Teenagers are more likely to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit because they are less able to make mature decisions, new research shows.
Experts have called for major changes to the criminal justice system after finding innocent younger people are far more likely admit to offences, even when innocent, than adults.
Those who carried out the study say teenagers should not be allowed to make deals where they face a lesser charge in return for pleading guilty. The study suggests young people are more likely to be enticed by these deals, and take what they see as an advantageous offer even when they have done nothing wrong.
Most criminal convictions in the UK and the USA occur as the result of guilty pleas, rather than trial. This means the majority of convictions are the result of decisions made by people accused of crimes rather than jurors.
The research was carried out in the USA, where a system known as "plea bargaining" is utilised, but the academics say their discovery has implications for countries across the world that allow teenagers accused of crimes to receive a sentence or charge reduction by pleading guilty. Specifically, the researchers recommend restricting reductions that may entice innocent teenagers into pleading guilty and making it easier for teenagers to change pleas after they have been entered.
Other research has found adolescents are less able to perceive risk and resist the influence of peers because of developmental immaturity.
Rebecca Helm, Ph.D., HD '18
Dr Rebecca Helm, from the University of Exeter Law School, who was part of the research team said: "It is important to ensure the people accused of crimes have the capacity and freedom to make sensible decisions about whether to plead guilty. Where systems allow defendants to receive a reduced sentence or charge by pleading guilty they need to ensure that defendants are suitably developed to make such decisions and that they have the necessary levels of understanding, reasoning, and appreciation.
"We hope this research will lead to plea systems becoming fairer and less coercive for adolescents. Any restrictions on guilty pleas for adolescents would have to be introduced in a way that avoids harsher average sentences being imposed on adolescents. However, research increasingly suggests that in the same way as they are too young to vote, too young to drink alcohol, and too young to rent a home, perhaps adolescents are too young to plead guilty."
Valerie Reyna, Lois and Melvin Tukman Professor
Dr Helm and Professor Valerie F. Reyna, Allison A. Franz, and Rachel Z. Novick from Cornell University tested decision making among people of different ages. Participants were 149 adolescents recruited from high schools and middle schools in New York aged from 9 to 17, 200 students from Cornell University aged between 18 and 22, and 187 adults from across America.
Participants were given the same hypothetical situation in which they were asked to indicate the decisions they would make if accused of a crime. Participants were either asked to imagine they were guilty or not guilty of the crime, and were told the approximate likelihood of conviction at trial and the reductions that could be gained by pleading guilty as opposed to being convicted at trial.
The research found that as people become older, those who are innocent are less likely to plead guilty. Innocent teenagers indicated that they would plead guilty in roughly one-third of cases, while innocent adults indicated that they would plead guilty in just 18 per cent of cases. Importantly, when examining the decisions researchers found that teenagers were significantly less influenced in their decision-making by whether they were guilty or innocent than adults were. Results also suggest that adolescents are making decisions that do not reflect their values and preferences, including those relating to admitting guilt when innocent, due to developmental immaturity.
Although this was an experiment, the academics believe the findings have important implications for the juvenile justice system.
"Too Young to Plead? Risk, Rationality, and Plea Bargaining's Innocence Problem in Adolescents" is published in the journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law.
Valerie Reyna was on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Committee that produced the report, Pain Management and the Opioid Epidemic. Here are links to media coverage of the report.
In a sweeping report Thursday, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine pushed the FDA to bolster a public health approach that already has resulted in one painkiller being pulled from the market. Last week, the maker of opioid painkiller Opana ER withdrew its drug at the FDA’s request following a 2015 outbreak of HIV and hepatitis C in southern Indiana linked to sharing needles to inject the pills.
In a comprehensive report on what must be done to staunch the toll of opiates in the United States, a report released by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine makes clear that steps taken to prevent the creation of future opiate addicts will drive some now dependent on these drugs toward street drugs such as fentanyl and heroin.
To help bolster its campaign against an epidemic of opioid abuse that now kills about 90 people a day, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last year called for help from an independent advisory panel. The resulting report, released today by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, makes some strong prescriptions. Among its assorted recommendations—from supporting state syringe exchange programs to increasing federal funding for neurobiology research—the panel suggests that FDA dramatically expand the types of evidence it requires from companies to show that an opioid is safe and effective, both before and after it gets market approval.
