25-Year-Old Child Criminals

Should criminals in their 20s be treated like children? Many states say yes.

DA Mary Moriarty in Minneapolis and DA Larry Krasner in Philadelphia have Emerging Adult Units. The goal of both pro-crime systems is to treat criminals under 26 years old like children.

As the Philly DA’s office puts it, these “young adults aged 18 through 25” will be put through a diversion system that will “resolve lower-level felony” crimes without actual consequences. For these 25-year-old children, “charges may be withdrawn or reduced in order to lessen the social and economic damage that a criminal conviction inflicts.” Never mind the actual victims.

In Michigan, the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act allows 25-year-old sex offenders to get a pass and avoid having to register as sex offenders, while in California, murderers up to 26 years old qualify for a parole hearing as ‘youthful offenders.’ Earlier this year, Darryl Lamar Collins, who had been sentenced to 25 years to life for two murders, was freed after only serving half his sentence because he was a ‘youthful offender’. A year later, he murdered a woman.

The pro-crime argument contends that 26 is the new 18 and that the developing brain of the 25-year-old child “until maturation in their mid-twenties” is incapable of coping with right and wrong, and with consequences, and so, “emerging adults may act impulsively and respond to peer pressure in ways that are more likely to bring them into the criminal justice system”.

“When you’re talking about adolescent brain development, there are no brakes,” DA Mary Moriarty, a Soros activist whose pro-crime activism was so extreme that Gov. Tim Walz removed her after she gave two ‘children’ a pass for murdering a woman, claimed. “When you’re talking about emerging adulthood, there are brakes — but sometimes they fail on a bumpy road.”

In bumps on the road, Jeffrey Dahmer killed his first victim a few weeks after graduating high school, the Son of Sam started shooting people at 22 years old and Ted Bundy may have killed when he was as young as 14 years old. But two out of three of them then went on killing even after their 26th birthdays. And the only reason Son of Sam stopped is because he was caught.

Is 26 years old really the red line at which children are distinguished from adults? Some proponents of emerging adulthood have set the mark at 29 years old. An article in Psychology Today claims “Teen Brain Development Continues to Age 32”. On the other side, California redefined any criminals over 50 years old as ‘elders’ and tracked them for release. The ‘elders’ set to be released included a man convicted of 16 counts of kidnapping and child molestation.

That shrinks the window of criminal culpability between 26 (or 29 and 32) and 50 years old. Only in those 24 (or 21 or 18) years are criminals really fully liable for their crimes. That means criminal culpability only applies between a third and a quarter of the average American lifespan.

And that’s no coincidence. The purpose of turning criminals in their twenties into children and middle-aged criminals in their fifties into the elderly is to free as many criminals as possible.

The left-leaning pro-crime activists who argue that 25-year-olds are immature children who can’t be expected to make decisions or deal with consequences aren’t proposing that we raise the voting age to 26. On the contrary, they want to lower it to 16. Nor are they proposing raising the ages of military service, legal drinking or sexual consent to 26 years old. Just like the lawyers who claim every death row inmate is mentally ill, mentally retarded and suffering from PTSD, they’re making bad faith arguments that they don’t believe in or consistently advocate.

Even as they advocate for treating 25-year-old criminals like children, they certainly don’t believe in prosecuting rapists who assault 25-year-olds as child rapists. Nor do they support prosecuting criminals who assault anyone over 50 for abusing the elderly. These age games only work one way: exempting criminals without ever using those age limits to aid victims.

The whole idea that anyone under 26 is a child is bad pop science hijacked for political ends.

There is no official age at which brain development stops or hits some sort of peak. Experts have warned that the 25-year-old limit, which became a popular talking point for immature twenty-somethings who popularized the hashtag ‘adulting’, has no scientific basis. Some parts of the brain go on developing into the thirties while others continue developing into the nineties.

The idea that a more ‘mature’ brain controls behavior is biological determinism. There are children with more ‘mature’ brains than adults, but that doesn’t make them ready to make adult decisions. A brain scan is not a predictor of morality or character. Pro-crime junk science insists that 25-year-olds commit more crimes because their brains are immature and at the same time also argues that locking them up is wrong because more of them are black and male.

For example, a pro-crime organization argues that, “although emerging adults make up approximately 10% of the U.S. population, they account for 19% of admissions into adult prisons nationally… Black and Latino 18- and 19-year-old males were 12 times and three times more likely to be imprisoned than their white peers, respectively. For Black males ages 20 to 24, the incarceration rate was eight times greater than for white males of the same age, while Latino males were three times more likely to be incarcerated than their white peers.”

So are the brains of black and Latino men under the age of 25 more immature? Or is that racism? And if racism accounts for the high rates of young black and Latino men being accused of crimes, perhaps they’re also being victimized by ageism. Either their brains are immature, a biological factor, or they’re victims of racism, a societal factor, but it can’t be both.

Pro-crime advocates are picking and choosing any argument that is helpful to their cause.

There is no magic line in brain development that switches from evil to good. Individual brains mature at different rates and people differ in their levels of self-control. But that is ultimately a question of character, not brain development. Teenagers tend to exhibit lower rates of self-control than adults do, but it’s debatable whether that is really a question of brain development or cultural expectations. Much more in the way of responsibility was expected of a teenager a few centuries ago while today we assume that nothing can be expected of them.

Alexander Hamilton, General Lafayette, and Nathan Hale were teenagers in the early stages of the American Revolution; James Madison was campaigning for the revolution at the age of 24.

Today, we treat men and women in their mid-twenties like teenagers, and we treat teenagers like children, and they act like it. And instead of Hamilton, we have 25-year-old child criminals.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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