Tiffany Hanssen: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hanssen, filling in for Brian today. When Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch agreed to stay on to head the NYPD for the mayor-elect, they both acknowledged that they don't agree on everything when it comes to policing. One area of disagreement is changing New York State's Raise the Age law. That law, put into effect in 2018, keeps 16 and 17-year-olds from being tried and incarcerated as adults, something only one of the other states besides New York still allowed.

Commissioner Tisch has spoken out about the need to change the law, as has Mayor Adams and Bronx DA Darcel Clark. Governor Hochul has stated her willingness to discuss the law in the next legislative term. Mayor-elect Mamdani has spoken in favor of the law, though he did point to the fact that the funding to support it didn't materialize. We're joined now by an advocate for the law, Vincent Schiraldi, the former Commissioner of Probation under Mayor Bloomberg, and the Commissioner of Correction under Mayor de Blasio. He's also run juvenile justice departments in Washington, DC, and Maryland. He's now a visiting fellow at the Pinkerton Foundation. Welcome back to the show, Vincent.

Vincent Schiraldi: Thank you, Tiffany. Thanks for having me on.

Tiffany Hanssen: You got it. All right, Vinnie, let's just start by talking about what the law changed when it was put into effect, and then maybe we can get into some of the data about how it's working now and why some folks are calling for it to be amended. What was the goal originally of that Raise the Age law, which folks refer to as RTA? Was it to really bring justice to those young offenders who were being tried as adults? Was there a goal perhaps of having less crime overall by separating young people in the criminal justice system from adults? Because we know that there is a connection between trying children as adults and their likelihood of reoffending, right? What was the original goal, do you think?

Vincent Schiraldi: Yes, I'll go back a minute further than that, to the birth of the juvenile court back in the late 1800s by a trio of crusading women in Chicago, Lucy Flower, Julia Lathrop, and Jane Addams, who created a court to separate kids from adults. Before that, if you were arrested as a 12-year-old, you went to an adult court, and if you got locked up, you went to adult jail or prison. They thought this was wrong, and they thought that kids were not just smaller versions of adults, but qualitatively different in ways that matter jurisprudentially. It matter in terms of what we should consider in the court. Not that they weren't responsible at all, but that there was mitigation.

The mitigation was kind of twofold. One was they're not as responsible as a fully mature adult because they're not developed as much as a fully mature adult, and the other is they're going to get better, they're going to get older, more mature and less likely to do stupid, childish things. Decades and decades later, tons of research funded by the Justice Department and the MacArthur Foundation, and some other foundations found, lo and behold, what every parent knows is true. Kids are different than adults. The boy of 15 is different from the man of 30 in the way a man of 30 is not different from the man of 45. They're different, the man of 30 and 45, but there's not that much different.

A boy of 15 and a man of 30, man at 30 is way more mature, way less likely to be influenced by his peers, way less volatile in emotionally charged settings, way more oriented towards the future, and able to therefore delay gratification. That's what the research has found. The overwhelming majority of states had set 18 as the age at which we say you're an adult from the standpoint of being prosecuted. Doesn't mean you wouldn't be prosecuted before 18, but the prosecutor would bear the burden. They'd have to go to court and say, "This kid did something so bad and has done so many bad things before, we want them to be prosecuted."

As an adult, defense attorney would defend it. Judge would make a decision. Not in New York. In New York, when you turn 16, for all criminal purposes, you are an adult. You went to adult court. If you got arrested for misdemeanors or petty theft, that was an adult charge. If you got convicted of it, it stayed on your adult record forever. If you went to jail, you went to Rikers Island. When I was--

Tiffany Hanssen: Was there any wiggle room there, Vinnie? I'm wondering, that-

Vincent Schiraldi: No.

Tiffany Hanssen: -16, 17-year-old, was it always just you went right to adult court? There was no wiggle room for a prosecutor or a defendant to say, "These extenuating circumstances mean that this child should be tried in a family court situation." It was really just that black and white?

