Blogathon- Young juvenile tried as adults

Should juvenile be tried as adults?
I found this topic really interesting and I want to know what are you opinion about this subject.
I posted also a video so that you can have some more idea and to shape your opinion.


DAVID ANDERSON NOVEMBER 16, 2001


Should young criminals be tried as adults criminals? 
For nearly a century, childhood has been a mitigating condition in the eyes of the criminal law. Now that legislators want to try more children as adults, we need to be careful about throwing the baby out with the jail key.


While America's latest crime wave appears to be subsiding, the legitimate fears it aroused in urban America leave a powerful political legacy. Along with new police strategies and more prisons, legislators continue to call for harsher treatment of juvenile offenders long granted special status because of a historic belief in the diminished culpability of children and adolescents.


Nearly all states now permit the "waiver" of youngsters charged with serious crimes to adult courts; in more than half, legislatures have specifically excluded those charged with certain crimes from juvenile court jurisdiction. In some cases the exclusions apply to children as young as 13. Legislation moving forward in the current Congress would expand adult federal court jurisdiction over offenders as young as 14 and give prosecutors, rather than judges, the power to transfer a juvenile case to adult court.


It formally recognized that childhood should exist in the eyes of the criminal law. Youth, Progressives believed, can partly excuse even violent misbehavior and always permits hope for rehabilitation. Is that historic commitment really obsolete?


The question remains germane even as juvenile crime trend lines turn down, because demographics suggest a possible new crime wave. Scholars like James Alan Fox of Northeastern University have predicted a "baby-boomerang" 20 percent increase in the juvenile population and juvenile crime by 2005. The Justice
Department predicts a doubling of juvenile arrests for violent crime by 2010. The Senate Judiciary Committee report on the new juvenile crime bill relies heavily on such predictions to justify treating more juvenile offenders as adults. Defenders of special treatment find themselves hampered by the history of the juvenile court, whose usefulness has fallen into real question as it has succumbed to an advanced identity crisis.


Today's juvenile courts continue the practice of dealing with cases of child abuse and neglect, along with "status offenses"—truancy, running away from home, unmanageability—as well as juvenile delinquency. A 1994 survey counted 1.9 million juvenile court filings (an increase of 59 percent since 1984); about two-thirds were for juvenile delinquency.


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 more constructive approaches 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. That compared favorably with other states. In California, for example, 70 percent of youngsters released from reform schools were rearrested 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. 


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. And 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 majority of young people who break the law are not feral, pre-social predators. Though juvenile violence increased at a shocking rate during the late 1980s, the more than 2,000 homicides reported each year remain a tiny percentage of all juvenile crime. Of the 1.4 million arrests referred to juvenile courts in 1992, 57 percent involved property offenses as the most serious charge, while 21 percent involved crimes against the person. There is real danger that legislative nets cast to capture the "superpredators" will sweep in thousands of lesser fry as well, at appalling social and financial cost.


Furthermore, whatever goals the move against special treatment might accomplish, greater public safety does not appear to be one of them. A Florida study published in 1996 matched 2,738 juvenile delinquents transferred to adult courts with a control group that remained in the juvenile system. "By every measure of recidivism employed, reoffending was greater among transfers than among the matched controls," the researchers stated.


Beyond programs designed to deal with youngsters after arrest, students of juvenile crime remain fascinated with the idea of intervening in the lives of children and teenagers "at risk" of delinquency in hopes of averting criminal behavior before it starts. Research documents some success. The most famous study was of the Perry Preschool, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which provided two years of enriched schooling and weekly home visits to small children from poor minority families. By the time the kids had turned 27, half as many had been arrested as a control group that did not benefit from the enriched classes.


Mark Moore, a professor of criminal justice policy and management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, offers a more innovative and sophisticated idea. He recognizes the need for the transfer of some juvenile cases to adult courts if they show "unusual maturity, acted alone, or persisted in committing crimes."