Reforming Juvenile Justice A Developmental Approach (2013) / Chapter Skim
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3 Current Practice in the Juvenile Justice System
3 Current Practice in the Juvenile Justice System
Pages 49-88
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From page 49... ...
The availability and suitability of an intervention often influences the outcome of earlier decisions. As expressed in most state statutes and understood by participants, the goals of the process are to hold youth accountable, to satisfy the demands of due process, and to prevent crime, ideally by providing rehabilitative interventions in the most serious and high-risk cases while keeping costs to a minimum and avoiding the use of expensive interventions for lowrisk youth and youth charged with less serious offenses.
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From page 50... ...
After describing the characteristics of youth (and charges) that can bring them within the jurisdiction of the juvenile court, the chapter provides an overview of juvenile justice administration and summarizes the aggregated decisions made at each stage of the process by police, intake officers, prosecutors, and judges.
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From page 51... ...
the young person charged with committing the act is below the age at which the criminal court traditionally assumes jurisdiction; and (3) the juvenile is charged with an offense that must be adjudicated in the juvenile court (or some other court with jurisdiction over noncriminal but illegal acts of juveniles)
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From page 52... ...
. In most states, youth may be transferred by order of a juvenile court judge who "waives" the juvenile court's jurisdiction and allows the case to be tried in criminal court.
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From page 53... ...
State law gives prosecutors the authority to decide whether to send certain youthful offenders to juvenile court or to criminal court. Also known as "concurrent jurisdiction" because certain cases (those involving serious offenses committed by youth at least age 14, age 15, etc.)
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From page 54... ...
Other states operate juvenile courts within a single, statewide structure of limited jurisdiction courts. Certain processing steps, of course, are common to most juvenile justice systems, regardless of terminology, the configuration of the court, or the allocation of service delivery responsibilities.
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From page 55... ...
Probation departments are generally responsible for screening cases, making detention decisions on some of them, preparing investigative reports on most of them, providing supervision to more than a third of all cases processed by the juvenile court, and delivering aftercare services to many youth released from out-of-home placement. Youth may be assigned to the probation department at the front end as a pretrial alternative to formal adjudication or as an alternative to detention.
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From page 56... ...
. Prior to making a determination to proceed to adjudication, the court may also schedule a waiver or fitness hearing prior to proceeding to or in lieu of an adjudicatory hearing if the prosecutor has filed a motion asking the court to waive juvenile court jurisdiction and transfer the youth to the criminal court.
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From page 57... ...
. The Impact of Due Process Requirements A full and accurate description of juvenile court administration is incomplete without addressing the impact of the due process requirements mandated by various decisions of the Supreme Court in the 1960s and 1970s.
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From page 58... ...
Although the states incorporated due process requirements into their state codes, it is difficult to generalize about the extent of their implementation given the diverse practices of juvenile courts. Little research exists on the contemporary juvenile court more generally or on the philosophies and practices of those who administer and work in it (Bishop, 2006; Tanenhaus, 2012)
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From page 59... ...
in many jurisdictions. Finally, most juvenile courts allow young offenders to waive those rights; others have been noted for their aggressiveness in encouraging waivers (Binder et al., 1997)
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From page 60... ...
. Juvenile courts nationwide report that they handled just 36,600 delinquency cases in 2008 involving 15-year-old juveniles charged with drug offenses (Puzzancheraet, Adams, and Sickmund, 2011)
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From page 61... ...
The first step in using this information for analyzing juvenile crime is to create national estimates of juvenile arrests. The UCR reports do not include data from all jurisdictions in the country, only those jurisdictions able to report data on time and in the format required by the FBI.
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From page 62... ...
In 2010, these older teens were involved in 54 percent of all juvenile arrests. They accounted for 55 percent of arrests under age 18 for the FBI's four Violent Crime Index offenses and 52 percent of juvenile arrests for the four Property Crime Index offenses (arson, burglary, larceny/theft, and motor vehicle theft)
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From page 63... ...
100 62 Curfew and loitering law violations 94,800 53 NOTE: These estimates may vary slightly from those published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) later in 2012, as the BJS estimates typically include additional data not counted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's annual report.
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From page 64... ...
After fluctuating for several years, the violent crime arrest rate dropped below 230 per 100,000 in 2010. With few exceptions, juvenile arrest rates for the most serious property offenses (i.e., those included in the FBI Property Crime Index)
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From page 65... ...
As a result, the composition of delinquency cases processed by police after the youth violence peak of the 1990s and the workload of the juvenile court system at that time were not identical to the caseload mix that existed prior to the mid-1990s. When the number of juvenile arrests for these other
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From page 66... ...
Juvenile Crimes Referred to Courts The several thousand juvenile courts across the United States are not required to report case-processing data for national statistics, but, through the efforts of the National Juvenile Court Data Archive at the National Center for Juvenile Justice, the nation has a source of information that comes very close to being nationally representative. Funded since 1975 by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the National Juvenile Court Data Archive (Archive)
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From page 67... ...
In 2008 (the most recent data available at the time of publication) , the national estimates generated from the National Juvenile Court Data Archive suggested that juvenile courts throughout the United States handled an estimated 1.65 million delinquency cases (see Figure 3-6)
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From page 68... ...
. Larceny/ theft, simple assault, obstruction of justice, and disorderly conduct were the most common delinquency offenses seen by juvenile courts in 2008 (see Table 3-2)
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From page 69... ...
Adjudication in juvenile court was most common for cases involving drug offenses and public order offenses (63 percent) , but this was only slightly higher than the odds of adjudication for cases involving property offenses (61 percent)
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From page 70... ...
