-old who’d reportedly committed robbery and car theft.
A 2021 law barred police from arresting children under 12, with an exception for alleged homicide charges. That reform effort was aimed at keeping young children out of the juvenile justice system and addressing racial disparities. Instead, they would receive help from community-based agencies — services tailored to their needs and those of their families, like housing, educational support or mental health care. Previously, children as young as 7 could be arrested in New York.
Youth advocates and the lawmakers who backed the 2021 reform now say there has been an unintended consequence, illustrated by the three upstate cases: the arrest and prosecution of parents.
“It appears that it’s being used, unsurprisingly, to prosecute Black and brown mothers,” said Bernadette Rabuy, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi, who sponsored the original bill, said in an email that arresting parents in such cases “flips the intent of this law on its head,” is “legally questionable” and risks creating more disruption for children already in distress. “When a child is struggling, our role is to stabilize the situation and connect their family to help — not escalate through criminalization,” he said.
Police and prosecutors involved in the three cases declined to respond to requests for comment. But in public statements, one police department contends that arresting parents is a way to hold them accountable and force them to accept services.
In the Utica case, city police consulted with the county district attorney, who chose to pursue the rarely used charge against the mother of the 11-year-old “due to the overwhelming amount of public nuisance this child has caused,” the department said in an Aug. 20 Facebook post. Every time the child committed illegal acts, his mother had been informed and offered services, the police statement said. The DA charged the mother as a last resort because her child was too young to charge. The crimes “could not continue in this manner,” they added.
Section 260: When parents pay
In each case, the New York mothers were charged with violations of section 260.10 of the state penal code, a class A misdemeanor offense. It penalizes a parent for not exercising “reasonable diligence” to prevent their child from becoming an “abused child,” “neglected child,” “juvenile delinquent” or “person in need of supervision.”
In the past, prosecutors invoked the statute against parents who didn’t seek medical care for a child, failed to protect them from harm by another caregiver or left them unsupervised. Attorneys said the recent use reflected a new tactic: leveling child endangerment charges at parents for their young children’s misbehavior.
“I’ve been a public defender for 20 years, and I never saw this subsection of 260.10 used for this purpose when I represented adults,” said Natalie Peeples, attorney-in-charge of youth justice and policy at the Legal Aid Society in New York City.
Rabuy also said she hadn’t heard of the statute being invoked for that purpose.
They describe the recent cases as an effort to get around the 2021 law raising the minimum arrest age from 7 to 12. “Now the response of a prosecutor is, ‘OK so I’ll incarcerate the parents instead,’” said Peeples. “That’s absolutely outrageous. Why are they prosecuting the parent? Is prosecuting the parent helping the child?”
A spate of parent prosecutions
In recent years, prosecutors have pursued a wave of similar cases against parents in states across the country, including Michigan, Illinois, Georgia and Tennessee. The prosecutions involve everything from very young kids caught with guns to mass shootings committed by teenagers. In 2023, the mother of a Virginia 6-year-old was sentenced to two years in prison for child neglect after her child took her unsecured weapon to school and wounded his teacher.
The three New York cases follow a similar pattern. The defendants and their attorneys could not be reached for comment.
In the latest, Utica city police arrested a 36-year-old mother on Aug. 19. In the Facebook post, they said her 11-year-old son had been tied to “at least four” felonies and “many more misdemeanors,” including a robbery and the theft of two vehicles.
Oneida County District Attorney Todd Carville confirmed by email that he charged the boy’s mother with one count of endangering the welfare of a child but said commenting on the case would be inappropriate because it’s ongoing.
So far, she has pleaded not guilty to the charge, which carries a maximum sentence of a year in prison. Her next court appearance is March 18.
That case followed two similar arrests by officers in Jamestown, in the state’s southwest corner. In November 2022, police detained and jailed a 43-year-old mom, accusing her of “failing to exercise reasonable due diligence in the control of her child” after the child was found repeatedly causing issues for downtown businesses, according to local news reports.
Just over a year later, they detained and charged another mother, 33, after police received reports that three of her children had been throwing rocks and damaging property.
“Now the response of a prosecutor is, ‘OK so I’ll incarcerate the parents instead.’ That’s absolutely outrageous.”
— Natalie Peeples, attorney-in-charge of youth justice and policy at the Legal Aid Society
Last March, she was granted a deal under which her charges will be automatically dismissed and sealed if the mother isn’t re-arrested for a year, said Jamestown City Court Chief Clerk Lisa Cannon by email.
In Utica, police signaled this might not be the last such case. In its social media post, the department noted that going forward it would “explore this charge for similar incidents and patterns, but we are hopeful that this is a last resort option as parents are willing to partner with us and community providers to ensure safe and appropriate behaviors for their children.”
Former Jamestown Police Chief Timothy Jackson, who retired in February, didn’t respond to questions from The Imprint about whether the families were offered services and how much jail time the two mothers served.
The three parents and their attorneys couldn’t be reached for comment.
Some justice experts question not only whether these tactics improve public safety, but if they are even legal. And they point to more effective alternatives.
In a 2025 California Law Review article, Cynthia Godsoe of Brooklyn Law School and Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore School of Law called such prosecutions “legally unsound and largely driven by public pressure, emotion, and the desire to hold someone — anyone — responsible.” They added that there are “no empirical findings that prosecuting parents prevents crime by minors.”
The three upstate cases lay bare the “unconscionable lack of investment in non-punitive community-based services for children and families in New York,” said José Perez, program strategist at Children’s Defense Fund New York. If the response to the 2021 law is to arrest parents, “we have not changed the mindset. We have just changed the target.”
Before he joined the Children’s Defense Fund, Perez worked with gang-involved youth at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services in New York City.
He gives NYPD officers credit for getting social service providers involved as an alternative to arrest. When police received repeated calls about a family or individual, they alerted his organization with the child’s address. Social workers would then visit, assess the situation and connect the family to help.
Police “had a pathway with the community that didn’t involve an arrest,” Perez said. “All they needed to do was make a phone call.”
Disclosure: The Redlich Horwitz Foundation, mentioned above, is a funder of Fostering Media Connections, The Imprint’s parent nonprofit.
This article has been corrected to show that Shanta Trivedi is with the University of Baltimore School of Law.
