Make New York Post a Preferred Source A gun is seen on a Bronx street after a 12-year-old girl was shot on Oct. 12, 2026. Kevin C. Downs for NY Post “You go to the park to sit there and play with your friends, not to get shot.”
That was 14-year-old Miral Alamouri talking to The Post about her little sister Maya, age 12, who was caught in the crossfire of a gang shootout in The Bronx last month.
Violent crimes among juveniles in New York are rising fast.
And thanks to the entirely foreseeable overcrowding of the city’s juvenile detention facilities, they’re about to get much worse.
New York’s “Raise the Age” law, phased in during 2019, has coincided with a significant increase in juvenile crime.
Compare the stats from 2020 to those of 2025: The number of juvenile rape victims went from 434 to 571, while felony assaults on kids went from 1,297 to 2,610, and robbery went from 924 to 1,570.
Youth arrests have also risen substantially — for murder from 32 to 42, for instance — despite a drop in the youth population.
But while their violent offenses have continued to go up, our capacity for keeping these offenders off the streets and rehabilitating them has fallen.
Raise the Age forced all the 16- and 17-year-old juvenile offenders who previously would have been held on Rikers Island to be moved into one of the city’s two youth detention centers, run by the Administration for Children’s Services — Crossroads in Brooklyn and Horizons in The Bronx.
That’s led to extreme crowding in both facilities.
Worse, under the law these offenders were entitled to stay at the youth centers until they were tried.
That left 20-year-olds living in juvenile dormitories alongside kids as young as 12.
And not first-time shoplifters, but violent offenders.
ACS is required to release a daily update of the number of kids in their facilities, as well as their capacity.
Kevin O’Connor, a retired NYPD assistant commissioner for youth strategies, has taken screenshots of those updates — and has seen the deception happen in real time.
“They’ve been lying about statistics every single day,” he said of ACS.
In April 2023, for instance, ACS showed a combined capacity of 212 for the two facilities, and put the number of residents at 218.
The following month, the agency changed the capacity to 224 — without any explanation — and reported 235 total residents.
That December, the capacity grew to 243 — again with no explanation and no structural changes to the facilities; one month later, in January 2024, the capacity went to 267.
No — ACS had quietly obtained a waiver from Albany loosening a legal requirement for “dormitory-style housing” at its facilities.
As the population swelled, juvenile detainees were sleeping in classrooms, on floors, in cafeterias and in converted offices.
And in June, the overcrowding exploded into a massive riot at Horizon.
A dozen staffers and residents sustained serious injuries, including “dislocated shoulders, head trauma, neck injuries, back injuries, knee injuries and deep lacerations requiring stitches,” according to one official.
There were 187 youth living in a facility with 125 beds.
Legal Aid has rightly been crying foul for years: These are not appropriate conditions in which to be holding youth — or adults, for that matter.
And it seems an unlikely environment in which to educate and rehabilitate kids.
Then a few weeks ago, on Sept. 29, the number of reported residents plummeted from 259 to 195 overnight.
It’s one thing to quietly expand the capacity, but quite another to release more than 60 juvenile offenders without explanation.
That month ACS, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and the Department of Probation announced a new plan to reduce the number of juvenile-detention residents — via a new “intensive community monitoring program,” allowing some to remain at home while their court cases proceed.
Thanks to Raise the Age, these cases are being adjudicated in family court, shielded from public and media scrutiny.
And while the ACS commissioner has almost total discretion about when and how to release these violent offenders, she now has few choices.
In July, the state denied the waiver that had allowed the agency to keep operating over capacity.
Meanwhile legislators like Althea Stevens, who chairs the City Council’s youth committee, last month called for the release at least 150 more of these juvenile offenders back into their communities.
“When we were supporting Raise the Age,” explained Councilwoman Pierina Sanchez, “we had a vision for rehabilitation . . . but that’s not what we’re experiencing today.”
No kidding. Maybe it’s time to try something else.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
