Young Adult Offenders

Abstract

In most states, the legal treatment of offenders changes dramatically when they reach their 18th birthday. (In some states, this transition occurs at ages 16, 17, or even 19; see Griffin, 2012.) Instead of being dealt with in the juvenile justice system, which focuses mainly on the best interests of the child, rehabilitation, and programming, offenders start being dealt with in the adult criminal justice system, which focuses on just deserts, retribution, and deterrence, with few attempts at offender programming. What is the justification for the dramatic change in legal treatment at age 18? Is there a dramatic change in criminal propensity or criminal careers, for example? Many justifications have been put forward for treating juveniles differently from adults. It has been argued that juveniles have less mature judgment; poorer emotion regulation; and self-regulation; poorer decision making in offending opportunities; and poorer executive functioning, reasoning, abstract thinking, and planning (Scott and Steinberg, 2008). Arguably, juveniles have poorer impulse control and are more likely to take risks and commit crimes for excitement rather than according to a rational cost–benefit assessment. In their decision making, juveniles are thought to be influenced more by immediate desirable consequences than by delayed possible undesirable consequences. Allegedly, they are thought to be more susceptible to peer influences, more changeable, more redeemable, and less set in their offending habits. Consequently, they are less culpable or blameworthy, have diminished responsibility, and are less deserving of punishment. Also, they have lower adjudicative competence to communicate with lawyers, make legal decisions, understand and participate in legal procedures, or stand trial (Howell, Feld, and Mears, 2012). Do all these abilities change dramatically at age 18? This seems unlikely. Although we accept that there are great variations in the methods of processing used by juvenile and adult criminal courts, we argue in this article that the usual change from rehabilitation to punishment on the 18th birthday is too abrupt. The cognitive functioning of offenders changes gradually, and young adults aged 18–24 are similar in many respects to juveniles aged 15–17. In many ways, young people continue to mature up to the mid-20s. Many justifications for the special treatment of juveniles also apply (to a greater or lesser degree) to young adult offenders. Therefore, we argue that there should be special legal provisions for young adult offenders aged 18–24, who in many respects are midway between juveniles and adults. Legal age boundaries in many areas, including juvenile and criminal justice, seem arbitrary. For example, the minimum legal ages for driving a car, drinking alcohol, owning a gun, having sexual intercourse, and getting married often are different from the minimum legal age for adult court. There are great variations in legal age boundaries between countries and between U.S. states, and great changes over time. For example, most young adults aged 18–24 may have been living independently in the 1950s, but they were not in the 2000s. The dominant theory of the life course in developmental psychology, first proposed by Erikson (1950), postulated that adolescence, lasting from the beginning of puberty until the late teens, was followed by young adulthood, lasting from the late teens to about age 40 when middle adulthood began. This paradigm may have made sense in the middle of the 20th century when most people in industrialized societies married and entered stable full-time work by around age 20 or shortly after. However, by the end of the century, this paradigm no longer fit the normative pattern in industrialized societies. Median ages of marriage had risen into the late 20s, and the early to mid-20s became a time of frequent job changes and, for many people, pursuit of post-secondary education or training. Furthermore, sexual mores had changed dramatically, and premarital sex and cohabitation in the 20s had become widely accepted. Most young people now spent the period from their late teens to their mid-20s not settling into long-term adult roles but trying out different experiences and gradually making their way toward enduring choices in love and work. The theory of emerging adulthood was proposed as a framework for recognizing that the transition to adulthood was now long enough that it constituted not merely a transition but a separate period of the life course. (Arnett, 2007: 68–69) In this article, we first discuss some aspects of the special legal treatment of juvenile offenders, and then we present knowledge about human development and offending careers from the teenage years to the 20s. We then review reentry problems of young adult offenders and the legal treatment of young adult offenders in some other countries. Finally, we suggest methods of improving the legal treatment of young adult offenders