Gray Area: A model of change for young adult justice
Building a framework that shifts impact from some young adults to all young adults
Welcome to the Gray Area series, where we explore the intersection between young adulthood and justice reform.
In our last edition of Gray Area, we looked at the types of criminal justice reforms that states across the country are implementing to improve outcomes for young adults. Each approach has upsides and downsides, but they share a philosophy inspired by international models: justice intervention can be an opportunity for healing and reform, rather than just punishment.
These reform efforts also share a common limitation in that, they are severely limited in their scope. Whether it is because the prosecutor has discretion over who enters a transformative justice program or because we lack the resources and social buy-in to redesign prison units at scale, only a small percentage of young adults benefit from current reforms.
Instead of selecting some justice-involved young adults to participate in new criminal justice interventions, what could a model for change that encapsulates all of them look like?
The model I’m proposing is an evolving concept informed by research, theorists, activists, and my own work in the criminal justice space. It is just that: a concept. I start with this caveat both to encourage conversation and acknowledge that it is a flawed, breathing framework that has and will continue to change.
Before getting into the specifics of what we can do to make categorical change, we need to unpack the tension between the two systems at play: science, in the form of the developmental neuroscience of young adults, and law, in the form of codes that define and punish criminal behavior.
Science and law both act as systems of rationality and, on the surface, share a philosophy: to make sense of the world we live in. Should our legal system, then, be informed by scientific discoveries in order to become a more logical system?
Sheila Jasanoff, a brilliant scholar in Science and Technology, rejects this linear idea. Both science and law revere rationality, but science ultimately seeks truth while the law ultimately seeks justice. Simply inserting more science into the law fails to account for the complexities and different roles of both systems.
A few quick historical examples of how science, despite its rigorous fact-finding, can be distorted into a social tool: the common nineteenth-century “hysteria” diagnosis for women, used to keep women out of the workforce, perform forced hysterectomies, and commit them to asylums.
Eugenics, which “focused on the notional ‘improvement’ of human populations by halting the reproduction of supposedly lesser genes.” From the justification of slavery to the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that sanctioned forcible sterilization, eugenics seeped into both codified law and normal standards as a “scientific” foundation.
The list goes on and into the modern era — the proliferation of “bite mark” science and flawed hair matching analysis in courtroom settings just scratch the surface of how science can be twisted and misused.
To be clear, this is not to discredit scientific methods, research, and discovery. We see every day how manipulating science into a social tool literally kills, as thousands of Americans become gravely ill or die from the impacts of COVID-19 vaccine skepticism.
This is to say that science evolves and can be distorted in harmful ways. That’s why Jasanoff is right: we can’t rely on just science to make changes to our legal system without careful, critical analysis in the current social context. The neuroscience research on young adults could easily be skewed to demonstrate that because young adults are more impulsive, they should be punished more severely than older adults. To avoid that kind of manipulation, we need to ground scientific research in a web of other relevant data, information, and context.
Jasanoff gets at this idea with her constructivist theory of science and law — that the two inform and depend on one another. They function within unique, malleable social contexts that build feedback loops. A scientific discovery contributes to a change in the law, which contributes to further scientific discoveries, and onward.
The constructivist theory is critical to my model of categorical justice reform. This model is a feedback loop itself. Each of the three stages — Kairos (the opportune moment), building capital, and generating collective power — all feed into, depend on, and evolve from one another. They are not a linear process, but a cyclical one. This is the model:
Much of the way my thinking about this model has grown is thanks to the work of adrienne maree brown and her writing on emergent strategy. “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” In my model of young adult justice reform, these specific actions are not something I pretend to prescribe. Instead, the actions taken by experts on the ground fit within this theory of change.
Brown also emphasizes one of the most powerful outcomes of decentralizing, which is relevant to the building capital piece of the model. Decentralization enables individuals and groups to depend less and less on factors out of their control. Factors like politicians who skew science to fit whatever argument — and voter base — they want.
Movement Generation, an Oakland-based project, grounds their theory of change in adaptation and relationship building. Their work inspires my concept of what it means to grow collective power. A social movement is built on relationships among people and groups, rather than against people and groups.
The question is, does this model actually work?
I believe it can. The model has parallels to juvenile justice reform that show its potential effectiveness. Take the case of Evan Miller. Evan was sentenced to a mandatory life without parole (LWOP) for a murder he committed when he was fourteen years old. His case made it to the Supreme Court, which said that mandatory LWOP sentences for juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment.
The Miller case was decided in a uniquely suited context. The court had already said that juveniles could not be sentenced to death (Roper v. Simmons) or to LWOP for a non-homicide crime (Graham v. Florida). Miller’s attorneys submitted an extensive brief on the developmental psychology of juveniles by the American Psychological Association. The APA, along with a diverse group of supporters, grew their collective power by filing amicus briefs to the court.
Miller was built on Graham and Roper, which also presented scientific research to the court. Before the Roper decisions, researchers funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice specifically researched topics that could be used to support a developmental argument against the juvenile death penalty. They built the capital they needed.
Then, Atkins v. Virginia happened. The Atkins case held that the death penalty is unconstitutional for people with intellectual disabilities because they are developmentally different. Atkins set a legal precedent for a developmental argument that juvenile advocates could build upon. They were ready with the research; they just needed the right moment of Kairos. And when they brought Roper v. Simmons to the Supreme Court on the heels of Atkins, they won, abolishing the death penalty for juveniles.
The juvenile justice system is still full of abuse, mistreatment, and too-harsh sentencing. But advocates have succeeded in these categorical reforms — no juvenile can be executed, no juvenile can go the jail for life without the possibility of parole if they did not kill anyone, and no juvenile can receive a mandatory LWOP sentence, even for murder. Their developmental status means that they, as a holistic group, are distinct.
The same type of relational model can work for categorical young adult justice, in perhaps some of the same categories. For example, death penalty abolition for all young adults would be a huge step toward change at a massive scale that recognizes their developmental stage at large.
This is not to say that categorical young adult justice reform needs to come in the form of a Supreme Court decision. For one, our 2021 Court is very different from the 2012 Court that decided Miller. And, Supreme Court rulings are precarious. They, too, can be manipulated. Case in point: Texas’ latest abortion ban that pushes the boundaries of Roe v. Wade; and the looming possibility that Roe will be overturned in the upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
I will also add that justice reform implies improving the existing system. Yes, the system can improve in becoming less harsh and more centered on dignity. But it is also a fundamentally broken and oppressive system. Our system neither addresses the harms caused by crimes and the harms that cause crime.
The goal of categorical reform can range from taking the death penalty off the table and improving prison conditions, to prison abolition and rebuilding a new model of transformative justice, to a vision of justice that has yet to come into our collective consciousness.
My model is not that vision of possibility. It is simply a theory of how we might achieve resounding change in this particular intersection of criminal justice, neuroscience, psychological development, and human rights.
As we wrap up the Gray Area series, these fundamental questions come into focus. Now that we understand 1) the unique cognitive development of young adults, 2) the way the system disproportionately harms them, and 3) the efforts currently at work on reforming these systems, we can ask: how do we go about furthering and amplifying change? And as we do so, what is the change — the vision of a more just world — that we truly wish to see?
