More states are getting rid of laws that automatically bump teenagers from juvenile courts when they reach a certain age, abandoning a model of punishment proven to be expensive, ineffective and not flexible enough to improve outcomes for offenders or society, a new study says.

The Justice Policy Institute focused on national trends and on what it called positive results in states that have most vigorously adopted policies designed to help teenagers and not send them to adult prisons. Research showed that states that have raised the age of jurisdiction — meaning the point where a teenager can no longer access the juvenile system and must be treated as an adult, no matter the crime — have seen decreases in crime.

“There are multiple reasons why places that raised the age avoided the dire predictions that juvenile justice systems would be overwhelmed, and why places considering raise the age proposals can pass them this year, knowing the change in jurisdiction can be managed effectively,” the study’s authors wrote.

States that have increased the age of jurisdiction, typically from 16 years old to 18, faced complaints from opponents worried that their juvenile system would be inundated with new cases and could collapse under the strain. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, the research shows that since 2007, the number of teens nationally who were automatically excluded from adult courts has been cut in half, from 175,000 to less than 90,000 today.

[For more of this story, written by John Holland, go to http://jjie.org/2017/03/07/sta...ngs-jpi-report-says/]