in the United States. (For more details about all of these issues, see Loeber and Farrington, 2012.) Culpability focuses on a person's blameworthiness and the degree of deserved punishment. The diminished responsibility of young people for offending is thought to require mitigated sanctions to avoid permanently life-changing penalties and provide room for reform. Compared with adults, youths' immature judgment reflects differences in appreciation of risk, appraisal of short- and long-term consequences, self-control, and susceptibility to negative peer influences (Scott and Steinberg, 2008). The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roper v. Simmons (2005) to abolish executions of juvenile offenders in the United States provides the backdrop for our discussion of the reduced criminal responsibility of young people. In Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court conducted a proportionality analysis of adolescents' culpability to determine whether the death penalty ever could be an appropriate punishment for juveniles. A majority of the Court offered three reasons why states could not punish youths found to be criminally responsible as severely as adults. First, juveniles' immature judgment and lesser self-control caused them to act impulsively and without full appreciation of the consequences of their actions and, thus, reduced their culpability. Second, juveniles are more susceptible to negative peer influences than are adults. In addition, juveniles' greater dependence on parents and community extends some responsibility for their crimes to others, which diminishes their criminal responsibility. Third, juveniles' personalities are more in flux and less fully formed than those of adults, and their crimes provide less reliable evidence of "depraved character." Although the differences between adolescents and adults seem intuitively obvious, Roper v. Simmons provided minimal scientific evidence to support its conclusions (Denno, 2006). The Court's Roper v. Simmons decision (2005: 569) also attributed youths' diminished culpability to a "lack of maturity and … underdeveloped sense of responsibility … [that] often result in impetuous and ill considered actions and decisions." Roper v. Simmons focused on adolescents' immature judgment rather than on the narrower criminal law inquiry into the ability to distinguish right from wrong, and it was concluded that their immaturity reduced their culpability. The Court's rationale recognized both adolescents' reduced moral culpability and their greater capacity for growth and change—that is, their diminished responsibility for past offenses and their unformed and perhaps redeemable character. In sum, the Supreme Court concluded that juveniles' reduced culpability warranted a categorical prohibition of execution (Feld, 2008). The same developmental characteristics that diminish youths' criminal responsibility also affect their adjudicative competence adversely. Competence is the constitutional prerequisite to the exercise of other procedural rights. Due process requires a defendant to be competent to assure a fair trial. To be competent to stand trial, a criminal defendant must have "sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding [and have a] rational as well as factual understanding of the proceedings against him," as well as the capacity "to assist in preparing his defense" (Drope v. Missouri, 1975: 171). Adjudicative competence involves a defendant's ability to communicate with lawyers or aid in his or her defense, to make legal decisions as well as understand and participate in such legal procedures, to waive Miranda rights, to waive or assist counsel, to stand trial, and to exercise other constitutional protections. Judges evaluate a youth's competence by assessing his or her ability to (a) understand the charges and the basic elements of the adversary system (understanding), (b) appreciate one's situation as a defendant in a criminal prosecution (appreciation), and (c) relate pertinent information to counsel concerning the facts of the case (reasoning) (Bonnie and Grisso, 2000: 76). Developmental psychologists have examined adolescents' adjudicative competence, their capacity to exercise or waive Miranda rights or the right to counsel, and their ability to participate in legal proceedings. This research questions strongly whether juveniles possess the cognitive ability, psychosocial maturity, and judgment necessary to exercise legal rights. Many young offenders, especially those younger than age 16 and those confronted with the complexities of criminal courts, cannot meet the legal standards for competence (Grisso et al., 2003; Scott and Grisso, 2005; Scott and Steinberg, 2008). Developmental psychologists argue that immaturity per se produces the same deficits of understanding, impairment of judgment, and inability to assist counsel as does severe mental illness, and it renders many juveniles legally incompetent (Grisso, 1997, 2000; Scott and Grisso, 2005). This