How should we think about adolescent agency and responsibility?

At our second annual Symposium on Adolescent Brain Development, science journalist Lydia Denworth spoke with BJ Casey, PhD, Professor at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Joanna Visser Adjoian, JD, Senior Program Officer, at Spring Point Partners, about how we should think about adolescent agency and responsibility, particularly as it relates to juvenile justice.

“Anyone with adolescents in their lives wrestles with this question of where to put the line about how much agency and how much responsibility to give them, or to think about that,” said Lydia. “The stakes get really, really high when we’re talking about juvenile justice and our system.”

Developmental science shows that there are many situations in which young people are better than adults at making rational decisions quickly and accurately. However, adolescents may take more unhealthy risks in emotionally charged and social situations, which can bring young people into contact with the law.

“We don’t want to say that they can’t make decisions because we know they can,” said BJ. “But, we want to understand the circumstances and the situations in which their decision making, even when they know better, can go awry.”

Research also shows that our brains are rapidly changing during adolescence. “There’s the myth that who we are and our identity is formed early in development, and then that’s stable,” said BJ. “And that’s so not true based on what we know from personality development.”

Our personality traits related to emotion regulation and conscientiousness increase throughout our lives. The rapid brain changes in our adolescent years make this period a tremendous opportunity to shift behavior—especially through the right, youth-targeted interventions. “You see a decrease in violent crime as a function of age,” said BJ. “And with the right interventions, the youth targeted ones, you get an even bigger decrease.”

Joanna described her work as the co-founder and past co-director of the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project, supporting young people facing serious charges in the criminal legal system and juvenile justice system in Pennsylvania, and those sentenced to life in prison without parole as children. “We were doing the work of really trying to thread the needle,” said Joanna. “Not to minimize the harm that was caused, but to tell the story of resilience, of plasticity, of change, of evolution, and of the life that has happened inside since they went into prison as teenagers, when they had no expectation that they would ever come home.”

So far, the organization has helped hundreds of people. “Former Juvenile Lifers are coming home and are leaders of nationally prominent organizations,” said Joanna. “They are informing the conversation for reform in Pennsylvania and beyond. They are also living their lives. They are thriving. They are parents. They are getting married.”

BJ and Joanna also discussed the fact that sentences imposed on young people can often be impacted by subjective bias, in which adults perceive black and brown youth to be older and less innocent than their white peers.

Additionally, although solitary confinement for juveniles was banned in the federal prison system under the Obama administration, there are still at least 15 states that allow youth to be placed in solitary confinement. In many states, young people, who have not yet been found guilty of a crime, can face pretrial detention in horrific facilities, sometimes for years, because their families cannot pay bail.

In order to make sentencing fair for all young people, we need policies at the levels of the State Supreme Courts or US Supreme Court that set guidelines for how we define who is a juvenile and how we protect youth from the harshest sentencing, including the death penalty.

“We didn’t give those individuals any opportunities, and yet, they are the ones who are coming out and fighting the hardest, and they’re our leaders,” said BJ. “It makes you want to do so much more for young people.”

Key Takeaways

• Research has shown that there are many situations in which adolescents are better than adults at making rational decisions quickly and accurately. Adolescents may take more unhealthy risks in emotionally charged and social situations, which can bring young people into contact with the law.
• Our brains are changing rapidly during our adolescent years, creating a tremendous opportunity to shift behavior. Extreme behaviors tend to peak around the late teens to early 20s. The right, youth-targeted interventions can decrease these behaviors dramatically going into adulthood.
• Personality traits related to emotion regulation and conscientiousness increase throughout our lives. These findings emphasize the potential for change well beyond childhood and adolescence.
• Although solitary confinement for juveniles was banned in the federal prison system under the Obama administration, there are still at least 15 states that allow youth to be placed in solitary confinement. In many states, young people who have not yet been found guilty of a crime can face pretrial detention in horrific facilities, sometimes for years, because their families cannot pay bail.
• Sentences imposed on juvenile offenders can be impacted by subjective bias, in which adults perceive black and brown youth to be older and less innocent than their white peers. To make sentencing fair to all young people, we need policies at the levels of the State Supreme Courts or US Supreme Court that set guidelines for how we define who is a juvenile and how we protect youth from the harshest sentencing, including the death penalty.