Vincent Schiraldi: Everything was adult. Now, prosecutors had the ability to dismiss the charges, to divert the case to a program, but if they decided to prosecute the kid, the only venue available was adult court for that 16 or 17-year-old, and the only jail that was available was Rikers. They couldn't put them in Horizons and Crossroads, the city's juvenile facilities, or Spofford back then. I will say, aside from being terrible public policy, the fact that by the time Raise the Age passed, New York was only one of two states, the other being North Carolina, where 16-year-olds were automatically and irrevocably tried as adults, was embarrassing.

When we used to go to other conferences in other states, I was probation commissioner there. People would be like, "What's up with that? I don't get it. Why is it 16? Why'd you pick 16?" The answer is they picked it when they formed the juvenile court back 100 years ago. Because of the volatility of this issue and the fear that politicians had for stepping on it, on this third rail, it just took decades and decades of really incontrovertible evidence about how bad it is to put kids in a juvenile system before we finally dragged the folks in Albany over the line to raise the age to 18.

The evidence is clear. Centers for Disease Control says when you try kids as adults, not incarcerate, not necessarily even incarcerated, just put them in the adult system, they're 34% more likely to reoffend. When they do go to jail, kids who ultimately go to adult jails, they're a third more likely to die, literally die between the ages of 18 and 33. That's how toxic an effect this has on a young person.

Tiffany Hanssen: Listeners, we're talking with Vincent Schiraldi about the Raise the Age law. Some folks wanting to bring it up for discussion again in the next legislative session. Do you have a question for our guest about how the law has worked? Maybe you have an experience with the juvenile justice system and have seen how some changes in the Raise the Age law affected the process after they went into effect? You can call us at 212-433-9692. You can also text us at that number.

Vinnie, I've seen this flowchart about how the system works and it really looks-- our colleagues at Gothamist have linked to it. It looks like nobody under 18 gets detained or tried right now in regular adult court. Family court handles misdemeanors, some nonviolent felonies, but for serious felonies, there is a new Youth Part. That Youth Part is part of the adult court system. Explain for us how that Youth Part actually differs from adult court, if it does, and how many kids are ending up there. Do we know?

Vincent Schiraldi: I know a couple of things. I don't know everything, but let me take it from a different angle and say what changed when Raise the Age passed, right? Then that'll get me into the Youth Parts. First of all, no 16 and 17-year-olds now go to Rikers Island or jail in any county in New York state, which is hugely good. I saw the 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds on Rikers Island when I was with the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice after I was probation commissioner, and it is nothing that a decent society should be proud of. Then, if a 16 or 17-year-old is charged with a misdemeanor, as you said, they go to family court, which is juvenile court.

Felonies are a little different. If you're charged with a felony, you go to criminal court, which now has a separate part they call a Youth Part. It's still a criminal court judge. That judge got appointed and elected and reelected the same way any criminal court judge would, and they determine where your case is going to go, whether you're going to go down, if you will, to family court, or up, if you will, to one of their criminal court brethren. If it's a nonviolent felony, the presumption is you're going to be transferred to family court.

The prosecutor has the opportunity though to say, "No, no, no, no. There are some extraordinary circumstances here. I know this one is nonviolent, but the last one was violent, and I think this kid should be tried as an adult." Defense attorney defends, judge decides. If it's a violent felony and the person's accused of significant physical injury, displaying a deadly weapon like a gun, or engaging in any sexual offense, they stay in adult court. Many of the cases you're hearing--

Tiffany Hanssen: In the Youth Part of the adult court, is that right?

Vincent Schiraldi: You know what, I'm going to apologize right now. I think they go to a regular adult court judge. I think the Youth Part just makes that decision, but I hope there's somebody on the phone that knows the answer to that. In any case, it's still an adult court, whether it's a Youth Part or the not Youth Part.

Tiffany Hanssen: Understood. Yes.

Vincent Schiraldi: What's interesting is a lot of the cases you're seeing in the papers where it says, "Oh my God, this kid did this. We should try all juveniles as adults." Those kids who did those murders or attempted murders or first-degree robberies, they're going to get tried as an adult even though they're 16 and 17. They're not coming back to juvenile court because they used or displayed a deadly weapon or engaged in a sexual offense. It's ironic that the proposals to lower the age to 16 and 17 would actually, in some respects, affect kids accused of slightly less serious crimes than the ones that are really frightening everybody.

