In the early hours of Sunday, August 3, 2025, Edward Coristine, a nineteen-year-old computer programmer who had achieved notoriety as an employee of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, was walking a friend back to her car near U Street in Washington, D.C., when they crossed paths with a group of teenagers. According to prosecutors, only one approached at first, demanding the keys to the car. More joined, and some of them punched Coristine, he later told the police, causing him to suffer abrasions, a bloody nose, and head swelling. (He refused medical attention on the scene but subsequently told Fox News’s Jesse Watters that he had a broken nose and a concussion.) Police quickly arrived, and the group fled with Coristine’s iPhone.
By Tuesday President Donald Trump had posted a photo of a blood-streaked Coristine on Truth Social along with a warning that crime in the District was “out of control.” Within days he announced a federal takeover of D.C., using the threat of teenage “thugs” attacking “innocent Citizens” as a pretext for sending in the National Guard—part of a playbook he would subsequently deploy in other Democrat-controlled cities. (A person close to the case disputed the characterization of the teenagers as “some militarized group”—it was “a bunch of kids” that included “innocent bystanders.”) Trump also took the Coristine assault as an occasion to call for another shift: “The Law in D.C. must be changed to prosecute these ‘minors’ as adults, and lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14,” he wrote. Teen offenders “are not afraid of Law Enforcement because they know nothing ever happens to them, but it’s going to happen now!”
Trump’s post fueled calls on the right to try more teenagers accused of crimes as adults. “Young criminals who escape adult criminal court because of their ‘tender’ years should be made responsible for the crimes that they commit,” US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on August 12, 2025. Mocking an event advertised by D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, she added: “Ice cream socials for hardened repeat offenders just doesn’t cut it.” When the Coristine case resulted in a boy and a girl, both fifteen, being given probation instead of referred to adult court—sentencing in line with what prosecutors had requested, according to the Post—Trump and Pirro pilloried the judge. (Pirro later charged additional members of the group with multiple crimes from that night, including the assault. One teenager incarcerated at eighteen has been held in jail for over ten months without trial, despite having no prior arrests.)
Congress has signaled that it is open to granting Pirro the power to refer more minors for harsher punishment: last September several House Democrats joined with Republicans to pass legislation that would lower the age at which certain youths in D.C. can be tried as adults, from sixteen to fourteen. Her office can already transfer sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds charged with serious crimes to adult court without any judicial review; about a dozen teenagers (all Black) were held in pretrial detention in D.C. under this law as of August. Because of D.C.’s lack of statehood, critics fear the House bill, if enacted, could lead to younger kids being sentenced to facilities contracted with the federal Bureau of Prisons, a system that is ill-equipped to rehabilitate children. It is one of several bills waiting in the wings of the House and Senate that would cause teenagers and young adults to serve longer sentences and acquire criminal records that follow them long after they’re released. Taken together, these pieces of legislation represent not just an attack on D.C.’s self-governance but a broader ideological push to lock up young people rather than prioritize returning them to their communities.
Meanwhile, youth advocates worry that the message coming from Washington could encourage prosecutors to impose these ideas on a case-by-case basis. In New Jersey in April 2025, Trump’s pick for interim US attorney, Alina Habba, announced that she would use a federal law to charge a fourteen-year-old, who was accused of killing one police officer and injuring another, as an adult, since New Jersey state law mandates that people under age fifteen be tried in family court. The state’s then attorney general, a Democrat, also expressed support for changing the state law so that the teenager could be charged. (Habba has since resigned after a federal appeals court found that the Trump administration installed her in her position unlawfully.) “The message is very clear,” Habba told The New York Post. “If you’re a child, I don’t care.”
