New Haven Independent

Some lawmakers and youth advocates are hoping to strip Connecticut of a dubious distinction this coming legislative session: our state is one of only three that treat 16-year-olds as adult offenders in the criminal justice system. They want to “raise the age” to 18, and they all wore buttons saying just that at a legislative breakfast this morning at Gateway Community College. It was sponsored by the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance.

New Haven State Rep. Toni Walker (in photo) is the point person in the General Assembly for the proposed bill. Mike Lawlor (D-East Haven), co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, is also on board.

They want the default age set at 18 instead of 16, but for a particularly heinous crime a prosecutor could still propose that a 16-year-old go into the adult system, just as sometimes happens now with kids even younger than 16.

That didn’t make sense to at least one person in the audience. Sally Joughin of People Against Injustice, a prison reform group, said, “If someone commits a horrible crime, that’s not my definition of an adult.” Joughin (pictured at left) suggested that everyone 18 and under should go into the juvenile system. That could prove politically unpalatable.

The key difference between adult and youth justice systems is that in philosophy — or certainly in practice — the former is all about punishment, while the latter is supposed to balance punishment with support and rehabilitation.

The move to put more kids in the juvenile system also raised some contradictions, in that many of the same people pushing for this change recognize how dysfunctional the juvenile system is. One of them is Laura McCargar (pictured), the young executive director of Youth Rights Media, who serves on the steering committee of the Alliance. Her group produced a video blasting the Connecticut Juvenile Training School for its abuse of young people incarcerated there, but she still says putting kids in youth facilities is better than locking them up with adults.

Margaret Roberson attended the breakfast with tears in her eyes. She’s been raising her grandson, who had his first scrape with the law at 15, for which he received probation. Now 16, he violated probation and was sentenced to three years in prison. Roberson (pictured at left) said her grandson doesn’t tell her anything about his situation. “He’s probably worried about me because I have a heart condition,” she said. “If there was something happening to him I don’t think he’d tell me.”

The other focus of the Alliance’s legislative efforts this year will be to create race-neutral criteria for prosecution. Right now, said Alliance member Ann-Marie DeGraffenreidt, blacks and Hispanics represent a quarter of the state’s youth population, yet they are more than 70 percent of the youth held in pre-trial detention and nearly 80 percent of the youth committed delinquent to the Department of Children and Families.

“Many people continue to believe that the only reason there is disproportionate minority contact [with the criminal justice system] in Connecticut is because there are more people of color who happen to be poor people concentrated in urban areas,” DeGraffenreidt said. “That’s not true. It happens regardless of socio-economic status. There is a different response to kids of color.”

The General Assembly convenes this year on Feb. 8.