Tiffany Hanssen: We talk about the lead-up to the Raise the Age law, and Mayor Adams had referred to the previous system as draconian. Almost everybody agrees with the impetus behind this Raise the Age law. There are a few things that critics of the law want to change. I want to play a clip for you here, Vinnie, from Commissioner Tisch back in June.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: From 2018 to 2024, the number of children under the age of 18 arrested with a gun increased by 136% in New York City. Over the same time, shooters under age 18 went up by 92% and young shooting victims increased 81%. So far this year, 36 or 14% of our shooters in the city or persons of interest in a shooting were under the age of 18. 44, also 14% of our shooting victims, were under 18. I have seen enough. This all went off the rails when the first part of New York State's Raise the Age law took effect in 2018.

Tiffany Hanssen: All right, Vinnie, do you agree? Disagree?

Vincent Schiraldi: First of all, I do want to say, when I was a corrections commissioner for a very awful seven months, the final seven months of Mayor de Blasio's term, during which Omicron was spiking, people were dying in Rikers. It was a terrible, terrible time there. Commissioner Tisch was commissioner of the Department of Information Technology, and she was, bar none, the most enthusiastic person about helping to fix conditions in Rikers Island. I'm going to say I disagree with her next. I feel like our society's evolved to the point where if you disagree with somebody, you must hate them and you must think they're the enemy.

I do not hate Commissioner Tisch, and I do not think she's the enemy. I think she's concerned about public safety in the city of New York. She and her team see up close the ramifications of gun violence. I have been to far too many kids' funerals myself in my years running these various different departments you mentioned earlier. It's a terrible, terrible thing to see people victimized by gun violence, whether that's by an adult or juvenile. I think to blame Raise the Age for that is flawed. 6.8% of the felony arrests in New York City were of kids under 18 prior to Raise the Age. Last year, it was 6.4%, so it hasn't gone up. It's slightly lower than it was before.

Remember, we did have a pandemic that was really, really emotionally upsetting. It was particularly difficult for young people who were sort of on the edge, who were going to challenging schools, who lived in challenging neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods got flooded by guns. We're experiencing the ramifications of that right now, but it's certainly not because of Raise the Age, because everybody who displays a gun or engages in violence who's 16 or 17 already stays in adult court. It's just not logical to think it's Raise the Age. Also, that group of young people commits fewer crimes as a percentage than they were before Raise the Age passed.

It doesn't mean they don't commit any crimes. It doesn't mean that gun possession's not up. Gun possession's up. We've flooded our communities with guns during and after the pandemic, and we need to address that in a very serious way. I think Mayor Mamdani is right. We need to all get in a room, knock heads. He's proposed a whole department of community safety that gets to young people and old people before they commit crimes. My hope is that he and Commissioner Tisch and whoever runs that department can get this together and say, "Okay, what are we going to do to stop people shooting in the first place, not wait till afterwards to punish them harshly?"

Tiffany Hanssen: One of the things when we're talking about guns in the hands of younger people, Vinnie, Commissioner Tisch, Mayor Adams, others have claimed that gangs are putting guns in the hands of younger people with the idea that they won't face the same criminal penalties. I'm wondering if you agree or disagree with that conclusion.

Vincent Schiraldi: I am sure that periodically happens. We are talking about such an infinitesimally small number of situations now because that's an argument for getting rid of the whole juvenile court if you want to say that. That's true for drug possession, that adults manipulate and abuse children, and have them hold their drugs. Should we abolish juvenile court for drug possession? Should we more harshly punish kids because adults are abusing them? I don't want to act like, "Oh, okay, we shouldn't do that so we're just going to be victimized by crime." There are things we should be doing. They're just not fiddling with Raise the Age, particularly not during the budget process.