This attitude suggests a growing backlash against decades of successful advocacy for more humane treatment of young people by the criminal justice system. Starting in 2005, the Supreme Court handed down several decisions that established a framework for treating kids differently from adults, including outlawing the death penalty for juvenile offenders—defined in that case as those who committed a crime while under the age of eighteen. Since the late 2000s, states have increasingly moved away from trying and incarcerating kids as adults in the justice system. Teenagers not considered mature enough to vote, smoke, serve on a jury, or, in some places, drive should not be held culpable for mistakes in the same way as adults, the thinking goes. The number of kids in both juvenile and adult jails and prisons has dropped dramatically over the last two decades.
These shifts were, in part, driven by neuroscience research indicating that adolescents’ still-developing brains respond much better to a rehabilitative justice model than a punitive one, which in turn reduces recidivism. MRI studies have found that the frontal lobes of the brain that are vital to decision-making, including impulse control, are among the last to reach maturity—the process is completed well after the age of eighteen, according to an amicus brief submitted by psychologists to the Supreme Court in 2004. As a result of this period of rapid development, children’s brains may also be more vulnerable to trauma: one 2009 study found that adults who recalled experiencing many adverse events during childhood had life expectancies almost twenty years lower than those of their peers. (Subsequent researchers posited a link between childhood stress and biological changes, since the association with premature mortality persisted even after accounting for socioeconomic and behavioral factors, like smoking.) All of this suggests that incarceration and its harms can have especially long-lasting effects on children.
Such research arrived as incarcerated youth and their supporters—including a coalition of directly impacted Black and brown parents—were already campaigning in courts and the media against juvenile imprisonment, as the journalist Nell Bernstein reported in her 2025 book, In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison. At the peak of the movement’s success, in 2021, forty-seven states had “Raise the Age” laws on the books, which keep children under eighteen from being automatically sent to the adult system for most offenses. (Vermont, in their law, included eighteen-year-olds and laid the groundwork for some nineteen-year-olds to be included in the future.) “At a moment when regressive forces threaten to stall or unravel progress on multiple fronts, the unlikely success of this movement holds a crucial message,” Bernstein wrote: “transforming an entrenched institution in the service of justice is possible.”
The Covid-19 pandemic jeopardized that progress. At first youth advocates hoped that lockdowns might motivate communities to embrace alternatives to incarceration. In the spring of 2020, as schools across the country shuttered, states faced a choice about whether to also release kids from jails and prisons, where the virus could spread rapidly. In some jurisdictions, authorities decided to isolate incarcerated youth, at great risk to their mental health: Louisiana placed some kids in twenty-four-hour solitary confinement, where they “became so starved for human contact that they dismantled their light fixtures and used the pieces to dig holes in the walls that separated them,” Bernstein reported in her book.
Elsewhere—most notably across California’s already dwindling state system—intake was halted, or kids were released. (Though in California, as Bernstein wrote, they were instead “shunted to county juvenile detention centers that are just as bad or worse.”) There were clear racial disparities, with Black youth less likely to be released than white youth. But the total population in juvenile detention plummeted by almost a quarter in March 2020, according to a survey of agencies in thirty states conducted by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private philanthropic organization focused on young people. Arrests also dropped during this time, in part because schools were closed.
Advocates hoped the trend toward decarceration would last. “A lot of us were, I think now, foolishly optimistic,” Marsha Levick, a juvenile law expert, told me. Instead, violent crime, including homicides, temporarily spiked in major cities—a result, researchers at the Brookings Institute suggested in hindsight, of teen boys being out of school and young men out of work in low-income neighborhoods. Politicians on the right seized the opportunity to push a broader narrative about the failure of progressive criminal justice policies. Homicides remained high through 2022, then quickly went back down, trending toward prepandemic levels. But anxieties about crime surged: between 2020 and 2023, the share of Americans who indicated they were afraid to walk home alone at night rose from 29 to 40 percent.
