Lawmakers on Beacon Hill have drafted Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown to help tip a bill on youthful offenders toward passage.

Brown headed to the State House Wednesday as the joint judiciary committee considered a proposal to see some crimes committed by 18-year-old adults eventually expunged from their records.

Under consideration by the Joint Committee on the Judiciary are House and Senate versions of “An Act to Promote Public Safety and Better Outcomes for Young Adults,” a pair of bills that would raise the age at which a person’s actions slip from youthful indiscretion toward adult criminal conduct.

“We’re all one decision away from being in a different situation,” Brown said. “As society continues to evolve, the systems that serve it should evolve as well.”

As written, the bill would change the portions of state law that describe the “age of criminal majority” from 18, as it stands now, to 19.

The change comes as lawmakers — and judges — try to grapple with the growing body of research showing the human brain doesn’t stop developing until a person is about 25 years old. A person who commits a crime at age 18 simply does not have the wherewithal to realize the impact their actions might have on the rest of their lives, according to Senate President Karen Spilka.

“Most crimes done by emerging adults, many of them, are in the heat of the moment, a mistake,” Spilka said. “To hold them back for the rest of their lives because of that is just not right.”

According to advocacy group Raise the Age MA, young adults who are kept out of the adult prison system are less likely to become repeat offenders than those who are placed outside of the juvenile justice system and treated like grownups.

“CDC research has shown that similar adolescents had a 34 percent lower recidivism rate when they were in the juvenile versus adult system,” the group says on their campaign page. “Massachusetts policy makers raised the age of juvenile court to keep 17-year-olds out of the adult system in 2013. Since then, juvenile crime has declined by 51%, and has seen faster declines in violent and property crime rates than the national average.”

As with the change in the law in 2013, Spilka said, the current proposal would leave room for judges to use their discretion in sentencing and placement of youthful offenders. Extreme violence or other particularly heinous acts, Spilka said, could still be treated as such.

According to state Rep. Manny Cruz, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, but for the grace of a caring school resource officer that intervened during his wayward youth and prevented him from building a criminal record, he wouldn’t be in a position to help change the law now.

“I might not be sitting here today,” he said.

White the law will be beneficial for all of the commonwealth’s young adults, Cruz said, it is especially important for communities of color.

“You are 7.8 times more likely, if you are Black, to end up incarcerated. Four times more likely if you are Latino. By raising the age, what we will do is ensure that we address the deep disparities that exist with respect to recidivism and the desperate situation that we are still seeing with our young people of color who are experiencing a different criminal justice system,” he said.

The bills were heard by the committee in September of last year, but have not yet reported out.