Gray Area: Reform efforts reflect a new attitude toward justice
Prioritizing rehabilitation over punishment is leading the way toward young adult justice reform
Welcome to the Gray Area series, where we explore the intersection between young adulthood and justice reform.
The last segment of Gray Area examined how five stages of the criminal justice system have a disproportionate impact on young adults. Young adults have limited autonomy in how they navigate the justice system — in the vast majority of cases, young adults are treated the same as older adults within the justice system. But some young adults across the United States have had a different experience when they come into contact with the justice system.
At each stage of justice-system involvement, reformers are experimenting with intervention models catered to the specific developmental needs of young adults. These reforms include diversion programs, specialized young adult courts, legislation, and specialized prison units. They vary in their scope and application, and none provide the perfect solution. But they all share a common ethos of prioritizing rehabilitation and building safer communities over punishment.
Diversion Programs
Diversion programs initiate from district attorney offices. They allow prosecutors to choose a different response for young adults, rather than charging them in criminal court. Young adults are diverted to programs that, if they complete successfully, limit or avoid further justice involvement.
These programs are diverse in the services they provide, from parenting classes and substance use treatment to restorative justice models that work on rebuilding community trust. Others tailor their services to the needs of young adults, like education, community involvement, and employment. Diversion can also occur at different decision points in the justice system depending on the program. For example, a police officer may be able to refer a young adult to services rather than arrest them at all. Usually, prosecutors are the primary decision-makers.
Case Study: Lone Star Justice Alliance’s Transformative Justice Program (Dallas County and Williamson County, Texas): In 2019, the Long Star Justice Alliance launched its Transformative Justice Program in response to young people arrested for nonviolent felonies. Young adults age seventeen to twenty-four work with a multidisciplinary care team to develop and meet goals. If they meet these goals, their case is dismissed and their records are expunged.
These multidisciplinary teams might include “substance use counselors, housing specialists, career counselors, behavior health professionals, or education experts.” They take a cross-systems approach to address many needs of the young adults involved.
In addition to the holistic treatment model of the Transformative Justice Program, a major upside is that the program is available before any further contact with the justice system occurs. Young adults can receive services without ever going before a judge. Their pending charges will be dropped from the court docket and they will return to the community without a criminal record from the action that led to their participation in the program.
One of the downsides of this program is that it is dependent on prosecutors choosing whether or not to divert a young adult’s case. Many elected prosecutors have an interest in maintaining a “tough-on-crime” image for the public — which can disincentivize prosecutors recommending these programs. This prosecutorial discretion also allows biased perceptions of who is a criminal to influence the prosecutors’ decisions and can perpetuate structural imbalances — such as racism and sexism — when it comes to deciding who receives more lenient options and who does not.
Specialized Courts
Many counties use specialized courts to divert defendants from the traditional criminal justice system. For example, in drug courts, individuals receive alternative sentencing that includes treatment and supervision. The goal is rehabilitation and recovery. Mental health courts mandate treatment to participants who otherwise would be sentenced to a traditional jail or prison sentence.
In the same vein, some jurisdictions have established young adult courts. This is a newer concept, but they replicate the same model as other specialized courts. Interventions include substance use counseling, mental health counseling, vocational training, educational programming, and collaboration with external resource agencies. After a young adult completes a program through young adult court, they may have fines dismissed, probation or incarceration time reduced or eliminated, or charges dropped entirely.
The function of a judge also shifts in young adult courts. Instead of acting only as an arbiter and punisher, they also guide, support, and adjust program requirements as needed. Young adult courts have an overarching goal of rehabilitation: they seek to return young adults to their communities with the tools to better avoid future justice-system involvement, rather than with the trauma of incarceration and stigma of a criminal record that so often prevent successful reentry.
Case Study: The Young Adult Court (San Francisco, California): In 2015, San Francisco established the first Young Adult Court (YAC) grounded in neuroscience. Young adults age eighteen to twenty-five participate in YAC programming instead of a typical criminal court proceeding. Programming includes orientation, developing a wellness care plan, case management services, drug supervision, regular court appearances, and a system of rewards and consequences for their actions within the program. Young adults who complete all four phases of the program will have their cases dismissed.
A year-and-a-half after YAC started, the program retained 65% of its participants. Only 27% of graduates in San Francisco County were re-arrested after completing the program. This is a stark contrast to the rest of the state, where the recidivism rate is more than 60% for young adults.
Some of the upsides of the YAC are that, unlike many other young adult courts, the YAC accepts and prioritizes young adults charged with felonies. It is a collaborative model that uses a holistic view to address interconnected challenges that contribute to justice involvement, such as housing, employment, and mental health care. It also incorporates the developmental phase of young adults into the programming design.
However, young adult courts like the YAC have some downsides, including eligibility requirements. In the YAC, potential participants are disqualified for offenses involving a firearm and for having a prior strike offense. In California, the Three Strikes Law requires a 25 to life sentence for defendants with a new serious or violent felony after two prior felony convictions (before 2012, it applied to any new felony). This limits the impact of the YAC and may perpetuate contextual social factors. For example, if a young adult’s firearm offense stems from growing up in a violent neighborhood, he may need the YAC even more but be barred from entry.
