New press analysis reports juveniles sentenced as adults in Florida get longer sentences than adults

The Miami Herald has this notable and lengthy new article about juvenile sentencing headlined “‘Very disturbing’: Florida teens get longer prison sentences than adults.”  Here are some of the details:

Florida is one of 13 states that give prosecutors unfettered power to try children as adults without getting sign-off from a judge.  And when judges determine the penalties for those kids, they give them higher sentences on average for felony crimes than older, adult offenders, according to a Miami Herald investigation….

Florida judges have the option to give teenage offenders “juvenile sanctions,” which send them to a juvenile facility rather than prison, or classify them as “youthful offenders,” resulting in either probation or being confined at a camp with other convicted young adults for up to six years…. Only one in 10 of the more than 20,000 children tried as adults in Florida were given juvenile sanctions and less than 5% received a “youthful offender” designation, the Herald found in an analysis of the last 15 years of state court system sentencing data from 2008 to 2022….

Children tried as adults were sentenced to a little more than three years in prison on average for third-degree felonies — around 50% longer than the average sentence given to adults for the same class of offense. The vast majority of all felony charges are third-degree offenses, which are the lowest class of felony crimes and include burglary, some types of assault, drug possession and certain DUI offenses. Children and adults had similar average sentences for more serious offenses that fall under first and second-degree felonies.

Overall, a child tried as an adult was sentenced to a little more than five years for a felony charge while an adult received around three-and-a-half years. These trends held even after the Herald adjusted for the most extreme sentences that could skew the figures.

Though it is hard to assess the Herald analysis, I am not sure these data should be all that shocking if Florida prosecutors generally tend to bring only the most aggravated juvenile offenders into adult courts for adult sentencing.  If only the very worst of juvenile offenders in Florida are sentenced like adults in adult courts, it should not be too surprising that their average sentences are longer than the full array of adult offenders, many of whom, comparatively speaking, may be less serious offenders.  (At the risk of providing a confusing (and imperfect) sports analogy, this would be like noting that the top 50 minor league home run hitters, on average, hit more home runs than all average major league hitters.)