Kids became a particular target of this panic. While the vast majority of people arrested for violent crime in 2022 and 2023 were adults (over 90 percent, according to an analysis of FBI data by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank), an entire genre of sensational media story took shape around the temporary uptick in crimes committed by youths. “‘It’s Fight Night’: Disturbing Video Captures Teen Mob Beat Up Off-Duty Firefighter,” read one New York Post headline from 2021. “Disturbing Video Shows Terrified Woman Attacked by Mob During ‘Teen Takeover’ of Downtown Chicago,” read another from Fox News in 2023.
Carjackings were a special focus. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing devoted to the issue in March 2022, the president and CEO of a trade association that works to stop insurance crime painted a picture of juveniles—“some as young as eleven”—stealing cars to commit drive-by shootings. Senators blamed such thefts on the policies implemented in blue states and cities: Marsha Blackburn mentioned Rachael Rollins, then the US attorney for Massachusetts, while Ted Cruz blamed “district attorneys funded in significant part by George Soros” for carjackings and homicides.
These images of teenage mobs taking over cities resurrected a familiar trope. In 1995 the political scientist John J. DiIulio, Jr., then a professor at Princeton, wrote a cover story for The Weekly Standard arguing that the US, and especially Black urban neighborhoods, was incubating a generation of “super-predators” who would bring about a wave of violent crime. “The demographic bulge of the next 10 years will unleash an army of young male predatory street criminals who will make even the leaders of the Bloods and Crips…look tame by comparison,” he warned, predicting that these products of an environment of “moral poverty” would rape and murder without remorse.
This alarmism was itself a reprise of previous moral panics, including the 1970s hysteria over muggings by Black youth in Britain that Stuart Hall and his coauthors famously wrote about in Policing the Crisis (1978). DiIulio’s theory arrived as politicians were already clamoring to be seen as tough on crime, pushing policies such as “three strikes” and “truth-in-sentencing” laws that mandated lengthy prison terms and limited early release. Harsher sentencing—which President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill incentivized—hastened America’s march toward mass incarceration. It also contributed to a feedback loop, in which rising incarceration fed the perception that locking more people up lowered violent crime, when the two trends were not so clearly linked. Trump helped spread this racialized panic, too: in 1989 he took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the return of the death penalty in New York following the arrest of the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers—the youngest of whom were fourteen—who were wrongfully convicted of assaulting and raping a white woman. (They were all exonerated in 2002 and later sued Trump for defamation over statements he made about them during a 2024 presidential debate.)
The crime wave DiIulio foresaw never came to pass, and he eventually disavowed his theory. “The superpredator idea was wrong,” he said in a PBS documentary that aired in 2019. “Once it was out there, though, it was out there.” Indeed, it had measurable consequences for Black and brown youth; by the end of the 1990s state legislatures across the country had hardened their approach toward juveniles, as an analysis by The Marshall Project of the propagation of the superpredator myth found. (DiIulio declined to comment for this story, citing health issues.) Starting in 1992, over a dozen states added or changed their laws to establish mandatory minimum sentences for various categories of juvenile crimes. Eleven states lowered the age at which certain juveniles could be transferred to criminal court. Between 1993 and 1995 alone, the average daily population of juveniles held as adults almost doubled nationwide. With kids as young as fourteen coming into the adult system, prisons were struggling with their “new mandate to house them,” observed researchers in a 1996 Justice Department report. Even then, they suggested that many of the legislative changes were based on “public perceptions of the escalation of violent juvenile crime” rather than evidence.
Despite the reformist turn of the later 2000s, the biases reinforced by the superpredator panic persist. A 2014 study found that police officers perceive Black children suspected of felony conduct to be four and a half years older than their actual age, and white children to be almost a year younger. In another study from 2012, white participants were more likely to consider juvenile offenders as blameworthy as adults if they first read that an adolescent who committed a rape was Black as opposed to white.
