The Forgotten Middle

By Dr. Clover A. Perez

America, the land of the free, has long wrestled with the paradox of mass incarceration. Within the labyrinthine corridors of the U.S. criminal justice system, the faces of those confined are as diverse as they are numerous. Yet among them is a population too often overlooked: emerging adults—young people who have crossed the legal threshold into adulthood while still navigating one of the most consequential developmental periods of their lives.

At eighteen, the law may pronounce a person an adult, but human development does not adhere to a statutory calendar. Emerging adults, generally spanning the years between 18 and 25, constitute a distinct developmental stage between adolescence and mature adulthood. During these formative years, individuals continue to undergo significant metamorphoses in cognitive development, emotional regulation, social identity, independence, and decision-making. Research shows that behavior- and impulse-control development continues well beyond the eighteenth birthday and into the twenties. The National Institute of Justice has similarly recognized that, in important cognitive respects, emerging adults may resemble adolescents more closely than fully mature adults.

This developmental reality matters in the criminal justice system. Emerging adults are often characterized by heightened impulsivity, susceptibility to external influences, risk-taking, and emotionally charged decision-making. Yet it is also a period distinguished by an extraordinary capacity for maturation, rehabilitation, and transformation. The very characteristics that may contribute to poor judgment during these years are not necessarily permanent traits. They occur during a developmental period in which change is not merely possible but expected.

That distinction is imperative. Too often, the criminal justice system memorializes an emerging adult's conduct as though it represents the immutable character of the person who committed it. A consequential decision made at nineteen can become the defining narrative of an individual who subsequently lives to be forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years old. The offense remains frozen in time, while the person responsible continues to evolve.

For countless young people, the consequences imposed during this turbulent juncture extend far beyond emerging adulthood. An analysis of nearly 30,000 individuals sentenced to life without parole across 20 states between 1995 and 2017 found that two in five, 11,613 people, were younger than 26 when sentenced. The most common age at conviction among those receiving life without parole was 23. More recent research examining life and long-term imprisonment has continued to illuminate the substantial number of people serving extreme sentences for offenses committed during adolescence and emerging adulthood.

These numbers represent far more than statistical abstractions. They represent men and women who entered prison during adolescence or emerging adulthood and then moved into mature adulthood within correctional institutions. Some entered at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one. They did not merely serve time while adults; they became adults while serving time. That distinction warrants greater contemplation.

Emerging adulthood ordinarily unfolds through a succession of experiences that help cultivate maturity: pursuing an education, entering the workforce, developing intimate relationships, becoming financially independent, establishing a household, raising children, making mistakes, accepting consequences, and learning from them. These experiences contribute to the gradual construction of adult identity. For the emerging adult who enters prison, however, that developmental trajectory shifts profoundly. The transition into adulthood occurs within an environment defined by confinement, institutional regulation, restricted autonomy, separation from family, and limited opportunities to exercise the ordinary responsibilities through which adulthood is conventionally cultivated.

People mature within confinement. They acquire education, develop vocational proficiencies, confront trauma, assume responsibility, strengthen familial relationships, mentor others, discover faith, create art, write, teach, and, in some instances, spend years reckoning with the harm that brought them into the criminal justice system. None of these accomplishments extinguishes the gravity of an offense or the suffering victims and their families endure. But the gravity of an offense should not require us to pretend that human beings are incapable of changing.

Research concerning desistance, the process through which individuals reduce and ultimately cease involvement in criminal behavior, further complicates the notion that bad conduct committed during emerging adulthood can reliably predict whom someone will remain decades later. Criminal behavior generally declines with age, and the transition through emerging adulthood itself is associated with significant changes in behavior, relationships, responsibilities, and identity. The person who enters prison at nineteen, therefore, should not automatically be presumed to possess precisely the same judgment, temperament, motivations, or vulnerabilities at fifty-five.

This is where emerging adults become, in many respects, the forgotten middle of the criminal justice system.

