For Youth in Crisis, Why ‘Raise the Age’ Still Matters
2022 is a turning point for our City and State leaders. Over the next few weeks and months, as budgets are negotiated in Albany and City Hall, we have the opportunity to make the kind of bold investments in youth and communities that evidence shows will make us safer. But we can’t arrive there if we willfully ignore the dire conditions facing our communities.
Following more than two years of pandemic crisis, our young people face two harsh realities.
First, by all accounts they are more emotionally and psychically vulnerable than at any time in recent memory. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Surgeon General have called this moment a crisis in adolescent mental health: More psychiatric emergency room visits, more reports of suicidal thoughts, and the single largest increase in drug overdoses in 20 years. It is a State of Emergency.
The assessment of child and mental health professionals is that we face “young people with soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality that will have lasting impacts on them, their families, and their communities.” This vulnerability is compounded by their disconnection. According to a 2020 City report, approximately one in four 16-to-24-year-olds are likely out of work or out of school. The experience of being untethered from community support and experiencing disrupted age-appropriate milestones around school and work hurts young people, their families, and communities in predictable ways, harming earning power and economic mobility as well as individual and neighborhood health.
Second, young people also are at the center of our public conversation about gun violence and community safety – frequently blamed for the problems adults have failed to solve. But many of the loudest voices in that conversation have failed to focus on truth-telling about this complex issue, or direct the public to address the root causes of gun violence, which is the best path to public safety.
Research from our own communities in New York City shows that many young people who carried guns “grew up in atmospheres where violence, or the threat of violence, was ever-present. More than four of five had been shot or shot at, and two-thirds had been attacked with a weapon other than a gun. Almost 90 percent had experienced a friend or family member.” The same research showed that high rates of poverty in communities drive young people into survival strategies, which can include carrying a gun.
Increases in youth gun violence have prompted some elected officials to call for rolling back Raise the Age reforms. It would be a return to the failed policies of prosecuting 16- and 17-year-olds as adults, where they face lifelong criminal records and long prison sentences, which then create insurmountable barriers to jobs, stable housing and school. It is criminal on the State’s part to subject young people to adult prosecution and sentencing, which is why we have the Raise the Age law.
Poverty is traumatic for young people. But it need not be terminally so. We know more today than we did even just five years ago – when the State’s Raise the Age reforms were enacted – about what works to support young people in responding and recovering from trauma and stress. Thanks to emerging brain science, including recent data from the National Academies of Science, we know that adolescence, for all its challenges, is also a time of heightened resilience and developmental opportunity: the young brain is especially adaptive and responsive to interventions. Under Raise the Age, most young people have their cases heard in Family Court, where age-appropriate services and programs are available.
Rolling back Raise the Age would return us to the failed path of the past, at our peril. It’s the path of failing too many of our young people by not addressing the perilous conditions in their communities, and then expecting a different outcome. As Washington, D.C.’s chief prosecutor recently explained: “We cannot solve juvenile crime simply by locking up more kids for more time. It does not work. It is not fair. It destroys communities, and it does not make us safer.”
The truth is, Raise the Age is working. During the first 18 months of the Raise the Age law, shootings in New York City remained the lowest they have been in decades, even as arrests and incarceration of 16- and 17-year-olds declined. Only after months of Covid-19 infections, deaths, and lockdowns did gun violence increase.
A recent report on the first year of Raise the Age and 16-year-old re-arrest rates, cited by some who question the reform, actually doesn’t undermine its record of success. Overall arrests of 16-year-olds dropped by over 40 percent the year RTA went into effect, and the raw number of re-arrests actually decreased as well.
Now, when we talk about Raise the Age and increases in youth gun violence, we should only talk about real solutions, focused on addressing root causes that are grounded in a public health response to violence that can actually lead to improved public safety. The work ahead, both locally and statewide, is to pass budgets that include “policies and programs [that] start by contending with the traumatic conditions these young people live in, learning from them what they need and how best to cooperate on delivering it.”
Gun violence is an economic inequality issue, and the solution is investment and economic opportunity. This should take the form of targeted investment in gun violence prevention and broad investments in youth and community wellbeing. These funds should be accessible to community-based organizations closest to the young people and families they serve. Our young people and their communities desperately need the $250 million that the governor’s proposed State budget has allocated for continued Raise the Age implementation to actually and quickly reach our communities, including IN New York City.
We do this by getting this money to organizations that are the best equipped to serve youth. By doing so, we can make meaningful strides in addressing the youth mental health crisis and reconnecting young people with school, jobs, and their communities. Evidence from City credible messenger mentoring programs that serve young people who have contact with the criminal legal system showed a 69 percent reduction in felony reconviction rates, compared to similar young people on probation. And programs like Families Rising that provide evidence-based mental health support for youth and families have helped teenagers who have been arrested to complete school, remain employed, and avoid re-arrest. This work is borne out in national research as well, which has found that in large cities “every new organization formed to confront violence and build stronger neighborhoods led to about a 1% drop in violent crime and murder.”
Community-led solutions and services embedded in communities are effective in reducing violence, and our City and State budgets should reflect this.