vulnerability is enhanced for certain categories of juveniles: (a) those who are marginal or weak in intelligence, (b) those who are mentally ill, and (c) those who are otherwise mentally impaired as a result of injury or child abuse. For adolescents, generic developmental limitations, rather than mental illness or mental retardation, adversely affect their ability to understand legal proceedings, receive information, communicate with and assist counsel, and make rational decisions (Grisso, 1997; Redding and Fuller, 2004; Scott and Grisso, 2005). To what extent do the Supreme Court's views conform to scientific knowledge about human development in adolescence and young adulthood? For many years, developmental psychologists focused on logical reasoning capacity as the linchpin of maturity. A new perspective on adolescent risk taking has emerged that begins with "the premise that risk taking in the real world is the product of both logical-reasoning and psychosocial factors" (Steinberg, 2007: 56; see also Steinberg, 2004). "However, unlike logical-reasoning abilities, which appear to be more or less fully developed by age 15, psychosocial capacities that improve decision making and reduce risk taking—such as impulse control, emotion regulation, delay of gratification, and resistance to peer influence—continue to mature well into young adulthood" (Steinberg, 2007: 56; see also Steinberg and Monaghan, 2007). Increasing evidence shows that the brain continues to develop during childhood into early adolescence, including ongoing myelination, and into adulthood, when white matter increases and synapses are pruned. Research also shows that "the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, important for controlling impulses, is among the latest brain regions to mature without reaching adult dimensions until the early twenties" (Giedd, 2004: 77). The importance of white matter is underscored by the finding that decreased white matter is significantly more common among boys with psychopathic tendencies compared with controls (De Brito et al., 2009). Much is known about structural brain deficits of offenders (see, e.g., Raine, Lencz, Bihrle, LaCasse, and Colletti, 2000), but we focus narrowly on changes in brain functioning with age. Biological changes in the prefrontal cortex during adolescence and the early 20s lead to improvements in executive functioning, including reasoning, abstract thinking, planning, anticipating consequences, and impulse control (Sowell, Delis, Stiles, and Jernigan, 2001). The data on brain development, although mostly cross-sectional, are much in line with evidence that reckless acts are still common until early adulthood, as is evident from data on the incidence of car accidents, even when controlling for the number of miles traveled (Foss, 2002). This fact is recognized widely by insurance companies, whose premiums for car insurance for young drivers (especially males) up to approximately age 25 are dramatically higher than for older drivers. It also is recognized by car rental companies that either do not rent cars to people younger than age 25 or levy a surcharge for drivers younger than that age. The idea of improved behavioral controls that emerge between late adolescence and early adulthood also is evident from psychological research. For example, Steinberg, Cauffman, Woolard, Graham, and Banich (2009) investigated time perspective, planning ahead, and anticipation of consequences among individuals between ages 10 and 30. Although this study employed a cross-sectional design, the results suggest that the ability to plan ahead improves dramatically between early adolescence and the early 20s, along with the anticipation of consequences, whereas time perspective improves slightly less in that same period. Prior et al. (2011) completed a useful literature review titled Maturity, Young Adults and Criminal Justice. They found that physical maturity (the completion of puberty) usually occurred by age 12 or 13, whereas intellectual maturity was usually complete by age 18. However, the higher executive functions of the brain, such as planning, verbal memory, and impulse control, were not usually developed fully until age 25. They concluded (p. 8) that "the human brain is not mature until the early to mid-twenties." However, it is difficult to specify how much maturation occurs between ages 18 and 25. Based on the work of Steinberg and Cauffman (1996), Prior et al. (2011) divided psychosocial maturity into three categories: responsibility (the ability to act independently, to be self-reliant, and to have a clear sense of personal identity), temperance (the ability to limit impulsiveness, to control aggressive responses and risk taking, and to think before acting), and perspective (the ability to understand and consider the views of others before taking a decision to act). Prior et al. (2011) concluded that temperance was especially related to offending. Although responsibility and perspective became relatively