On the recordJune 22, 2021
I am proud to be here today to advance the Justice for Juveniles Act. I thank Chairman Nadler, Leader Hoyer, and my colleague, Congressman Armstrong, for their support and partnership on this effort. The Prison Litigation Reform Act, or PLRA, was passed in 1996 in an effort to decrease so-called frivolous lawsuits brought by prisoners. Chief among the PLRA's mandates was a requirement that before seeking relief for civil rights violations in court, a detained person must exhaust administrative remedies. Whatever the merits of that underlying legislation, we now have broad bipartisan agreement that the language is overbroad in its application to juveniles. Studies have consistently shown that juveniles are both more likely to be abused while in detention and less likely to navigate the administrative remedies that bar them from seeking relief. For those of us who have kids or who have worked with children, it is easy to imagine the difficulty a young person in detention might have navigating complex legal systems necessary to raise a complaint. Young people in the criminal or juvenile justice system are more likely than not to be functionally illiterate, and science has shown that the brain is not fully developed until a person is in their mid- twenties. It is one of the many reasons our justice system makes a distinction between juvenile and adult offenses.…
