REFORM ROLLBACK

This article is part of an ongoing series about juvenile justice. Read part one here.

The case involved a gun — or, at least, that’s what it said in the police report. No shots were fired. No bullets were found. The gun itself was never located. And the weapon seemed to evolve over time, sometimes appearing in reports as a Glock, in other accounts resembling a starter pistol.

But the mere allegation of pointing the gun was important. It meant that when a girl called the police after an altercation in her Germantown home with her 15-year-old cousin Anwar and his friend Ahmad, the two teenage boys were charged as adults with aggravated assault and other felonies.

Instead of being processed in juvenile court — with a menu of options including diversion and juvenile probation — they faced criminal trials and up to 20 years in state prison.

One morning last August, Ahmad Tyler, 16, sat next to his mother on a worn wooden bench in a Philadelphia courtroom.

Like many teens, Ahmad is torn by competing desires for attention and invisibility. The high school student wore a surgical mask high up over his nose, and a hood over his shoulder-length locs. But he posts videos online of his experiments with rap and music production. His Instagram bio reads: “Trust nobody.”

He was jittery, awaiting the hearing that could determine his future — whether he would be treated as a child or an adult under the law.

He had become embroiled in the legal system at a pivotal, and perilous, moment.

In the last decade, in the wake of abuse scandals at juvenile institutions and research documenting the harms of locking up kids, leaders locally and nationwide have called for reforming and shrinking the juvenile justice system.

And District Attorney Larry Krasner, who campaigned on a promise to “treat kids as kids,” announced a new era for juvenile justice in Philadelphia, outlining sweeping policies with an emphasis on rehabilitation. He celebrated immediate and sharp reductions in the number of kids jailed awaiting trial in the adult system and pledged to end what he said was a “coercive” practice of requiring kids charged as adults to plead guilty in exchange for being transferred to the juvenile system.

But along the way, city and state leaders’ most significant reform proposals have been shelved.

And critics say some of the district attorney’s bold juvenile policies, though nominally still in place, have fallen by the wayside. The number of youth jailed awaiting trial as adults is significantly higher than when Krasner took office, while the negotiating tactic Krasner once derided as coercive is once again routine.

Compared with 10 years ago, Philadelphia does incarcerate significantly fewer young people. And the DA’s office now diverts one in five juvenile cases. “We are no longer incarcerating youth as a first step,” Krasner said in 2019.

And police recently launched an additional diversion program aimed at diverting those low-level cases even earlier, at the point of arrest.

But Philadelphia remains an outlier both in Pennsylvania and among big cities nationwide in its rate of locking up kids. Even as the number of teens in the system declined, the total nights spent in secure detention have increased. And the city regularly sends youth who score as low-risk on state standardized assessments to high-security institutions.

Ahmad landed in that system in October 2023 after, he admits, failing to listen to his mother.

On that particular afternoon, Kenisha Tyler told her son to come straight home after school. She works as an event planner and wanted him to help move chairs, tables, and the light-up marquee letters she had built in her workshop.

He told her he’d be there in an hour.

But first Ahmad and his friend Anwar Magras Jr. stopped by the home of Anwar’s cousin, who had previously dated Ahmad. When they learned she had a boy in her room, they began to bicker with her — and then ran upstairs to investigate, she testified later. But when they opened the door and saw a boy they recognized, all three boys burst out laughing.

That much is basically undisputed.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia police will stop arresting kids for some crimes under new diversion program

But the girl also told police that their conduct was criminal: that the two boys forced their way into the house, brandished a gun, and attempted to pistol-whip her — culminating in a brawl in which they punched her and she hit them with a mop.

Ahmad and Anwar maintained that there was no gun, no home invasion, and no assault — only a visit soured by an argument, which they fled to avoid being struck by the mop handle.

The teen’s mother, reached by phone, declined an interview request.

When police showed up at Anwar’s house afterward to arrest them both, Ahmad tried to keep calm.

“I wasn’t too worried because I knew there wasn’t a gun,” he said. “But they can still lock me up, which they did.”

He was hit with a dozen charges, including five felonies: aggravated assault, burglary, carrying a gun without a license, breaking and entering, and conspiracy.

A magistrate set $100,000 bail. That left Tyler to find $10,000 for the deposit. Until that happened, Ahmad would await trial at Philadelphia’s juvenile detention center.

Ahmad’s trajectory in the justice system was shaped by events that unfolded 30 years ago, at a time when teen violence had skyrocketed and states across the country were looking to crack down.

