Since the inception of the juvenile court system at the turn of the 20th century, the criminal legal system’s treatment of youth has swung on a pendulum between rehabilitative aims and harsher, more punitive measures.^[1] In the early 1990s during the height of the “tough-on-crime” response, youth were referred to as super-predators, given harsh sentences, and largely treated as adults.^[2] As the new millennium approached and scientific research on adolescent brain development began gaining traction, the pendulum swung back toward rehabilitation, with a specific focus on treating children as fundamentally different from adults due to their lack of maturity, underdeveloped frontal lobe, and susceptibility to peer pressure.^[3]

The first year of President Trump’s second term reflects an effort to yank the pendulum back to the tough-on-crime days, using D.C. as a testing ground. Despite violent crime hitting a 30-year low in 2025, Trump issued a “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” executive order and called the nation’s capital “a situation of complete and total lawlessness.”^[4] He later championed an associated legislative package aimed at cracking down on crime in D.C.^[5] One of these bills, H.R. 5242, would repeal D.C.’s Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act (IRAA) and Second Look Amendment Act (SLAA), which provide sentence reconsideration for individuals whose offense occurred before their 25th birthday and who have served at least 15 years of their sentence.^[6] Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), one of the congressional sponsors of the senate version of H.R. 5242, called the practice “reckless” and erroneously claimed that “violent criminals are [being] set free early solely based on age.”^[7] In reality, judges consider a variety of specific factors in making these determinations, granting release only if they determine that an individual is not a danger to the community and their release is in the interest of justice.^[8] Rather than a cautionary tale, the success of D.C.’s second look laws should serve as a model for the nation.

The movement for second look legislation was born out of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Graham v. Florida[9] and Miller v. Alabama[10], which held juvenile life without parole sentences unconstitutional, building upon the Court’s earlier acknowledgement in Roper v. Simmons[11] of the “diminished culpability of juveniles.”^[12] Currently, 25 states, D.C., and the federal government have some form of second look legislation authorizing judges to review sentences after a convicted youth has served a significant period of time.^[13] D.C.’s second look legislation is the most expansive among these, as the 2019 SLAA raised the maximum age of a juvenile at the time of offense from 18 to 24, reflecting the scientific understanding that brain development is not complete until around age 25.^[14]

Second look laws are not only backed by data on brain development, but also recidivism rates and government and family expenditures.^[15] In D.C., less than 3% of people released under IRAA or SLAA have been rearrested and convicted of any new crime since returning to the community, reflecting the widespread understanding that recidivism decreases markedly with age.^[16] These laws also decrease overall spending on incarceration; according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the average cost of incarceration was $44,090 per person in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023.^[17] Families of incarcerated people also bear significant costs, spending around $4,000 a year on incarcerated loved ones.^[18] As of March 2025, 368 D.C. residents have returned home through IRAA and SLAA, impacting the lives of countless more loved ones.^[19] Second look laws save governments and families money and allow communities, families, and individuals to heal.

Baseless, inflammatory statements intending to stoke fear and garner support for tougher crime laws such as those made by the president and Republican members of Congress are nothing new. But calls to repeal IRAA and SLAA ignore the overwhelming data that second look laws work, and D.C. is proof. The pendulum (nor the president) need not drag us back as a society when we know what works. We should double down on second look laws instead.

 

 

^[1] The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth, Ch. 9: Justice System (Emily P. Backes and Richard J. Bonnie eds., Nat’l Academies Press, May 16, 2019).

^[2] Tiara Green, Should Youth Be Charged as Adults in the Criminal Justice System?, A.B.A. (Oct. 21, 2025), https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/resources/newsletters/childrens-rights/should-juveniles-be-charged-adults-criminal-justice-system/#:~:text=for%20Just.,tremendous%20negative%20impact%20on%20youth [https://perma.cc/GQX6-7Y7D].

^[3] Id.

