Young People in the Justice System | OAS Episode 183

Legislatures in recent years have focused considerable attention on bills related to juvenile crime. In 2022, for example, there were nearly 750 bills related to juvenile justice introduced in state legislatures and 189 of those measures were enacted.

While there are headline-grabbing stories about youth crime and localities where there are spikes in youth crime, the overall rate of violent crime by young people as of 2020 has seen a 78% decline since 1994, the peak year for such crime, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the U.S. Department of Justice

Senator Whitney Westerfield, a Republican from Kentucky, joined the podcast to discuss how legislatures are responding to the issue. Westerfield, who has worked on juvenile justice related legislation for more than a decade, said the statistics show youth crime in his state is not surging. But nonetheless, there are many voices both in the legislature and in the community, calling for harsher treatment for youth offenders.

Another guest on the show is Dick Mendel, a senior research fellow for youth justice at The Sentencing Project, and author of the recent report, “Why Youth Incarceration Fails: An Updated Review of the Evidence.” The report points to a number of reasons why locking up young people does not make society safer and damages the young people caught up in the system.