A similar measure appears to be on the verge of adoption by the South Carolina Legislature.  Here in Louisiana, the change could alter the lives of close to 5,000 17-year-olds who are arrested each year, mainly for nonviolent misdemeanors. Under the new law, even if they were given prolonged stays in juvenile facilities, they could receive therapy and a chance for high school degrees rather than criminal records and exposure to hardened criminals.  To allay concerns that the state’s juvenile system, already caught in a severe budget crisis, is not prepared for an influx, the bill would phase in the change, with nonviolent offenders making the switch in 2018, and the rest in 2020, said Josh Perry, executive director of the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, which provides public defenders for children and has lobbied for the bill.  As in other states, prosecutors would retain the option to transfer juveniles who commit particularly serious crimes into adult courts.  In the peak “tough on crime” years of the 1990s, many states acted to send more young offenders to adult courts. But in the last seven years, Illinois and Connecticut increased the age for automatic treatment as adults to 18 from 16, and Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Mississippi raised it to 18 from 17.  The experience in those states has bolstered the case for change, said Vincent Schiraldi, a senior research fellow in criminal justice at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former justice official in New York City and Washington, D.C.  While the declining crime rate makes comparisons difficult, evidence suggests that treating 17-year-old offenders as juveniles may reduce public costs over time, he said, because they are less likely to commit future crimes than youths who are punished as adults. Fears that crime would rise or detention facilities would be overwhelmed have proved incorrect.  Officials in Connecticut, Illinois and Vermont are even discussing raising the cutoff to 21, though this is more widely disputed. In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has proposed raising the age for adult culpability to 18, but members of the Republican-controlled Senate have expressed concerns about transitional costs as well as public safety.  In Lafayette, La., Rob Reardon, the director of corrections for the parish, explained why he thought that both the state and the young offenders would be helped by treating 17-year-olds as juveniles.  “This is an adult jail,” he said, “and the outcomes for the young people just have to be terrible.”  On a recent day, the parish jail held eight male and one female 17-year-olds, awaiting adjudication for crimes that ranged from trespassing to murder.  When they spend a few weeks in his jail, Mr. Reardon said — and for those who cannot make bail, it is often 90 days or more — youths are expelled from school and never graduate.  The presence of 17-year-olds is also a major resource strain, he said. Inmates generally live in pods of 13 cells with double bunks, or 26 to a pod. According to a federal law (one that has frequently been violated in New Orleans), youths must be kept separate, so one entire pod was occupied by just the eight 17-year-old boys, who were tended 24 hours a day by a guard. The 17-year-old girl was housed alone in a unit with four cells.  The separation also means that the youngest inmates cannot take part in activities like kitchen work. In the youth pod in Lafayette, guards had brought in coloring books and jigsaw puzzles to give the boys something to do.  In New Orleans, Ms. Marshall, now 22, was lucky in some ways after her arrest.  A judge allowed her to enter a diversion program; if she attended an anger management class, stayed drug free and continued in school, the criminal charge would be dropped.  She finished high school the next year. But now, five years later, she still lives with her great-aunt, Yolanda Wills, in east New Orleans, where a mantel in their home is filled with Ms. Marshall’s high school athletic trophies.  Ms. Wills, a retired school bus driver living on disability, said she was taken aback when the police arrested Ms. Marshall and then was frustrated by what followed.  “They said that if she goes through the program, they’d clear her record,” Ms. Wills said.  “But it didn’t go anywhere,” she said.  What Ms. Wills and Ms. Marshall did not realize was that, while the criminal charge disappeared, the arrest record remained.  Ms. Marshall said that because of that record, she has repeatedly been turned down for jobs — as a superstore clerk, as a security guard and as a postal worker, among others.  She learned only recently from a public defender that her arrest record could be expunged — for $500 in fees.  Ms. Wills does not have the extra cash, and Ms. Marshall has no way to earn it.  “I can’t pay to expunge the record, and I can’t get a job to get the money,” she said.
Louisiana is among a dwindling number of states where 17-year-olds are automatically treated as adults, and among a growing number that are looking at revising those laws.