New York Is One of Only Two States That Puts Teens in Adult Jails

The lawmakers are hopeful that they can pass the legislation in the next session. "I don't want to toot our own horn, but we have been able to achieve a lot of things that have been bottled up for a long time. $15 minimum wage. Paid family leave, which we talked about since the beginning of time. This is something that is extremely important to me," Jeff Klein, leader of the State Senate's Independent Democratic Conference, told NY 1.

But this reform is long overdue. "It's a failed relic from the 'tough on crime' era," Joshua Rovner, a state advocacy associate who works with the Sentencing Project, explained. "It doesn't do anything to reduce offending or increase public safety. That has not been shown to the be case at all." Lawmakers pushing for reform say that teens who are jailed with adults are more likely to commit future crimes.

Indeed, in supposedly one of the most progressive states in the union, the policy is not only backwards, but devastating. Sixteen and 17-year-olds who are charged with a crime are automatically seen as adults in the eyes of the law, which has funneled children awaiting a trial in facilities like Rikers Island, one of the most notoriously violent jails in America. Kalief Browder, who committed suicide after spending three years at Rikers without being convicted of a single crime, was 16 when he was accused of stealing a backpack.

According to Justice League NYC, a taskforce of juvenile and criminal justice experts, 45,000 teenagers are put into adult prisons every year in New York. Raising the age of criminal responsibility would allow all minors to be held in a juvenile facility where they are less vulnerable to abuse by correctional staff or other inmates. According to the Campaign for Youth Justice, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission found that more than any other group of incarcerated persons, youth incarcerated with adults are probably at the highest risk for sexual abuse.

"Juvenile facilities are much more equipped to deal with teenagers because that's who they're built to serve," Rovner said. "That's not to say that every juvenile facility is a good place; the right place for a teenager to be is at home with his or her family and community. But, certainly, they are more equipped than an adult facility, both at a staff level and a facility level, to help a teenager in conflict with the law."

North Carolina, a state with a government that has passed anti-trans laws and has been said to be "only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world," is the only other state that puts kids at risk by automatically procescuting them as adults, regardless of their alleged crimes.

"States like Louisiana and South Carolina have recently raised their age to 18 and New York is an outlier. New York State can look next door to Connecticut, which used to be one of those states where 16-year-olds were magically adults when they committed a crime. They raised their age to 18, and they have seen their overall crime rates go down for juveniles and the number of people held in juvenile facilities go down," Rovner said. "It's really time for New York to get in line with the direction the rest of the country has gone."