‘Raise the Age’ falling short on transforming troubled youth

When the law took effect nearly four years ago for 16-year-olds, then-Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul joined Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in casting the change as a new era for New York’s previously harsh treatment of adolescent offenders.

“We’re raising the age of criminal responsibility to remove 16- and 17-year-olds from the adult criminal justice system and place them in settings with proper services and treatment,” Hochul said at the time. “We championed this cause of ending the injustice of treating teenagers as adults.”

Cuomo billed it as a “major accomplishment” in his efforts “to ensure a more fair and equitable justice system.”

But over the past few years, adolescent and juvenile offenders who would have been placed in detention because of the severe nature of their alleged crimes were instead released from custody due to the lack of secure juvenile facilities. That situation has become so serious that a proposal buried in Hochul’s 2023 executive budget would enable 16- and 17-year-olds to be held in local adult jails for certain violent felony offenses.

The proposed legislation calls for the adolescent offenders to be separated from adult defendants in the jails. They could only be placed there after a hearing where a judge must weigh factors that include public safety, the physical and mental maturity of the alleged violator, and the youth’s prior criminal history. A similar hearing would be conducted every 30 days for the duration of the youth’s incarceration in an adult facility.

Measuring the success or failure of the Raise the Age statute has also been hampered by the fact that many of the cases that fall under its provisions are shifted to Family Courts, where probation departments become largely responsible for oversight — but apparently do not track the rates of rearrest or the number of times young offenders violate the terms of their release.

Broken promises

A monthslong Times Union examination found that in many instances, young offenders whose cases have been transferred to Family Court are released under supervision — often with ankle-monitoring bracelets that are tracked by county probation departments — only to have their cases languish for months without any court-ordered intervention, according to interviews with law enforcement officials, prosecutors, defense attorneys and others involved in the juvenile justice system.

The recent study by the New York City Criminal Justice Agency, which tracked recidivism rates of adolescent defendants after the law took effect, said their research “documents extremely high rates of rearrest among these young offenders.” The report noted that if they could track outcomes in Family Court, the rate of recidivism for those age groups might have been ever higher.

But Albany County’s probation department, like others around the state, does not track rearrests or “noncompliance” by 16- and 17-year-olds released under their supervision by Family Court judges.

Still, the New York City report’s findings that recidivism is high among teenagers affected by the Raise the Age statute is not surprising to some law enforcement officials, nor to attorneys who routinely handle cases involving adolescent and juvenile offenders.

“I was there when all the deals were made. There was all sorts of promises of services with Raise the Age,” Orange County District Attorney David M. Hoovler said in an interview in December. “They were going to get more services … (and) work on computers; get their GED, get substance abuse and mental health counseling. Somebody even mentioned job training. Here we are a couple years later — and I understand COVID has wrecked it for the last 18 months — but the structure was never put in place for all that.”

Indeed, the state has distributed just $270 million of the $800 million that was allocated for the Raise the Age legislation enacted into law as part of the 2018 state budget. 

Much of the money that has been spent, according to the Division of Criminal Justice Services, was used to hire new probation officers, fund direct services for youth, and contract with nonprofit organizations to provide additional services, including mentoring, counseling and activities.

Melissa A. Carpinello, a criminal defense attorney who has worked for the Albany County public defender’s office and has handled juvenile criminal cases in Family Court for more than two decades, said there is a glaring lack of services in that venue at a time when shootings and other crimes of violence are surging.

“It’s a gun thing that’s out of control right now,” Carpinello said in a recent interview. “These kids are carrying guns for their own protection because Albany is literally the Wild West right now; so these kids are getting picked up for gun charges and nobody is doing anything.”

She said that while Albany County District Attorney David Soares’ office has launched a program to provide adult offenders with services to help them find jobs — before their cases are adjudicated — “none of that is going on in Family Court.”

“I thought the point of the reforms was to get these kids out of the system on a more permanent way so they don’t come back,” Carpinello said. “If you’re asking me if that’s happening in Family Court, absolutely not. I don’t think it’s through the fault of the Family Court judges; there’s just no system in place.”

