In 2012, five teenagers in Elkhart, Indiana, attempted to burgle a house they thought was empty. It wasn't. The homeowner, Rodney Scott, shot and killed 21-year-old Danzele Johnson, and the surviving four - including three 16- and 17-year-olds - were charged with felony murder. Because Indiana mandates that anyone 16 or older accused of murder be tried as an adult, they were sentenced to at least 50 years each.
Blake Layman got 55 years until the Indiana Supreme Court stepped in, ruling that punishing a teenager like a fully formed adult is "disproportionate" given what science tells us about adolescent brains being glorified risk-assessment sponges. The court reduced the charges to burglary. Indiana later passed some reforms, but prosecutors can still charge children as young as 12 as adults. Because why learn from evidence when you can learn from vibes?
Despite decades of research showing that locking up kids makes them more likely to reoffend, and despite FBI data showing juvenile crime and arrests have plummeted about 75 percent since 1995, lawmakers are once again racing to throw minors into adult prisons. In April, Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe signed a bill allowing more juveniles to be tried as adults, explaining that if kids "act like an adult and commit a crime like an adult, they need to understand that those... have consequences." Never mind that consequences for adults are famously a deterrent to all crime everywhere.
Tennessee now allows 15-year-olds to be tried as adults for shoplifting or stealing firearms. Kentucky lets prosecutors charge 15-year-olds as adults for using firearms in certain felonies. North Carolina mandates 16- and 17-year-olds charged with serious felonies start in adult court. Louisiana, which stopped automatically prosecuting 17-year-olds as adults in 2019, reversed course in 2024. Crime-data analysts note that Louisiana's pandemic crime spike mirrored national trends - and has been falling since 2023 - but who needs data when you have "eagerness" to appear tough? As Rutgers law professor Laura Cohen put it, youth offenders have no natural lobbyist constituency, making them "a relatively easy target."
The 1980s and '90s tough-on-crime wave produced an "explosion of incarceration" and a slew of "auto-charging" laws that eliminated judicial discretion. Studies in the 2000s found these measures did little to deter young people from crime. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that executing minors is unconstitutional, and "raise the age" laws spread. After Massachusetts raised the adult prosecution age to 18 in 2013, juvenile arrests dropped 56 percent. Connecticut saw arrests of kids 17 and under drop by more than half after its 2012 raise-the-age law. Opponents couldn't argue those weren't working, so they presumably argued they were working too well.
Then the pandemic crime bump gave reformers pause. Never mind that youth violent crime in 2021 was three-fourths of the 2012 rate and one-third of the 1995 rate. As Columbia Law professor Josh Gupta-Kagan put it, the pandemic "took some of the momentum out of" reform. Now the country is in a state of "equipoise," per Cohen, with progressive reforms staying in some places and being dismantled in others, mainly Republican-led states. "A classic example of bad cases making bad law," she said.
Los Angeles illustrates the whiplash. In 2020, DA George Gascón vowed to stop prosecuting children as adults, but pivoted in 2022 after public furor over a 26-year-old trans woman sentenced to two years in juvenile lockup for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old when she was under 18. By 2024, incoming DA Nathan Hochman pledged to undo Gascón's "pro-criminal blanket policies."
Peter Moskos of John Jay College argues the backlash is a natural consequence of progressive overreach. "We need some accountability," he said. "The left won't talk about punishment at all." Supporters like Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) insist that "violent criminals shouldn't be let off the hook just because they are under the age of 18." Tennessee State Senator Brent Taylor explained his support for the state's new law by saying, "We have to make crime illegal again!" - a statement that implies crime has somehow been legal this whole time.
But data from John Jay College's Research and Evaluation Center found that youth under 18 still account for a small portion of New York City's violent crime, and pandemic violence trends among youth "mirrored the scale and direction of trends among adults." So raise-the-age laws didn't cause a spike; the pandemic did. But that would require lawmakers to read a study instead of a headline.
In the end, the cycle continues: crime goes up, politicians crack down on kids, studies show it doesn't work, crime goes down, politicians claim credit, crime goes up again, and everyone pretends the studies don't exist. At this rate, we'll be having this same conversation in 2050, possibly about sentencing toddlers as adults for crying too loudly.