In 1994, Tom Ridge ran a successful campaign for governor on a pledge to hold violent juveniles accountable in Pennsylvania, too. The next fall — the same month the term “juvenile superpredator” was popularized — now-Gov. Ridge signed a law requiring the cases of teens ages 15 to 17 accused of serious violent felonies involving deadly weapons to be prosecuted in adult criminal court.

Within a few years, the superpredator theory had been proven a myth. Youth crime plummeted nationally, defying predictions — even as the impact of the Ridge-era policies continued, and youth incarceration reached an all-time high by 2000.

The decline in youth crime — along with a relentless series of abuse scandals emerging from juvenile institutions — set the stage for a reform moment nationally.

In Pennsylvania, officials pulled hundreds of kids out of facilities where many were abused, and both city and state leaders organized task forces focused on reducing the use of institutions.

The state task force reached bipartisan consensus on reforms including raising the minimum age in juvenile court from 10 to 13, setting a presumed limit of six months on incarceration, and banning the practice of holding teens in county jails. But many of those proposals faced opposition from prosecutors and judges.

In Philadelphia, City Council concluded the city needed to reduce reliance on institutions, increase oversight, and keep Philly youth closer to home by creating a network of small, local residential facilities. That effort resulted in the creation of the city’s Office of the Youth Ombudsperson. But some problems identified by a 2019 city task force have only intensified: At the time, only one-third of incarcerated Philly youth were in institutions more than 100 miles from home. Now, more than half are.

And some advocacy groups that have pushed hard on the system have felt the system push back.

Most notably, YEAH Philly, a nonprofit that provides job training, legal assistance, food distribution — and even took out pointed bus shelter ads asking, “Who’s watching the juvenile court judges?” — has alleged retaliation in court. A month after the ads went up, in 2023, cofounder James Aye was arrested during a hearing for an 18-year-old YEAH Philly participant and charged with obstructing justice. (A year later, the charges were dropped.)

When Krasner outlined his office’s “treat kids as kids” policies, they set forth concrete and immediate steps to transform the juvenile justice system.

Among other reforms, they instructed prosecutors to oppose detaining children after arrest except in cases involving violence or a gun and to avoid sentences of incarceration for kids 13 and younger, and those accused only of misdemeanors.

Krasner announced that BB gun cases would be filed in juvenile court, rather than adult court, concluding the guns are not deadly weapons.

And he said he would transform how youth charged as adults were treated by moving cases back to juvenile court more quickly and by eliminating the “coercive” plea deals.

“There used to be a situation where the prosecution would say, ‘OK, you can go back to juvenile court — but only if you plead guilty.’ That’s unacceptable,” he said at a City Council hearing in 2020. He concluded: “We cannot promise a return to juvenile court on giving up [the right to a trial].”

But — much like the visions articulated by city and state lawmakers — many of Krasner’s announced reforms have also faded into memory.

In 2019, Krasner said his office had halved the number of cases that languished in criminal court past a preliminary hearing only to be sent back to juvenile court, from about 40 per year to 21. But by 2023, that trend had reverted back to pre-Krasner numbers.

He also touted a reduction in teens jailed awaiting trial in adult court, from 43 to 10. Recently, the number has been closer to 60. (They are now split between the juvenile detention center and a modular building at the city jail complex in Northeast Philadelphia — where Pastor Damone Jones, who mentors teens there, described infestations of vermin and teens locked in solitary confinement.)

And the coercive practice of requiring a guilty plea, often with agreement to incarceration, as a condition of transfer to juvenile court is now routine — occurring in about 70% of cases that are transferred, according to Sarah Morris, whose organization, the Youth Art and Self-empowerment Project, tracks cases through a court-watching initiative.

Krasner acknowledged that is “a fair criticism and an area where we have work to do.”

But, he said, “There are also other players on this field.”

For instance, in 2020, Philadelphia’s juvenile court leadership began refusing BB gun robbery cases, forcing them to at least start out in adult criminal court, Krasner said. A court spokesperson did not respond to questions about the decision.

Krasner also said his office has been responding to a rise in arrests of minors related to gun violence, even as 2024 saw historic declines in both homicides and nonfatal shootings.

But there was also resistance from within the office, several former prosecutors said. One, speaking on condition of anonymity due to concerns about professional retaliation, said some supervisors discouraged young prosecutors from offering the diversion and plea deals outlined in the policies. Instead, “People were told to use [juvenile court] as practice on how to try a case.”

