Why youth justice is different: adolescence, responsibility and history

Professor Desjardins opens the course with two photographs on the screen. The first shows the basketball court in Eastgate Park on a bright afternoon, a backpack lying near the fence. The second shows a school photo of a boy of about sixteen, his face blurred. 'On a Thursday afternoon in May,' Desjardins says, 'a fifteen-year-old named Ben Arsenault was knocked to the ground on that court and his phone was taken. Two teenagers were involved. One was sixteen and had never been in trouble with police. The other was seventeen and had been before a juvenile court twice. By the end of this course you will know how Port Ardent police department, the prosecutor, the court and the community dealt with both of them, and why the law treated them so differently from adults who did the same thing.'

He introduces his co-instructor for the course, Officer Marcus Bell, who has spent nine years in the juvenile bureau and three years before that as a school resource officer at Eastgate High School. Bell tells the class that most of his work is not arrests. 'I spend my days deciding what to do with young people who have done something wrong, and most of the time the right answer is not court. The hard part is knowing when it is.' Students who took the community policing course will also recognize Officer Grace Ferreira, the Eastgate neighborhood officer, who knew both teenagers before the robbery and will appear throughout the course.

Who counts as a young person

In the United States, each state decides who falls under the jurisdiction of its juvenile court. In Ohio, Revised Code 2152.02 defines a child for delinquency purposes as a person under 18 at the time of the act, and the juvenile court can keep jurisdiction over a child it has adjudicated until the age of 21. Ohio sets no minimum age for delinquency in the statute, although very young children are rarely charged and many states have set a minimum age, often 10 or older. Most states use 18 as the upper age of juvenile jurisdiction, and a few still treat 17-year-olds as adults for some or all offenses.

Desjardins points out that the dividing line is a legal choice. Nothing magical happens to a person on their eighteenth birthday. But the law has to draw a line somewhere, and the choice reflects a judgment that adolescents differ from adults in ways that matter for responsibility, for punishment and for how the state should respond.

Adolescence and responsibility

Research in developmental psychology and neuroscience over the last thirty years has strengthened an idea that parents and teachers have always known: adolescents are not simply small adults. Several differences are well established. Adolescents are more likely than adults to take risks, especially in the presence of peers. They are more sensitive to immediate rewards and less focused on long-term consequences. Their ability to control impulses, plan ahead and resist pressure is still developing, and the parts of the brain involved in self-regulation continue to mature into the early or mid-twenties. Under stress, in emotionally charged situations, adolescents' decision-making differs most from adults', even though in calm conditions their reasoning about simple choices can look much like an adult's.

Desjardins is careful about what this research does and does not show. It does not show that teenagers cannot tell right from wrong, or that they are not responsible for what they do. A sixteen-year-old who pushes another boy to the ground and takes his phone knows it is wrong. What the research supports is that young people are, on average, less blameworthy than adults for the same act, because their judgment and self-control are less mature, and that they have a greater capacity to change. Both points have shaped the law.

In a series of cases, the Supreme Court of the United States relied on the developmental differences between adolescents and adults to limit the harshest punishments. Roper v. Simmons (2005) barred the death penalty for offenses committed under 18; Graham v. Florida (2010) barred life without parole for non-homicide offenses committed by juveniles; and Miller v. Alabama (2012) barred mandatory life without parole for juveniles convicted of homicide. In J.D.B. v. North Carolina (2011), the Court held that a child's age is relevant to whether a reasonable person would feel free to leave a police interview, a case you will study in lesson 6. Ohio went further in Senate Bill 256, effective April 12, 2021, abolishing life without parole for anyone under 18 at the time of the offense.

The age-crime curve

One of the most consistent findings in criminology is the age-crime curve. When police-reported offending is plotted by age, it rises steeply through the early teenage years, peaks in the late teens or early twenties, and then declines. The exact peak varies by offense, coming earlier for property crime and somewhat later for violent crime, but the shape is found across countries and decades. Most young people who commit offenses stop on their own as they mature, find work, form relationships and take on responsibilities. Criminologists call this process desistance.

