'Adult crime, adult time'? Five experts debunk the need to be tough on crime—and propose impactful alternatives

Sofía Frech does not hide her enthusiasm as she speaks about the project that has become her passion: Fundación Reintegra.

Making hand gestures as she speaks to Salzburg Global Seminar via Zoom, Frech gushes about the Mexican nonprofit that has helped over 80,000 juvenile offenders reintegrate with society while keeping other at-risk youths from falling into crime.

“We pick up these guys when they are before the judge, who allows them release on parole as long as they join a reintegration program. Part of our job is to convince them to come with us,” says Frech, an innovation in education advisor for the 35-year-old organization to which she brings decades of experience in both university teaching and educational research, and the public sector. 

Around 200 young men and women take part in the program each year, some for three months, others for the full 12. This number of participants could be higher if so too were resources, Frech points out.

Based in one of the poorest and most violent districts of the capital, Mexico City, Fundación Reintegra built on its history of working with juvenile offenders to address their lack of job opportunities. Since 2013, they have offer programs in practical skills like baking and screen printing, which are run by community members alongside 50 employees and volunteers, most of them psychologists.

“There are no police and everyone is called by their [first] name,” Frech proudly stresses.

Besides individual and family therapy, recreational activities, education, and basic skills training, the program includes accompaniment during interrogation. 

“Many kids are raped, mistreated, or extorted during questioning,” Frech explains, emphasizing that most of them are “invisible” to society.

“These guys come from places where they didn’t exist for anyone, where no one cared about what they did, and what we try to do here is make them realize that they matter to the rest of the world… So, as soon as they arrive, they are treated as people.”

She brands the program a “transformation” process.

When teenagers join Reintegra, “they don’t care about schedules, don’t wash their face or brush their teeth, and are always late... They think only about themselves.”

But, as the months pass, they gradually change, and some even end up launching their small business once they leave, as they are allowed to continue using the NGO’s humble facilities for that purpose.

“Many don’t reoffend,” Frech assures. However, the main weakness of the program is its lack of documentation and measuring of its own impact due to budget constraints.

Despite the limitations of the program, there are still certainly many learnings to share from it—as Frech did as part of Salzburg Global Seminar’s Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice initiative, alongside 66 other youth justice advocates from 18 other countries. 

“These guys come from places where they didn’t exist for anyone, where no one cared about what they did, and what we try to do here is make them realize that they matter to the rest of the world… So, as soon as they arrive, they are treated as people.”

– Sofía Frech

Scarred lives

Despite the success of non-traditional alternatives like Fundación Reintegra, most of Mexico’s youth justice is still punitive. This is also the case for its neighbor to the north, the United States—another country represented in the Salzburg Global initiative. 

“Up until very recently, youth who were tried in our adult criminal justice system were subject to the more extreme penalties, including death penalty and life without parole,” explains Marsha Levick, a nationally recognized expert in American juvenile law, a decades-long advocate for children’s and women's rights and a Salzburg Global Fellow. 

The chief legal officer and co-founder of Juvenile Law Center has participated in numerous cases before the United States Supreme Court, including several recent sentencing cases challenging certain extreme sentences for youth.

“One of the things that we have to recognize about intervening in kids’ lives when they become involved with the justice system is that there are multiple ways in which that system can scar the lives of children going forward,” Levick warns.

“There are instances too frequently in the United States where kids are subject to solitary confinement, and they are at risk of physical abuse within some of these facilities. We’d like to think that things are getting better—and yet these stories continue to pop up.”

That trauma can have disastrous consequences further in their lives, so alternatives to imprisonment are a way to prevent future engagement in crime.

“Exposure to violence during the childhood and youth years, when the brain is still developing, is a major factor that increases the chances of violent acts later in life,” says Michal Gilad, a visiting fellow with the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives. 

Gilad’s work addresses the extent, scope, prevalence, outcomes and costs of childhood exposure to crime and violence.

“The problem is so widespread. Data show that over 60% of children are exposed to, at least, one form of direct or indirect violence before age 18,” she adds. 

“It means that every single child is more likely than not to be exposed.”

“Exposure to violence during the childhood and youth years, when the brain is still developing, is a major factor that increases the chances of violent acts later in life.”

– Gilad Michal

“Kids are different”

“Our path to developing a more humane system for youth who are involved with either the juvenile or the adult criminal justice system is really to look to developmental science and research and to recognize in a very fundamental way that kids are different,” Levick highlights.

