With three major pieces of legislation pertaining to adolescent behavior, mental health and juvenile justice at various stages in the United States Senate, psychology’s Laurence Steinberg organized a briefing for staff members of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee in Washington on June 11. The session focused on adolescent brain development and its implications for policy and practice in the juvenile justice system.

Steinberg is well positioned to help senators understand the issues involved. A Distinguished University Professor and the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology, Steinberg also serves as the Director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice.

In a prepared statement to the Senate staffers during the briefing Steinberg said, “We have always known that adolescents behave differently than adults. Young people are more impulsive, more short-sighted, more willing to take risks, and more susceptible to the influence of their peers. Anyone who has raised a teenager, taught a teenager, counseled a teenager, or been a teenager knows this.

“Scientific discoveries about brain development have helped us understand why this is true, but they haven’t changed the basic story line. Those who founded a separate system of juvenile justice in America some100 years ago had it right, even without the benefit of brain scans, when they made a commitment to treating young people who have violated the law differently than how we treat adults. It is a commitment that we need to reaffirm today.”

Steinberg was invited through the MacArthur Foundation to organize the briefing jointly by Senators Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass) and Gordon Smith (R-Oregon).
“Senator Kennedy is very interested in children, as is Senator Smith,” said Steinberg. “I think the senators were looking to make this briefing a bipartisan effort to educate the Committee, through its staff, on the latest research and how it may impact public policy.”

Those Steinberg brought to Capitol Hill with him assist in the briefing all have ties to Temple. They included Elizabeth Cauffman, Associate Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior at UC Irvine and a Temple psychology Ph.D. in 1996; Alex Piquero, Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of Florida and a former member of Temple’s criminal justice faculty; and the Hon. Michael Corriero, a prominent Manhattan judge whose last book, Judging Children as Children, was published last year by Temple University Press.

The three pieces of legislation that Steinberg and his colleagues addressed were:

• The Gang Abatement and Prevention Act, introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif), which federalizes gang-related crimes and calls for stiffer penalties for those convicted of committing a gang-related crime.

“The problem that my colleagues and I have with the harsher penalties called for in this legislation is that the way the bill defines gang-related crimes doesn’t make any sense to us,” said Steinberg. “It basically defines a gang-related crime in terms of the number of people participating in the crime at the same time. The problem with that is, kids commit crimes in groups, whether they are part of a gang or not.”

He said if the purpose of the legislation is to identify and punish kids who are the most serious offenders, then the bill was poorly crafted, as it will sweep up a lot of kids who are not very serious offenders.

“The typical scenario is that kids are hanging around with a bunch of their friends and one of the friends wants to do something stupid, so they all go along with doing it and all get caught and charged,” Steinberg said. “Except now, under this legislation, they’re getting charged as members of a gang.”

Although they have made no headway in getting the Judiciary Committee to change the definitions, Steinberg said they were pleased that a provision calling for 16- and 17-year olds who were charged with a gang-related crime be automatically tried as an adult was removed from the bill.

“The provision was struck out before we held the briefing, but we do feel their actions could have been influenced by the work the MacArthur Foundation group has been doing,” he said. “We’ve been very active in trying to show them that research findings do not support the value of trying these kids as adults. In fact, it actually encourages more crime.”

• The Mental Health Juvenile Justice Act, a bill introduced by Kennedy which calls for the better integration of mental health and juvenile justice by providing money for states to establish mechanisms for better communications and exchange of resources between the mental health and juvenile justice systems.

“This legislation grows out of the senator’s interest in children’s mental health and the recognition of the fact that a lot of kids in the juvenile justice system have mental health problems that are different from their criminal behavior; problems like depression or substance abuse,” Steinberg noted. “Our group has been very interested in the relationship between mental health and juvenile justice.”

• The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which is a reauthorization of expenditures on a wide range of juvenile justice issues. Although its passage is not in doubt according to Steinberg, “It is a bill that is of interest to us in that it reaffirms that kids are different from adults; that kids need to be treated differently from adults in the justice system.”

Steinberg said he felt positive about the briefing with the staffers.

“They took a lot of notes and asked some very good questions,” he said. “We’ve also received a request to send our testimony to Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev), the Senator Majority Leader.

“I’ve done these type of briefings and testimony before legislative bodies before and you never really know how anything you present is going to be used,” he added. “But what you do know is that if you don’t do it, your work certainly can’t make a difference.”