An example is when Raise the Age passed, they said-- because this is going to cost more money. Now, we serve kids more in the juvenile system. We try to turn their lives around, and that costs more than the adult system, where it's more about punishment, right? Because of that, the state said, "Every year, we're going to allocate $250 million to every county in New York State, except New York City, parenthetically, which gets none of that money, largely because Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo didn't get along with each other. New York City gets-- even though we have half of the kids involved in crime in the State of New York, we get none of that money.

Anyway, at least they were smart enough to say, "Let's put some money out there, so that since there's going to be more young people in this system, they'll get services." So far, the counties around the State of New York have spent a third of that money. Two-thirds of that $1.5 billion, a billion dollars is sitting in Albany's coffers unallocated, and none is going to be allocated to New York City unless the law changes. Maybe before we throw the law out, we should stand up the kind of programs that are going to help these young people not commit these crimes in the first place, rather than just figuring out more intricate ways to punish them after we arrest them.

Tiffany Hanssen: That is one of incoming Mayor Mamdani's complaints about the law is that it's gone largely unfunded in New York City. We can talk more about that, but I want to just circle back here to gun crimes specifically again, and bring in a clip here from the Bronx DA Darcel Clark, also back in June.

DA Darcel Clark: We've seen 16 and 17-year-olds, as well as now 13, 14, and 15-year-olds with multiple gun cases and other violent crimes that are not held responsible when they're going to family court. They're arrested for gun possession, released without proper supervision, and they graduate to a fatal shooting or they are killed by another youth with a gun. We need to make some common-sense adjustments to the Raise the Age law, such as changing display to possess for weapons charges so that that can halt kids before they pull out a gun and pull the trigger.

Tiffany Hanssen: Comments, Vinnie, on that? That was Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark. Do you agree? You think the law needs to be changed when it comes to these gun crimes specifically?

Vincent Schiraldi: Again, I'm going to start by saying when I was commissioner of corrections, all the cases that arose out of Rikers Island, if somebody did something particularly serious, either to another incarcerated person or to staff, they were prosecuted by Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark. She cared deeply about what was going on at Rikers Island. She came and visited. She came up with ways to expedite processing of those cases because once a crime like that occurs, everybody's on edge. She was super concerned as the woman that grew up in the Bronx, knows what's going on in the streets, and really cares about both conditions of confinement and crime as a general rule.

I disagree with her on this, but it's not that I hate her or think she's the enemy. I think we need to get in a room and figure stuff out. Here's why I disagree. First of all, 13, 14 and 15-year-olds, none of the proposals will affect them, and Raise the Age did not affect them. They were already in juvenile court. There was already a process for asking for them to be tried as an adult if they committed serious crimes. Raise the Age going up, and if it comes back down, will have zero impact on 13, 14, and 15-year-olds. It does bother me when people keep raising the cases. Several of the articles I see, "A 15-year-old did this, a 14-year-old did this."

Yes, 14 or 15-year-olds can occasionally, thankfully, very rarely, commit serious crimes. Lowering the age to 16 will have nothing to do with that. One. Two, there is a small group of young people, if you look at the data in New York, there's been an increase in crime, murders, attempted murders, and first-degree robberies have increased since the pandemic and Raise the Age. Again, I don't think that's because of Raise the Age, because those kids are already going to be tried as adults, but that has increased.

I suspect it's because of the same sociological factors that are affecting kids all around the country, which is they got shut out of school, everybody was emotionally distraught, their parents lost their jobs, they were getting evicted, and guns were flooding their communities. You can't just press a button when the pandemic's over to undo that. That is why I was so strong on the resources. We can. When I was in Maryland, until recently, I left that job in June. There were terrible number of shootings amongst the kids, terrible number of shootings, way worse than New York, who--

Tiffany Hanssen: Vincent, I do want to get to that a little bit more about the history that you have here with this, but I'm curious, Vincent, for your take, we mentioned it, but we didn't actually touch on, I think, this notion of recidivism, and if that was partially the intent of the law to lower this incidence of recidivism among kids who are tried as adults and incarcerated as adults. If that was part of the impetus for creating this law and implementing this law, has it been effective?

