Raise the Age Advances in NC, Dies in Missouri; Texas Uncertain

Supporters of raising the age of criminal responsibility in North Carolina are optimistic as legislation heads to the Senate after a 104-8 approval vote in the General Assembly.

The overwhelming vote Wednesday is a major step in the last state that still automatically charges 16-year-olds as adults, no matter the crime.

Michele Deitch TEDx Talk

Texas Juvenile Justice Reformers: ‘Raise the Age’ Will Rise Again

Supporters of overhauling juvenile justice in Texas cheered the passage of two state bills even as some mourned the failure of a third that would have stopped the prosecution of 17-year-olds as adults.

Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to restructure the state Juvenile Justice Department’s network of youth correctional facilities to keep teens closer to their homes in the sprawling state — a method that has been increasingly deployed in large states. And they voted to stop hauling kids into court for truancy, currently a misdemeanor criminal charge.

Reporter’s Notebook: Teenage Idiocy a Huge Gamble in Many States

I was 13, and my girlfriends and I had just begun to hang out with some older boys. It was the summer before the eighth grade, and they were 16, going to be juniors, and they had a car. We’d hang out late at night, each telling our mothers that we were at the other friend’s house, and we’d mostly hang out on the jungle gyms at the park or drive out to the Las Vegas desert and drink wine coolers.

Judge Jonathan Lippman

Jonathan Lippman: New York’s ‘Pro-Activist’ Judge

A life-long New Yorker, Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, uses his role as the chief judge to promote alternatives to incarceration and backed the creation of nine pilot community courts, called Adolescent Diversion Courts.

In April, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the members of the Commission on Youth, Public Safety and Justice, created in part to address raising the age of criminal responsibility.

The Two Sides of Raise the Age in New York

It was the tail-end of rush hour on a Thursday in March, and commuters were packed tightly onto a Brooklyn bus in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Not all of them got out alive.