It began in early 2024 when, less than 100 days after taking office, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry called a special legislative session to deal with “out of control” juvenile crime. The Legislature moved at warp speed to eliminate a broad swath of hard-won bipartisan victories, putting more juveniles in detention, keeping them there longer and limiting options to get out sooner. The coup de grâce was a repeal of Louisiana’s 2019 “Raise the Age” (RTA) law, funneling 17-year-olds back into the adult court system and succeeding where previous attempts had failed.
Now, older teens in Louisiana are treated as adults from arrest to sentencing. The goal was ostensibly to get dangerous young people off the streets. However, since the law took effect, most of the 17-year-olds charged as adults have been accused of nonviolent crimes. Only 13 percent have been charged with serious felonies, such as armed robbery and murder — crimes that were almost always moved to adult court anyway.
The law included novel punitive innovations. For example, a new database gives the public access to juvenile court records, regardless of whether the young person is ultimately found responsible for the crime. This public shaming can follow a young person for the rest of their life, limiting opportunities for education, employment and housing.
Louisiana’s repeal was the first time a state rolled back an RTA law, cracking a bipartisan consensus that shows no signs of returning any time soon. Louisiana’s legislative shift has quickly spread to other states. Capitalizing on public anxiety, for example, North Carolina lawmakers followed Louisiana’s lead, overriding a gubernatorial veto to repeal their own RTA law. The backlash effectively turned back the clock to 1919, when the state originally set the upper age of juvenile court jurisdiction at 16.
RTA repeal advocates in North Carolina leveraged data on system strain, such as longer detention stays, to argue that raising the age had pushed the system’s capacity past the limit. However, the type of violent felonies lawmakers cited make up a small percentage of all juvenile cases in the state. This focus on low-volume, high-severity felonies will not move the needle on system capacity, which is dominated by simple assault and other relatively minor offenses. Instead, the measure removes judges’ ability to evaluate children on a case-by-case basis, replacing judicial discretion with a one-size-fits-all punitive framework.
According to a 2025 report by the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, “expanded jurisdiction of the juvenile system did not lead to increases in recidivism rates beyond the historical rates,” despite a much larger eligible pool of youth in the system. In his veto message, then-Gov. Roy Cooper defended the law, which originally passed with strong bipartisan support, pointing out that placing young people in adult correctional facilities increases recidivism and “would keep some children from getting treatment they need while making communities less safe.”
Over the past decade, almost all states had moved away from prosecuting older teens as adults. As the last state to do so, North Carolina’s repeal suggests the wave has crested and is now rolling back. In Nebraska, lawmakers have targeted even-younger children, paving the way for juveniles as young as 11 to be placed in secure detention. The push for mandatory adult prosecution has even spread to the federal level. Over the summer, the House passed four bills addressing crime in the District of Columbia, including one that would lower the age at which juveniles can be tried as adults from 16 to 14.
This does not work to deter crime. The evidence here is unequivocal: Charging youth as adults is counterproductive. Studies consistently demonstrate that outcomes in the adult system are worse across nearly every dimension, including recidivism. Adult facilities are high-risk environments full of hardened criminals, dramatically increasing the risk of gang involvement, drug abuse, and physical and sexual assault. Tragically, children are 36 times more likely to die by suicide in an adult jail than in a juvenile detention facility.
The return to policies that prioritize punishment over rehabilitation undermines a bipartisan, evidence-based consensus that has worked to reduce youth crime for decades. The speed of the turnaround is striking, especially given the lack of causal data linking surges in crime to youth justice reforms. After the pandemic, violent crime did rise nationally, both in states that had recently passed RTA and those that did not. This simple fact suggests that spikes in Louisiana and North Carolina may have been a local manifestation of a national trend rather than a result of a change in state law.
The pivot toward treating children as adults also contradicts decades of neuroscience research. Cognitive capacity related to impulse control, future planning and risk assessment continues to mature until age 25. Until then, young people are highly motivated by short-term positive rewards and poorly deterred by the threat of long-term punishment. Psychologists emphasize that charging children as adults is “at odds with what researchers know about adolescent behavior and decision-making.”
If the goal is to reduce crime long-term, system alternatives such as restorative justice are much better than rigid, punitive mandates. Ultimately, the youth justice vibe shift not only jeopardizes lives but also the viability of a bipartisan consensus that has improved the lives of youth for decades.
Logan Seacrest is a resident fellow with the R Street Institute’s Criminal Justice and Civil Liberties program.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
