Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney has effectively enacted changes that relocated all 16 and 17 year olds held at the Onondaga County Correctional facility in Jamesville to the Justice Center in Syracuse as of Oct. 19.

This came in response to the efforts of the Alliance of Communities Transforming Syracuse (ACTS), a grassroots, interfaith network advocating for social justice.

According to Barry Lentz, who is the chair of the ACTS Research and Action Committee, ACTS was notified of the problem from the Grace Episcopal Church.

The church runs a program called the Grace Project. Members of the congregation visit the incarcerated teens at the county jail in downtown Syracuse. However, due to overcrowding, the 16-and-17-year-old inmates were moved to the Onondaga County Correctional Facility in Jamesville, Lentz said.

Members of the Grace Project followed the teens to Jamesville and continued their program, but many of the teens were not showing up for the programs.

“On any given day, there would only be a quarter to a third of the kids there,” Lentz said. “And they were wondering, ‘Where were the rest of the youth that had been incarcerated?’”
It turns out that those teens were in solitary confinement, or punitive segregation. The youths were locked in their cells for 23 hours a day and were allowed one hour a day outside of their cells, Lentz said.

“The explanation that the facility gives for putting the kids in segregation is because they’re a threat to each other or a threat to the officers,” Lentz said. “When we look at the data, which we were able to get after about a period of four months of researching and beginning to push this issue, a majority of the kids were put in punitive segregation not for violent fighting actions where they threatened an officer, but for basically just behaving like kids.”

Reverend Johanna Marcure from the Grace Episcopal Church said in a news conference that research has found that extreme isolation causes severe emotional and psychological harm, even among the healthy and mentally stable.

“The task force feels, as the rest of the country recognizes, that solitary confinement, in general, is a very, very detrimental practice,” Lentz said. “In particular, solitary confinement, or punitive segregation, with this particular age group, 16 and 17 year olds, is extremely detrimental to their general well-being, mental health and even their physical health.”

However, this is part of a larger issue that Gov. Andrew Cuomo is trying to combat.

Last April, Cuomo put together the Commission on Youth Public Safety and Justice to study and research the process of changing the age at which juveniles are tried as adults in New York State courts. Currently, New York is one of only two states that try children as adults at age 16.
According to Oswego State public justice professor Dr. Karel Kurst-Swanger, kids under 16 are processed in family court and kids 16 and older are processed in the adult criminal court.

“But they’re not really adults, they’re kids,” Kurst-Swanger said. “They’re being processed in adult court as youthful offenders.”

According to the research from the commission, the brain is not fully developed until a person in their mid-20s. In the past 10 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled three times that persons under 18 have “diminished culpability,” meaning that while they did commit the crime, they should not be held fully responsible because their mental functions were impaired.

The commission also found that processing 16 and 17 year olds as adults has many of negative impacts on the teens, including the absence of intervention programs, incarceration in adult jails and prisons and the potential for a lifelong criminal record.

“I think the reality is some kids have been committing some really horrible things,” Kurst-Swanger said. “And we don’t know what to do to them, or for them. Should we not be using that information to help us develop a more sane system for kids? But some of these kids have committed some really horrible things. And some of them have very significant mental health problems. What do you do?”