Such prejudices have clear implications for the way kids are treated by the criminal justice system. A report by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that seeks to end mass incarceration, found in 2019 that about half of white children’s delinquency cases were handled informally outside of juvenile court—still a much lower proportion than youth advocates would like—compared to 40 percent of cases involving Black children. And while the percentage of white youths’ cases that judges waived to adult court fell by over 70 percent between 2005 and 2021, the percentage of Black youths’ cases only fell by about 40 percent. In 2023 Black kids were held in juvenile detention facilities at over five times the rate of white ones, according to the Sentencing Project, the highest disparity since tracking began in the late Nineties.
When I interviewed Kristin Henning, a law professor at Georgetown University who works with children accused of delinquency, and who pointed me to such research, she told me that of the several hundred kids she has represented in over a quarter century in practice in D.C., only four have been white. “The superpredator myth,” she said, “lives on in the subconscious of all of us who are making decisions.”
The rhetoric about a teenage crime wave unleashed by Covid-19 was never so neatly borne out by data. Between 2020 and 2023, the country did see an uptick in the number and proportion of juveniles arrested for violent crimes, but the rates, which had been falling for decades beginning in the Nineties, still remained at or below prepandemic levels, according to the Council on Criminal Justice analysis. Juvenile justice experts attributed the increase to a small group of youth struggling—as adults did—with the unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic.
Yet “tough-on-crime” forces blamed the youth for driving an epidemic of violent crime in blue cities. They often traced such violence to progressive policies that in some cases predated the Covid-19 lockdowns. In January 2023 New York City’s then police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, said that the city had seen an increase in the number of juvenile-involved crimes, and pointed her finger at the state’s Raise the Age law, which passed in 2017 and began to go into effect in 2018. Former NYPD Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor told The New York Post that the law had led to fewer kids being arrested and that, therefore, “recidivism is skyrocketing.” Critics often cite a rise in youth shootings after the law’s passage. But a 2023 analysis of New York City police data conducted by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that changes in gun violence among youth “mirrored the scale and direction of trends among adults aged 18 and older.” According to a 2025 report from the NYC mayor’s office, in 2024 felony youth recidivism was about the same as it had been in 2018. “Needless to say, but the debate around criminal justice policies such as [Raise the Age] tends to be heavily agenda driven,” wrote René Ropac, a senior research associate at John Jay, in an email to me.
Even in New York, which has seen a rise in the number of kids arrested for serious violent felonies, the total has remained relatively low: 334 kids in 2024 as compared to 136 kids in 2018. No one wants to see the rates of murder or other serious crimes rise, said Gladys Carrión, a former commissioner for the New York State Office of Children and Family Services. But she questioned why Raise the Age was getting so much attention. “It’s the environment that we’re in now,” she lamented. “After Covid, and this return to being ‘tough on crime’—that really is driving it.”
When it comes to narratives about crime, “kids make an easy target,” said Jeff Asher, an expert in evaluating criminal justice data. Even as violence by kids is rare, the idea that some children are innocent and vulnerable while others are born to inflict harm lends itself to sensationalism. (“The baby-faced suspects…will be treated as adults” for the “grisly killing,” reads one recent New York Post story.) Conflating concerns about the state of the youth with anxieties about violent crime does a disservice to both, said Tom Woods, a senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “You’re not really dealing with either one,” he told me.
In addition to the D.C. bill that was passed in the House and still waits in the Senate, two states have overturned part or all of their Raise the Age laws since the start of the pandemic. North Carolina Republicans overrode their Democratic governor in 2024 to revoke part of a bipartisan law from 2019; sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds accused of serious felonies in the state now begin their cases as adults. In 2024 Republicans in Louisiana, which had enacted a Raise the Age law in 2017, reversed it altogether, meaning that the state now prosecutes all seventeen-year-olds as adults.
Asher testified twice in the Louisiana statehouse that rolling back the law was not likely to have any effect on crime rates, because adults commit the vast majority of violent crimes. But he sensed that his data was not convincing lawmakers nearly as much as a presentation by a district attorney, who shared a video of teenagers stealing a gun from an unlocked truck and a music video from YouTube in which Black kids rap while showing off weapons. “Look at them. They’ve got more guns than Kellogg’s got cornflakes,” the DA told lawmakers. He alleged that because seventeen-year-olds don’t have consciences like adults, they “will take you out.” One Republican lawmaker claimed that “some of these kids are already lost when they’re two years old.”
