Author(s): Youth Justice Research Collaborative
Published: August 2020
Report Intro/Brief:
“In April of 2017, Raise the Age legislation was signed into law, ending New York’s practice of automatically charging all 16- and 17-year-olds as adults for any offense. This was a significant piece of legislation that reinvested in the lives of young people across the state. This victory was won by a grassroots movement of youth, families, advocates, and lawyers, built across the state over more than a decade. The implementation of the new law was too important to leave unchecked and unexamined.
The Youth Justice Research Collaborative (YJRC) grew out of the Raise the Age movement. We came together to monitor the implementation of Raise the Age, documenting its successes and identifying areas for further reform. The YJRC was designed as a collective to center the lives and conditions of those most impacted, using participatory action research to join experts who have direct experience of youth prosecution and incarceration with a team of academics and advocates. The YJRC is a partnership of Youth Represent, the Public Science Project at the CUNY Graduate Center, Children’s Defense Fund-NY, the Citizens’ Committee for Children, and the many research associates who have contributed observation, analysis, and insight.
This brief report outlines our preliminary findings of Raise the Age’s first full year. It focuses principally on summarizing public data, but provides crucial and unique detail based on 473 court observations collected from June 1 to September 30, 2019 in New York City.2 Court watchers spent many hours a day, multiple times a week, across many months taking detailed and standardized notes of the proceedings (see “From the Court Watchers” to learn more).
In this report we begin by reviewing the youth arrest data, move to a look at youth detention, and conclude by comparing the newly created Youth Part of Adult Court with Family Court. In each of the sections we outline numbers that show signs of a successful implementation as well as areas of concern.”
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