Does Developmentally Informed Justice for Older Adolescents Improve Educational Attainment? Evidence From Raise the Age in Massachusetts

• In Event: Education Inside the Juvenile Justice System: Leveraging Data, Research, and Evidence to Drive Improvement in a System Under Tension

Abstract

Many justice-involved youth have tenuous educational trajectories. While some studies have shown that justice system involvement can provide an opportunity to strengthen or reestablish connections to school, many other studies have documented how the criminal justice contact can further disrupt educational pathways even among those with shallow system involvement. To address this potential for educational disruption for justice-involved youth, especially older adolescents, policymakers across the U.S. are experimenting with developmentally informed justice policies. Broadly speaking, these initiatives seek to help justice-involved youth become successful, law-abiding members of society.

Raise that Age (RtA) is one example of a developmentally informed justice policy. It shifts the prosecution of arrested older adolescents from the adult criminal justice system into the juvenile justice system. As a result, older adolescents are exposed to a system with additional programming and services that facilitate successful aging out of crime and integration into pro-social age-graded adult roles. Though prior evaluations of RtA have examined traditional criminal justice outcomes such as recidivism, no prior studies have examined the impact of RtA on affected adolescents’ educational trajectories. Given programmatic differences across juvenile and adult jurisdictions whereby youth processed in the juvenile system have greater access to educational programming, then those processed in the juvenile system may be more likely to achieve key academic milestones.

This study aims to fill this void by examining the impact of RtA on educational attainment (i.e., graduation, expulsion, drop-out, GED/HiSET attainment) among all arraigned 17- and 18-year-olds (n = 27,483) in the two years before and after the arrival of RtA in Massachusetts. By focusing on the arraignment stage our sample examines educational outcomes among youth with early and potentially shallow system contact. We use a difference-in-differences research design comparing the educational experiences of both affected and unaffected 17-year-olds alongside the experience of a comparison group of unaffected 18-year-olds. Preliminary analyses suggest that RtA had a mixed impact on educational attainment with discernible impacts on some outcomes but not on others.

Authors

• Charles Loeffler, University of Pennsylvania

• Bianca Bersani, University of Maryland