Under New York law, children as young as 13 are automatically tried as adults if charged with second-degree murder and certain felony sex crimes. So are 14- and 15-year-olds charged with a long list of other violent offenses, including rape, robbery, assault in the first degree and arson.

That isn’t unusual in the United States, where nearly all states have laws allowing minors under 18, some as young as 10, to be tried as adults in certain circumstances. The country has always allowed these prosecutions in some cases. But in the “tough on crime” era of the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, the practice exploded, with states adopting sweeping laws that made it easier to prosecute those under the age of 18 as adults.

New York was a leader in the incarceration of children. It began prosecuting young adolescents as adults under a draconian law passed in 1978, in the aftermath of the Willie Bosket case. Mr. Bosket was a 15-year-old black boy who fatally shot two men and wounded a third on the subway. He was sentenced to five years in a juvenile facility under the law at time. The city’s tabloids responded with outrage over the sentence. Under pressure and facing re-election, Gov. Hugh Carey, a Democrat who had once supported criminal justice reforms, reversed course, campaigning hard for legislation that would rebrand him as tough on crime. The result was the law, still on the books, mandating the prosecution as adults of children as young as 13 when they’re charged with certain violent crimes.

(Mr. Bosket, now 57, has been incarcerated for all but two years since the age of 9. He will be eligible for parole in 2062, having been convicted of numerous charges including assaulting correction officers. In 2008, when he had been in solitary confinement for two decades, he told The Times, “If somebody came to me with a lethal injection, I’d take it.”)

Thousands of adolescents have been tried as adults in New York. From 2014 to 2018 alone, nearly 1,800 children ages 13 to 15 were charged as adults, according to data compiled by the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. Among the children prosecuted as adults in New York over the years was Korey Wise, one of the teenagers wrongfully convicted in the rape and assault of a woman jogging in Central Park in 1989. Mr. Wise, 16 at the time of his arrest, served about 13 years in prison before he was exonerated.