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Youth Justice: Spotlight on States

Advocates have been fighting to end the prosecution of youth as adults, and to make all sentences have more of a rehabilitative outlook; they’ve also been questioning why the system typically has an abrupt cutoff at age 18, if not younger, fighting the detention of minors, and much more.
This page chronicles the latest state-level developments in these battles. And the maps below track the landscape in just two dimensions—the push to ban sentences of life without the possibility of parole for minors, and the push to end the automatic prosecution of youth as adults.