settled at approximately age 18, temperance continued to develop up to the mid-to-late 20s (Modecki, 2008). Prior et al. (2011) also discussed the fact that females usually mature earlier than males and discussed the need to distinguish between adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent offenders (Moffitt, 1993). They also advocated the use of instruments to assess maturity in the criminal justice system, highlighting the work of Soderstrom, Castellano, and Figaro (2001). In conclusion, the review of Prior et al. (2011) suggested that extending the minimum age for adult court offending up to the mid-20s might be justifiable based on knowledge about the development of cognitive functioning and maturity. Young adults, like juveniles, could be considered less culpable than older adults because of their psychosocial immaturity. Research findings agree that the prevalence of offending increases from late childhood into adolescence, peaks in late adolescence, and decreases subsequently into adulthood. This process is generally known as the age–crime curve (Farrington, 1986; Tremblay and Nagin, 2005). The curve can be observed in all populations of youth. Less well known is the fact that, although an early age of onset, compared with a later age of onset, is associated with a longer offending career, the highest concentration of desistance takes place during early adulthood irrespective of age of onset. This finding corresponds with the downslope of the age–crime curve. In fact, the decrease in prevalence in the downslope of the age–crime curve is very substantial. In some cases, it goes down from approximately 50% to approximately 10% of all persons (e.g., Loeber, Farrington, Stouthamer-Loeber, White, and Wie, 2008). All available age–crime curves show that the legal age of adulthood at 18 (or for that matter ages 16 or 17 in some states) is not characterized by a sharp change in offending at exactly that age, and it has no specific relevance to the downslope of the age–crime curve. Serious offenses (such as rape, robbery, homicide, and fraud) tend to emerge after the less serious offenses of late adolescence and early adulthood. Even for serious offenses, however, no clear dividing line occurs at age 18. Steinberg et al. (2009: 583) concluded that "[t]he notion that a single line can be drawn between adolescence and adulthood for different purposes under the law is at odds with developmental science." Most studies show that approximately half of juvenile offenders recidivate beyond age 18 into adulthood (see Piquero, Hawkins, and Kazemian, 2012). Piquero and colleagues addressed the following key questions about delinquency careers: How common is persistence in and desistance from offending between adolescence and early adulthood? And how common is the onset of offending during early adulthood? The criminal career parameters include prevalence and frequency, continuity, escalation and specialization, types of crimes and criminal careers, co-offending, prediction of offending into adulthood, and prediction of the onset of offending in the young adult years. Most young adult offenders have previous juvenile records. For example, in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, which is a prospective longitudinal survey of more than 400 males, two of those who were between ages 18 and 25 had been as juveniles (Farrington, 2012). of all offenders were first at age or older and Farrington, In this the age of the first was 17, whereas the age of the was 25. also of decreases in offending et al., it can be concluded that most offenders in their early 20s. It seems that desistance is caused by justice processing because were followed by an in offending in this (Farrington, Farrington, and There is no that to the of decreases from the teenage years to the 20s. To assess in Piquero, Farrington, and examined between different age from in the Cambridge They found that of offenders at also were offenders at whereas of those who were not at were offenders at The of males who were between ages 10 and and between ages 16 and 20 could be compared with of males at who were at and of males at who were at et al., 2006). For a of males in White, and found that the of offenders who were years decreased from at age 17 to at age 25. For offenders, however, the decreased from at age 17 to at age 25. It is known that the decrease in the age–crime curve after the is much for males than for Although the prevalence of offending and the of decrease from the teenage years to the 20s, it does not that the of a criminal career to the age of or the number of offenses in a criminal career However, and investigated these in the Cambridge based on of and they found that these decreased with age. The career decreased from years for offenders at age 18 to years for offenders at age and the number of offenses decreased from at age 18 to at age 25. should be into by and they could be by the age of the th

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