Much like the middle child within a family, they can become obscured between two more readily recognized populations. Juveniles have increasingly become the beneficiaries of a jurisprudence that acknowledges developmental immaturity, diminished culpability, and an enhanced capacity for change. Fully mature adults, conversely, are situated unequivocally within the conventional adult criminal justice framework. Between these populations is another group: no longer legally children, yet still traversing the developmental passage toward mature adulthood.

The demarcation at eighteen is legally consequential, but development itself does not undergo an instantaneous metamorphosis at midnight on one's eighteenth birthday. A seventeen-year-old does not awaken the following morning suddenly equipped with fully matured judgment, emotional regulation, resistance to external influence, or foresight merely because the law has bestowed upon that individual the designation of “adult.” The legal boundary is indispensable for innumerable societal purposes; nevertheless, its administrative necessity should not be mistaken for a neurological transformation.

This creates an uncomfortable incongruity. Our understanding of human development has become increasingly sophisticated, yet many individuals remain incarcerated under sentences imposed during an era—or within a legal framework—in which emerging adulthood received little meaningful consideration. Some were sentenced before contemporary developmental research became as influential within criminal law as it is today. Others were sentenced after that science emerged but in jurisdictions where the eighteenth birthday continued to function as an almost impenetrable dividing line between diminished youthfulness and complete adult culpability

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The issue, therefore, extends beyond what we now know about the developing brain. It reaches into a deeper inquiry into time, punishment, accountability, and transformation.

What becomes of the nineteen-year-old after thirty-six years of incarceration? What becomes of the twenty-two-year-old after thirty? At what juncture, if any, should the criminal justice system examine not merely the individual who committed the offense, but the individual who emerged through the decades that followed?

These questions do not require us to disregard victims, minimize violence, or absolve individuals of responsibility for the harm they caused. Accountability remains indispensable. But accountability and transformation are not mutually exclusive propositions. A justice system can unequivocally condemn an act while still acknowledging that the person who committed it can become something more than the worst act of his or her life.

And perhaps this is where the conversation surrounding emerging adults must now evolve. The question can no longer be whether developmental science should influence the sentences imposed on young people today. We must also ask what that knowledge means for those sentenced yesterday, individuals who entered prison as emerging adults, matured within its confines, and may have spent decades demonstrating precisely the capacity for transformation that contemporary science says this developmental period possesses.

That question is no longer entirely theoretical. Across the U.S., a gradual but consequential recalibration has begun to emerge as courts and legislatures grapple with the intersection of developmental science, excessive sentencing, rehabilitation, and the passage of time.

The movement has not been uniform. Nor has it produced a single definition of emerging adulthood or a consistent age at which developmental considerations should end. What it has produced, however, is a clearer recognition that the legal demarcation of eighteen does not necessarily resolve the more complicated questions surrounding maturity, culpability, and the capacity for transformation.

Massachusetts offers one compelling illustration. In 2024, its highest court concluded in Commonwealth v. Mattis that sentencing individuals who were 18, 19, or 20 at the time of their offenses to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole violates the Massachusetts Constitution. The court examined contemporary scientific research concerning emerging-adult development and concluded that the characteristics associated with youth do not instantaneously dissipate upon reaching eighteen. The decision did not erase accountability, vacate convictions, or guarantee release. It recognized instead that members of this developmental population must have the opportunity to show that the person who committed the offense is not necessarily the person who will remain forever.

Other jurisdictions have begun confronting similar questions through varying mechanisms. Michigan and Washington courts have extended certain constitutional protections involving mandatory life-without-parole sentences to people who committed offenses during emerging adulthood. California provides earlier parole consideration for many individuals whose controlling offenses occurred before age 26, although important exclusions remain. Rhode Island provides earlier parole eligibility for certain individuals who committed offenses before age 22. These reforms differ considerably in eligibility, exclusions, procedural protections, and the amount of incarceration required before review. Their collective significance, however, resides in the proposition underlying them: youthfulness does not necessarily terminate at eighteen for every purpose relevant to punishment.

