Juveniles and Prior Record Level

I am occasionally asked about the adult sentencing consequences of a defendant's juvenile history. The first-order answer is easy: juvenile adjudications never count toward felony prior record level or misdemeanor prior conviction level. This is true of all juvenile adjudications, even those for acts that would be Class A - E felonies if committed by an adult. They can support an aggravating factor under G.S. 15A-1340.16(d)(18a), as discussed here, but they never count for points. There is no exception to this rule allowing one juvenile adjudication to count toward adult prior record level. A closer question comes up when youthful offenders still on juvenile probation or resident in a youth development center commit crimes for which they are prosecuted as adults-a not uncommon scenario in light of the jurisdictional overlap between North Carolina's adult and juvenile worlds. Under G.S. 15A-1340.14(b)(7), a felony defendant [note: there is no analogous provision for misdemeanor defendants] gets one additional prior record point if his or her offense was "committed while the offender was on supervised or unsupervised probation, parole, or post-release supervision, or while the offender was serving a sentence of imprisonment, or while the offender was on escape from a correctional institution." The question is: does confinement in a YDC count as "imprisonment"? Do juvenile "probation" and "post-release supervision" count? As to the first question, we know it does not. In State v. Tucker, 154 N.C. App. 653 (2002), the court of appeals held that a defendant in training school (the precursor to today's [...]