Nicole El, chief of the children and youth justice unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said she has urged the office to stick to its policies.

“A lot of the assistant DAs don’t even know that those policies exist,” El said. “We are asking that, if you publicize policies, that you either follow them or you tell us, ‘You know, things have changed.’”

She said the policy of requiring that prosecutors ask whether a child’s educational needs could be served in placement has not been followed in more than a year.

Other policies were followed intermittently, she said, citing a case in which a prosecutor had argued in favor of incarcerating a 12-year-old accused of stealing a car. In another case, she said, a teen should have been eligible for diversion under Krasner’s policy because he had no record and his alleged offense involved trying to break up a fight — but the prosecutor refused to allow it.

Krasner said his office’s policies have not changed and largely are being followed. He noted that the number of young people sentenced to institutions has declined 60% compared with 2017.

“The seven years of this administration are light-years ahead of what came before us,” he said.

He disputed the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (DHS) standardized assessments that, as of September, rated 84% of Philly youth in state institutions as “low” or “moderate” risk.

“For the most part, people who are getting placements are in a more serious category,” Krasner said. He said the office does not currently have data on charges that sent youth to placement.

A recent case of a teen arrested for robbery with a BB gun appeared to show how the office has shifted. At preliminary hearings in Philadelphia for youth charged as adults, it’s been common practice to allow the prosecutor to simply withdraw charges in order to refile them in juvenile court. But rather than agreeing to such a transfer, given Krasner’s stated position that youth BB gun cases should not carry adult charges, prosecutors would do so only with a plea in place. In exchange for a return to juvenile court, the teen wound up agreeing to two years in a state institution — a longer term than at least one of his adult codefendants.

As of last fall, about 75 Philly teens were serving such lengthy fixed terms in institutions run by Pennsylvania DHS.

Those programs are designed to last only six to nine months. But Robert Listenbee, Krasner’s first assistant district attorney who oversees juvenile prosecutions, said the longer terms are necessary. In his view, Pennsylvania DHS needs to “modernize” its programming to support teens serving longer sentences.

He believes DHS does not want to accommodate long-term youth, because “their preference would be to send those kids to state prison,” he said. “We’re not going to do that.” (A DHS spokesperson said the agency’s record “clearly refute[s]” any such claims. He added that it had adapted by creating a new program for long-term stays and is committed to serving all youth sent to its care.)

In August, Ahmad hunched in his seat outside the courtroom, trying to ease the hem of his jeans down over the bulky electronic monitor strapped around his ankle.

“I feel like a dog,” he said, fiddling with the digital leash.

After nearly five months in juvenile detention, he was home on bail. Then, Ahmad arrived late for court one morning, and a judge ordered him onto the monitor and house arrest.

Now, he was staring down the most consequential court proceeding of his young life — a hearing to determine whether it was in the public interest to send his case back to juvenile court.

The judge assigned to handle those transfer hearings last year, Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott, has voiced skepticism of the defense evidence typically presented in such hearings. In some instances, she declined to transfer cases to juvenile court even when prosecutors argued it was in the public interest to do so.

“It used to be the presumption that in most cases if it’s a first offense, kids were going back to juvenile court,” said Michelle Mason, chief of the public defender’s juvenile special defense unit. “Now, it’s much more difficult.”

When a lawyer cited a teen’s strong family support, academic performance, and positive psychological assessment, McDermott said such assets were a “double-edged sword” — as the teen should have known better than to commit a crime.

But a defendant’s history of victimization was not necessarily mitigating either.

Addressing a teen charged with robbery — whose history included diagnosed mental illness, childhood leukemia, and surviving a violent home invasion — she said it was concerning that he inflicted the same type of trauma he had experienced on another person. She dwelled on the cost of the bone marrow transplant he had been given. “A very significant amount of resources went into saving you,” she told him. “You got saved physically. But … how have you used that gift?” (In the end, McDermott approved a deal for the teen to spend 18 months in a secure juvenile institution.)

McDermott declined to comment on her handling of the cases.

Last year, lawyer and private investigator Noel Hanrahan found herself in McDermott’s courtroom in an unexpected capacity.

Hanrahan was used to advocating for defendants in wrongful conviction cases. Then, her teenage son was shot in the stomach.

Hanrahan listened as lawyers debated the fate of the boy who shot her son, leaving wounds that required multiple surgeries. But her opinion was fixed: “I think every kid deserves a chance to be heard in [juvenile] court. They are children.”

