In a charged debate on the House floor last week, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts forcefully condemned a Republican-backed bill that aims to lower the age at which children in Washington, D.C. can be tried as adults. “This bill seeks to create 14-year-old prisoners in the adult criminal legal system,” Pressley said plainly, standing before her colleagues. “We know this approach doesn’t improve public safety. It only traumatizes our babies.”

It All Goes Back to the Central Park Five

Pressley rooted her opposition in a painful chapter of American history: the wrongful convictions of the five Black and Latino teenagers once known as the Central Park Five. She named each of them — Antron McCray, Yousef Salam, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Kevin Richardson — children at the time who were coerced into confessions and tried as adults. They were later exonerated, but not before their youth had been consumed by prison and stigma. Pressley pointedly reminded Republicans that Donald Trump, then a New York real estate developer, had called for the death penalty for those boys. He has never apologized. “These five Black and brown children were innocent, but Trump wanted them killed,” she said. “And Republicans in Congress are supporting him and his bigotry with this bill.”

Tough on Crime

Pressley drew a line from “tough on crime” rhetoric that disproportionately targets Black and brown communities to militarized responses to protest, and now to efforts to strip children of protections and push them deeper into the prison system. The beneficiaries, she argued, are not communities but the “prison industrial complex,” which profits from incarceration. The stakes, she said, are not abstract. Children sent into adult prisons face violence, sexual assault, and isolation. In D.C., when young people are charged as adults, they are often shipped to far-off federal facilities in South Dakota or Texas, severing them from family and making rehabilitation all but impossible.

When Does Someone Become an Adult

She also leaned on science. Adolescent brains, Pressley noted, are not fully developed until well into a person’s twenties. Their decision-making, impulse control, and susceptibility to influence all differ profoundly from adults. To treat them as fully culpable, she said, is not only cruel but also divorced from what experts in law, psychology, and sociology know to be true.

A Challenge To Protest Our Youth

The Congresswoman also stressed democracy itself. D.C. residents never voted for Donald Trump or the Republicans pushing this law. “What Republicans do in D.C., they want to apply to the entire country,” she warned. Pressley closed with a broader appeal, pointing out that if Republicans were truly concerned with safety and justice, they would fully fund victims’ services, support restorative justice, and invest in violence-prevention programs rather than cutting them. Quoting James Baldwin, she ended: “The children are always ours. Every single one. I challenge you to protect them all.”