That led her, back in the 1980s, to join forces with Barry Feld, one of the US’ leading scholars of juvenile justice and a pioneer in drawing on psychology and neuroscience to prove youths’ reduced criminal responsibility and diminished competence.

Later, they would lobby the United States Congress to modify laws and improve the delivery of legal services in juvenile courts, and they have continued to work together on issues associated with quality of justice. 

“Three characteristics of kids bolster these conclusions that they have reduced criminal responsibility: immaturity and impulsivity, susceptibility to peer influences, and transient personalities that are not fully formed,” Feld explains. Feld, like Levick, Frech and Gilad is now taking part in the Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice initiative.

“Kids think differently than adults, are more likely to emphasize short term over long term, have different calculations for risk assessment, and are much more likely to emphasize short term gains over long term losses.”

“Those differences require that we approach even their criminal offending very differently than we might approach that of adults, and so it has oddly been a path out for us from what has, as I said, historically been quite a punitive system towards kids,” Levick adds.

Research from the MacArthur Foundation, a funder of the Salzburg Global initiative, shows that juveniles and young adults are impulsive, particularly under conditions of emotional arousal, because their brain is not yet fully mature and will not fully develop “until sometime in the early to mid-twenties”.

According to Feld, “the neuroscience basically has bolstered what we already knew: kids do stupid, reckless stuff without thinking about the consequences, and now we know that it is in part because their brains don’t work right.”

That is why, after authoring 11 books and 150 articles, he is an advocate for what he calls the “youth discount”: “short sentences for short people.” 

Namely, children should get significantly shorter sentences because of their diminished criminal responsibility. 

The seriousness of the crime, Feld argues, is the product of two factors: the harm caused and the culpability of the actor in producing that harm. 

“The harm is the same whether mugged by a 15-year-old or a 25-year-old, but the culpability is different because of differences in both the developmental psychology and the neuroscience.

“And because of that reduced criminal responsibility, kids’ crimes are by definition less serious, that is to say, they are not as culpable.”

However, as Levick recalls, “there’s not a consensus, sadly, about how we should treat children in the justice system. 

“There continues to be a view among some law enforcement and among many prosecutors and district attorneys that children should pay a heavy price for criminal conduct that they become involved in.”

“The harm is the same whether mugged by a 15-year-old or a 25-year-old, but the culpability is different because of differences in both the developmental psychology and the neuroscience.

“And because of that reduced criminal responsibility, kids’ crimes are by definition less serious, that is to say, they are not as culpable.”

– Barry Feld

The cost of doing nothing

“Violence is a learned behavior,” Gilad points out. “And there is really good evidence that interventions early on, either therapeutic or counseling, that help process the trauma, can make a huge difference and decrease this risk [of becoming violent] substantially.” 

“It’s often ignored that doing nothing costs us a lot of money because there is so much damage, not to mention the negative outcomes of exposure to violence in early years are so vast and expensive that they actually affect every single facet of the individual and community life.”

Physical and mental health are likely to be damaged by repeated exposure to violence, the US-based Israeli expert remarks. 

“Health conditions that you wouldn’t even think about, like heart and lung conditions, cancer, sexually transmitted diseases; just a very broad range of health conditions that will not necessarily immediately show up… When you go to mental health, you add anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and on the other end of the spectrum, you have aggression and difficulty controlling anger.”

Other outcomes include “vulnerable immunity, acting out, attention problems, dissociation, disconnecting with things going on around you, and attachment problems—difficulty to attach to peers, to the parents, to the family.”

In terms of economic impact, the resulting health problems affect employability, earning capacity and productivity. Not to mention the amount of money required to treat the victims, whose condition will aggravate over time if nothing is done early enough.

“In parents who were exposed to violence when they were younger… and weren’t treated, we see the effect seeping down to their children too. And we see children affected by proxy even when they are not aware at all of the parent’s exposure,” Gilad warns.

“Kids and young people who grow up without proper education, surrounded by addiction, are not going to contribute anything positive to the community and society,” emphasizes Teresita Escotto-Quesada, a former United Nations official who devoted years to several national projects on youth development and prevention of violence, mostly in Central America and the Caribbean. 

The Mexican expert, who was part of UNESCO between 1995 to 2014 and has also joined the Salzburg Global initiative, stresses “the cost of helping this population” living in marginalized communities with violent backgrounds, as well as the “material damages and harm to others, to the victims.”

“Our calculation,” Gilad assures, “showed that in the United States alone, we are nearing a cost of $500 billion every single year.”