^[4] Gabrielle Lazor et al., How Trump exaggerates DC crime in taking over its police department and deploying the National Guard, PBS (Aug. 12, 2025, at 12:41 p.m. EST), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-trump-exaggerates-d-c-crime-in-taking-over-its-police-department-and-deploying-the-national-guard [https://perma.cc/6VEU-XQ35]; Press Release, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia, Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low (Jan. 3, 2025), https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low [https://perma.cc/998T-M3ZW].

^[5] Exec. Order No. 14252, 90 Fed. Reg. 63 (Apr. 3, 2025); Press Release, House Comm. on Oversight and Gov’t Reform, Markup Wrap Up: Oversight Committee Advances Legislation to Codify President Trump’s Efforts to Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful (Sep. 11, 2025), https://oversight.house.gov/release/markup-wrap-up-oversight-committee-advances-legislation-to-codify-president-trumps-efforts-to-make-d-c-safe-and-beautiful/ [https://perma.cc/TC2B-KHGA].

^[6] To repeal the Second Chance Amendment Act of 2022 and the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act of 2016, H.R. 5242, 199th Cong. (2025); The Second Look Amendment Act, Pub. Def. Serv. for D.C., https://www.pdsdc.org/resources/client-resources/second-look-amendment [https://perma.cc/GQT5-CVUP] (last visited Jan. 30, 2026).

^[7] Press Release, Lindsey Graham, Senator (R-S.C.), Graham, Cornyn, Budd and Blackburn Introduce Bill to Eliminate D.C.’s Soft-On-Crime Laws (Sep. 16, 2025), https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=C2376D78-A8DE-4218-9206-1C5A27A80C08 [https://perma.cc/ZHP9-UQMP].

^[8] The Second Look Amendment Act, supra note 6.

[9] 560 U.S. 48 (2010).

[10] 567 U.S. 460 (2012).

[11] 543 U.S. 551 (2005).

^[12] Sara Cohbra & Becky Feldman, The Second Look Movement: An Assessment of the Nation’s Sentence Review Laws, Sent’g Project (Aug. 27, 2025), https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/the-second-look-movement-a-review-of-the-nations-sentence-review-laws/#footnote-ref-15 [https://perma.cc/84TP-XCPQ]; Roper, 543 U.S. at 571.

^[13] Cohbra & Feldman, supra note 12.

^[14] Id.; Mariam Arain et al., Maturation of the adolescent brain, 9 Neuropsychiatry Disease & Treatment 449 (Apr. 3, 2013), https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3621648/ [https://perma.cc/NF4T-RXWL].

^[15] Michael Serota, Taking a Second Look at (In)Justice, U. Chic. L. Rev., https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/taking-second-look-injustice [https://perma.cc/DMX7-AX8F].

^[16] CCE Releases Educational Fact Sheets on Key D.C. Legal Systems and Laws, Ctr. for Ct. Excellence (Nov. 23, 2025) https://www.courtexcellence.org/news-items/2025-fact-sheets [https://perma.cc/282H-PAES]; J.J. Prescott et al., Understanding Violent-Crime Recidivism, 95 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1643, 1675 n.134 (2020), https://ndlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/9.-Prescott-et-al..pdf [https://perma.cc/Z2G7-DLEN].

^[17] Annual Determination of Average Cost of Incarceration Fee (COIF), 89 Fed. Reg. 97072 (Dec. 6, 2024), https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/12/06/2024-28743/annual-determination-of-average-cost-of-incarceration-fee-coif [https://perma.cc/D9WP-TMZP].

^[18] Meg Anderson, The true cost of prisons and jails is higher than many realize, researchers say, NPR (June 3, 2025, at 5:00 A.M. ET), https://www.npr.org/2025/06/03/nx-s1-5413282/true-cost-of-prisons-and-jails-higher-than-many-realize [https://perma.cc/BSR4-H57M].

^[19] D.C.’s Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act and Second Look Amendment Act, Ctr. for Ct. Excellence, https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/659c0df344c9c8325dd821ca/68c093adcb7bd070430a953d_IRAA%20and%20SLAA%20Fact%20Sheet%20-%20CCE%202025.pdf [https://perma.cc/FWG4-AN2B] (last visited Jan. 30, 2026).