Illinois Raised the Juvenile Detention Age to 12. It's Not High Enough.
Illinois just raised the minimum age for juvenile detention to 12, effective July 1. That means the state will no longer lock up 10- and 11-year-olds. The threshold goes to 13 by July 2027. I spent six months in solitary as a child. I'm allowed to have an opinion about what that does. Two new laws passed the Illinois legislature this year. The first raises the minimum age for juvenile detention from 10 to 12 immediately, and to 13 next year. The second establishes the Child First Reform Task Force to study alternatives to detention and recommend further reforms. The first law is the one that matters. The task force is the part that sounds good in a press release. Here's what setting a minimum age does: it draws a line under which the state admits a child is too young to be institutionalized. That line had been 10. Now it's 12, then 13. It's not high enough – there shouldn't be a threshold at all, children don't belong in cages – but moving it up is still correct...