Coalition forms to defend Raise the Age ahead of potential rollback — Queens Daily Eagle

By Jacob Kaye

A group of over 220 organizations launched a new coalition this week to defend against any potential attempt to roll back the state’s Raise the Age law, which prevents the state from prosecuting 16- and 17-year-olds as adults.

Public defense attorneys, criminal justice advocates, unions, clergy groups and others teamed up to form The Coalition to Protect Raise the Age: Build Futures, Invest in Youth in the wake of an expected push to scale back the 2017 criminal justice reform in the upcoming legislative session in Albany.

The coalition, which includes groups like The Legal Aid Society, St. John’s University School of Law Defense and Advocacy Clinic, the New York Civil Liberties Union, Make the Road New York, CUNY School of Law Defenders Clinic, Brooklyn Defender Services and others, began meeting with lawmakers this week, urging them to reject any attempt to alter the state’s Raise the Age law. The coalition also plans to launch an ad campaign to defend the law.

The formation of the group comes ahead of the start of the 2026 legislative session, during which Governor Kathy Hochul is expected to face pressures to make changes to the law that prevented prosecutors from continuing to charge 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in the state’s criminal courts.

The longstanding practice made New York an exception – it was only one of two states to send minors to be tried as adults at the time Raise the Age was passed. Advocates said that when teenagers were treated as adults in the criminal justice system, they were more likely to continue to commit crimes as they got older.

While members of the coalition say the law has been effective, they also say it hasn’t lived up to its full potential. That’s because the state has been slow to spend the $1 billion meant to fund community-based alternatives to incarceration, counseling and mentoring programs, the coalition said.

“How can you count out an intervention that has never even started,” said Jonathan McLean, the CEO of CASES, a nonprofit that has several alternatives to incarceration programs aimed at teenagers. “New York has not received one cent of Raise the Age funding.”

The effort to defend Raise the Age has already been picked up by a handful of lawmakers, including some in Queens.

“Purely punitive approaches to young people cause lasting harm and simply do not keep us safer,” Queens Assemblymember Catalina Cruz said in a statement. “Instead of demonizing our young people, we should be investing in and scaling up the kinds of evidence-based, community-based programs and supports that we know work to keep young people on the right path. I look forward to working with the coalition to make that a reality in the coming session.”

Scaling back the state’s criminal justice reforms has become something of an annual tradition in Albany.

In recent years, Hochul has made it a priority to roll back the state’s 2019 bail reforms. Last year, she pushed for changes to the state’s discovery reforms after being lobbied to do so by the state’s district attorneys.

This year may very well be no different. The state’s DAs said in August, just as the changes to the evidence-sharing law were going into effect, that their eyes would turn toward Raise the Age in 2026. Hochul said at the time that she’d be open to reforming the reforms.

“If there’s conversations about Raise the Age, the legislative session is the time to do that, and I would certainly entertain conversations on every topic related to criminal justice,” the governor said. “I will be looking at all the laws.”

Also potentially impacting the effort to roll back the reform is the gubernatorial election. Hochul will likely be facing a Republican challenge from Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has previously criticized the governor for taking, what she claims to be, a soft on crime approach. The last time Hochul faced a Republican challenger – now-U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin – bail reform changes took center stage during the state’s budget negotiations.

The governor’s office declined to comment on the creation of the coalition.

Members of the coalition claim that any effort to tweak Raise the Age should be met with serious resistance because data shows it has mostly worked as intended.

The law, which requires 16- and 17-year-olds to have their cases heard in Family Court, was passed in the hopes that teens accused of committing crimes would be connected with services instead of being prosecuted like an adult.

The number of teens arrested on a handful of felony charges has dropped in 2025 when compared to 2015, according to an August report from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.