ASHEVILLE — A capacity audience Wednesday urged the North Carolina General Assembly to raise the age at which children can be tried as adults in the state.
Youths who are 16 and 17 years old are currently charged as adults in the state. The law is different than all the states that surround North Carolina. In Virginia and Tennessee, the age at which a person is tried as an adult is 18. In South Carolina, the age is 17.
State Rep. Alice Bordsen, who chairs the Youth Accountability Planning Task Force, said she and other legislators want to introduce a bill in the next General Assembly that raises the age to 18. They held a listening session at the North Carolina Arboretum on Wednesday to hear from the public about the current law.
Bordsen said the present law is unfair to youths in the state.“People say that they know what they are doing is wrong (at 16 and 17),” Bordsen said. “The question is, what do you do with them to make them productive members of society?”
Once a crime is committed as an adult, it is permanently on someone’s record. A criminal record can make getting a job more difficult and always has stigma associated with it, Bordsen said. In North Carolina, 86 percent of the crimes committed by 16- and 17-year-olds are misdemeanors; 10 percent are low-level felonies; and 4 percent are violent crimes.
“We are talking about basically 96 percent of 16- and 17-year-old criminal activity,” Bordsen said. “It’s not murderers. It’s not rapists.” Greg Borom, Children First/Communities in Schools director of advocacy and community engagement, said young people are still developing at 16 and 17 and do not need to be put into the adult criminal justice system. He said the legislature should “decriminalize our youth” and work on improving the community.
“We do more harm than good by sending teens to the adult justice system,” Borom said.
Jim Pitts, a retired professor and the local representative for the National Alliance for Mental Illness, said serious mental illness can lead youths to drugs and criminal activity. The state should help these young people solve their problems and not put them into the adult criminal justice system.
“We are undermining the creativity of the American population,” Pitts said. “We are criminalizing it.”
BY JAMES SHEA • NOVEMBER 18, 2010
