Soft-on-crime Raise the Age law packed ill-prepared NYC juvenile facilities with hardened criminals: report
New York’s soft-on-crime “Raise the Age” law has overwhelmed the Big Apple’s two understaffed juvenile facilities with older, hardened criminals — including accused killers, a scathing new report found.The number of murder suspects held in residential centers designed for misbehaving youngsters has more than quadrupled since the state law passed in 2017 — sparking nearly a dozen outbreaks of violence that have sent staffers and inmates alike to the hospital, according to the city Department of Investigation.The measure, and a bail reform package passed by the state legislature the following year, “have fundamentally altered the juvenile detention population,” and made additional approaches to discipline “insufficient to deter misconduct,” the 75-page DOI report released Thursday says.The two youth facilities — Horizon Juvenile Center in The Bronx and Crossroads Juvenile Center in Brooklyn — saw their resident population skyrocket from 52 in April 2018 to 237 in May 2023, according to the report.And the number of those facing murder charges spiked to more than 230 from just seven over the same time frame, investigators found.Interviews with hundreds of current and former employees at the city’s Administration for Children’s Services – which oversees the two juvenile detention centers — revealed that staffers are overworked and have been forced to grapple with nearly a dozen outbreaks of shocking violence, including riots that have sent workers to the emergency room, the report said.“These challenging circumstances call for ACS to strengthen its behavioral management tools to better track and respond to violent and criminal conduct,” DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber said in a statement.
The report sparked outrage from state and city politicians, as well as from police sources, who have also been forced to grapple with the effects of the controversial criminal justice reforms.“It is all a shell game,” one Brooklyn detective gri...