New York State was inspired to raise the age for a person to be criminally liable under the law to age 18 back in 2018. It’s all the rage in progressive jurisdictions to treat violent, juvenile offenders like Father Flanagan’s kids (“There’s no such thing as a bad boy”).
“The purpose of the Raise the Age law,” according to a juvenile justice advocacy website, “was to ensure that more youth would benefit from the Family Court’s rehabilitative focus and sealed records policies. The law also barred all minors from adult correctional settings, with few exceptions.”
More than “a few,” says Albany District Attorney David Soares. He’s been calling on Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature to repeal the “Raise the Age” law because of the chaos and mayhem it has caused.
Flagging a recent fatal shooting involving a teen gunman who’d had several run-ins with the justice system, [Soares] told them: “We witnessed the murder of a young man at the hands of another young man that had gone through the family court Raise the Age process and was a beneficiary there at a minimum of three times.”
Last year, the outspoken, progressive Albany DA blasted Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers over RTA and other criminal-justice reforms that have “normalized” violence without consequences in urban minority communities across the state.
Soares knows that those violent man-children are totally aware that they can commit almost any kind of violent crime and be tried in juvenile court. Where a young offender may have gotten 7 years for a convenience store holdup if tried as an adult, Family Court would be far more lenient and may not even send the offender to prison.
And because the threat of prison has been all but removed, the recidivism rate among these kids is astronomical.
The result, as noted above has been a series of teen offenders who have gone through the system as many as three times in a single year, with some of them murdering people after they are released. Just in Albany County (well outside of New York City), 12 out of 18 teenagers charged with violent crimes were rearrested after they went on to do even worse.
This has produced what DA Soares describes as “a system of normalized violence without consequences.” The family courts are not set up to deal with violent teen repeat offenders. What they wind up doing is “releasing troubled kids with underdeveloped minds and Glocks” back into the community to wreak more mayhem.
Family Court wasn’t designed to “deal with violent, super, super, violent youth,” Soares explains. These are not “children” in any way except age. They are grown-up violent predators who are smart enough to figure out the angles of the Raise the Age law and avoid serious consequences for their actions.
Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw nails it: “This falls under the same rule that we’ve discussed here so many times but liberal Democrats remain deaf to. If you remove the negative incentive for committing crimes, the result will be more of those types of crimes. It applies to retail looting and it applies to attempted homicide.”
If you remove the “negative incentive” for shoplifting, you end up with a lot fewer retail stores. But then, the kids have suffered under a racist system, so maybe we could see this minor crime as reparations, right?
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