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration screens new opioid drugs it should better anticipate how people might abuse them in the real world, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine warns in a major report issued Thursday on the country’s opioid crisis, which kills 91 people a day—often via overdoses on prescription drugs. The FDA needs to move beyond its traditional focus on clinical studies about drug effectiveness and side effects, and to seek public health data on potential abuse, the Academies advises in its 400-page proposal for targeting the deadly issue.
However, experts say there's no quick fix for the opioid epidemic. According to a new report from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, it will take years of coordinated effort on the part of local, state and federal agencies to halt and reverse the drug crisis.
In March 2016, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to outline the state of the science regarding prescription opioid abuse and misuse, as well as the evolving role that opioids play in pain management. We greatly appreciate all the work done by NASEM over the past year to produce the comprehensive report released today, which includes recommendations for the FDA and others on this important issue.
Stephen Ceci, the Helen L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology in the Department of Human Development, will receive the American Psychological Associations’ G. Stanley Hall award for distinguished contributions to developmental science at APA’s August 2018 meeting in San Francisco.
More than 50 Cornell Cooperative Extension educators and 4-H program leaders, youth service providers from community agencies and Cornell faculty members discussed productive social media use and youth development.
Lindsay Dower ‘17 spent her four years at Cornell working to improve the lives of both those within the College of Human Ecology and in the broader Ithaca community, truly embodying the mission of the college.
Lindsay Dower ‘17 spent her four years at Cornell working to improve the lives of both those within the College of Human Ecology and in the broader Ithaca community, truly embodying the mission of the college.
As a Human Development major and Policy Analysis and Management minor, working towards a career in health policy, she pursued coursework that allowed her to better understand the human condition in the context of healthcare. Lindsay took full advantage of the opportunities within the college to create an undergraduate experience that intertwined courses in behavioral neuroscience with those in healthcare.
Dr. Valerie Reyna and Lindsay Dower '17
She joined Professor Valerie Reyna’s lab for Rational Decision Making during her freshman year after learning about Reyna’s work in an introductory Human Development course. Further, Lindsay served as a Cornell Cooperative Extension Intern during the summer of 2014, bringing evidence-based curricula developed in the lab to middle school-aged campers at 4-H Camp Bristol Hills. Through a series of hands-on activities, she delivered an obesity prevention intervention to the campers, while completing a randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of the curricula.
The following year, she gratefully received a Human Ecology Alumni Association Grant to continue studying how people make decisions about their eating and exercise habits. Lindsay’s research then expanded to include a project on investigating the decision making behind medication adherence in Type I and Type II diabetics. Her passion for the projects in the lab earned Lindsay the role of Undergraduate Team Leader of the Health and Medical Decision Making Team when she was a junior. Lindsay led a group of over ten undergraduates in the lab, serving as a resource to help them engage with the material in meaningful ways.
Outside of the classroom, Lindsay was very involved with Alpha Phi Omega, a national community service fraternity with a chapter on campus. As a member of APO, Lindsay served as chair for the Loaves and Fishes project, during which she and other members volunteered to serve free, hot meals to those who needed them most in downtown Ithaca. Additionally, she played the flute in the Big Red Pep Band during her time at Cornell.
Valerie Reyna was featured in an outreach video about members of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).
The NAM has more than 2,000 members from the United States and 140 nations around the world. Members are elected by their peers in recognition of exceptional professional achievement. Members lend their expertise in service of the NAM's mission to improve health for all by advancing science, accelerating health equity, and providing independent, authoritative, and trusted advice nationally and globally.
Reducing the Risk Plus (RTR+)is an intervention for reducing sexual risk-taking in adolescents by Valerie Reyna and was rated as a best-evidence HIV behavioral intervention by the CDC. Best-evidence interventions are HIV behavioral interventions that have been rigorously evaluated and have been shown to have significant and positive evidence of efficacy (i.e., eliminate or reduce sex- or drug-risk behaviors, reduce the rate of new HIV/STD infections, or increase HIV-protective behaviors). These interventions are considered to be scientifically rigorous and provide the strongest evidence of efficacy. These interventions meet the PRS efficacy criteria for best evidence ILIs/GLIs/CPLs or efficacy criteria for best evidence CLIs.
