OPINION: Using adolescent treatment center is key to addressing juvenile crime

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman are outraged by high-profile crimes allegedly committed by teenagers. But their proposals won’t help; they might make things worse.

The governor asked the Legislature to “toughen” penalties for such crimes. When they didn’t, she excoriated them, threatening to call them back to Santa Fe to change the Children’s Code, adding longer sentences and even prison for juveniles. She hopes the threat of more years behind bars will deter juvenile crime.

Bregman is making tougher handling of lawless teens the linchpin of his gubernatorial campaign.

What neither acknowledge is that there’s an excellent reason why the Legislature in the 1980’s decided to treat adolescent crime differently from adult crime. The reason for a Children’s Code has not changed since the original code was drafted in the 1980s: In humans, brain development is a gradual process, not one that occurs automatically at 14, 18 or 21 years of age. Developmental psychologists say the brain is not usually fully developed until we are 25.

This is why the code makes a crucial distinction between delinquent acts (offenses committed by youths) and criminal acts (offenses committed by adults). It lays out drastically different courses of action for prosecutors and courts to follow for each.

That distinction’s based on the fact (not opinion) that adolescents’ delinquency springs from immature brains. Thus, the code deals with teens as people who can be turned around, rehabilitated. Their punishment is removal from their families and communities while placed in facilities with programs designed to produce functioning, law-abiding adults.

It’s crucial to recognize that a teen’s choices are not the free choices of an adult weighing options, considering consequences. They are largely reflexive, shaped by what life has taught about survival. Many adolescents have experienced severe trauma in their families, neighborhoods or even in school. They carry that damage with them like shackles that impede their choices.

Considering the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on young people, the code wisely treats them differently from adults. It values the potential for change in every youth and is clear about providing opportunity, hope and support. It gives kids a chance to become healthy, contributing members of society. It rejects the notion that a mistake as a 16-year-old should end that child’s life and professes that we benefit more from turning around a troubled youth than from locking him up for years.

It makes easy campaign fodder to demand teens accused of homicide go to adult prisons, but does society benefit from wasting another young life? It won’t deter other troubled teens. It costs $60,000 each year to imprison him. It does nothing about the environment that produces delinquents. It returns us to failed models most states have moved past.

The best response to youth crime is early intervention and diversion from the justice system. New Mexico has a facility for this purpose, Sequoyah Adolescent Treatment Center. In recent years it has been underutilized. When there are dozens of vacant beds in that facility, one specifically designed for treating teens accused of delinquent acts who are struggling with mental and emotional problems, one must ask why the governor isn’t demanding that it be operated at full capacity rather than attempting to gut the Children’s Code and start sending kids to adult prison. Revitalizing Sequoyah would be taking positive action about youth crime — an approach that really would produce the intended result.