OVER the past dozen years, the Supreme Court has issued several landmark decisions affirming that adolescents and adults are fundamentally different in ways that justify treating minors less harshly when they violate the criminal law. The court, drawing on psychological and brain science indicating that people under age 18 are not yet fully capable of controlling their behavior, abolished the juvenile death penalty and greatly restricted life without parole sentences for crimes by juveniles. As scientists and legal scholars who specialize in these issues, we have welcomed these changes with enthusiasm.
But in recent months, a number of advocates have sought to extend the developmental immaturity argument to young adults, proposing that the age of juvenile court jurisdiction be raised to 21 from 18, where it now stands in almost all states. This idea has gained some real-world traction. Late last year, for example, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut called on his state’s Legislature to raise the age of juvenile court jurisdiction, and Illinois and Vermont are now contemplating a similar change.
Such reform, though well intended, is premature at best. While considerable scientific evidence supports the distinction that the Supreme Court endorsed between adolescents under age 18 and adults, research on the maturity of young adults (i.e., those between 18 and 21) is at an early stage. We know that brain maturation continues past age 18, but it is not clear that the brains of 20-year-olds are so immature that they should be treated as if they are teenagers.
For example, research indicates that a hypersensitivity to reward causes teenagers to focus on the short-term consequences of their actions and assign less importance to the future, which often inclines them toward impetuous and risky activity (such as crime). We know of no evidence indicating that the same is true with regard to young adults.
A new study complicates things further. In this research, which appeared this year in Psychological Science, a team led by the neuroscientist B.J. Casey (and including several of us) looked at the impact of emotional arousal on impulse control in three age groups: juveniles between 13 and 17, young adults between 18 and 21, and adults ages 22 to 25. The participants were presented with a rapid series of calm, fearful and happy faces and instructed to press a button when one type of face was shown, but to resist doing so when it was one of the other types. During the experiment, the participants’ emotional state was manipulated from time to time by leading them to expect that at any moment they might experience something positive (winning a prize), something negative (hearing a loud noise), or neither.
The study found that when young adults were negatively aroused (anticipating the noise), they made as many mistakes as juveniles, and significantly more than the somewhat older adults. But under conditions of either low or positive arousal (anticipating the prize), the young adults performed as well as their older counterparts, and significantly better than the juveniles. Are people in their early 20s more like teenagers or more like adults? According to this research: It depends.Continue reading the main story
The proposal to expand the jurisdiction of the juvenile system to age 21, in addition to being based on ambiguous science, would also create two potentially serious policy problems. First, just as the adult correctional system is ill equipped to respond to the needs of adolescents, the juvenile justice system is poorly positioned to handle young adults. It is hard to imagine a juvenile facility that could appropriately house 20-year-olds and 14-year-olds, or a juvenile justice staff whose training would allow it to work effectively with young adults. And because a disproportionate number of serious violent crimes are committed by individuals between 17 and 21, the juvenile system would be overwhelmed by the number of young adults it would need to process, and its rehabilitative purpose could be seriously undermined.
Second, the juvenile justice system interacts with several other health and child welfare systems. Those agencies have created relatively separate systems for serving children and adults, in part because of important differences between these two ages. For example, some mental illnesses arise only in young adulthood, and professionals have long specialized in providing services either to children and adolescents or to adults. Creating a juvenile justice system that works well for both adolescents and young adults would require significant (and costly) restructuring of many other agencies.
Changes in the ways in which we treat young adult offenders are long overdue. This group has its own distinctive educational and mental health needs. But that’s an argument for treating them as a special category of offenders in the adult justice system, not raising the juvenile jurisdictional age. In the long run, this may better serve the interests of young adults and juveniles alike.Continue reading the main story