Drawing the Line

Abstract

Every state maintains some mechanism by which youths can be tried as adults in criminal courts. While scholars have long debated the inherent benefits or detriments of prosecuting youths as adults, empirical studies of actual outcomes have provided mixed findings and have been limited by problems of selection bias and jurisdictional differences in processing. The current research aims to further inform this literature by capitalizing on a policy change in Connecticut that raised the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 17 on January 1, 2010, creating a natural experiment to assess the recidivism differences for youths based upon the system of processing: juvenile versus adult court. Findings from a 2-year follow-up reveal that 16-year-olds processed in juvenile courts had substantially reduced rates of recidivism with odds of rearrest that were between .462 and .630 less than for 16-year-olds processed in adult courts dependent on model specification. Keywords juvenile justice, waiver/transfer, age of criminal responsibility, recidivism The last quarter of the 20th century has come to be known as the "get-tough" era of juvenile justice in the United States. A real increase in youth violence in American cities (Sickmund & Snyder, 1999) coupled with media portrayal of these youths as a new breed of "super predator" put enormous pressure on policy makers and law enforcement officers to get tough on adolescent offenders (Butts & Mitchell, 2000; Cook & Laub, 2002). The response was a national movement to change both the purpose and the processing of the juvenile justice system. One of the most notable changes was a proliferation in mechanisms to transfer youths to adult courts for what was intended to be a greater punishment (Feld, 1984; Zimring, 1991). From 1992 to 1995 alone, 40 states and the District of Columbia modified legislation for trying juveniles as adults (Griffin, Torbet, & Szymanski, 1998). These laws lowered age thresholds for processing youths as adults-in some places to as young as 12 years of age-designated large categories of offenses for transfer, and shifted power in transfer

A proven reoffending study of individuals managed under the multi-agency public protection arrangements (MAPPA) in England and Wales

“…However, limited research has investigated the mechanisms and interacting variables underlying this (Doren, 2006 ). So far, some evidence suggests that this link between recidivism and age may differ between offense types (Hanson, 2002 ), and could be mediated by cognitive (e.g., proactive criminal thinking; Walters, 2022 ), as well as situational factors [e.g., treatment of adolescents as adults by the criminal justice system (Fowler and Kurlychek, 2018 )]. In line with the Age-Graded Theory of Informal Social Control, age-related protective factors may additionally apply more to older individuals (Ambroziak et al, 2021 ).…”