A change in the makeup of North Carolina’s juvenile detention population with adult court youth surging from 39% to 65% in a year presents new challenges for the juvenile detention system as it scrambles to accommodate this changing population, according to a new report from the North Carolina Division of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
The 2025 Annual Juvenile Justice report, released on April 28, indicates this “shift” in adult court youth is due to the passage of HB 834 in December 2024. This bill ensures that all 16- and 17-year-olds charged with Class A-E felonies now start their cases in criminal court, whereas before their cases started in the juvenile system before being transferred to adult court, the report said.
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HB 834 is the latest in a series of bills since the Juvenile Justice Reinvestment Act — also known as “Raise the Age” — that have made notable changes to the juvenile detention population, and now the effects of such legislation are truly being realized.
As the population continues to grow and change, the system is becoming more and more strained as it tries to accommodate juveniles under conditions for which its centers weren’t originally built.
Timeline of Raise the Age legislation
It all began with Raise the Age, which passed in 2017 but didn’t take effect until 2019. Up until that point, any juvenile over the age of 15 was considered an adult. Under Raise the Age, 16- and 17-year-olds are no longer considered adults, and are placed in the juvenile system rather than automatically being placed in adult jails and the adult system.
NC Rep. Marcia Morey, D-Durham, said one reason for it was to give those older juveniles a better shot at rehabilitation, since the adult system is more punitive.
“I came to the General Assembly in 2017 and that’s when we were debating Raise the Age jurisdiction so we would be in sync with other states that 16-17 year olds charged in juvenile court would start the process,” Morey said. “That follows the science of the youth brain, and we do a much better job helping youth in the juvenile system than the adult system.”
William Lassiter, deputy secretary for the North Carolina Division of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, said there’s also a safety component, since kids can end up victimized in adult jails.
Prior to Raise the Age, most 16- and 17-year-old offenders in North Carolina were convicted of misdemeanors rather than violent felonies, according to a 2017 report from the North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law and Justice. Data shows that when their cases are dealt with in the juvenile system, they reoffend at a much lower rate than when they are dealt with in the adult system.
But some juveniles do commit violent felonies. In her 2024 blog, Jacquelyn Greene, a professor of public law and government at UNC-Chapel Hill, wrote that to account for that group, special provisions were included in the bill.
Youth who are charged with committing A through G felonies at 16- or 17-years-old would be transferred to adult court, and transfer was already required of 13, 14, and 15-year-olds who are charged with Class A felonies. Transfer was also allowed for lower-level felony charges for suspects between 13 and 17 years old, Greene said in her 2024 blog.
Even if they aren’t accused of committing a violent felony, there were still some 16- and 17-year-olds who were finding themselves in adult jurisdiction and adult jails. These included legally emancipated youth and those charged as an adult prior to Raise the Age taking effect, among others, Greene said in her 2020 blog.
To fix this oversight, HB 593 was passed in 2020. This reflected a change in federal law and started requiring any youth under 18 to be housed in juvenile detention facilities, even the previously excluded youth, Greene said in her 2020 blog.
Then HB 834 followed on Dec. 1, 2024, to add another layer of changes. This new law mandates that 16- and 17-year-olds charged with Class A-E felonies now start their cases in criminal court, as opposed to starting in juvenile court, Greene said in her 2024 blog.
Morey described these legislative changes of the past few years as a “deliberate tightening of the screws” or the appearance of “tough on crime.”
“We occasionally have horrible crimes and cases get a lot of attention, and then lawmakers rush to pass a bill to address a particular issue, but it applies across the board for kids based on their age,” she said.
These changes were a reaction to the “growing pains” that have occurred since Raise the Age, Lassiter said, but he doesn’t know whether these changes were fully thought through.
“These tweaks that have occurred over the last few years are ways to try to make that bill better and make the policy better,” Lassiter said. “But … some of the ramifications of those kids ending up in juvenile facilities, was it fully understood?”
How legislation affected juvenile detention
Matthew Debnam, communications officer for the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, said Raise the Age prompted the biggest demographic shift in the juvenile detention population when it took effect in December 2019, since it added 16- and 17-year-olds.
While the division had two years to implement the changes brought on by Raise the Age, they had virtually no time at all to adjust to HB 593, Lassiter said.
HB 593 was approved by the governor on July 1, 2020, and took effect on Aug. 1, 2020, allowing for only a “short one-month window for implementation,” Greene said in her 2020 blog.
“Because it passed very quickly as a technical correction to a budget bill in 2019, there wasn’t a lot of planning that was put into what (this would) mean for the system,” Lassiter said. “What is needed in the system to address this new population that would be coming into the system?”
When HB 834 took effect a few years later, it essentially changed the starting point for Class A-E felony cases for 16- and 17-year-olds from juvenile court to adult court. Under the old law, even if the felonies were ultimately transferred to criminal court, they counted as juvenile cases for some time. Now, they only count as criminal cases, Greene said.
