Mitigation for minors: Exploring the nuances of social constructs and legal status in structuring sentences for youthful offenders
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Author | Megan C Kurlychek |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474517708559 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
2018, Vol. 20(4) 498–522
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474517708559
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Article
Mitigation for minors:
Exploring the nuances
of social constructs and
legal status in
structuring sentences
for youthful offenders
Megan C Kurlychek
University at Albany, State University of New York, USA
Abstract
New York State is one of only two states in the nation that processes all 16- and
17-year-old defendants as adults. Contrary to this seemingly punitive stance, the state
also maintains a Youthful Offender Statute that requires mitigated punishments for
youths up to their 19th birthday upon court designation of youthful offender status.
This study empirically examines the individual and combined impact of the social status
of being a ‘‘minor’’ and the legally awarded status of being designated a youthful
offender, upon adult court sentencing decisions framing the discussion within broader
conceptualizations of youthfulness, culpability, and punishment. Utilizing a population of
all youths ages 16–21 whose cases were disposed in New York between 2000 and 2006,
this study finds the legally defined status of youthful offender to provide much greater
mitigation at sentencing than the more general social status of being a minor. Findings
are discussed as they relate to categorical and individualized assessments of culpability.
In addition, as the study finds individualized assessments of culpability to be related to
factors such as gender and race, broader implications for the role of court assigned
statuses and mitigation of punishment are offered.
Keywords
juvenile, mitigation, sentencing, youthful offender
Corresponding author:
Megan C Kurlychek, University at Albany, State University of New York, 135 Western Avenue, Albany,
NY 12222, USA.
Email: mkurlychek@albany.edu
While the notion that children are different than adults has a long social and legal
history, it was during the 1800s that the issue came to the forefront of our nation’s
criminal justice policy through the child-saving movement (Platt, 1969). The move-
ment was premised in the idea that youth are different than adults, primarily
because they are still developing and capable of change. Thus, advocates ques-
tioned the wisdom of placing wayward youths in penitentiaries with hardened
adult criminals where they would develop and change under negative rather than
positive conditions. A municipal judge in New York City at the time wrote, ‘‘the
penitentiary cannot be but a fruitful source of pauperism, a nursery of new vices
and crimes’’ (Pierce, 1869). This statement exemplifies the thinking of the time
which emphasized that youth are (1) still developing and learning, (2) are highly
influenced by the environment of such learning, and (3) therefore need to be treated
differently than adults. From the creation of the first House of Refuge in New York
in 1825 to the first official Juvenile Court in Cook County Illinois in 1899, the child-
saving movement continued to embody the belief that minors are fundamentally
different than adults.
However, as long as there has been a separate system of justice for juveniles in
America, there have been procedures in place that allow certain youths to be pro-
cessed as adult criminals. Referred to as the ‘‘adult-juvenile’’ (Barrett, 2013), these
youths are children ‘‘under the age of 18 caught in legal limbo: legally labeled
within the justice system as an adult for the purposes of criminal prosecuting,
yet still defined as a minor in all other legal and social settings’’ (p. 12). In many
instances, this adult status is conferred based solely on the seriousness of the crime
committed with public sentiment seeming to be that normal youths are capable of
minor wayward behaviors but that more serious and violent crimes are only com-
mitted by more mature and culpable youths.
While many statuses may be of little consequence, this conferred ‘‘adulthood’’
on a minor for criminal justice purposes becomes a ‘‘master status’’ as it structures
and defines all that happens next. The youth, who is by all other social definitions a
child, is denied the rehabilitative efforts of the juvenile justice system and instead
placed in a retributive adult criminal justice system. To date, the phenomenon of
processing minors in adult court has led to much research aimed at understanding
which youths ultimately reach adult court and what this adult court processing
means for later recidivism outcomes. Much less research, however, has focused on
the immediate sentencing outcomes of these youths and how courtroom actors
respond to this conflicted status of ‘‘adult-juvenile.’’
The current study seeks to examine the impact of such conflicted social and legal
statuses on the sentencing outcomes of youths processed in one state’s adult court
system. The state of New York is selected as the context for the study for two
reasons. First, it is one of only two states that defines the age of adulthood for
criminal justice purposes for all youths as 16.
1
Thus, an adult court judge in this
state sees not just the most serious or chronic youthful offenders (YOs) captured by
transfer policies, but rather all youths ages 16 and 17, regardless of the seriousness
of the offense committed. Second, since the 1940s New York has maintained
Kurlychek 499
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