Pandemic pause

Mike McLaughlin, the county’s director of policy and research, said its plans to increase programming and add to the number of beds at its juvenile detention facility in Colonie — similar to the designs of multiple other counties across the state — were put on hold when the pandemic struck.

“It literally stopped everything completely,” McLaughlin said. “We were down the road on design and everything related to the expansion of the facility and internal changes. … (The state) literally said ‘Stop everything,’ because any capital reimbursement … won’t be honored until we figure out where financially the state will be. … All of the other stuff — programmatic, operations-wise — that also was halted, or I guess you could say that’s slowed.”

The law went into effect in October 2018 for 16-year-olds and a year later for 17-year-olds. Pressing for those reforms, advocates and many lawmakers had argued that New York was one of the last states to automatically treat offenders as young as 16 as adults in criminal prosecutions. 

Much of the funding allocated for the judicial transformation was supposed to be devoted to adding juvenile detention beds in secure facilities across the state, where young offenders would receive programming and counseling to help put them on a better path. But very few beds have been added in the past three years. State officials confirmed that as of December, only the Hillbrook Juvenile Detention Center in Syracuse had expanded its capacity, from 32 to 50 beds.

As a result, there are often no secure juvenile beds available in New York; the severe shortage has resulted in many teenage defendants being released from custody for violent offenses or, in some instances, transported to juvenile detention facilities hours away from their homes.

The state Office of Children and Family Services, one of the multiple state agencies that has a stake in the Raise the Age implementation, also blamed the pandemic for the delays in implementing a juvenile justice network that would accomplish what lawmakers had pledged it would do.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply impacted locally administered pre-adjudication detention facilities throughout the state and created delays in counties’ detention planning and design efforts to increase bed capacity,” said Monica Mahaffey, a spokeswoman for OCFS. “Additionally, delays in criminal trials have led to prolonged lengths of stay for adolescent offender youth awaiting adjudication, and local detention facilities have been plagued by the workforce crisis affecting many service sectors.”

Mahaffey said the state is waiting for final plans from Long Island and Erie, Monroe and Westchester counties to increase capacity at juvenile facilities to locally house their youth. Counties are not required to operate juvenile facilities, but they must have access to one because detention of a juvenile or adolescent offender falls to the local county. There are eight state-operated juvenile facilities where youth are placed after adjudication of their criminal cases, Mahaffey added.

The New York City Criminal Justice Agency’s study, released in December, found rearrest rates for adolescent offenders were high even before the pandemic struck.

“These youths warrant concerted attention from the NYC criminal justice and child welfare communities to address their recidivism,” the report noted.

Not all counties have fallen short in their development of programs for troubled youth. Ulster County probation director Nancy Schmidt said that while their county does not deal with the level of violent offenders that counties like Albany do, they have developed an alternative system for handling and helping adolescent offenders, including transforming an empty warehouse into a restorative justice center.

Youth in that county, like many others that have developed similar programs, receive guidance on applying for jobs, improving their schoolwork and staying off a path of criminal activity.

“We’ve really tried to take this to heart, and do exactly what the state intended and utilized the funds to expand services,” Schmidt said.

But in many counties, including Albany, there are adolescent and juvenile offenders who engage in criminal activity so serious, including attempted murder, that connecting them with programming they will accept can be extremely challenging.

Justin Gaddy, an anti-violence supervisor with Albany 518 SNUG, one of the community organizations that receive funding to help troubled youth, said their programs require voluntary commitment, and they will not force a teenager to take part.

“We want to be there. We want the kids to know that we’re here in support of them,” Gaddy said. “It’s just strictly volunteer and confidential. That’s the way that we work and it’s been the best way. … It takes time to get the high-risk individuals. Their minds aren’t really there on changing, so you have to kind of work them into it.”

Gaddy said probation departments would like to mandate treatment in programs like SNUG, “but as soon as that person says he doesn’t want to be involved with the program, we step off.

“It’s never going to work if we force it,” he said.