Dr. Valerie Reyna is a member of National Academies' Committee on Pain Management and Regulatory Strategies To Address Prescription Opioid Abuse.
Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA’s development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.
Click to download a copy of the report.
This is an important report. Both untreated pain and the epidemic of opioid use are serious problems requiring urgent solutions. Somehow the balance must be found to both manage the increasing problem of pain in the aging US population, while regulating more effectively the diversion of prescription opioids into the broader population. This report represents the best thinking about how the balance might be made more effectively, while acknowledging the social determinants of opioid diversion and use in depressed communities.
Elaine Wethington
- Professor Elaine Wethington, Professor, Department of Human Development, Department of Sociology, and Gerontology in Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine
Daniel Casasanto, a new member of the HD faculty, heads an NSF investigation of brain areas activated by hand movements when communicating through ASL.
In a new study led by Anthony Ong, people who experienced the widest range of positive emotions had the lowest levels of inflammation throughout their bodies.
Marianella Casasola is working with Head Start Centers and day schools in New York City to promote development of spatial skills and language acquisition in preschoolers.
Junior and senior high school students from Ithaca Youth Bureau’s College Discovery Program visited the Department of Human Development to learn about college, research, and concussions from members of Dr. Valerie Reyna'sLaboratory for Rational Decision Making (LRDM).
gelatin brain used for concussion simulation
The middle schoolers attended a concussion and the brain workshop on July 17th at the LRDM lab in Martha Van Rensselaer Hall led by David Garavito (JD/PhD) and Joseph DeTello '18. The group participated in a research project on concussions and decision-making and then took part in an interactive program about concussions. Students shook eggs to demonstrate how you don’t need to crack a shell (their skulls) to damage a yoke (their brains). Then they compressed and stretched gelatin brains to see how diffuse damage to neural fibers (axons) in the brain can occur after the impact of a concussion.
Allison Franz '18 and middle schoolers from Ithaca Youth Bureau
Allison Franz '18 got the group moving with a game of “blob tag". In this game, a group of students form a “blob” and try to tag other students without letting go of each others’ hands. The tagged students then became part of the blob. As the blob grew and people pulled in different directions, the blob would break apart and lose the tagged players. This is similar to what occurs when there is a blow to the skull and the skull comes to a fast stop - the brain moves in different directions and the neural fibers break resulting in diffuse damage to the neuronal axons.
The high school students attended the second brain and concussion workshop in the LRDM lab on August 16th. They participated in the concussion and decision-making project followed by a hands-on demonstration of concussion risks even when wearing helmets. The students loved creating their own "helmets” to protect eggs which were dropped from a great height. They learned that not only did they need to protect the egg from hitting the ground, they also needed to slow the momentum of the egg. This is a very important lesson to learn, as there is often a false sense of security when wearing a helmet in sports like football. Although the skull may be protected by a helmet, an abrupt momentum shift causes the brain to keep moving, resulting in the brain hitting the skull and a concussion.
James Jones-Rounds, HEP lab, and high school students from the Ithaca Youth Bureau
The group also visited the HD EEG and Psychophysiology (HEP) Laboratory. James Jones-Rounds, HEP manager, the lab equipment used for gathering data about electrical activity of the brain, electrical characteristics of the skin, and measurement of eye activity. Many of the students volunteered to be in the demonstration - one student even tried on the mobile EEG headset and managed to move a box on a computer screen using her mind!
We gratefully acknowledge Engaged Cornell for funding the Engaged Risky Decision Making project which supports our research and outreach with adolescents on the risks of sports-related concussions.
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Stephen Ceci
In a new paper, 
Lindsay Dower ‘17 spent her four years at Cornell working to improve the lives of both those within the College of Human Ecology and in the broader Ithaca community, truly embodying the mission of the college.
Valerie Reyna - member of the National Academy of Medicine
In a new study led by 
arianella Casasola
New research by 
Students in
Daniel Rosenfeld '18 and his adviser 
