In order to have a closer look on the situation it will be appropriate to understand the questions brought up by the issue whether kids should go to adult prisons or not. Should a juvenile guilty of rape and murder go to adult prison? Many people would give a positive answer. However, should a 13-year-old boy be responsible for his actions after committing serious crime? Well, here the opinions split. It is suggested that at such age, the perception of the world is not formed yet and a person is unable to make right decisions, but is not it enough that at such an early age a person is already able to commit serious crimes? Through the 1970s and early 1980s, responding to pressure from a crime-weary public, legislatures began pushing for punishment rather than treatment, especially of youngsters who looked like “hard-core” juvenile career criminals. They required juvenile courts to impose determinate or mandatory minimum sentences based on the severity of the crime rather than the needs of the offender. Some juvenile courts adopted the more punitive approach without any prodding from a legislature.
Juveniles sentenced to confinement, meanwhile, all too often wound up in training schools or detention centers that mocked the historic commitment to therapy, education, and rehabilitation. Inquiries and lawsuits during the 1970s and 1980s found juvenile inmates regularly subjected to systematic humiliation, solitary confinement in squalid cells, beatings, and homosexual assaults. All this occurred in the face of evidence that approaches that are more constructive could work. In the early 1970s, the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, led by Jerome Miller, closed most of its training schools, reserving only a few institutions for the worst offenders. The rest went to residential community-based programs or home to their families while the state contracted with private agencies for appropriate social services. An evaluation 15 years after the training school closings found that half of 875 youngsters released from DYS programs were rearrested within three years; during that time, 24 percent wound up recommitted to DYS or incarcerated in adult prisons.
The Essay on Juvenile Crime Years Children Iman
Should Juveniles be Tried as Adults Violent crimes are committed in the United States everyday. Almost one-half of them are committed by teenagers ages 13 through 17 ("End of Line" 484). After the crimes have been committed and the lives of these children have been radically changed, society often demands that those who commit violent crimes be tried as adults, rather than as adolescents. ...
That compared favorably with other states. In California, for example, 70 percent of youngsters released from reform schools were re-arrested within only one year, and 60 percent were reincarcerated three years after release. To this day, Massachusetts remains the leading example of how reform might help. A 1992 meta-analysis of 443 juvenile delinquency program evaluations lent support to the Miller approach. The author, Mark Lipsey, found that programs reduced the delinquency of their clients by five percent overall, from 50 percent to 45 percent, compared with control groups. However, he found higher effects for programs that emphasized community-based rather than institutional treatments.
Even so, uses of secure training schools and detention centers continued to increase nationwide. The rate of confinement for juveniles rose from 241 per 100,000 to 353 per 100,000 between 1975 and 1987, according to one national study. Another found that while the number of juveniles in the population declined by 11 percent between 1979 and 1989, the number locked up in institutions rose by 30 percent. States also encouraged the shift of more juvenile cases to adult courts by either lowering the age of adult court jurisdiction for crimes or giving judges or prosecutors discretion to order waivers. The trend continued despite research demonstrating that such measures were having less than the desired effect. Adult courts are typically far more lenient with property offenders than are juvenile courts. In addition, in states where judges supervised transfer of juvenile cases to adult courts, they tended to send up many more burglary and larceny cases than robberies, rapes, and murders. The property offenders therefore benefited from the “punishment gap,” getting off with a year or two of lightly supervised probation, the routine in adult court, when the juvenile judge might have ordered them into a youth prison..
The Term Paper on Juvenile Drug Courts Court Treatment Juveniles
JUVENILE DRUG COURTS Drugs and our youth, the numbers are rising. More and more children today are using drugs without their parents knowing. What happens when they get caught It all depends on who caught them. If it is the parents, usually a big punishment. If it is law enforcement they may have to appear in front of drug courts specialized to handle juvenile cases. Sometimes the parents may even ...