New York has also seen a sustained attack on its Raise the Age law. Last year Jessica Tisch, the current New York City police commissioner, called to change the legislation “before more kids get killed.” Even supporters of the law have questioned its implementation. Money allocated by the legislature to fund county programs for at-risk youth stalled, with almost $1 billion languishing unspent in Albany, as Politico has reported; juvenile facilities were also strained by an influx of older kids. This left the law open to the criticism that alternatives to criminal court don’t work. (Governor Kathy Hochul ultimately protected the law against pressure from district attorneys to roll it back.)
Elsewhere, Vermont’s legislature has delayed further rollout of their Raise the Age law, with the state’s Republican governor pushing to repeal it for nineteen-year-olds. Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee have all recently eased the path to try teenagers as adults for certain crimes, as The Atlantic reported, as has Mississippi for kids as young as thirteen. Meanwhile, in 2021, the Supreme Court issued a decision that makes it easier for states to sentence juveniles to life without parole. What this effectively means, as The Marshall Project has pointed out, is that in states that haven’t banned such sentences, judges already handing down this punishment will have even more discretion to do so.
From New York to D.C. to Louisiana, attacks on Raise the Age laws reflect the same hardening attitude toward kids accused of crimes. So far, the rhetoric has outpaced actual changes in policy, cautioned Joshua Rovner, a senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project. One reason for hope is that after several years in which polling showed that Americans felt there was more crime in their areas following the pandemic, new Gallup surveys suggest they feel there is much less. And a handful of states have passed progressive laws, such as one that went into effect this month in Minnesota redirecting children under thirteen out of the juvenile justice system altogether. Nonetheless, in addition, “many regressive laws have passed,” Rovner observed.
The treatment of youth offenders, like so much else in US politics, is becoming a site of polarization. Between 2000 and 2025, the proportion of Americans who indicated that violent juvenile offenders should be treated more leniently than adults rose from 24 to 50 percent. Among Republicans, however, the trend has reversed: between 2023 and 2025, the share of Republicans who said juveniles should be treated the same way as adults rose to 65 percent, the highest level in over twenty years.
The consequences of this attitude can be nightmarish. Over a decade ago, I reported on teenagers who were physically and sexually abused while housed with adult prisoners in Michigan. According to interviews, documents, and videos I obtained, some had been restrained until they urinated on themselves, or gassed with chemical spray; a number had attempted suicide. One testified that a guard threatened to “rape my fat ass if I wasn’t seventeen.” Two others told me directly about being sexually assaulted.
Long after I finished the Michigan story, these horrific episodes would play on repeat in my mind as I tried to sleep. But years later, I also remember the kids themselves. One dreamed of being a deep-sea diver. Another told me about looking forward to caring for the dogs that visited the prison as part of a program for the incarcerated. At the time, across the country, lawmakers of all political persuasions increasingly agreed that locking up children like adults was bad policy. Michigan was an outlier. Following a class-action lawsuit in which the state attorney general’s office sent a representative to follow me into the prisons and subpoena me for my handwritten notes, youth settled with the state of Michigan for $80 million. (The state said that its Department of Corrections “was never able to corroborate the allegations made by plaintiffs about widespread sexual abuse in state prisons.”) Michigan became the last state in the US to end the practice of treating all seventeen-year-olds as adults, in 2019.
