Reconsidering North Carolina’s Minimum Age of Jurisdiction
In 2019, North Carolina raised the age of juvenile jurisdiction from 16 to 18. This law, which was in effect for a hundred years, addressed the maximum age at which a person would be charged in juvenile court rather than adult court. Much attention was paid to the fact that North Carolina was one of the last states to automatically criminalize 16- and 17-year-olds for any offense. But did you know that North Carolina is currently the only state in the country to charge youth as young as six years old?
The minimum age of jurisdiction is the youngest age a child may be charged with a crime. Though many (29) states have no minimum age, North Carolina has the distinction of being the state with the youngest minimum age. There doesn’t appear to exist any legislative history on why this age was set, so it’s difficult to determine the policy rationale behind setting the age of six.
According to the North Carolina Division of Juvenile Justice, on average, about 440 children annually aged six through nine are charged in delinquency court. Most of these cases (80%) in fiscal year 2018-19 were closed or diverted without being formally processed. 70% of the complaints received were school-based offenses.
After the maximum age of jurisdiction was raised effective December 1, 2019, interest emerged in discussing the minimum age of jurisdiction, both in North Carolina and nationally. There are several considerations driving these discussions. How should capacity to stand trial (adjudication) impact the minimum age? If the court does not get involved, are there other services available for these children? And should a minimum age be stated, or should there be no minimum age stated?
The State Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice (TREC) has recently recommended that the minimum age of jurisdiction should be raised to 12. The Juvenile Jurisdiction Advisory Committee, charged with assisting in the implementation of raise the age, has formed a Minimum Age Subcommittee which looked at the issue during 2020 and made a preliminary recommendation to raise the minimum age to 10, pending discussions with other stakeholders. The National Juvenile Justice Network has also recently weighed in on minimum age, advocating for a national minimum age of 14.
Why is this issue generating such interest now, and what is the impact of raising the minimum age? Since we have little or no history on why the minimum age was set at 6, it is hard to reason why children so young, in pre-adolescence, should be held accountable in a court of law. Anyone with any familiarity of the criminal process, let alone the juvenile process, will know that the myriad complexities of the parties, procedures and processes would overwhelm younger children to the point of losing any positive value. The lessons of the research and case law on adolescent development should resonate that much stronger when addressing children yet to reach their teens.
Additionally, it is well documented that the deeper contact a young person has with the justice system, the more likely it is to reoffend. And considering that children of color are most likely to be overrepresented at most stages of juvenile proceedings, but particularly at intake, even filing a complaint against a young Black or Brown child can potentially set them on the road to stigmatization, unnecessary supervision, and incarceration.
Will it take a hundred years for North Carolina to reconsider the minimum age of jurisdiction? Hopefully not that long. Those interested should be on the lookout during this legislative session for any movement on the issue.