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Louisiana voters go to the polls today to consider substantially stiffening juvenile justice laws. The proposal, constitutional Amendment 3, would give state lawmakers new leeway to send teenagers to adult courts, jails and prisons. Currently, 14-to-16-year-olds can only be charged as adults for the most serious crimes like rape and murder. Advocates for the amendment want the power to add new felonies, like the distribution of fentanyl.
It’s a far cry from the mid-2010s, when state legislators advanced a bipartisan law that pulled youth out of the adult criminal justice system, followed by broader sentencing reforms that reduced the state prison population by about a third. Most of those reforms were scrapped last year. If today’s ballot measure passes, it would further slide the state toward an even more punitive system than the one reformers sought to change a decade ago.
Louisiana is not alone in reversing course. Across the country, the tide of legislative criminal justice reform efforts, which crested in 2020, continues to stall or be actively rolled back, generally in the face of resurgent “tough-on-crime” narratives.
Lawmakers in New Mexico also pushed a law this session to expand the list of crimes for which young people could be tried as adults, but the measure failed after youth advocates raised concerns. So did an alternative effort that would have expanded intervention and reentry programs for teenagers, but also would have added manslaughter to the charges that could see youth charged as adults.
The alternative bill was not punitive enough for many lawmakers. “These kids need our attention and our help, and at the same time, they need to be held accountable, and we must send a message to the juvenile violent criminals in this state that it’s not a badge of honor to go to jail for 20, 21 months. It’s not going to happen that way anymore. We have to do more,” Republican state Sen. Nicole Tobiassen told KOAT-TV.
New Mexico lawmakers have been rattled by recent developments in two high-profile crimes. Last week, three minors aged 11, 13, and 16 were arrested in the apparently intentional hit-and-run death of a cyclist that occurred last year. Just days after those arrests, a mass shooting at a park in Las Cruces also allegedly involved three underage suspects.
In Michigan, lawmakers didn’t even get the chance to consider criminal justice reforms this session. House Speaker Matt Hall announced bluntly in January that no reform efforts would advance, including prospective proposals to eliminate cash bail and juvenile life without parole, or a push to introduce “second look” sentencing reform.
Second look laws allow for incarcerated people to request a reduced sentence, generally after they have been locked up for years. A judge reviews their prison conduct, the circumstances of their offense, and victims’ perspectives before deciding whether to grant the sentence reduction. That would be an important release valve for a state where the average prison sentence is nearly three times as long as the national average, argued an editorial in the Detroit Free Press last week.
In New York, reforms are not only stalled, but are being actively unraveled. Gov. Kathy Hochul is backing legislation to scale back portions of the state’s 2019 discovery reform law. The proposal would reduce the amount of evidence prosecutors are required to share with defense attorneys before trial, and limit judges’ ability to dismiss cases over prosecutors’ non-compliance. Prosecutors say the changes are needed because case dismissals have increased since the law was enacted. Defenders of the reform argue that was part of the point, and that most of those dismissals came in misdemeanor cases.
“These minor offenses, the majority of which involve no allegations of physical harm, often result from the over-policing of Black and brown neighborhoods,” wrote defense attorney Kathryn Miller in an editorial this week.
The push to undo discovery reforms follows New York’s backtracking on bail reform. This week, New Hampshire followed the Empire State’s lead after Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed a new bail law on Tuesday. The legislation rolled back a 2018 bail reform, reducing the legal hurdles for a judge to deny bail and adding mandatory detention after arrest and before the initial court appearance on certain crimes. The Texas Senate also recently approved a bail law to keep more people accused of violent crimes in jail before trial. Similarly, in Tennessee, lawmakers are making progress on a constitutional amendment that would expand the list of charges for which people can be held without bail.
But Tennessee also shows that even as the winds shift towards more punitive approaches to justice, it’s still possible for legislatures to embrace laws aimed at accountability. This week, the state senate advanced a bill that would financially penalize private prison company CoreCivic if the death rate in one of its facilities reaches double that of a state-run facility. The move was spurred by ongoing violence and overdose deaths in the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, an hour east of Nashville. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the CoreCivic-run facility has the highest homicide rate of any prison in the country.
But there’s no denying those efforts at reform and accountability are fewer and farther between than they were a few years ago — and much smaller in scope. Take a bill being considered in the Florida House of Representatives to expand parole eligibility. Even if passed, it would apply to fewer than 4% of the state’s roughly 88,000 incarcerated people.