Young adult courts only benefit some young adults, which perpetuates systemic imbalances and limits widespread change for young adults as a whole.
Legislation
Laws that apply to young adults as an entire age group have the potential for the most widespread impact. There are two main types of legislation that have been used to enact young adult justice reform: raise-the-age laws and youthful offender statutes.
Raise-the-age laws increase the age limits of a state’s juvenile justice system beyond seventeen. This enables young adults to be part of a less punitive, more service-oriented system. Under these laws, criminal records are also easier to expunge, which reduces the long-term consequences of justice system involvement.
Youthful offender statutes give prosecutors discretion to charge young adults as “youthful offenders.” These laws generally seek to create a hybrid of the adult criminal justice and juvenile justice systems that provide young adults with more rehabilitative services than the traditional criminal system.
Case Study: Act 201, The Raise the Age Initiative (Vermont): As of July 1, 2020, eighteen-year-olds are included in Vermont’s juvenile jurisdiction. Under Act 201, passed in 2018, that age will continue to increase gradually. By 2022, nineteen-year-olds will become part of the juvenile system, and by 2024, twenty-year-olds will move from the adult criminal justice system to the juvenile justice system.
There are significant upsides to Act 201. Rather than small trial groups of fifty or one hundred young adults who are accepted into a specialized court or program, this law applies to the majority of young adults aged eighteen to twenty. It allows them to access necessary services and maintains confidentiality and record expungement, all of which are critical for young adults seeking education and employment.
But there is still one downside: Act 201 makes exceptions for a set of “Big 12” serious crimes, in which young adults will still be charged in the adult criminal justice system. This type of exception is already in place for juveniles. It is how juveniles can be charged as adults for certain crimes. Another concern is that legislation often reflects a swinging pendulum of criminal justice attitudes. These laws can be reversed and replaced with reactionary, extreme laws — exactly like what happened in the tough-on-crime era of the 80s and 90s.
Specialized Correction Units
Some prisons and jails have created specialized units within their facilities for young adults. They are designed to be more therapeutic than punitive. These units offer more extensive educational opportunities than standard prisons, including vocational training and access to college courses.
Young adult units offer more behavioral and mental health resources. One of the most striking differences, however, is their reevaluation of the relationships within a correctional environment. Many young adult units design training and programming to build more trusting, cooperative relationships among young adult inmates, older inmate mentors, and correctional staff on the unit.
Case Study: Restoring Promise (Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Massachusetts, South Carolina, North Dakota): Restoring Promise is an initiative by the Vera Institute of Justice and the MILPA Collective. They partner with people living and working in prisons to repurpose existing units into specialized units designed for young adults and their older adult mentors.
At the TRUE Unit in Connecticut, the first of Restoring Promise’s young adult units, the environment is one of growth. Young men spend up to twelve hours a day in a rehabilitative environment, where they learn to confront emotional challenges in their past, conflict resolution, and basic life skills like managing a budget. This program is designed with input from both mentors and correctional officers.
One of the most impactful upsides of the Restoring Promise units is their complete reimagining of the prison system and the relationships within those prisons. Among existing reforms, it is one of the only models to intervene after a young adult has been convicted of a serious crime, and proves that they still have the potential to grow.
As groundbreaking as this rehabilitative, growth-based perspective is, the downside is that implementing these units at a large scale takes extensive time and resources. In order for these small models to grow into the default system for all young adults, stakeholders from all parts of the system must buy into its efficacy and worth. It is easier to maintain the status quo, especially for a traditionally unsympathetic group of incarcerated individuals.
Outside the United States
The Restoring Promise model is largely inspired by the way other countries approach their prison systems, especially Germany. The Neustralitz Prison houses people between nineteen and twenty-five, who are all considered juveniles in the German system. They each have a minimum wage job, participate in therapy and farming, and have the freedom to wear their own clothes, cook with knives, and form relationships with the opposite sex.
As young adults progress within this program, their freedoms increase. Eventually, they are able to leave the prison during certain hours to work an outside job, visit family, or look for a place to live after their release.
The United States has significant cultural differences that make applying the German model difficult — particularly when it comes to the United States’ history of systemic racism against Black folks. However, many of the German principles can be adapted for a US setting. For example, Warden Scott Erfe came up with the idea of mentors being instrumental in running the TRUE program. Even though correctional staff run the programs in Germany, Erfe noticed that older prisoners tended to “adopt” younger ones. He explained:
“Part of this is guards and counselors realizing they can’t speak to these young men with knowledge of what they’re really thinking; only older prisoners from the same neighborhoods can.”
Despite the differences between Germany and the United States, the biggest difference in corrections comes down to perspective: there, losing your freedom is punishment enough. Quality of life and opportunity should not also suffer. Here, the punishments pile on and on — both during and after incarceration. In its current form, the carceral system in the US is primarily focused on punishment and not rehabilitation.
The array of reforms for young adults reflects a shift toward the more European attitude that values rehabilitation over punishment. They are each making an impact at a different level and in diverse communities throughout the country. However, they remain tiny pockets of change within a massive system.
Next week, we will consider how we might implement this philosophical shift in criminal justice, particularly toward young adults, and contribute to lasting change at a systemic scale.
