When Louisiana reversed its “Raise the Age” law in early 2024, moving all 17-year-olds back into the adult criminal system, it became the first and only state in the nation to enact such a reform, intended to shield youth from adult prisons, only to then repeal it. Since then, sheriffs of some of the biggest parishes in the state have struggled to accommodate the influx of minors into their jails. Now, Louisiana lawmakers are seeking to go a step further: They’ve proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would give themselves more leeway to decide what crimes can send children even younger than 17 into adult court—and potentially adult prison.
On March 29, Louisianans will vote on Amendment 3, a constitutional amendment that would hand legislators the power to add, with a two-thirds majority vote, any felony to the list of charges that would qualify a child to be treated like an adult in the eyes of the law. In Louisiana, this includes crimes like making a fake ID or stealing a phone. The state constitution currently restricts the crimes for which minors aged 14 and up can be charged as adults to a list of 16 serious felonies including murder, rape, and armed robbery.
The amendment’s sponsor, Republican state senator Heather Cloud, says the limits on charging children as adults have “hamstringed” Louisiana from being able to address juvenile crime. Some of the bill’s supporters have expressed a deeply pessimistic view of Louisiana’s youth population; in a House committee hearing last fall, Republican lawmaker Tony Bacala told his colleagues, “Some of these kids are already lost when they’re two years old.”
The move has alarmed advocates across the state, who are urging a no vote. “This is just casting the net wider to get young people inside the system,” Antonio Travis, the youth organizer for the group Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, told Bolts.
“These are grasps for more power,” said Sarah Omojola, the executive director of Vera Institute New Orleans. “We’re really trying to cage up and defund Louisiana’s future.”
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry sat in chambers during the House’s debate and vote on the amendment in November, a signal of his support. Its content is consistent with a broader effort by Landry and his allies in the legislature to establish more serious and lasting consequences for young people accused of crimes. In 2023, as attorney general, Landry campaigned for a bill that would have made young people’s criminal records public—but only for residents of the state’s three most populous parishes, which are all majority-Black. The bill was sponsored by state representative Debbie Villio, a former prosecutor and ally of Landry’s who brought the constitutional amendment alongside Cloud.
Both Landry and Villio insisted at the time that this targeting was about crime rates, not race, but organizers were appalled. “How could a person not look at the evidence and see that this is an intentional attack on certain communities?” Travis asked. The bill died in the senate amidst widespread accusations of racism. But in 2024, during a special session on crime that Landry called as his first official act as governor, Bacala brought back a new version that applied equally to every parish, which passed. Landry promptly signed it into law.
Before 2017, the year Louisiana’s “Raise the Age” law took effect, “the education system was definitely, definitely feeding our youth justice system,” Travis told Bolts. “Kids were getting incarcerated from truancy. Kids were getting incarcerated from being suspended too much.”
The reform moved 17-year-olds into the juvenile justice system as a default, though those accused of serious crimes could still be transferred to adult court. “This narrative of these hard criminals … that narrative was slowly being done away with,” Travis said. “The general public was recognizing that these are kids and they deserve resources.”
But this new day in Louisiana wouldn’t last long. There were a few abortive efforts to overturn “Raise the Age”: one bill that Landry, then attorney general, supported died in 2022; another was vetoed by then-Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, in 2023. But this year, with Landry as governor, the legislation passed and became law last April. Landry feted the change on X, writing: “No more will 17-year-olds who commit home invasions, carjack, and rob the great people of our State be treated as children in court. These are criminals and today, they will finally be treated as such.”
The fallout was immediate: Any 17-year-olds already in custody were transferred to adult facilities, and all 17-year-olds arrested from then on were processed and treated as adults, meaning that their criminal history also becomes public record. The vast majority of these young people were not accused of home invasions, carjacking, or robbery, it turns out. Of the 203 17-year-olds arrested in the state’s three largest parishes during the first five months under the new law, ProPublica found that nearly 70 percent were charged with nonviolent crimes, like trespassing or marijuana possession. Only 13 percent were charged with serious felonies—and prosecutors already had the discretion to send young people accused of these crimes into adult court.
Erika Jupiter, statewide organizing manager for Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children’s, told Bolts that the change has had the effect of separating young people from their families and communities. ”Parents are very worried about the experience their children are having, and also it’s harder for them to communicate with their children,” she told Bolts. “If your child is in that adult facility, you may go weeks without knowing a status on what’s happening with them.”
