The Transferring of America’s Youth

The Transferring of America’s Youth PDF

Author: Sheri Jenkins Keenan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 1793623643

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A separate juvenile justice system was established in the United States in 1899 with a goal of diverting juvenile offenders from the harsh punishments of the adult criminal court, and encouraging rehabilitation based on the individual needs of the offender. This new juvenile court was set up as a civil or chancery court with informal proceedings and discretion left to the juvenile court judge. Furthermore, juvenile court proceedings were closed to the public and juvenile records were to remain confidential. However, as the decades progressed juveniles became increasingly involved in more serious crimes. This generated a growing fear among lawmakers, educators, and the public which resulted in a number of “get tough” policies and strategies. By the 1990s the most popular approach in dealing with violent juvenile crime was for states to make it easier or to require the prosecution of juveniles as adults in criminal court. Research demonstrates that such policies may be counter-productive, increase rather than decrease recidivism, and cause harm to offenders, their families, and the community. This volume provides a comprehensive historical review of knowledge surrounding the transfer of American’s youth from the rehabilitative, individualized treatment of the juvenile justice system to the adult criminal justice system.

Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice

Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice PDF

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2001-06-05

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0309172357

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Even though youth crime rates have fallen since the mid-1990s, public fear and political rhetoric over the issue have heightened. The Columbine shootings and other sensational incidents add to the furor. Often overlooked are the underlying problems of child poverty, social disadvantage, and the pitfalls inherent to adolescent decisionmaking that contribute to youth crime. From a policy standpoint, adolescent offenders are caught in the crossfire between nurturance of youth and punishment of criminals, between rehabilitation and "get tough" pronouncements. In the midst of this emotional debate, the National Research Council's Panel on Juvenile Crime steps forward with an authoritative review of the best available data and analysis. Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents recommendations for addressing the many aspects of America's youth crime problem. This timely release discusses patterns and trends in crimes by children and adolescentsâ€"trends revealed by arrest data, victim reports, and other sources; youth crime within general crime; and race and sex disparities. The book explores desistanceâ€"the probability that delinquency or criminal activities decrease with ageâ€"and evaluates different approaches to predicting future crime rates. Why do young people turn to delinquency? Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents what we know and what we urgently need to find out about contributing factors, ranging from prenatal care, differences in temperament, and family influences to the role of peer relationships, the impact of the school policies toward delinquency, and the broader influences of the neighborhood and community. Equally important, this book examines a range of solutions: Prevention and intervention efforts directed to individuals, peer groups, and families, as well as day care-, school- and community-based initiatives. Intervention within the juvenile justice system. Role of the police. Processing and detention of youth offenders. Transferring youths to the adult judicial system. Residential placement of juveniles. The book includes background on the American juvenile court system, useful comparisons with the juvenile justice systems of other nations, and other important information for assessing this problem.

Justice for Kids

Justice for Kids PDF

Author: Nancy E. Dowd

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1479832952

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Children and youth become involved with the juvenile justice system at a significant rate. While some children move just as quickly out of the system and go on to live productive lives as adults, other children become enmeshed in the system, developing deeper problems and or transferring into the adult criminal justice system. Justice for Kids is a volume of work by leading academics and activists that focuses on ways to intervene at the earliest possible point to rehabilitate and redirect—to keep kids out of the system—rather than to punish and drive kids deeper. Justice for Kids presents a compelling argument for rethinking and restructuring the juvenile justice system as we know it. This unique collection explores the system’s fault lines with respect to all children, and focuses in particular on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation that skew the system. Most importantly, it provides specific program initiatives that offer alternatives to our thinking about prevention and deterrence, with an ultimate focus on keeping kids out of the system altogether.

Reforming Juvenile Justice

Reforming Juvenile Justice PDF

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2013-05-22

Total Pages: 463

ISBN-13: 0309278937

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Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.

Juvenile Justice

Juvenile Justice PDF

Author: Barry Krisberg

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0761925015

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Juvenile justice policies have historically been built on a foundation of myths and misconceptions. Fear of young, drug-addled superpredators, concerns about immigrants and gangs, claims of gender biases, and race hostilities have influenced the public′s views and, consequently, the evolution of juvenile justice. These myths have repeatedly confused the process of rational policy development for the juvenile justice system. Juvenile Justice: Redeeming Our Children debunks myths about juvenile justice in order to achieve an ideal system that would protect vulnerable children and help build safer communities. Author Barry Krisberg assembles broad and up-to-date research, statistical data, and theories on the U.S. juvenile justice system to encourage effective responses to youth crime. This text gives a historical context to the ongoing quest for the juvenile justice ideal and examines how the current system of laws, policies, and practices came into place.Juvenile Justice reviews the best research-based knowledge on what works and what does not work in the current system. The book also examines failed juvenile justice policies and applies high standards of scientific evidence to seek new resolutions. This text helps students embrace the value of redemptive justice and serves as a springboard for the current generation to implement sounder social policies. Juvenile Justice is an ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate students studying juvenile justice in Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Sociology. The book is also an excellent supplemental text for juvenile delinquency courses. About the AuthorBarry Krisberg, PhD has been President of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) since 1983. Dr. Krisberg received both his master′s degree in Criminology and his doctorate in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Hawaii and has held previous faculty positions at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Minnesota. Dr. Krisberg was appointed by the legislature to serve on the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Population Management. He has several books and articles to his credit, is known nationally for his research and expertise on juvenile justice issues, and is called upon as a resource for professionals and the media.

