[Y]oung adults convicted of non-violent crimes and between the ages of 18 and 21, could have their records expunged under a bill updating the state’s juvenile justice system, delivered to the governor’s desk on Thursday.
Other changes called for in S.234, which was passed by the General Assembly earlier in the month, are for minors to be funneled through the family court system instead of the criminal court system and for anyone incarcerated under the age of 25 to be kept away from the general prison population.
Rep. Barbara Rachelson, D-Burlington, a member of the House Judiciary Committee who presented the bill on the House floor, said the bill builds upon Act 153, which became law in 2016, and called for someone over the age of 18 and charged with a crime, under certain circumstances, to be tried as a juvenile, rather than an adult.
Rachelson said the goal of both bills is to increase the effectiveness of Vermont’s juvenile justice system and to decrease recidivism.
“If we’re sending people 18 and up to adult court we’re giving them that permanent baggage of a criminal record,” she said.
Receiving more appropriate treatment, Rachelson said, would greatly increase their chances of returning to society as functioning young adults.
“Lots of doors are going to close, in terms of ever getting college loans, certain kinds of housing,” she said, “and people under 25 are super responsive to treatment.”
The bill also calls for the Department for Children and Families to look into the cost of expanding juvenile services to those who will be 18 and 19 by 2021, and presenting plans for renovating the juvenile justice system by Nov. 18 this year.
Cara Cookson, the public policy director at the Vermont Crime Victims Services, is “cautiously optimistic” about the potential impact the bill could have on the state’s juvenile population. She said early intervention would lead to fewer victims in the future.
“We know when they have access to social services early, it reduces the risk of it happening again,” she said.
On the other hand, Cookson said, one of the tradeoffs is that if someone accused of a crime is placed in the family court system, it impedes a victim from gaining access to records and other information about the case.
Rachelson, who worked as a social worker in Washington, D.C., and Michigan before coming to Vermont, said she was surprised at how behind the times the state’s juvenile justice laws were, especially given Vermont’s progressive politics.
“The thing that was so interesting Vermont was an outlier in how behind the times we were,” Rachelson said.
For example, before the passage of earlier reforms, children aged 10 could be tried as adults in Vermont, she said.
Rachelson said the state’s punitive approach was spurred in part by a brutal murder in Essex in 1981.
Two male teenagers sexually assaulted two 12-year-old girls and murdered one of them. One of the convicted, James Savage, who had been 15 at the time of the murder, walked out of prison two years later, with no criminal record because of laws that had allowed him to be tried as a minor.
Gov. Richard Snelling called a special session of the Legislature that ended with the enactment of a new law allowing children as young as 10 to be tried as adults if charged with crimes resulting in death, assault and robbery with a dangerous weapon, kidnapping, maiming, sexual assault, murder and burglary of a bedroom at night, according to a 1982 New York Times article.
Rachelson said the new bill will take into account new research in the past 20 years on the development of juvenile brains, notably that brain development is not complete until age 25, as well as the fact that the juvenile crime rate is decreasing. From 2012 to 2014 the crime rate fell 46 percent.
Rachelson noted that a potential benefit of the bill is that, since it will enable more young people to enter the workforce, it will be good for Vermont’s economy.