Perhaps the most salient example is in the District of Columbia. Its sentence-reconsideration framework permits individuals whose offenses occurred before their 25th birthday to petition for reconsideration after serving 15 years of imprisonment. The law evolved from an earlier provision applicable only to offenses committed before age eighteen and was subsequently expanded to encompass individuals who committed offenses before age 25. In doing so, the district moved beyond the traditional juvenile-adult dichotomy and created a mechanism that recognizes emerging adults within retrospective sentence review.

These developments form part of a broader movement commonly described as “second look” sentencing. As of 2025, twenty-five states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government had enacted some form of judicial sentence-review policy, although their scope and accessibility vary substantially. Some mechanisms are restricted to populations or offenses; others depend upon prosecutorial initiation, age at the time of the offense, or a prescribed period of incarceration. The fundamental premise of second-look law is nevertheless significant: a sentence imposed decades earlier need not invariably remain insulated from subsequent judicial scrutiny.

That premise becomes particularly compelling when applied to emerging adults.

A sentence imposed on a nineteen-year-old necessarily contains an element that no sentencing court, no matter how diligent, can definitively ascertain: who that nineteen-year-old will become. A judge can examine the offense, criminal history, aggravating and mitigating circumstances, victim impact, family history, psychological evaluations, and the information available at sentencing. The judge cannot examine twenty or thirty years of a life that has not yet occurred. The passage of time supplies evidence that prediction cannot.

It reveals whether the impulsivity of youth persisted or subsided. It reveals whether an individual continued to engage in violence or instead developed mechanisms of restraint. It reveals educational attainment, vocational development, institutional conduct, mentorship, accountability, spiritual development, psychological maturation, and the arduous process of confronting the consequences of one's actions. It may reveal profound transformation. It may also reveal its absence. Either way, determination is more informed after decades of observable conduct than it could have been at the inception of the sentence. This is precisely why sentence reconsideration should not be misconstrued as sentence forgiveness.

A judicial review does not require a predetermined outcome.

For emerging adults serving protracted sentences, I believe second-look review should become a more deliberate component of our system of justice. Individuals who committed offenses before age 25 and who have subsequently served a substantial portion of their sentences should, under carefully delineated circumstances, have an opportunity to return before a court for an individualized examination of maturation, rehabilitation, accountability, and present-day risk. But reconsideration should entail more than simply returning an individual to the same architecture that produced the original sentence.

If emerging adulthood is sufficiently distinctive to warrant an expanding body of scientific research, specialized interventions, judicial decisions, and legislative reforms, then it may also warrant specialized judicial expertise.

I envision a judicial framework dedicated to reconsidering sentences imposed for offenses committed during emerging adulthood. Such proceedings could be presided over by judges specially trained in developmental neuroscience, trauma, adolescent and emerging-adult psychology, desistance, rehabilitation, and the distinctive consequences of spending one's formative adult years within a correctional institution. The objective would not be to relitigate guilt or innocence, nor to supplant the original court's judgment with contemporary sentiment. It would answer a question the original sentencing judge was structurally incapable of answering: What became of this individual after the sentence was imposed?

There is also merit in considering whether such review should occur before a judge other than the original sentencing judge. A new judicial officer would encounter the individual without having presided over the emotionally charged circumstances of the original trial or sentencing and could examine the record through the discrete lens of retrospective review. Such a structure would not repudiate the original sentence. Rather, it would acknowledge that initial sentencing and sentence reconsideration constitute fundamentally different judicial inquiries. One determines an appropriate consequence considering the offense; the other examines whether, after substantial punishment and demonstrable maturation, that consequence still serves its intended purposes.

Any such framework would require rigor. Eligibility for review should never be synonymous with entitlement to release. The court should examine the totality of the individual: institutional conduct; educational and vocational accomplishments; participation in rehabilitative programming; evidence of accountability and remorse where appropriate; psychological and emotional maturation; disciplinary history; relationships with family and community; reentry preparedness; the circumstances surrounding the original offense; the individual's developmental condition when it occurred; and credible assessments of contemporary public-safety considerations.

