José A. Perez, MPS
I was 13 years old when New York decided my childhood was over. It wasn’t a weapon or a felony—it was a dollar. I bullied a classmate into giving it to me, and the state responded by sending me to jail.
They took me to the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center—a jail that literally floats off the Bronx. A barge of steel and rust bobbing on the water, designed to disappear people. I didn’t understand the geography then, only the terror of it: the rocking beneath my feet, the gates slamming shut, the sound of metal swallowing my childhood. I remember being strip-searched by grown men, standing naked and exposed, trying to disappear inside my own skin. I remember the yelling, the threats, the cries of other children echoing off concrete and steel. Children lining up for soap and deodorant, learning early that dignity was not something the state planned to preserve.
That was my introduction to incarceration. At age 13.
Years later, I was sent upstate to Clinton Correctional Facility. I was 16, 17 years old—still a child—serving a 20-years-to-life sentence in one of the most violent prisons in New York. Clinton is infamous for brutality and corruption. Long before the nation learned how deeply broken that institution was, the truth was already clear: teenagers were being raised in cages, taught survival instead of accountability, violence instead of healing.
That was New York before Raise the Age.
Back then, children were prosecuted as adults as a matter of policy. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds—mostly Black and brown, mostly poor—were funneled into adult jails and prisons where trauma compounds and hope evaporates.
The system labeled us irredeemable before we were fully formed. It confused cruelty with safety.
New York’s Raise the Age legislation, passed in 2017, was a long-overdue acknowledgment of reality: children are different. Their brains are still developing. When you place them in adult facilities, you don’t reduce harm—you manufacture more of it.
Today, the progress we’ve made in New York highlights a reality now threatened nationwide due to the federal government’s attack on funding and fear-mongering rhetoric. We are witnessing a coordinated assault on community-based alternatives, youth diversion, and restorative responses to harm. Fear-based narratives are being used to roll back reforms, expand incarceration, and abandon young people precisely when they need investment the most.
New York is not immune to this moment—and what happens here matters nationally. So, America should know that over the last decade, Raise the Age has proven to be a success in our state.
I serve as the program strategist for Children’s Defense Fund-New York, a proud partner of the Raise the Age coalition. Data from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services shows that outside of New York City, juvenile arrests have decreased by 63% between 2015 and 2024. They’ve decreased by 77% in New York City.
This success is even more remarkable when you consider New York has yet to even fully fund Raise the Age. State comptroller data shows only about one-third of the $1.7 billion appropriated to Raise the Age has been spent. Further, only a fraction of that money has gone to community-based programs that we know work.
Session is underway. The state budget is due by the end of March. This is not an abstract debate—it is a live decision point.
Let’s fund the Youth Justice Innovation Fund, which would ensure funds go directly to the places that can make the most impact.
A recent report from the statewide Alternatives to Incarceration coalition shows that there is currently a significant gap in funding of these types of programs. Let’s show the rest of America what policies, like Raise the Age, can achieve when fully supported.
New York’s commitment must also be local. In Rochester, where one of our CDF Freedom Schools is rooted, we see what sustained investment in young people looks like: literacy, leadership, safety, and joy. That presence reflects an undying belief that young people are worth more than punishment—that communities thrive when children are supported, not discarded.
Fully fund Raise the Age. Not just for the data—but for the 13-year-old on a prison barge, the teenager surviving a life sentence, and the children we can still reach. The question is not what punishment children deserve. It is what kind of future we are willing to build—right now.