11-10-2012, 11:16 AM
Adolescents, Maturity, And The Law
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Anthony Laster was a 15-year-old eighth-grader with an IQ of 58 who was described by relatives as having the mind of a 5-year-old. One day in 1998, shortly after his mother died, Anthony was hungry, so he reached into the pocket of another student in his Florida middle school and took $2 in lunch money. The boy's family reported the crime to the authorities, and the local prosecutor, Barry Kirscher, decided to prosecute Anthony as an adult. It was Anthony's first arrest. He spent the next seven weeks -- including his first Christmas since his mother died -- in an adult jail waiting for his court date.
Anthony's story, reported by 60 Minutes II, is, sadly, familiar. Every day, judges and prosecutors make complex decisions about whether young offenders should be tried as juveniles or adults. Sometimes the choice is made in a retail process repeated daily in juvenile courts or prosecutors' offices; at other times, the choice is made, wholesale, by legislative fiat in a process far removed from the juvenile courts.
These choices reflect deeply held assumptions about the nature of teen crime, how society should react to it, and adolescence itself. The two court systems reflect sharply contrasting ideas about adolescents who break the law -- their immaturity and culpability, whether they can be treated or rehabilitated, the security threats they pose, and the punishment they deserve. Sending a youth to adult criminal court usually is irreversible, and it often exposes young lawbreakers to harsh and sometimes toxic forms of punishment, not to mention more unsavory peer influences that in many cases have the perverse effect of increasing criminal activity.
In the original juvenile-court reform movement, as historian David Tanenhaus has noted, there was a presumption of “childhood”; only the most incorrigible youths were transferred to the adult criminal court, and the decision was made by the judge. Had Anthony's case arisen during the first three-quarters of the 20th century, he would almost certainly have remained in the juvenile court. But in the past 30 years, our assumptions have come nearly full circle, as states have decided that more adolescents like Anthony belong in adult criminal court.
This push to treat more kids as adults, however, is contradicted by new behavioral and biological research about maturity and criminal culpability, as well as evidence from the criminal-justice system about how adult court affects children. Brain development and the social psychological skills that it controls suggest that kids are actually immature far longer than we previously thought. My own research, and that of others, suggests that kids put into the adult system are likely to have worse outcomes.
Crime, Law, and Maturity
Historically, the courts' algebra of maturity was based mainly on social norms and popular legal comfort zones for other adult functions, such as driving, voting, marrying, and signing contracts -- typically 18, though occasionally 16. Juvenile courts assumed that young offenders similarly are not fully responsible for illegal behaviors. Because they were immature, they had “room to reform” before reaching adulthood. Juvenile courts also were designed to avoid both the stigma of a criminal conviction and exposure to the toxic influences of adult punishments. They emphasized treatment and education more than punishment, “in the best interests of the child.”
Until recently, judges decided which youths were immature and “amenable to treatment” on a case-by-case basis, applying a series of criteria that were elevated from the norms of everyday practice to a set of constitutionally sanctioned standards identified in Kent v. U.S., the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case that grappled with the concepts of “maturity” and “sophistication.” Judges relied heavily on the evaluations of social workers whose recommendations were usually persuasive to the juvenile court. Repeated appearances in juvenile court signaled to the judge that this kid needed tougher punishment or stronger treatment than the juvenile court could provide. Judges usually waived high-profile cases into adult criminal court, in part to avoid political criticism of the juvenile court itself.
As fears of a juvenile-crime epidemic rose in the 1970s, state legislatures across the country started to take away judicial discretion by carving out large sectors of the juvenile-court population -- as young as 13 years of age -- and removing them to the criminal court. In some states, the power to send a teenager to the criminal court was transferred from juvenile courts to prosecutors. And several states changed the rules to make juvenile offenders show why they should not be transferred.
Development, Immaturity, and Culpability
The recent push to lower the age threshold for treating juvenile offenders as adults assumes that adolescents are no different from adults in the capacities that comprise maturity and hence culpability, and that they have adult-like competencies to understand and meaningfully participate in criminal proceedings.
But the new science reliably shows that adolescents think and behave differently from adults, and that the deficits of teenagers in judgment and reasoning are the result of biological immaturity in brain development. The adolescent brain is immature in precisely the areas that regulate the behaviors that typify adolescents who break the law. Studies of brain development show that the fluidity of development is probably greatest for teenagers at 16 and 17 years old, the age group most often targeted by laws promoting adult treatment.
Teens at these ages tend to be poor decision-makers when it comes to crime. They often lack the several elements of psychosocial development that characterize adults as mature, including the capacity for autonomous choice, self-management, risk perception, and the calculation of future consequences.
Teen Brains
Advances in neuropsychological research have produced a new body of knowledge showing that teen brains remain immature through early adulthood. These new studies have zeroed in on the areas of the brain where impulsivity, risk taking, and poor social judgment are regulated. Because adolescent brains are not fully developed, they do not achieve critical mechanisms of impulsivity and behavioral control until perhaps age 20 or beyond.
Beginning in the early 1990s, new forms of brain scans called “functional” MRIs provided images of brain functioning during tasks such as speech, perception, reasoning, and decision making. In one study, Dr. Jay Giedd, a neurologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, used this type of MRI to track the individual brains of 145 children and adolescents over a 10-year period into young adulthood. These studies showed that the frontal lobe, especially the prefrontal cortex, is maturing and developing dramatically during the teen years. Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg of the New York University School of Medicine shows that this is the region of the brain associated with decision making, planning, cognition, judgment, and other behavioral skills associated with criminal culpability. Dr. Nitin Gogtay, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, and his team used longitudinal MRI studies with subjects from ages 4 through 21 to show that the frontal lobe is one of the last areas of the brain to reach maturity.
Immaturity, Public Safety, and Courtroom Competence
Adult court places juveniles in a very different legal context, and some of the developmental deficits of immaturity that make them less culpable may also make them less competent defendants and unreliable witnesses. Their immaturity makes them less likely to understand their rights and less able to make meaningful and informed decisions to help in their defense. Immature decision-makers are vulnerable to waiving their rights or to making statements without a lawyer present, even when they know their rights.
Experimental evidence and case autopsies show that adolescents may be prone to false confessions owing to their immaturity and collateral factors such as their suggestibility and vulnerability to coercion. It's no surprise, then, that adolescents are overrepresented among defendants who give false confessions during police interrogation, including the five defendants below age 17 in the Central Park jogger case. In one study, teenagers ages 15 to 16 were far more likely, compared with young adults 18 to 26, to confess to a mock crime when presented with false evidence of their guilt.