Victims and surviving family members must also retain a meaningful place within this process. Developmental science does not diminish their suffering, and reconsideration should never require erasing their voices. A sophisticated system of review must hold two truths simultaneously: the harm caused by an offense can be permanent, and the human being responsible for that harm can nevertheless change.

These propositions are not irreconcilable, nor should new developmental knowledge automatically invalidate every sentence imposed on a person younger than 25. Individualization is the very essence of the proposition. Some petitions would warrant relief; others would not. Some records would reveal extraordinary transformation; others might demonstrate continuing concerns that militate against sentence modification. The legitimacy of the process would reside not in guaranteeing liberation, but in guaranteeing meaningful consideration.

Recent sentencing research underscores why such structure matters. A 2025 study of emerging adults between 18 and 25 found that emerging-adult status does not necessarily produce greater leniency in adult courts and that, without clear laws or sentencing guidelines, consideration of youthfulness can produce inconsistent and disparate outcomes. A specialized framework could therefore do more than create an avenue for reconsideration; it could establish greater coherence around what developmental evidence means, how to evaluate it, and how it should coexist with accountability, proportionality, and public safety.

We have already accepted, in other contexts, that justice sometimes requires a second look. The burgeoning second-look movement rests upon precisely that recognition. The question before us now is whether emerging adults, particularly those who entered prison during a period of profound developmental transition and subsequently spent decades becoming adults behind its walls, should occupy a more deliberate place within that evolving change in laws.

Perhaps the most consequential question is no longer whether people can change. It is whether our institutions are sufficiently capacious to recognize when they have.

The Complexity of Looking Again

Any meaningful discussion of sentence reconsideration must resist the temptation to reduce an extraordinarily complex issue to a singular proposition. Emerging adults may warrant greater consideration within our jurisprudence, but developmental science does not render every offense less consequential, every incarcerated person rehabilitated, or every sentence inappropriate. Nor should the recognition of developmental immaturity become an instrument through which victims are relegated to the margins of the conversation.

Some individuals in this population committed profoundly serious offenses. Lives were lost. Families were irreparably altered. Communities were traumatized. Those realities cannot, and should not, be sanitized in pursuit of reform. The legitimacy of any reconsideration framework depends, in part, upon its willingness to confront the totality of the harm alongside the totality of the human being who caused it.

But the seriousness of the offense and the capacity for transformation are not mutually exclusive considerations. A person may have committed an act of extraordinary gravity at nineteen years old and still undergo an extraordinary transformation by fifty. Acknowledging the latter does not require denying the former. It requires a system sufficiently discerning to examine both. The purpose of retrospective review is therefore not to rewrite history, but to determine what significance decades of subsequent history should carry.

This distinction becomes especially important when considering victims and their families. No judicial mechanism can restore a life taken, erase trauma, or reconstruct what an offense dismantled. Victims must retain meaningful rights to notification, participation, and expression within any reconsideration process. Yet the permanence of harm does not necessarily dictate that punishment must remain impervious to every subsequent manifestation of growth. Justice must preserve memory of the injury while still examining the evolution of the person responsible for it.

Another complexity cannot be extricated from this discussion: race.

The burden of extreme punishment among emerging adults has not been distributed evenly. In an analysis of people sentenced to life without parole between 1995 and 2017, 66 percent of those sentenced at age 25 or younger were Black, compared with 51 percent among those sentenced as older adults. More recent national data on life imprisonment show this disparity persists. Among people serving life without parole in 2024, Black Americans constituted 62 percent of those who had been younger than 25 at the time of their offenses, compared with 50 percent of those who had been 25 or older. These figures alone cannot explain every mechanism responsible for the disparity, but they render race impossible to excise from any serious examination of emerging adult and extreme sentencing.

The disparities extend beyond life sentences. Federal justice resources report particularly pronounced imprisonment disparities among emerging-adult men: in 2022, Black males ages 18 and 19 were imprisoned at 11.3 times the rate of their White counterparts, while Black males ages 20 through 24 were imprisoned at eight times the rate of White males in that age group. These disparities do not mean every sentence resulted from discrimination. It does, however, demand that any examination of punishment during emerging adulthood contend with the broader structural context in which those sentences have been imposed.

