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Study: Immaturity May Spark Teen Crime
December 2, 2007
By Malcolm Ritter
 The
teenage brain, Laurence Steinberg says, is like a car with a good
accelerator but a weak brake. With powerful impulses under poor
control, the likely result is a crash.
And, perhaps, a crime.
Steinberg, a Temple University
psychology professor, helped draft an American Psychological
Association brief for a 2005 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court
outlawed the death penalty for crimes committed before age 18.
That ruling relies on the most
recent research on the adolescent brain, which indicates the
juvenile brain is still maturing in the teen years and reasoning and
judgment are developing well into the early to mid 20s. It is often
cited as state lawmakers consider scaling back punitive juvenile
justice laws passed during the 1990s.
"As any parent knows," wrote
Justice Anthony Kennedy for the 5-4 majority, youths are more likely
to show "a lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of
responsibility" than adults. "These qualities often result in
impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions."
He also noted that "juveniles are
more vulnerable or susceptible to negative influences and outside
pressures, including peer pressure," causing them to have less
control over their environment.
Some child advocates have pointed
to the Supreme Court decision and the research as evidence that
teens - even those accused of serious crimes - should not be
regarded in the same way as adults in the criminal justice system.
Dr. David Fassler, a psychiatry
professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine who has
testified before legislative committees on brain development, says
the research doesn't absolve teens but offers some explanation for
their behavior.
"It doesn't mean adolescents can't
make a rational decision or appreciate the difference between right
and wrong," he said. "It does mean, particularly when confronted
with stressful or emotional decisions, they are more likely to act
impulsively, on instinct, without fully understanding or analyzing
the consequences of their actions."
Experts say that even at ages 16
and 17, when compared to adults, juveniles on average are more:
-impulsive.
-aggressive.
-emotionally volatile.
-likely to take risks.
-reactive to stress.
-vulnerable to peer pressure.
-prone to focus on and overestimate
short-term payoffs and underplay longer-term consequences of what
they do.
-likely to overlook alternative
courses of action.
Violence toward others also tends
to peak in adolescent years, says psychiatrist Dr. Peter Ash of
Emory University. It's mostly likely to start around age 16, and
people who haven't committed a violent crime by age 19 only rarely
start doing it later, he said.
The good news here, he said, is
that a violent adolescent doesn't necessarily become a violent
adult. Some two-thirds to three-quarters of violent youth grow out
of it, he said. "They get more self-controlled."
Some of the changes found in
behavioral studies are paralleled by changes in the brain itself as
youths become adults.
In fact, in just the past few
years, Steinberg said, brain scans have given biological backing to
commonsense notions about teen behavior, like their impulsiveness
and vulnerability to peer pressure.
It's one thing to say teens don't
control their impulses as well as adults, but another to show that
they can't, he said. As for peer pressure, the new brain research
"gives credence to the idea that this isn't a choice that kids are
making to give in to their friends, that biologically, they're more
vulnerable to that," he said.
Consider the lobes at the front of
the brain. The nerve circuitry here ties together inputs from other
parts of the brain, said Dr. Jay Giedd of the National Institute of
Mental Health.
This circuitry weighs how much
priority to give incoming messages like "Do this now" versus "Wait!
What about the consequences?" In short, the frontal lobes are key
for making good decisions and controlling impulses.
Brain scans show that the frontal
lobes don't mature until age 25, and their connections to other
parts of the brain continue to improve to at least that age, Giedd
said.
The inexplicable behavior and poor
judgments teens are known for almost always happen when teens are
feeling high emotion or intense peer pressure, conditions that
overwhelm the still-maturing circuitry in the front part of brain,
Giedd said.
As Steinberg sees it, a teenager's
brain has a well-developed accelerator but only a partly developed
brake.
By around 15 or 16, the parts of
the brain that arouse a teen emotionally and make him pay attention
to peer pressure and the rewards of action - the gas pedal - are
probably all set. But the parts related to controlling impulses,
long-term thinking, resistance to peer pressure and planning - the
brake, mostly in the frontal lobes - are still developing.
"It's not like we go from becoming
all accelerator to all brake," Steinberg said. "It's that we go from
being heavy-foot-on-the-accelerator to being better able to manage
the whole car."
Giedd emphasized that scientists
can't yet scan an individual's brain and draw conclusions about how
mature he is, or his degree of responsibility for his actions.
Brain scans do show group
differences between adult and teen brains, he said, "but whether or
not that should matter (in the courtroom) is the part that needs to
be decided more by the judicial system than the neuroscientist."
Steinberg, who frequently testifies
on juvenile justice policy and consults with state legislators on
the topic, said it's not clear to him how much the research on teen
brains affects lawmakers. They seem more swayed by pragmatic issues
like the cost of treating teens as adults, he said. But he noted
that he has been asked to testify more in the past few years than
before.
In any case, experts say, there's
nothing particularly magic about the age 18 as a standard dividing
line between juveniles and adults in the courtroom.
Different mental capabilities
mature at different rates, Steinberg notes. Teens as young as 15 or
16 can generally balance short-term rewards and possible costs as
well as adults, but their ability to consider what might happen
later on is still developing, he said.
A dividing line of age 18 is better
than 15 and not necessarily superior to 19 or 17, but it appears
good enough to be justified scientifically, he said.
Steinberg said he thinks courts
should be able to punish some 16- or 17- year olds as adults. That
would be reserved for repeat violent offenders who've resisted
rehabilitation by the juvenile justice system, and who could
endanger other youth in the juvenile system if they returned. "I
don't think there are a lot of these kids," Steinberg said.
For the rest, he thinks it makes
sense to try rehabilitating young offenders in the juvenile justice
system. That's better than sending them through the adult system,
which can disrupt their development so severely that "they're never
going be able to be a productive member of society," Steinberg said.
"You're not doing society any favor at all."
Ash said that to decide whom to
treat as an adult, courts need some kind of guideline that combines
the defendant's age with the crime he's accused of. That should
leave room for individual assessments, he said.
But "we don't have very good
measuring sticks" for important traits like how impulsive a juvenile
is, he said.
In any case, the decision for each
defendant should balance a number of reasons for punishment, like
retribution, protecting society, deterring future crime, and
rehabilitation, said Ash, who's a member of the American Psychiatric
Association's Committee on Judicial Action.
Even if a 14-year-old murderer is
held morally responsible for the crime, he will have matured by the
time he's 18, and in the meantime he may be more amenable to
rehabilitation than an adult murderer is, Ash said.
In fact, most experts conclude that
rehabilitation works better for juveniles than for adult offenders,
he said.
And just as parents know how
irrational juveniles can be, Ash said, they also know that
rehabilitation is a key goal in punishing them.
"What we really want," he said, "is
to turn delinquent kids into good adults."
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