Those involving person offenses were most likely to involve detention. In 2008, 17 percent of property offense cases involved detention, compared with 27 percent of person offense cases, 23 percent of public order offense cases, and 18 percent of drug law violation cases.
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From page 71... ...
. National Juvenile Court Data Archive: Juvenile court case records 1985-2008 [machine-readable data files]
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From page 72... ...
Short of transfer to the criminal court system, the most restrictive form of disposition for youth in juvenile court is placement out of the home in some form of residential setting, including foster homes and group homes, residential treatment centers, and juvenile correctional facilities. Between 1985 and 2008, the number of cases in which an adjudicated delinquent was ordered by the court to be placed in a residential facility increased 51 percent, from 104,500 to 157,700 cases (see Figure 3-8)
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From page 73... ...
FIGURE 3-7 Number of cases resulting in out-of-home placement, 2008. NOTE: Detail may not add to totals due to rounding.
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From page 74... ...
. National Juvenile Court Data Archive: Juvenile court case records 1985-2008 [machine-readable data files]
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From page 75... ...
. National Juvenile Court Data Archive: Juvenile court case records 1985 75 2008 [machine-readable data files]
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From page 76... ...
When one considers the number of new placement cases generated rather than changes in the relative rate of placement, the top five offense categories responsible for expanding the number of juveniles involved in out-of-home placement cases were obstruction of justice, simple assault, drug law violations, the Violent Crime Index offenses, and vandalism. Together, the growth in placements for these offenses accounted for an increase of 52,300 cases between 1985 and 2008, nearly equal to the increase in placement overall (see Table 3-5)
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From page 77... ...
In all offense categories, cases involving black youth were more likely to end in out-of-home placement (32 versus 26 percent) , and once again the difference was most striking in drug law violation cases (35 versus 19 percent)
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From page 78... ...
* Delinquency Cases in 2008 Total Cases 1,043,600 563,500 23,500 22,700 Person offenses 226,400 167,100 5,200 4,500 Property offenses 405,900 191,200 9,400 10,200 Drug law violations 131,200 43,500 2,700 2,000 Public order offenses 280,100 161,600 6,200 6,000 Petitioned Cases as Percentage of Total Cases All delinquency cases 53 61 61 58 Person offenses 55 64 61 64 Property offenses 51 57 59 51 Drug law violations 54 70 58 57 Public order offenses 55 59 68 66 Adjudicated Cases as Percentage of Petitioned Cases All delinquency cases 63 57 70 61 Person offenses 61 55 69 63 Property offenses 63 56 69 57 Drug law violations 64 59 70 60 Public order offenses 65 59 72 65 Cases Placed Out-of-Home as Percentage of Adjudicated Cases All delinquency cases 26 32 31 25 Person offenses 29 34 35 31 Property offenses 25 30 32 24 Drug law violations 19 35 24 27 Public order offenses 29 30 31 23 NOTE: Detail may not add to totals due to rounding.
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From page 79... ...
. National Juvenile Court Data Archive: Juvenile court case records 1985-2008 [machine-readable data files]
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From page 80... ...
. The Progressive Era reformers who created the juvenile court believed that it should be the only court with jurisdiction over youth below the age of criminal responsibility (Tanenhaus, 2004)
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From page 81... ...
Juvenile court records follow young adults into criminal court in many states. By allowing criminal court judges to consider a defendant's prior juvenile court record at the time of sentencing, states have altered the terms of the historical agreement that created the juvenile justice system in the first place.
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From page 82... ...
Several states have seen a rise in school-based arrests as a result. For example, in Pennsylvania, the number of school-based arrests nearly tripled from 4,563 in 1999-2000 to 12,918 in 2006-2007; in North Carolina, there were 16,499 delinquency referrals to juvenile court directly from schools in 2008-2009 (Advancement Project, 2010)
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From page 83... ...
Children's Services and the Justice System Many children involved in the child welfare system later come to the attention of the juvenile justice system as adolescents. These youth are known as "crossover youth," a term most commonly applied to those who have experienced maltreatment and engaged in delinquency.7 Crossover youth are of particular interest in understanding the juvenile justice process because youth from the same families and the same neighborhoods are often at higher risk of involvement in both systems, and because the link between child maltreatment and subsequent delinquency is well documented.
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From page 84... ...
In one study, youth with child welfare involvement were much more likely to penetrate further into the juvenile justice system. The researchers followed youth in Arizona's juvenile justice system and found that only 1 percent of all informal diversion cases were dual jurisdiction youth (i.e., involved in both the child welfare and the delinquency systems)
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From page 85... ...
In affluent communities, there may be diversionary programs that are not available to youth in impoverished communities. For youth living in impoverished areas, the juvenile justice process may be more similar to the criminal system, with fewer alternatives.
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From page 86... ...
. Complexity is an unavoidable quality of modern life, and it is not surprising that complexity affects juvenile justice decision making.
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From page 87... ...
What we do know is that juvenile crime has declined since its peak in the 1990s and that the juvenile court is handling a different mix of offenses than in the 1990s -- more youth being processed with misdemeanor assaults, drug offenses, and disorderly conduct, and fewer youth with violent offenses and serious property crimes. Similar to the adult system, the juvenile justice system operates like a funnel with only a fraction of cases referred to juvenile court ending up being formally processed and adjudicated.
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From page 88... ...
Court processes are also shaped by due process requirements although it is difficult to generalize about their implementation and impact. Race appears to play a part in arrests and juvenile court processes.
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