This week Justice Policy Institute, an OSI-Baltimore grantee, released “Raising the Age: Shifting to a Safer and More Effective Juvenile Justice System,” which shows promising results from states that have raised the age of those who can be absorbed into the juvenile justice system.
According to the report, in the past 10 years, half of the states committed to treating young people under the age of 18 as juveniles and therefore processing them through the juvenile rather than the adult court system did so without “significantly increasing taxpayer costs, and the number of youth in the adult system nationwide was nearly cut in half.” Raising the age, the study found, also keeps young people safer than if they were in the adult court system, enhances public safety and creates a more effective system.
OSI-Baltimore has been working with Advocates for Children and Youth and Community Law in Action (founded by 1998 OSI Community Fellow Terry Hickey, now Director of Special Projects in Mayor Pugh’s administration) to eliminate the automatic prosecution of youth as adults by returning all or most offenses committed by youth to the original jurisdiction of the court.
In addition, the Open Society Policy Center, a non-partisan and non-profit advocacy group that is part of Open Society Foundations, has teamed with the Justice Policy Institute as part of the Coalition for a Safe and Just Maryland, which is working to advance bail reform in the state.