The War on Kids

The War on Kids PDF

Author: Cara H. Drinan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190605553

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In 2003, when Terrence Graham was sixteen, he and three other teens attempted to rob a barbeque restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida. Though they left with no money, and no one was seriously injured, Terrence was sentenced to die in prison for his involvement in that crime. As shocking as Terrence's sentence sounds, it is merely a symptom of contemporary American juvenile justice practices. In the United States, adolescents are routinely transferred out of juvenile court and into adult criminal court without any judicial oversight. Once in adult court, children can be sentenced without regard for their youth. Juveniles are housed in adult correctional facilities, they may be held in solitary confinement, and they experience the highest rates of sexual and physical assault among inmates. Until 2005, children convicted in America's courts were subject to the death penalty; today, they still may be sentenced to die in prison-no matter what efforts they make to rehabilitate themselves. America has waged a war on kids. In The War on Kids, Cara Drinan reveals how the United States went from being a pioneer to an international pariah in its juvenile sentencing practices. Academics and journalists have long recognized the failings of juvenile justice practices in this country and have called for change. Despite the uncertain political climate, there is hope that recent Supreme Court decisions may finally make those calls a reality. The War on Kids seizes upon this moment of judicial and political recognition that children are different in the eyes of the law. Drinan chronicles the shortcomings of juvenile justice by drawing upon social science, legal decisions, and first-hand correspondence with Terrence and others like him-individuals whose adolescent errors have cost them their lives. At the same time, The War on Kids maps out concrete steps that states can take to correct the course of American juvenile justice.

The Changing Borders of Juvenile Justice

The Changing Borders of Juvenile Justice PDF

Author: Jeffrey Fagan

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2000-09

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9780226233802

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Since the 1960s, recurring cycles of political activism over youth crime have motivated efforts to remove adolescents from the juvenile court. Periodic surges of crime—youth violence in the 1970s, the spread of gangs in the 1980s, and more recently, epidemic gun violence and drug-related crime—have spurred laws and policies aimed at narrowing the reach of the juvenile court. Despite declining juvenile crime rates, every state in the country has increased the number of youths tried and punished as adults. Research in this area has not kept pace with these legislative developments. There has never been a detailed, sociolegal analytic book devoted to this topic. In this important collection, researchers discuss policy, substantive procedural and empirical dimensions of waivers, and where the boundaries of the courts lie. Part 1 provides an overview of the origins and development of law and contemporary policy on the jurisdiction of adolescents. Part 2 examines the effects of jurisdictional shifts. Part 3 offers valuable insight into the developmental and psychological aspects of current and future reforms. Contributors: Donna Bishop, Richard Bonnie, M. A. Bortner, Elizabeth Cauffman, Linda Frost Clausel, Robert O. Dawson, Jeffrey Fagan, Barry Feld, Charles Frazier, Thomas Grisso, Darnell Hawkins, James C. Howell, Akiva Liberman, Richard Redding, Simon Singer, Laurence Steinberg, David Tanenhaus, Marjorie Zatz, and Franklin E. Zimring

Boys among Men

Boys among Men PDF

Author: David L. Myers

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2005-06-30

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 031301471X

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Images of youngsters in handcuffs and prison uniforms have become common on the nightly news in the United States. As America's fascination with crime and justice has grown, so has attention to the ways in which youthful offenders are charged, tried, and sentenced. While they may once have been viewed as misguided youth, more and more juveniles are being charged as adults and sentenced to adult prisons. Myers questions whether doing so is an effective deterrent for young offenders, if rehabilitation is out of the question, and if youth and society are better served by sending children away to adult prisons rather than juvenile detention facilities. These questions and others are addressed in this careful analysis of the history and evolution of transfer laws that are increasingly prevalent throughout the United States. The move toward charging juvenile delinquents as adult criminals initially coincided with an increase in violent crimes committed by youthful offenders. However, as such policies have grown and expanded, the methods by which youth are formally treated as adults in the criminal justice system have changed. Here, Myers examines the demographic, legal, criminal, and social characteristics of those youth who are waived to adult courts, assessing the nature, use, and effectiveness of punishment and rehabilitation efforts in modern juvenile and criminal justice systems. He concludes that as long as separate juvenile and adult justice systems are maintained, there will be a desire and perceived need for transferring some youth to adult court. However, he suggests that such transfers should be facilitated on a much more limited basis, while greater resources and funding for prevention and early intervention should be implemented to prevent youth from offending in the first place. This controversial topic receives a thorough accounting in this volume, which will open readers' eyes to the realities of juvenile delinquency and its treatment by the criminal justice system.