Kevin Beckford
09/20/2025
Congress has proposed a number of bills that call for lowering the age for transfer to adult court to 14, repealing second-chance laws that work, and limiting a judge’s discretion to rule in cases involving youth in Washington, D.C. These bills reflect the unfortunate and untrue superpredator youth myth of the 1990s. The resulting mass transfer and subsequent jailing of Black youth had an adverse effect on the safety and socioeconomic posterity of communities.
What Congress is attempting to do now is nothing more than an optics-driven campaign that plays on false notions of a youth crime wave, which has unfortunately been perpetuated about localities like Washington, D.C., despite decreasing crime rates.
Charging youth as adults makes communities unsafe
Youth detention rates have fallen by 46 percent over the last 10 years due to second-chance laws and programs that have sought to redirect youth connected to crime to resources and promising pathways. Transferring youth to adult court increases the likelihood for recidivism; that is why in the last 20 years, most states have moved away from prosecuting teens as adults, recognizing that their developing brains make them less culpable than adults, and that the practice is linked to future offending. To the contrary, the earlier a young person comes into contact with criminal justice, the more likely they are to have continued contact with the system as adults. Furthermore, an individual’s economic, employment, and housing prospects decline with increased contact with the system.
If we truly wanted communities to be safer, we would prioritize housing, mental health services, family planning and support, extracurricular activities and schooling–not sending a young person to an adult court. If advancing safety is truly the goal, efforts like these proposed bills, which are biased against Black and Brown youth, are counterproductive and nonsensical.
Youth violence is declining in D.C.; Baltimore as a site of promise
If we wanted safer and stronger communities, we would replicate recent initiatives like those happening in Baltimore. In recent years, Baltimore has invested in providing youth with trauma-informed care, violence intervention and programs and extracurricular activities, which advanced safety outcomes in the city in a short period of time. Youth arrests in Baltimore dropped by 5 percent and concurrently, youth victimization did as well. The Baltimore Police Department reports that youth victimization by homicide and non-fatal shooting dropped by 74 percent in 2024 and so far, 2025 is trending to have the fewest youth homicides in over a decade.
Like Baltimore, cities across the nation should double down on supports that keep kids home, in school, and connected, rather than push 14-year-olds into adult court. With federal cuts to community violence intervention programs, it is imperative that cities like Baltimore and Washington, D.C., further affirm their commitments to proven interventions that actually keep communities safe.
Ultimately, we have to ask if these legislative measures from a Congress that is disconnected from the everyday realities of Washingtonians, aim to keep communities safe or seek to execute a tragically racist sociopolitical agenda of jailing Black youth. The timing and the aggressiveness of this legislative measure is in direct tension with data trends across the nation and community safety literature. Fewer youth are committing crimes – notably violent crimes – in contexts where diversion and a more holistic approach to addressing illegal activity is in place. Violent crime is on the decline in major cities across the nation, notably D.C., where violent crime fell by 35 percent in 2024 (robberies down by 39 percent and homicides by 32 percent).
Recent legislative efforts targeting youth appear to be nothing more than racist attempts to incarcerate Black youth, and we have to call attention to it. The consequences of these bills are grotesque for Black youth in particular because even as crime decreases, Black youth are still 2.5 times more likely to go into custody as White youth. Now more than ever, we must fight back against such measures by dispelling fear-mongering narratives about Black youth. We must also lean into protecting our youth by promoting and scaling out community-driven interventions that work.
Safety isn’t secured by jailing kids. It is built by ensuring they have all of the resources and guidance needed to thrive in adulthood. Both the moral path and the practical path are clear.