Vincent Schiraldi: The research on it was from the early years of implementation, when I don't think things were being implemented well, and when the resources weren't available to help with the kids. There's been some slight increases that some of the research has shown relative to recidivism, but this is a group of kids. You do need really powerful programs. What I was about to say about Maryland was that when we were able to isolate the kids most likely to be engaged in gun violence, either as a victim or an offender, after having evaluated 30,000 cases, we did a data analysis of 30,000 cases. We then stood up a program.

It was a slightly expensive program because it was really intense, where every one of them got a life coach who was a credible messenger, who used to help them develop their own life plan. "I'm going to go to school. I'm going to get a job. I'm going to get therapy. My family and I are going to move." We then resource those plans. We had the money that Governor Moore gave us to resource those plans. Even though these were the highest risk kids in the highest risk communities, we were able to substantially reduce both their victimization because many of them were going to get killed.

None of them got killed, and it's been going since September of '23. Two years, and their likelihood of engaging in gun violence. New York have these programs--

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, I just want to interrupt here. Sorry, because I know we're getting down to our last minutes here, and I want to circle back to something you talked about. Resourcing the plan. One of the things that Mayor-elect Mamdani has pointed to as a problem, specifically with the Raise the Age law, and DA Clark also pointed out in that clip that we heard, that there was supposed to be money for local jurisdictions for youth violence prevention. New York City hasn't seen any of it. Tell us what happened to that money, and how can the law be changed? Can it? To fix that?

Vincent Schiraldi: Yes, it's a scandal. We created a program called Close to Home when Mayor Bloomberg was mayor and Governor Cuomo was brand new. That took all of the kids back out of these brutal state Office of Children and Family Services facilities and put them into programs, some residential, some community, in New York City. When we did that, they gave us half of the money that it cost the state. It was costing the state $250,000 per kid per year, crazy money to lock them up in these awful upstate facilities. That half of that money shifted to the city, so we were able to stand up a whole continuum of programs for those kids.

When that sunset five years later, even though we kept all of the kids, Governor Cuomo didn't re-up the money. That happened the same year as Raise the Age, when $250 million a year was allocated to absorb the impact of Raise the Age for every county in the State of New York other than New York City. I've never seen a political analysis of why, other than Governor Cuomo didn't like Mayor de Blasio, and he wasn't going to give him any money. Now, that money gets allocated every year. It's very challenging, even for the upstate communities. Only a third of it has been spent.

It's a billion dollars sitting in a pot. New York City has no access to it. Again, before we change the law, how about we spend the money to help the young people not get involved in violence in the first place? I've been beaten up. I've been mugged in Central Park and in a park in my neighborhood, my apartment's been robbed. I grew up in New York City. Stuff happened, and I would much rather not been victimized than been victimized and had the kid tried as an adult.

Tiffany Hanssen: We have been talking with Vincent Schiraldi, now a visiting fellow at the Pinkerton Foundation, about the Raise the Age law. Vincent, last 30 seconds before you go. What do you think is going to happen in this session? We've said it's up for discussion. Do you think anything will actually come of it?

Vincent Schiraldi: Yes. I think the main thing we need to try to do, our new mayor needs to try and do, is get this out of a backdoor deal. Albany often tries to pass important pieces of legislation like this during the budget process. That's absolutely wrong. Even if you disagree with everything I said, this should be debated in the legislative session in front of the proper committees. Prosecutors should come, advocates should come, and legislature should fit it out. They shouldn't stick it into some obscure section. That's why people are cynical about politicians.

I think, in my view of-- one final thought I would give you is every one of these kids has a parent, and I know their parents, and I've met these kids. I want you to think about if my kid had done what these young people are being accused of, even if it was a tough thing, what would I want? What would the system look like I would want to respond to my kid to both hold them accountable and help them turn their lives around? That's the kind of system we should devise for the children of other people. The one we want for our own children.

Tiffany Hanssen: Vincent, I think that's a great place to leave it. Vincent Schiraldi. Vinnie, thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it.

Vincent Schiraldi: Thanks a lot. I much appreciate being on.

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