Early, non-punitive intervention is thus crucial to reduce those skyrocketing figures.

And initiatives like Sofia Frech’s Fundación Reintegra are a powerful kickstart.

So too is UNESCO’s Open Schools program, which Escotto-Quesada has supervised in several countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. 

The UNESCO program consists of literally opening up schools, particularly at weekends to offer the entire community access to educational, cultural, sports, leisure, and income-generating activities.

“That helps them feel like they are part of something,” Escotto-Quesada explains.

In partnership with the Brazilian government, UNESCO launched Open Schools in Brazil in 2004. By 2010, it had been implemented across 4,000 schools in the country, serving approximately four million Brazilian children. It has since been adopted in Argentina, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, with “workshops to improve self-esteem, to make people feel important and worthy,” in Escotto-Quesada’s words.

In Guatemala, the weekend workshops are chosen by participants and organized with the support of the Presidency. 

“It’s about what the people there want—you can’t come and impose anything on them. If they want to learn hip-hop, then a hip-hop class is organized; if they want to learn how to play chess, a member of the community who knows how to play will be sought out to run a workshop.”

The sociologist claims that, when it started in 2000, the program was as cheap as a dollar per participant.

“It was found that after some time, violent activities among the youth started decreasing. They would get along better with each other, behave better in class, and weren’t violent with teachers anymore.”

“Kids and young people who grow up without proper education, surrounded by addiction, are not going to contribute anything positive to the community and society.”

– Teresita Escotto-Quesada

“Treated unfairly”

“There is hope,” Escotto-Quesada goes on. “Youngsters are often stigmatized: ‘He or she is dangerous, don’t give them a job.’ No, no, no! Emphasis must be placed on them because if not, they are lost generations.”

Now an independent consultant, she highlights the importance of primary crime prevention, which is directed at stopping the problem before it happens.

“Primary prevention is the easiest and the cheapest, but does not have an immediate political impact… As the effect is long term, it doesn’t pay off politically.” 

A “get tough on crime” policy often does pay off politically—but with no positive outcome.

“Many young people end up in jail for a minor offense… and have almost no opportunities for rehabilitation,” she laments.

What needs to be avoided is that “young people come out with a ‘specialization’ in crime,” and that instead they come out “recovered in order to healthily reintegrate with society.”

A low self-esteem and educational level, schools that do not make them feel protected, the lack of public spaces to socialize, and a group of friends that is not positive are a few of the risk factors paving the way to a violent path.

“You see more involvement with gangs because gangs provide protection,” Gilad explains. “It gives you some security and maybe helps you to feel less vulnerable to the threats coming from the outside.”

There are also “strong correlations between poverty or poor economic state, unemployment and violence,” she observes.

And Feld knows the reason: living in poverty, with exposure to violence and inconsistent parenting, is highly stressful. “High levels of stress produce cortisol, which also affects brain development and makes kids hypersensitive and reactive… That is creating the population at risk,” he points out.

Some impoverished communities are stigmatized and discriminated against by the rest of society and the state—a root of the problem that cannot be ignored.

“Too many people are treated unfairly, too many communities are marginalized,” says Levick. 

“Communities of color, in particular, are simply not treated equitably and are subject to a significantly greater degree of surveillance by law enforcement and intervention by law enforcement.”

“High levels of stress produce cortisol, which also affects brain development and makes kids hypersensitive and reactive… That is creating the population at risk.”

– Barry Feld

They need a chance 

“Children make mistakes and they can make really tragic mistakes,” Levick asserts.

But, as Escotto-Quesada asserts, “they are also victims themselves.”

“Of a family who doesn’t pay attention to them, who has taught them to live surrounded by violence, of a community and a state that don’t care about them… They feel the exclusion and that shows in violent attitudes.”

Given the widespread systemic injustice and the heavy investment required to lift these marginalized communities out of poverty, the “dire” background many of these at-risk youths experience, as Feld described it, will probably unfortunately remain unchanged. In the interim, they need the resources to cope with and learn from their lived experiences.

“They will continue to live in the same neighborhood and go to the same school. You can’t change the context, but you can give them the tools to face it,” Frech says, raising her voice.

She is struggling to find the money to expand Fundación Reintegra, replicating its success across Mexico.

“There’s this phrase that I hate, that ‘they are like this because that’s what they want’. It’s the worst phrase in the world.

“They don’t have options!”

Funding alternative prevention schemes, however, would give these young men and women new opportunities.