Orgs call on gov to boost Raise the Age funding
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Nearly 100 organizations called on the state legislature and governor to boost funding for Raise the Age implementation in the state’s budget. File photo by Matt H. Wade/Wikimedia Commons
By Jacob Kaye
A group of nearly 100 organizations demanded on Monday that the governor and legislative leaders increase funding for the implementation of New York’s Raise the Age laws in the state’s budget, which is due in a little less than a month.
In a letter to Governor Kathy Hochul, Majority Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, the organizations requested both funding and fundamental changes to the criminal justice reform that first went into effect statewide in 2020.
The organizations, which included legal services and social services providers throughout New York, said that Raise the Age legislation, when implemented “has improved community safety and youth well-being.”
However, its implementation is not yet fully realized, they said.
“Despite this significant progress, New York State has failed to fully deliver on its promise to fund community-based services and programs that provide alternatives to incarceration and reentry programs for young people under Raise the Age,” the organizations said in the letter, which was first reported by Politico.
With the deadline to pass the state’s budget fast approaching, the letter’s signatories called for the fiscal document to “streamline delivery of and expedite access to appropriated funds ensuring resources reach organizations and providers that are serving our communities through youth development, violence-prevention services, and other alternatives to incarceration.”
“Investing in these community rooted programs across New York State is crucial to the law’s continued success and to improving outcomes of young people,” they added.
The state’s Raise the Age legislation was one of several major pieces of criminal justice reform bills to pass in the state legislature in the years just prior to the pandemic. It was passed as a part of the state’s budget for Fiscal Year 2018.
At its core, the legislation raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18 years of age. The legislation ended New York’s status as being one of only two states that automatically prosecuted 16- and 17-year-olds as adults.
As part of the law, adolescent offenders who are convicted of non-violent crimes are to receive interventions and evidence-based treatments, including housing and programming aimed at lowering the risk of re-offending.
But the organizations said in their letter that those interventions and programming, and the groups that offer them, don’t have enough cash to meet the demand.
The organizations called on the Fiscal Year 2025 budget to include a $250 million appropriation for implementation of Raise the Age – Hochul’s executive budget included the figure.
The groups, which included Brooklyn Defender Services, Children's Defense Fund-NY, The Legal Aid Society and The Fortune Society, also called on the state to increase its Supervision and Treatment Services for Juveniles Program to $11.3 million. The program is designed to support programming for youthful offenders under the Raise the Age legislation.
Additionally, the groups said that they hope the budget includes a provision to establish a Youth Justice Innovation Fund, which would be financed using $50 million of the total $250 million appropriation for Raise the Age.
The fund, which would be administered by the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, would offer service providers an opportunity to access money directly to implement Raise the Age programming.
Under the fund, community-based organizations would apply for funds to “provide a continuum of services including prevention, early intervention and alternatives to detention, placement and incarceration.”
Crucially, the organizations called on lawmakers and the governor to remove a tax cap restriction that prevents certain counties – and New York City – from accessing Raise the Age implementation funding handed out by the state.
The restriction has resulted in New York City, which accounts for half of the state’s youth justice system population, the groups say, receiving no state funding since the law’s passage.
Though New York City hasn’t seen any funding, the community-based organizations that qualify for the funding and implement Raise the Age programming have had a hard time getting reimbursed for their services.
Advocates say that bureaucratic red-tape has prevented organizations from getting paid for their work on time, if at all.
During a January budget hearing in Albany, Queens Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi, who chairs the Committee on Children and Families, noted the payment issue.
“I think the reason why we’re getting into this trouble is we’re asking providers to lay out money they just don’t have,” Hevesi said, as reported by youth and family publication The Imprint.
Also during the hearing, Hevesi said that he would make an effort to work a provision into the budget that would require the state to pay organizations implementing Raise the Age programming up front.
Like the state’s bail reform and discovery reform laws, Raise the Age was controversial both before and after its passage. Also like its criminal justice reform counterparts, efforts have been made to scale the legislation back in recent years.
During his first year in office, Mayor Eric Adams called on Albany to scale the Raise the Age laws back after he claimed that a disproportionate of gun crimes in New York City were being perpetrated by 16- and 17-year-olds either taking advantage of the criminal justice reform or being forced to commit the crimes by older New Yorkers hoping to exploit the reform.
But advocates say four years into full implementation of the law, Raise the Age is working.
In 2021, a year after the law’s implementation, arrests for youth under 18 years old decreased by 67 percent outside of New York City, according to the state.
“Young people across New York are looking to our elected leaders to stand up, defend, and embrace lasting solutions and real investments in youth and healthy communities,” the organizations said in their letter to state leadership. “We have borne witness to the suffering of our communities who continue to struggle to navigate the lasting effects of the pandemic, the crisis of affordable housing and homelessness, the critical unmet needs of youth mental health, and the absence of robust support for education and employment opportunities that all young people in New York deserve.”
“Our proposals deliver state dollars to the communities and organizations ready to serve young people and their families,” they added.
The state’s budget is due on April 1.
