Addressing Child Mental Health by Creating a National Minimum Age for Juvenile Justice Jurisdiction

Abstract

In August 2020, in the midst of a national conversation about racism in the United States, news of a Black eight-year-old boy being arrested for sitting improperly in the school cafeteria spread through the country.¹ Body-camera footage showed police attempting to place the boy in handcuffs that slipped from his wrists before they took him to a juvenile detention facility where he was charged with felony battery. The boy's mother and lawyer reported that following arrest, he experienced somatic and trauma symptoms, including headaches, nightmares, and insomnia. His story, and the attention it garnered, illustrate the importance of the growing movement to establish a national minimum age of juvenile justice jurisdiction-an age below which a child cannot be prosecuted in juvenile court. We call upon child and adolescent psychiatrists to join this movement as a critical tool for promoting mental health and racial equity for children.

Figure 1.

Current Minimum Age of Juvenile Justice Jurisdiction by State^{a a}: State minimum age laws were compiled by initially reviewing National Juvenile Defender Center’s systematically compiled data (found at https://njdc.info/practice-policy-resources/state-profiles/multi-jurisdiction-data/minimum-age-for-delinquency-adjudication-multi-jurisdiction-survey/) which was last updated in January 2020 followed by individually reviewing each state’s minimum age laws and pending legislation in order to update them as of November 2020.