Another question remains: Why 25?

The answer should not be that the human brain magically completes its development on a person's twenty-fifth birthday. Neuroscience does not provide such an immaculate dividing line. Development is heterogeneous. Individuals mature at different rates, and neurological, psychological, and social development continues along trajectories that cannot be reduced to a single birthday. Federal justice research has nevertheless recognized that capacities associated with emotional regulation and behavioral control continue developing into approximately the mid-twenties, providing an empirical foundation for treating emerging adults as a distinctive developmental period.

Twenty-five, therefore, should be understood as a reasoned policy boundary rather than a biological expiration date. The law necessarily creates boundaries. The more consequential question is whether those boundaries reflect contemporary knowledge more faithfully than the presumption that complete developmental maturity arrives uniformly at eighteen.

Nor should age operate in isolation. Developmental status should constitute one component of a more comprehensive inquiry encompassing childhood circumstances, trauma, cognitive and emotional maturity at the time of the offense, susceptibility to peer influence, prior exposure to violence, educational history, family environment, the nature of the offense, and the individual's subsequent trajectory. Emerging adults should open the door to consideration; it should not predetermine what lies on the other side.

The same principle should govern how much time must elapse before reconsideration. A meaningful second look cannot occur immediately after sentencing because its very purpose is to examine development across time. The District of Columbia, for example, permits certain individuals whose offenses occurred before age 25 to petition for sentence reduction after serving at least 15 years. Existing second-look laws elsewhere employ different periods and eligibility requirements. No single formula resolves the question for every jurisdiction or every offense.  Perhaps there need not be.

The essential proposition is that a sentence of extraordinary duration should include a mechanism by which demonstrated maturation can eventually become legally cognizable. Fifteen years, twenty years, or another carefully considered interval may be debated legislatively. What should not remain beyond debate is whether a person sentenced as an emerging adult should be rendered permanently invisible to the developmental history that follows.

The need for such scrutiny becomes even more pronounced when considering the scale of extreme sentencing. In 2024, 68,429 people serving life sentences in the United States had been younger than 25 when they committed their offenses. Nearly one-third of that population had no possibility of parole. Behind each number is an individual history: an offense, a victim or victims, a family, a sentence, and years—sometimes decades—of human development after the courtroom doors closed. A reconsideration framework would not treat all those histories the same. That is precisely the point.

Some individuals may demonstrate little evidence that sentence modification is warranted. Others may present compelling records of rehabilitation, accountability, maturity, and preparedness for reintegration. A specialized judge should possess the discretion to distinguish between them. Individualized review is not antithetical to accountability; it may represent accountability in its most exacting form because it requires the court to examine not an abstraction, an age category, or a decades-old snapshot, but the complete trajectory of a human life.

There is an irony embedded within our present approach. We routinely demand that incarcerated individuals transform themselves. We encourage education, rehabilitation, accountability, vocational development, introspection, and personal growth. We tell people to become different from the individuals who entered prison. Yet for some serving the longest sentences, the system provides no meaningful mechanism to let that transformation alter the legal trajectory of their lives.

What, then, are we asking them to become?

That question reaches beyond emerging adults. It penetrates the philosophical architecture of punishment itself. If rehabilitation remains among the professed purposes of incarceration, there must eventually be some mechanism capable of recognizing when rehabilitation has occurred. Otherwise, transformation becomes something the system demands but cannot institutionally acknowledge.

For emerging adults, the contradiction is particularly acute. They entered the criminal justice system during a developmental period marked by both vulnerability and malleability. Many subsequently spent the years when identity ordinarily consolidates in institutions never designed to replicate the developmental experiences of ordinary adulthood. Some faltered. Some survived. Some transformed themselves in ways no sentencing court could have anticipated.

The question is not whether every one of them should come home. The question is whether, after sufficient time has passed, they should have an opportunity to demonstrate why they might.

