Why travel to Europe to learn about how to respond to crime by America’s emerging adults?

March 23, 2018. This is the first of the blog post series Reflections on how Europe handles emerging adults in trouble with the law by Vincent Schiraldi.

 

Justice involved emerging adults - young people between the ages of 18 to 25 – are the subject of increasing activity among advocates, researchers and policy makers. I was first alerted to this issue in 2013 by a pair of friends and colleagues – Jeff Butts from John Jay College of Justice and Tracy Velazquez, former executive director of the Justice Policy Institute – along with a National Institute of Justice-published bulletin by Rolf Loeber, David P. Farrington and David Petechuk.

That year, I also joined an Executive Session at the Harvard Kennedy School that Bruce Western was the principal investigator of, and he and I began researching this population along with colleague Kendra Bradner.

In 2013, Tracy wrote a persuasive policy piece arguing for a more developmentally appropriate approach to system-involved youth over age 18. 

Loeber, Farrington and Petechuk concluded “that young adult offenders aged 18-24 are more similar to juveniles than to adults with respect to their offending, maturation, and life circumstances” and recommended raising the age of juvenile court to 21 or 24 so that fewer youth were handled in the criminal justice system.

Even though he recognizes that young people under age 18 were terribly served by the criminal justice system, the enigmatic Butts was concerned that advocacy implied a “magic 18th birthday” after which young people were fully mature, something research didn’t bear out. He asked me to keynote a "Raise the Age" conference to discuss the importance of better treatment for older, but still not fully mature, youths.

Staff from the United Kingdom’s Transition to Adulthood Alliance saw that presentation and invited me to keynote their annual conference in 2015. I did so with a delegation of officials from New York with the Tow Foundation’s support.

Probation Commissioner Ana Bermudez; Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner Gladys Carrion; Tow’s Diane Sierpina; my wife Grace Schiraldi, who is studying for a Masters in Applied Theater; and my daughter Tara Schiraldi, a Philadelphia public defender continued on to Germany. I had heard of the German system from the Vera Institute’s Mike Jacobson and Don Specter from the Prison Law Office who had organized several trips to the Neustrelitz youth prison with U.S. policy makers.

In advance of that trip, I reviewed Pruin and Dunkel’s Better in Europe?I learned that four out of five European countries had special laws concerning emerging adults and that Croatia, Germany and the Netherlands allowed emerging adults to be handled under juvenile law and in juvenile facilities.

Actually being in a country that was trying young adults up to age 21 and (infrequently) incarcerating them in decent and rehabilitative youth facilities was an eye-opening experience. Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy and his Corrections Commissioner Scott Semple toured Neustrelitz that year and came back eager to change things in the Constitution state.

Malloy came back from Germany and proposed to raise the age of his juvenile courts to include youth up to age 21 and Semple announced that he was launching a special young adult section of his prison. That same month, Western, Bradner and I released the Executive Session’s first report on this issue at a packed forum at the Justice Department’s Great Hall with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Office of Justice Programs head Karol Mason. Along with Roca’s Molly Baldwin, I helped organized a series of emerging adult convenings with leading Massachusetts policy makers lasting to this day.

In the years following this widely-publicized report and forum, policymakers in three additional states – Illinois, Massachusetts and Vermont – proposed to raise the age of their juvenile systems past age 18, bills that are pending as I write this. We began regular meetings with advocates and practitioners to discuss approaches for this population, as did the Justice Policy Institute’s Marc Schindler, who produced this report.

Meanwhile, the Columbia Justice Lab established a Learning Community with the help of the W.T. Grant Foundation and the Open Philanthropy Project (which funds our emerging adult work). The LC brings together researchers from around the country along with practitioners from six different sites to share research and practice lessons on emerging adults.

Which brings us to today and to Europe.

There was such strong interest in emerging adults among Massachusetts policymakers (and Patriots’ players/owners!) that we decided to organize a trip to Europe to learn more about the approach here. Lael Chester, director of the Justice Lab’s Emerging Adult Project, and I headed to the Netherlands and Croatia first; after which we will meet 20 Massachusetts policy makers, advocates, and practitioners in Berlin to tour Neustrelitz and community programs and meet with German judges, lawyers, and practitioners.

More on this trip as it progresses…

Read other blog posts in the series here.