Raise the Age
February 2016
RTA (Raise The Age) is a distressed justice system's shorthand for a legislative initiative that would increase the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to eighteen. With limited exceptions, and unlike every other state except North Carolina, 16- and 17-year-olds in New York are arrested, interrogated, detained, processed and exposed to many of the same criminal sanctions and housed in the same facilities as adult offenders. RTA recognizes, finally, the advances in brain science that help explain the too-often criminal lapses in adolescent judgment, and that non-violent acts committed as a youth should not define that person as an adult.
Since January 2012, Nassau County's Adolescent Diversion Program (ADP), the product of a partnership between the District Attorney's Office, Probation Department and the NYS Office of Court Administration, has fundamentally changed the way these non-violent 16- and 17-year-olds are prosecuted in Nassau. Over the last four years, ADP has diverted more than 2,000 teens to a specialized criminal court part. There, the Youth Assessment Screening Instrument (YASI), an actuarially-based recidivism risk assessment tool that is administered by probation officers immediately after arraignment, is used to inform case processing decisions. Generally, adolescents screened on the YASI at lower risk of reoffending will make fewer court appearances and receive fewer services, and those screened at higher risk of reoffending will make more court appearances and receive more services.
In late 2015, the NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services completed its second Nassau ADP outcome study. The results have important implications for what statewide reform of our flawed justice system might look like. Of the 771 ADP cases analyzed, 70% of whom scored low recidivism risk on the YASI, 18% had been arrested again within one year of program completion. This compared to a 20% rearrest rate for a non-ADP study reference group. Within two years of program completion, 29% had been arrested again, compared to 30% for the reference group. In other words, the diversion of these non-violent teens from traditional criminal prosecution to ADP had no negative impact on community safety, as measured by subsequent arrests. Case outcomes, however, improved dramatically. The number of cases dismissed jumped from 61% (non-ADP) to 93% (ADP), the incarceration rate fell from 7% to under 1%, and case processing time dropped 70%, from an average of 211 days down to 63 days from time of arrest to case closure. Doing less sooner rather than more later in response to the arrest of these 771 non-violent adolescents saved significant system resources while improving case outcomes and without making anyone less safe.
Arguably the most important lesson learned from Nassau's ADP is that New York can effectively manage these cases in a criminal court environment. A fundamental premise of the RTA legislative proposal is that these youth should be transferred to family court, with the expectation that improved outcomes would be more readily accessible. Migrating tens of thousands of additional cases to an overwrought family court system may ultimately prove unnecessarily complicated, prohibitively expensive and politically unworkable. New York has already set in motion the relocation of adolescents from state prisons and local jails to youth facilities, an essential system reform first step. If the next step is to provide the statutory authority and funding to support Probation Intake Adjustment Services in the criminal courts, structured like the existing adjustment services in the family court that Nassau's Adolescent Diversion Program successfully mimics, New York could relatively quickly and inexpensively achieve much of what RTA seeks to accomplish.