» READ MORE: Philly youth are subjected to illegal lockdowns in detention, city watchdog finds

In her view, giving the teen a chance to be rehabilitated was the best outcome for public safety, while sending him to adult prison would not erase her son’s pain. “We’re all personally related to this system. No one is not touched by what happens in the courts — and we are affecting our future if we don’t give these kids what they need.”

The case was eventually transferred to juvenile court. But Hanrahan kept coming back to court to watch how the other transfer hearings played out.

In some cases, teens accepted as much time in juvenile institutions as they might have in the adult system under the state criminal sentencing matrix.

Other teens were denied transfers, and ended up accepting plea deals involving a year or two in jail, plus seven or eight years on probation — even though Krasner’s probation policy states that probation longer than three years is “not just ineffective. It’s harmful.”

As for Ahmad, the prosecutor was offering a plea deal: In return for sending his case to juvenile court, he would have to plead guilty, serve two years in a secure institution, and complete six months of probation.

Ahmad’s mind was spinning.

“I should take the case to trial and beat it — they have no evidence,” he said. But, he added, “You know how long it takes to go to trial. And if I lose the case, it’s over.”

A few weeks later, the prosecutor came back with a new offer: four to six months of house arrest on the ankle monitor.

McDermott said she was reluctant to approve such a lenient deal. But she acknowledged the problem of the phantom gun.

“I don’t know the truth. And it is not my job at this point to determine the truth,” she said.

She agreed to transfer both his case and Anwar’s to juvenile court.

Kenisha Tyler was torn between relief that her son would avoid further incarceration, and disgust at being forced to concede what she viewed as bogus allegations.

“[The victim] said they kicked the door in, but the video shows them running out the door with their shoes and their jackets off,” she said. “I’ve never seen someone break into a house and then take off their shoes and jacket.”

But Ahmad was resigned. “I’m tired of this. I just want to start my life. I want to be a man. I want to one day get older, have kids, and they have kids. I’m not trying to be in the system. This is not me.”

In September, Ahmad had his first hearing in Family Court. It was his first time leaving the house since his court date in August — and the minute he stepped out the door, his ankle monitor began to loudly protest.

There was a loud beep, then a call through a speaker embedded in the monitor: “‘Mr. Tyler, why are you outside?’” He quickly reassured the invisible probation officer, “I’m on my way to court.”

The time in detention and then on house arrest had reshaped his life.

Before the case, he had been a student at Olney High School. On house arrest, he enrolled in a cyber charter school.

Cyber schools in Pennsylvania perform far worse than other schools. But Tyler feared that, at a regular urban high school, there were too many ways to get into trouble. She had reason to worry about her son’s safety. He’s been mugged and pistol-whipped and lost loved ones to gun violence.

Eventually, Ahmad’s public defender stopped by.

He advised the teen that none of the time he had already spent on house arrest would count toward his sentence. Ahmad tried to maintain his composure, but his eyebrows furrowed in frustration.

Tyler wants her son to see it as a learning experience: “This is why we avoid these types of situations.”

She reminded Ahmad that she had learned the lesson firsthand. Years ago, when she was 24, she had the opportunity to walk away from a fight but didn’t. She spent time in jail and was left with a felony record.

Ahmad has plans to turn his bedroom closet into a small recording studio. “Maybe he can write a song about this,” his mother said.

One bright spot: Ahmad had connected with YEAH Philly. Its staffers attended his hearings, helped him get his learner’s permit, and secured him a job with American Power Electrical Supply Co. wiring streetlight fixtures for the citywide conversion to LED.

He started work at 7:30 a.m. on a recent morning, at a West Philadelphia warehouse with about 10 other teens. Their supervisor, Nathaniel Coston, sighed as he surveyed his crew, some joking around or playing on phones. “It’s been a battle,” he said.

Ahmad, he said, was an exception. “He’s on my A team.”

It was Ahmad’s only opportunity to socialize while on house arrest. Instead, he clamped headphones over his ears and began to methodically attach wires and screw in metal plates. Then, he repeated the process — 72 times over an eight-hour shift.

Aye, the YEAH Philly cofounder, said he tries to remind the young people that they are part of something bigger, contributing to brighter sidewalks and a safer city.

To Ahmad, that was meaningful. “I feel like I’m actually doing something, and not just in the way.”

This article was supported in part by funding from the Stoneleigh Foundation, a philanthropic organization seeking to improve the life outcomes of young people. Inquirer articles are created independently of donor support.