No Longer the Forgotten Middle

For too long, emerging adults have inhabited an ambiguous space within our criminal justice system: old enough to inherit the full weight of adult punishment, yet young enough to remain in a profound developmental transition. We have drawn a legal boundary at eighteen because society requires boundaries, but we should not let the convenience of that demarcation eclipse what science, experience, and decades of human observation have increasingly highlighted: adulthood is not conferred in its entirety by a birthday. There are men and women in our prisons today who entered those institutions as emerging adults and subsequently became middle-aged or elderly behind their walls. Their offenses cannot be undone, the suffering of victims cannot be extinguished, and the years already lost to victims, families, communities, and those incarcerated cannot be reclaimed. Nevertheless, justice need not require us to become indifferent to everything that occurs after the sentence is handed down.

If we are prepared to acknowledge that emerging adulthood is a period of continuing maturation, heightened malleability, and substantial capacity for change, then that acknowledgment must mean more than academic literature and scientific discourse. It should compel us to examine whether our sentencing structures contain sufficient mechanisms to distinguish between the person who entered prison and the person who exists decades later. This is why a meaningful avenue for reconsideration matters, not as a promise of release, an erasure of accountability, or a repudiation of victims, but as an opportunity to return before a court after a substantial period of incarceration and present the totality of a life that the original sentencing court could never have foreseen. For those whose offenses occurred before age 25, such review could be entrusted to specially trained judges equipped to evaluate emerging-adult development, trauma, rehabilitation, desistance, institutional history, accountability, public safety, and the innumerable complexities that accompany decades of incarceration.

The question before such a court is not whether the original offense still matters, because it always will, nor whether youth excuses the harm caused, because it does not. The more consequential inquiry is whether the sentence imposed upon an emerging adult decades earlier should remain impervious to everything that individual has demonstrated since. Emerging adults have remained obscured between the protections increasingly afforded to juveniles and the assumptions of maturity imposed upon adults, occupying a space in which their developmental circumstances have too frequently been subordinated to the simplicity of chronological age. Bringing this forgotten middle into clearer focus requires neither absolution nor the abandonment of accountability; it requires a willingness to recognize that accountability can coexist with maturation and that punishment need not render subsequent human development irrelevant.

We cannot credibly proclaim our belief in rehabilitation while constructing sentences that make rehabilitation legally inconsequential. We cannot ask incarcerated individuals to educate themselves, confront trauma, accept responsibility, cultivate discipline, mentor others, strengthen familial relationships, and rehabilitate their lives while simultaneously maintaining that none of those accomplishments can ever possess sufficient significance to warrant reconsideration. If rehabilitation remains among the professed objectives of incarceration, our system of justice must possess a mechanism capable of recognizing when rehabilitation has occurred. Some individuals who receive a second look will remain incarcerated; others may demonstrate that decades of punishment, maturation, accountability, and rehabilitation have fundamentally altered circumstances that existed when they first stood before a court. Courts should make these determinations individually, meticulously, and without predetermined outcomes.

Emerging adults should no longer remain the middle children of criminal justice reform, too old to benefit from protections associated with adolescence, yet still traversing a developmental period whose significance should not disappear merely because the law has designated them adults. They deserve neither absolution by virtue of youth nor permanent condemnation because of it. What they deserve is something considerably more exacting: accountability for the harm they caused, meaningful consideration of the individuals they have become, and a judicial structure capable of discerning the difference between the two. A sentence necessarily memorializes a consequential moment in a person's life, but when decades of demonstrable growth stand between that moment and the present, we must at least ask whether that moment should continue to define the entirety of a human life.

Sources

Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development From the Late Teens Through the Twenties: SAGE Journals.

National Institute of Justice. Pathways to Desistance From Crime Among Juveniles and Adults: Applications for Criminal Justice Policy and Practice.

ScienceDirect, Emerging Adulthood and Sentencing in Minnesota, 2016-2029: Focal Concerns, Developmental Science, and Judicial Decision-Making.

The Sentencing Project. The Second Look Movement: An Assessment of the Nation’s Sentence Review Laws.

Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco. Material concerning justice-involved young adults.

Office of Justice Programs. Discussing the Future of Justice-Involved Young Adults.