State laws that send some individuals under age 18 to trial and prison as adults have achieved the opposite of what the policy’s proponents intended, a new research review concludes. Transferring young people into adult systems yields substantially higher rates of later serious crimes compared with youths handled by juvenile-justice systems.
Moreover, there’s no evidence that shifting some young offenders to the adult-justice system prevents or reduces violence in the general population of children and teenagers.
Log in
Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.