Growing Up Fast: In Wyoming, An Arrest Makes an Adult

Our introductory blog on this topic focused on the premises of graduate criminal justice fellow Brice Hamack's recent article in the Wyoming Law Review. It is important to clarify that while Mr. Hamack's general concerns are well founded, Wyoming's juvenile justice system has uniquely entrenched problems unique from and, in many ways, worse than those in the rest of the country.

Mr. Hamack leads with the contention that "…the United States juvenile court system focuses primarily on rehabilitation and controlling the stigmatization and liberty constraints accompanying criminal adjudications…"; an accurate statement of the intentions behind the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 (JJDPA). The JJDPA has been monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). The tenets of the JJDPA have been enacted through legislation in every state of the union except Wyoming.

As recently as the 2013 Annual Report to the Governor by the Wyoming State Advisory Council on Juvenile Justice, Wyoming has made clear it has not decided whether to adopt the tenets of the JJDPA. "Specifically, the Council was asked to examine the pros and cons of working toward compliance with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (Appendix G)."

Mr. Hamack's article goes on to explain that states are using transfer processes to move juvenile court proceedings to adult courts, thereby depriving the juveniles their rights under juvenile justice laws. Mr. Hamack contends that only judicial waivers, which allow the juvenile to argue against the transfer in court, preserve the juvenile's due process rights and liberty interests.

Outside of Wyoming, certain categories of crime, such as indexed violent crime, are classified as automatic judicial waiver crimes and juveniles are automatically prosecuted as adults. For other crimes prosecutors can assert the nature or circumstances of the demonstrated the character of the alleged juvenile offender justifies the harsher treatment in adult court.

Wyoming, by contrast, has only a handful of juvenile courts with only a few judges certified to adjudicate juvenile issues. Traditionally, Wyoming transfers only the "serious offenders" to the juvenile courts and adjudicates the remainder of juvenile cases in the local adult.

The OJJDP's easy access to juvenile data provides insight as to how Wyoming's juvenile offenders compare to the rest of the U.S. As seen in the charts below, Wyoming's juvenile arrest rate was greater than twice the national juvenile arrest rate for children 10-17 in 2011 (the most recent year for which data is available) while arrests for indexed violent crime were just over 40 percent of the national average.

Although Wyoming continues to arrest more than twice as many juveniles as the rest of the country, we arrest very few juveniles for what the rest of the world considers "real crime" such as the crimes that justify treating juveniles as adults.

With this in mind, Wyoming should develop a system to meet our unique needs. As Mr. Hamack points out: "juveniles are "dependent upon adults; are developing emotionally, morally, and cognitively and, therefore, are psychologically impressionable and behaviorally malleable; and have different, less competent, levels of understanding and collateral mental functioning than adults." Wyoming's current methods of over-arrest, over-incarceration and punitive rather than rehabilitative justice for juveniles must be reversed.