Two States, Two Directions: Juvenile Justice Reform in 2026

Illinois just became the first state to end detention of children under 13. Two new laws signed this month reform the state's juvenile system: one ends detention for children under 12 immediately, under 13 next year. The other establishes a Child First Reform Task Force.

Vermont, meanwhile, is proposing an indefinite pause on the landmark law that made it the first and only state to raise the age of majority for some nonviolent crimes. The Scott administration wants the reform stopped.

Same month. Opposite directions.

Illinois is moving toward what the research has been saying for decades: locking up children doesn't interrupt a cycle, it manufactures one. The younger the child, the more the system becomes the primary formative experience — not the corrective one, the FORMATIVE one. A kid who spends his developmental years learning that he is defective, that adults in authority are threats, and that violence is the appropriate response to perceived disrespect doesn't age out of that curriculum. He carries it.

Vermont's pause is being sold as a response to public-safety concerns. The framing is always the same: the reform was tried, crime went up, we need to go back. What that framing leaves out is whether crime went up because of the reform or in spite of it, and whether the alternative — more kids in cells — actually produces the safety being promised or just moves the violence further down the calendar.

I know which one it does, because I'm the proof of concept for the thing Illinois is funding and Vermont is abandoning.

I spent four years inside as a teenager, about a year of it in solitary. Seven months straight my first year in, then 30-to-60-day stretches after that. I was taught I was a problem that needed containing. That I was dangerous. That everything I did would be read as malicious, so I might as well be what they said I was. That worked exactly as designed: I came out harder, more isolated, more convinced that the only safety available was the kind you enforce yourself.

What changed the trajectory wasn't time, wasn't maturity, wasn't me figuring it out on my own. It was one parole officer who'd been a social worker before she was a parole officer. She picked up a phone, called recruiters, found me jobs, and those jobs became a career. One person. One decision. That's the intervention Illinois is trying to build systemically and Vermont wants to pause.

The argument against reform is always "what about the victims." I'm going to flip that: what about the victims the current system creates?

A kid who goes into detention scared and comes out knowing how to hurt people is not theoretical. A kid who learns that authority is arbitrary, that the adults with power over him are threats, and that asking for help is a liability doesn't just carry that into adulthood. He teaches it to his own kids, because it's what he has. The system calls that recidivism and uses it as proof that the first punishment wasn't hard enough. It's a loop, and the system is one of the moving parts.

Illinois is trying to break the loop at the point where it does the most damage: early, when a child's understanding of adults, authority, safety, and his own worth is still forming. Vermont is proposing to preserve it.

I don't know which one your state is doing. I know which one the research supports. And I know what happened when one person decided that reintegration was the point and acted on it.

That's the experiment Illinois is running. The results are already in the literature. Vermont just has to decide whether it's going to read them.