The biggest difference between adult court youth and juvenile court youth is their length of stay in juvenile detention, Lassiter said.
On average, juvenile court youth stayed 25 days, compared to youth starting in criminal court who stayed 47 days and youth who were transferred to adult court who stayed 276 days in 2025, the report said. This is because the juvenile system works much faster than the adult system, Lassiter said.
“Kids go to court much quicker,” Lassiter said. “It’s a hallmark of the juvenile justice system to make sure that kids move through the system faster, because kids don’t understand consequences unless they’re very immediate.”
The process of transferring a juvenile to criminal court takes a while because of the additional processes involved, including providing notice, holding a hearing and finding probable cause to transfer. Except for Class A felonies, the court also considers the juvenile’s age, maturity, prior record and more, Debnam said.
Once cases arrive in the adult system, they don’t move as fast as they do in the juvenile system because the adult system is bigger and handles more cases, Morey said. Kids may have to wait months before their cases go to trial, and potentially having to testify against someone or trying to reach a plea bargain can take some time, Lassiter said.
The result? More cases are backlogged in the adult system because more cases are starting there, but the kids are still staying in juvenile detention. As a result, adult court youth surged in the juvenile detention population from 2024 to 2025, as seen in the report.
Safety concerns for juvenile detention
One potential concern with this increased adult court population is safety, Lassiter said.
“Because they’re facing adult charges, they’re also facing lengthy prison terms after they leave our juvenile facilities,” Lassiter said. “And so it’s not the typical kid that we work with in juvenile justice.”
Most of the kids in juvenile justice wind up at a youth development center after being held in detention for roughly 14-15 months, compared to a kid facing adult charges who could face 10-20 years in prison, Lassiter said.
“That’s a very significant change in the type of population that we’re working with,” he said.
Morey echoed Lassiter’s concern for safety and said the funding and staffing issues they’ve faced at juvenile detention centers hasn’t helped either. The division saw no change in its overall staff vacancy rate of 23% from 2024 to 2025, the report said.
“As long as we have that crisis in funding, there are safety concerns,” Morey said. “To put a 13- or 12-year-old in with a 17-year-old, there does need to be more supervision and possibly segregation of ages.”
The division is trying to figure out how to separate the adult court population from the juvenile court population, but it hasn’t been easy. One of the division’s priorities is to keep juveniles close to home, making it a factor when it comes to detention placements. Designated facilities for adult court youth could make it harder for the division to prioritize placing juveniles close to home. Even designated wings of facilities could be tricky since adult court youth now make up a majority of the population, Lassiter said.
This is the “calculus” the division is trying to solve, Lassiter said, and it’s creating strain on the system as the division increasingly has to accommodate a population that needs to stay in detention longer, even while they’re facing a lack of resources.
Despite opening three new detention centers in the past few years, the division is still facing a shortage of beds. Secure custody was short 12 detention beds on average a day by the end of 2025, and this number was even higher during population surges, the report said.
“How juvenile detention centers were originally set up were for kids that were going to be short-term stays while the court was trying to figure out what is the best thing to do with this young person moving forward,” Lassiter said. “Juvenile detention centers weren’t really built or intended for the purpose of holding people long-term as we’re doing now.”
The support the system needs
Lassiter said the “ultimate solution” to stopping crime and youth from entering the justice system in the first place is by starting in the community with community-based programming. But that can only happen with the proper staff and resources.
“If we can intervene early and do early prevention with these young people to keep them out of the system in the future, that makes our community safer. It saves tax dollars, money,” Lassiter said. “That’s what we’re asking for, is an investment in the staff that work with these young people.”
Though the overall staff vacancy rate has stayed the same over the past year, the division was able to start a new streamlined hiring model that is helping them hire people faster. Previously, hiring was the responsibility of the directors at each facility, but it became too much for them to handle on their own because of how short-staffed they already were. Now, the division has HR leading the hiring process by interviewing candidates all day three days a week, averaging about seven to eight interviews per day, Lassiter said.
As a result, the division has reduced staff hiring time by 56%, going from 216 days to 95 days, the report said.
“Our goal is to even bring that number farther down as we get through the process, because a lot of our applicants, they can’t wait three months to get a job,” Lassiter said. “That’s a long time to wait on a paycheck, because it is another month after you get hired before you actually get paid.”
There still hasn’t been any progress in updating the state’s step-pay plan for juvenile justice staff, but the division has requested a 15% pay raise for staff in the governor’s budget and is currently working on a $5,000 retention bonus, which they hope will tide them over until the General Assembly does agree on a new budget, Lassiter said.
With the consistent shortage of beds, the division is also considering reopening the Mecklenburg County detention center, which was previously the largest in the state. But again, Lassiter said, funding remains the biggest hurdle to overcome.
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