Thanks to votes in state House and Senate committees this week, Michigan may be on its way to finally joining the 46 other states that have stopped locking up 17-year-old children in adult jails. “This is an initiative whose time has come,” said Democratic state Rep. David LaGrand, one of the co-sponsors of the package of “Raise the Age” bills in the state. He said it’s “really urgent that we move this legislation forward and get to a successful change, because I think this is a deeply moral issue.”
Under current Michigan law, 17-year-olds aren’t allowed to vote. The law limits their ability to make their own medical decisions, and restricts the kinds of contracts they can enter into without the consent of a parent or guardian. But if 17-year-olds break the law, they are automatically treated as an adult and face adult consequences—consequences that include years in an adult jail and criminal records that stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Or, as Briana Moore asked the state legislature in 2018, “At what point does the punishment end? Will I always be paying for the mistakes I made as a child?” According to a report in the Detroit News about Moore’s testimony, she was 17 when she got into a fight at a local mall and was charged with, and then convicted on, an adult misdemeanor.
Michigan was among the majority of states that began charging children as adults during the “tough on crime” orgy of punitive legislation that marked the period from the 1970s to the 1990s. Today, it’s one of only four states that still do so, even though the consequences of charging and treating children as adults have become starkly apparent.
Youth in adult jails are more likely to be sexually assaulted and thrown in solitary confinement, and face suicide rates 36 times higher than young people held in juvenile facilities, according to a report in the winter 2018 edition of the American Bar Association magazine Criminal Justice. They also lose their chance at an education, because “formal high school classes are virtually absent from adult jails and prisons,” according to the report. Further, surrounding impressionable teens with adult criminals makes them more, not less, likely to commit crimes when the adult criminal justice system finally sets them free.
Those consequences, along with developments in neuroscience showing that teenage brains are literally unable to reason and make decisions the way adults do, are among the reasons that the majority of states have changed course and passed laws that once again treat juvenile offenders as children. They are also the reason that the current move to finally raise the age in Michigan has attracted such a wide variety of supporters.
In addition to the ACLU of Michigan and the Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency, organizations including the Michigan Catholic Conference, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (a right-wing think tank), and a broad range of youth, justice, and religious groups are on board. The legislation also has broad bipartisan support, with Democrats and Republicans working together to get the legislation to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s desk.
“I think we’re very close,” Jason Smith, the Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency’s youth justice policy associate, told Daily Kos. “I hope we get passage sooner rather than later, because these bills will impact thousands of kids by allowing 17-year-olds to receive age- and developmentally appropriate treatment in the juvenile justice system, and align our laws with the rest of the country.”
If Michigan doesn’t act this year, Smith added, “there’s a good chance we could be the only state in the entire country that still prosecutes 17-year-olds as adults.” According to Smith, the only three other states that charge teens as adults—Texas, Wisconsin, and Georgia—are also considering bringing their laws up to date.
In addition to settling on details for funding Michigan counties that will be tasked with serving an increased number of juvenile offenders, supporters say there is one thing they hope will be fixed in the current package of bills: they aren’t set to take effect until 2021.
Smith said that most all of the other states that have raised the age have passed laws including multi-year implementation phases to give the various bureaucracies involved time to adjust to the change. “We would have preferred an effective date that was much sooner, but two years is what some of the stakeholder groups—judges, family court administrators, and others—requested for their support of the legislation,” he said.
“Overall, I’m very happy that we have taken a step in the right moral direction here,” LaGrand added in an interview with Daily Kos. At the same time, he said, “We’re talking about 2,000 juveniles a year being sent to adult jails, so waiting two-and-a-half years is going to make a big difference to about 5,000 kids.”
Dawn Wolfe is a freelance writer and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.