Recognizing that minors are at increased risk of physical and sexual assault in prison, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act requires them to be “sight and sound” separated from adult prisoners. This has resulted in adult prisons placing young people in solitary confinement or in “pods,” which Jupiter described as “windowless shipping containers.” “It’s still inhumane,” she said. Officials have also shipped kids to prisons over 150 miles away from their original facility since the law took effect. “You have children going so far away from home, and their parents can’t visit,” Jupiter said.
Will Harrell, an advisor to Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson, says that arrival of 17-year-olds at the jail—it’s currently housing 18 of them—has created logistical and financial challenges. Owing to the sight and sound restrictions, the jail has to fully shut down anytime they’re moved, which happens three or four times a day. These requirements negatively affect the adult population, too, Harrell said. “Say they’ve got a doctor’s appointment or they got to get to court? Well, we can’t move them until the kids move.”
Harrell has calculated that the presence of these 17-year-olds at the jail has also created a $3 million deficit for Orleans Parish. Legislators “created the mandate, but did not provide the funding,” he said. He plans to ask the legislature to cover the cost of housing the 17-year-olds, which would increase Louisiana’s overall spending on criminal justice since no funding was taken away from the youth system.
The Orleans Parish juvenile detention facility’s population dipped slightly in April 2024 when 17-year-olds were transferred to the adult system and has stayed slightly lower, but the number of 17-year-olds at the adult jail has steadily increased in the intervening months. This suggests that overall youth incarceration has actually gone up since the law went into effect.
If Amendment 3 passes, the consequences will be both less immediate and potentially farther reaching than the reversal of “Raise the Age.”
Because it would simply shift the power to state lawmakers to determine what constitutes an offense that can send young people into the adult systems, the amendment would have no automatic impact. And lawmakers would still have to get a two-thirds majority to pass any new laws under Amendment 3. But in the Republican-dominated legislature, that’s not such a heavy lift. And the power shift gives them great discretion to widen the net for crimes that bring children in contact with the adult criminal system—for years to come. “Every single session from now until, well, the end of time, legislators could just advance a bill adding more things for which children will be charged as adults,” Omojola said.
Villio defended the bill to Bolts in a statement, saying, “this isn’t about prosecuting 10-year-olds as adults, and it isn’t about prosecuting juveniles for petty crimes. It is limited to 15-and 16-year-olds and for serious felony offenses only.” But there is nothing in the text of the amendment indicating such boundaries. If it passes, legislators could decide to simply add serious felonies to the list—but they could also go far further. It is already within their power to lower the age for who the system treats as an adult.
Omojola said that she wouldn’t trust the legislature to use such an open-ended power responsibly. She stressed that lawmakers could even bring future bills allowing children even younger than 14 to be charged as adults. “It opens a pathway for the legislature to send more kids of any age to the adult system for any time, for any violent or non violent crime,” she stressed.
Whether that happens is another question entirely. Amendment 3 had less support than the rollback of “Raise the Age”—it passed with only one vote in the Louisiana House. Harrell, the Orleans Parish sheriff’s advisor, suspects that the fiscal and logistical challenges associated with moving more young people into adult prisons could make sheriffs more leery of such bills this time around.
For instance, the powerful sheriff of East Baton Rouge Parish, Sid Gautreaux, didn’t initially oppose “Raise the Age,” but after it passed he refused to accept 17-year-olds into his jail, saying the facility was too dangerous to accommodate minors. The department began only booking 17-year-olds accused of violent felonies, and it shipped a handful of 17-year-olds already in custody to a prison 200 miles away—one that is itself plagued by allegations of neglect and abuse of juveniles.
While Election Day for Amendment 3, along with three other proposed constitutional amendments, is on March 29, early voting has been underway since March 15. Overall turnout is expected to be low, as there are only amendments on the ballot save for a few towns’ local races. But early returns indicate slightly higher turnout among Democrats over Republicans, and higher-than-expected turnout among Black voters, who tend to vote Democrat in Louisiana. At least one pollster observed that this doesn’t bode well for any of the amendments on the ballot, which are all supported by Republican legislators.
Travis said that though Amendment 3 is technically race neutral, unlike the bill that would have only unveiled young people’s records in three majority black parishes, “there’s no secret that this issue in the state of Louisiana disproportionately affects Black young men at a higher rate than any other group in our state.” Almost 90 percent of 17-year-olds arrested in Orleans and Baton Rouge Parish are Black, according to ProPublica’s data analysis. “I think the players at the table know exactly what’s happening and what’s going on, and they’re intentional about that, and they hide behind language,” he told Bolts.