The curve has two practical lessons for officers. First, a large share of young people who come into contact with police will never come into contact with them again, especially if the first contact is handled well. Second, there is a much smaller group whose offending starts early, often before the teenage years, and persists. Researchers such as Terrie Moffitt distinguished between adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent patterns, and later research has shown that the picture is more varied than two groups, but the core idea remains useful: the right response to a first-time teenage shoplifter is not the right response to a young person with a long history of violence and serious problems at home and at school. Youth justice law tries to make room for both.

Bell adds a third lesson from his own experience. Formal processing can itself make things worse. Being charged, going to court, missing school for hearings and being labeled as a young offender can push a young person toward peers who offend and away from school and family. Studies comparing similar young people who were diverted with those who were formally processed have often found equal or lower reoffending among those diverted, especially for low-risk youth. That evidence is one of the main reasons both countries emphasize diversion, which lessons 4 and 11 explore.

From the first juvenile court to today

The first juvenile court in the United States opened in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899. Reformers believed that children who broke the law should be treated as children in need of guidance rather than as criminals, and the court acted under the doctrine of parens patriae, the state as a parent. Proceedings were informal and confidential, and judges had wide discretion to do what they thought was in the child's best interest. By the 1960s, critics argued that this informality had left children with neither the protections of the criminal courts nor the care that had been promised. In Kent v. United States (1966) and In re Gault (1967), the Supreme Court held that juveniles facing delinquency proceedings are entitled to fundamental due process rights, as lesson 3 explains.

In the 1980s and 1990s, rising youth violence and predictions of a coming wave of 'super-predators' led almost every state to make it easier to try juveniles in adult court, and to impose harsher penalties. The predicted wave never came; youth arrests fell sharply from the mid-1990s on. Since the 2000s, many states have moved back toward rehabilitation, raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction, limiting transfers to adult court, reducing detention and closing large state institutions. Ohio's RECLAIM Ohio funding program, launched in the 1990s, gives counties money to treat youth in their communities rather than commit them to state facilities, and the number of youth in Ohio Department of Youth Services facilities has fallen greatly since then.

Juvenile court terms

Juvenile courts use a vocabulary that differs from the adult criminal courts, partly to avoid the stigma of criminal labels. Ohio's statutes and rules use these terms, and officers should use them correctly in reports.

What police add, and what they decide

Police are usually the first part of the justice system that a young person meets, and their decisions shape everything after. An officer who responds to a call involving a teenager decides whether an offense has been committed, whether to take any action at all, whether to warn, refer or arrest, whether to hold the young person or release them, how to question them, and what to tell their parents and the victim. Ohio law and juvenile court rules encourage the use of informal handling and community resources, and most police departments have policies on when officers may warn and release a juvenile, refer them to a diversion program, or take them into custody and file a complaint. Bell tells the class that these decisions are where a youth officer earns their pay.

Desjardins writes three goals on the board that will run through the course: accountability, rehabilitation and protection. Young people must be held accountable for the harm they cause, in ways that are meaningful to them and to the people they harmed. The response should help them stop offending and grow into law-abiding adults. And the public, including victims like Ben Arsenault, must be protected. 'These goals do not always point the same way,' Desjardins says. 'Most of this course is about how to balance them when they don't.'

# Illustrative age-crime curve: relative offending rate by age (peak = 100).
# Values are invented for teaching; the shape follows the research.
rates = {12: 18, 13: 32, 14: 50, 15: 68, 16: 84, 17: 96, 18: 100, 19: 98,
         20: 94, 22: 82, 25: 64, 30: 44, 35: 32, 40: 24, 50: 13}
peak_age = max(rates, key=rates.get)
youth = [rates[a] for a in range(12, 18)]
print("peak age:", peak_age)
print("average relative rate, ages 12-17:", round(sum(youth) / len(youth), 1))
print("rate at 30 compared with peak:", round(rates[30] / rates[peak_age], 2))

peak age: 18
average relative rate, ages 12-17: 58.0
rate at 30 compared with peak: 0.44

In this illustrative curve, the rate at 30 is less than half the rate at the peak. Real curves vary by country, offense and year, but the pattern of a late-teen peak followed by decline is robust. Desjardins reminds students that a curve like this describes groups, not individuals: it does not tell an officer what any particular young person will do.