Massachusetts considers raising juvenile court age to 21

BOSTON — Is this the year that Massachusetts joins Vermont in swinging the doors of its Juvenile Court to a slightly older population?

Advocates, including several members of the legal community, hope so.

Sen. Brendan Crighton, D-Lynn, is the lead sponsor of S.1061, which would gradually raise the age of juvenile jurisdiction over a five-year period, first to 19, then 20, then 21. There is a companion bill in the House, H.1923, sponsored by Reps. James J. O’Day, D-Worcester, and Manny Cruz, D-Salem.

Proponents say the change would acknowledge both the science of brain development and data that show that young people who have access to the programming and services offered through the Department of Youth Services are less likely to reoffend.

At a hearing before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary on Sept. 23, retired Juvenile Court Judge Jay D. Blitzman urged legislators to “follow the science and the recidivism data, which best supports positive youth development and will improve public safety outcomes.”

Blitzman, who served on the Juvenile Court bench for 24 years and ran a youth advocacy project for two decades before that, said he could remember “vividly” many predicting the sky would fall when the state raised the age to include 17-year-olds within the jurisdiction of the Juvenile Court.

“That did not come to pass,” he said.

Instead, juvenile crime in the state declined by 51%, and the latest DYS data shows juveniles recidivate at a 20% rate, one of the lowest in the country, Blitzman reported.

In its white paper on the science of late adolescence, the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior indicated that it “makes eminent public policy sense” to phase the 18- to 21-year-old cohort into the Juvenile Court, Blitzman noted.

Meanwhile, juveniles placed in adult carceral settings have the highest recidivism rate of any group in the adult system, with 76% being rearraigned within three years, noted Eva R. DeCharleroy, legislative counsel with the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Crighton’s former legislative aide, DeCharleroy addressed two categories of “misinformation” swirling around the “Raise the Age” bill.

First, DeCharleroy stressed that the bill would not “jeopardize accountability.”

Juveniles charged with first- and second-degree murder would still be charged as adults and go through the Superior Court system, she noted. With other serious offenses, including those involving serious bodily injury, prosecutors and judges would retain a range of discretion in charging and sentencing, she said.

“Accountability will still be served in a way that is proportional to the charge but also takes into account the development of the individual,” DeCharleroy said.

A proposed alternative to have 18- to 21-year-olds placed into adult facilities but given access to specialized programming would still saddle young people with adult criminal records and all the related detrimental collateral consequences, she said.

“This is not a suitable solution, and it has the potential to cause irreversible harm,” she said, referencing the trauma such young people experience.

Jennifer White, an education staff attorney at Massachusetts Advocates for Children, has seen that trauma firsthand.

She told the legislative panel about her first visit with a young client in prison. After a wide-ranging discussion, White asked whether he was going to be able to finish getting his high school diploma. The “very large, very tattooed” young man paused, then started to cry.

“Attorney White, I am just trying to survive,” she recalls him saying.

“Can you imagine, at 19, a life in which every day you are just trying to survive rather than a life that might give you an opportunity to thrive?” she asked.

Before going to law school, White spent nearly 20 years working with adolescent parents, she explained. In that work, she saw the brain science others would describe from a clinical point of view “every day in action.”

“I learned that with the right support and opportunities, young people can accomplish far more than many people give them credit for,” White said. “They are pliable, and when someone shows interest, they will open up in powerful ways.”

There is no question that the Juvenile Court is best equipped to have jurisdiction over emerging adults, said Dulcineia Goncalves, deputy chief counsel of the Youth Advocacy Division at the Committee for Public Counsel Services.

“Our system is designed to provide individualized, developmentally appropriate services for young people,” she said. “It is a system that has more experience and better results than the adult system in promoting pro-social development of young people, and it is a system that is already working successfully with young men and women 18 to 21 in a variety of respects.”

Given the well-documented relationship between education and recidivism, enhancing educational access is another important reason to raise the jurisdictional age in the Juvenile Court, she suggested.

“Ensuring people who are incarcerated are able to complete high school is critical not only for young people but for community safety, as well as reducing the racial disparities that exist in the system,” she said.

Vermont passed its version of the Raise the Age law in 2018, similarly adopting a phased approach to increasing the jurisdictional age of its Family Court. Eighteen-year-olds were brought into the system in 2020, but lawmakers have repeatedly kicked the can down the road on including 19-year-olds within Family Court jurisdiction.

That aspect of the Vermont Raise the Age law is now set to go into effect on July 1, 2027, though Republican Gov. Phil Scott has said he would prefer a full repeal of the law with respect to 19-year-old offenders rather than further delay.

Speakers at the hearing told Lawyers Weekly that they were cautiously optimistic that the Legislature might act favorably on the legislation in some form, at least on the Senate side.

Blitzman says there seems to remain a school of thought in the House that it might be preferable to keep 18-year-olds in the adult system but adopt an approach that would include strictly supervised probation. But such an approach would have the unintended consequence of deepening the court involvement of these youths as they experience a “cycle of probation violations,” Blitzman believes.

As an indication of how much better equipped the Juvenile Court is to serve the emerging adult population, Blitzman points to data that shows that more than 60% of DYS-involved young people have chosen to enter the department’s voluntary Youth Engaged in Services program, which provides ongoing support to youth for the first six months after their discharge.

It would be hard to imagine a young person signing up for an additional six months of the services they had been receiving at the Suffolk or Middlesex houses of correction, Blitzman says.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the hearing, Blitzman and White agree, was the compelling testimony of young people representing organizations such as UTEC, which serves formerly incarcerated young adults in the Merrimack Valley, and Holyoke-based Pa’lante Transformative Justice.

Nichelle Rivera, a student at Holyoke Community College and Pa’lante peer leader and board member, closed her remarks with a plea.

“Please be the people that make the change for all of us,” she urged the lawmakers.