Estimating the Crime Effects of Raising the Age of Majority: Evidence from Connecticut

Recent empirical research has shown that juveniles do not achieve complete psycho-social maturity until post-adolescence and that processing juveniles as adults in the criminal justice system can be associated with elevated rates of criminal recidivism. In response to these as well as other concerns, a number of states have recently raised their legal ages of majority in the hopes of reducing juvenile offending rates. The State of Connecticut enacted one such law change when its age of juvenile majority was raised from 16 to 17 in 2010 and then from 17 to 18 in 2012 for all but the most serious offenses. The present study examines the effect of Connecticut’s policy change on juvenile crime. To discern between changes in juvenile offending and changes in the propensity of police to arrest youthful offenders in the aftermath of a law change, we utilize two methodological approaches. Synthetic control methods are used to generate triple differences estimates of the effect of Connecticut’s policy change on juvenile crime using a weighted average of other U.S. states as a natural comparison group. Next, using NIBRS data for a subset of Connecticut’s local jurisdictions, we compare changes in age-specific juvenile arrests to changes in age-specific juvenile offending. The resulting evidence suggests that no discernable change in juvenile offending occurred. In addition, evidence exists that in some Connecticut jurisdictions officer, rather than juvenile, behavior was impacted by this law change, and future efforts to alter offender behavior should anticipate likely adaptive behavior by all crime and justice actors. 1 We thank Kate Evans, Donna DiNello and their colleagues in the NIBRS unit of the Connecticut Department of Public Safety for their assistance in obtaining and interpreting Connecticut’s NIBRS data. Draft—Do Not Cite or Distribute September 2015