As such laws came under fire in the years since the pandemic, the number of kids held in juvenile detention also crept back up. For Black youth, those numbers at one point surpassed prepandemic levels: in January 2020, 1,185 Black youths and 431 white youths were detained across the juvenile detention facilities that the Casey Foundation surveys; by January 2024, the Black population was up 29 percent while the white population was down 4 percent. “At the start of the pandemic, those disparities were pretty large,” said Tom Woods, who tracks this data for the Casey Foundation. “And they have grown since.” This is mostly due to changes in length of stay: nonwhite youth, especially those who are Black, stay in detention longer, Woods noted. As of January, the total detained population had fallen below 2020 levels, but racial disparities persisted.
Children charged in adult court are rarely actually convicted and sentenced to adult prisons, meaning they’re more likely to spend time in a punitive adult jail. But even juvenile facilities can include adult-style punishments like restraints and solitary confinement. According to a recent class-action lawsuit in Colorado, a twelve-year-old diagnosed with autism has been incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility for over six months, despite a judge’s order that he be released. His lawyers report that the boy, who enjoys playing Clue, has been particularly upset by being taken to court in handcuffs. (“We take the concerns raised in the lawsuit very seriously,” wrote a spokesperson for Colorado’s division of youth services.)
In Louisiana, both teenagers whose cases were handled by the juvenile system and those affected by the rollback of the Raise the Age law have reported abuse; the state has also been accused of mixing teens with adult detainees. Teens have alleged being cut off from their families and education: “I am only one credit short of graduating from high school, but there is no school,” one juvenile held in jail in Louisiana testified last year, according to court documents obtained by The Appeal. The teens claim they’ve been confined in modified shipping containers that the jail calls “pods”: “I call the pods slave chambers. The pods are out in the middle of a field next to a jail facility like slave quarters used to be. The guards treat us poorly and they are almost all white. They call us ‘boy’ or ‘boys.’ They are very quick to use mace and put their hands on us.” In 2024 several youths alleged to an investigator that they were also maced inside an adult dorm. They were forced to “crawl up closer to the vents, attempting to find air,” the investigator wrote. The majority of seventeen-year-olds affected by the rollback of the state’s Raise the Age law are accused of nonviolent crimes, and nine out of ten of them are Black, a 2024 ProPublica and Verite News examination of several large Louisiana parishes found. (A spokesperson for Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry’s office did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)
To advocates for incarcerated youth, simply keeping Raise the Age laws on the books is not enough to prevent the enduring trauma caused by the prison system. For one thing, as Levick pointed out to me, many states still have a far lower minimum age of transfer eligibility, or no minimum at all, meaning younger kids can end up in adult court for especially serious offenses. An eleven-year-old was recently charged as an adult in Pennsylvania for killing his adoptive father; he allegedly found keys to a gun safe while looking for his Nintendo Switch, which had been taken away.
In a more sympathetic world, we might offer young people different choices and open up the possibility of different lives. In New York City, a coalition of youth justice providers recently argued that community-based organizations should be able to access Raise the Age funds through a competitive process; they imagine using these resources on existing programs that pair young people on probation with mentors from similar backgrounds and offer them paid internships. On the other side of the country, Bernstein reports on youth at the Young Women’s Freedom Center in San Francisco, a nonprofit founded as mass incarceration surged in the early Nineties, who come together to read texts such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “People who are in survival mode don’t have time and space to reflect, and to problem-pose, and to think critically, so that’s what we do in those circles,” Jessica Nowlan, the organization’s president, told me. (Nowlan herself was one of these young people when she first got involved with the Freedom Center in 1996 as, in her words, a seventh-grade dropout who had been incarcerated seventeen times.) The kids “do understand oppression, systems, control. But they haven’t had space to think about it,” she said.
Bernstein writes that immediate needs are always “front and center” in these discussions. In imagining their own futures, young people are “seeking the things families in wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods take for granted: safe housing, decent schools, accessible health care, fresh food and clean water, jobs and opportunity.” Nowlan, too, emphasized that we already know what young people need to thrive. None of it has changed since the Nineties. But “we need to be very careful right now,” she said, “because people have far less.” And “what’s at stake is people’s lives.”