Search Results

This chapter presents an overview of patterns of juvenile crime and school violence in the United States and then provides brief narrative histories of the development and impact of zero-tolerance policies in our schools, and the conception and establishment of a rehabilitative juvenile justice system that today has become largely adversarial and punitive. These narrative histories are used to illuminate the loss of focus on individualized justice and accountability to the suppression of youth—especially lower socio-economic, ethnic minority youth.

This chapter focuses on the youth's consumption of film, music, and fashion, examining non-conformist rather than integrative practices. It highlights the existence among the young of multiple notions of Sovietness, some of which — at times unconsciously — challenged official norms and expectations. While nascent Soviet subcultures caused indignation and a mild moral panic, true concern was reserved for juvenile crime.

This chapter reviews current research in relation to three topics: the biopsychosocial differences between juveniles and adults; the risk factors associated with juvenile offending; and the efficacy of interventions designed to reduce juvenile crime. Studying the first two subjects is crucial to figuring out whether the assumptions underlying the retributive, individual prevention, and rehabilitative models are accurate. The third topic is particularly important in assessing the individual prevention and rehabilitative models, as both rely on preventive interventions to succeed.

In this chapter, three particular studies regarding juvenile delinquency and justice are analyzed. The first study, “Research on Social Causes of Juvenile Crime,” is the most current research that looks into social causes of juvenile crime. It was commissioned by the Security Bureau. The second study is entitled “Culturally Specific Causes of Delinquency: Implication for Juvenile Justice in Hong Kong” and it accounts for culturally specific questions. As the Chinese account for more than 90 percent of the population in Hong Kong, this may be perceived as a cause for delinquency. The last study, “ Pathways to Delinquency in Hong Kong,” identifies some of the pathways in which early interventions may be formulated for youth crime prevention.

This chapter examines the issue of juvenile crime in the United States. After laying out the basic facts and trends relevant to youth crime over the last three decades, it considers both the social costs of youth crime and the personal risks and costs borne by the criminals themselves. It then presents three new sets of estimates that shed light on the issue. The first set of regressions uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to explore the correlates of crime at the individual level. The second analysis focuses on census-tract-level homicide data for the city of Chicago over a thirty-year period. These data provide a means of better understanding the influence of social factors and local labor market conditions on crime committed by youths. The final data set is a state-level panel covering fifteen years. The state-level analysis is ideal for examining the effect of the criminal justice system (and, to a lesser extent, economic factors).

This chapter reviews the literature of juvenile recidivism and provides an in depth analysis of recent evidence from Germany. While the empirical literature shows that transferring juveniles to criminal courts typically leads to higher recidivism in the United States, this result might not be generalizable to other legal systems. Based on a unique sample of inmates in Germany and applying both a bivariate probit and a regression discontinuity design, the authors do not find that the application of criminal law increases juvenile recidivism. Rather, the analysis suggests that sentencing adolescents as adults reduces recidivism in Germany.

This chapter examines the importance of evidence-based policies and rehabilitative programs. Research shows that adjudicating juveniles in criminal courts and imposing adult sentences produces counter-rehabilitative and nondeterrent effects, as documented in two recent comprehensive reports promulgated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Justice. Given the clear scientific evidence and the costs to society as well as to offenders of overly punitive responses to juvenile crime, people have the responsibility to persuade the public and policy makers that available evidence-based preventive and rehabilitative programs are effective, worth the cost, and compatible with reasoned and measured punishment. The chapter then suggests evidence-based persuasion techniques in convincing policy makers and the public.

This book proposes a novel kind of justice for kids, one that provides them with opportunities to grow and supports their families and communities while keeping them out of the juvenile justice system. It argues that America's juvenile justice system needs to be reconceptualized around children's needs so as to prevent and reduce juvenile crime and at the same time foster healthy child development grounded in evidence-based, effective interventions and systemic restructuring. Drawing on insights from scholars and experts in the field, the book examines various systems, including daycare, foster care, mental health care and special education, and education. It also explores the implications of race, gender, and sexual orientation for juvenile justice; looks at the police and the process of legal socialization; and describes a number of initiatives that exemplify a localized, evidence-based approach to juvenile justice.

This chapter focuses on the pervasive racial disparities in the existing juvenile justice system. Notwithstanding the growing body of developmental research demonstrating that much of juvenile crime and delinquency is the product of normal adolescent development, contemporary narratives portraying youth of color as dangerous and irredeemable lead police, probation officers, and prosecutors to reject age as an excuse or mitigation for these youth. Aggressive institutional approaches toward adolescent offending, motivated by explicit or implicit racial bias, thus lead to the disproportionate arrest and prosecution of black and Hispanic youth. The chapter considers reform in prosecutorial decision making at the intake stage as a viable strategy to reduce disproportionate minority contact in the juvenile justice system.

This chapter analyzes how the formal label of “Juvenile Offender” came into existence in New York law in 1978. As the first law of its kind in the nation, the passage of New York's Juvenile Offender Law set an early precedent for the routine prosecution of youths as adults. The year 1978 was an election year in New York State, and the issue of juvenile crime and violence became a hotly contested campaign issue, fueled in large part by two murders committed by 15-year-old Willie Bosket. The convergence of these forces—election year politics and juvenile violence—facilitated New York's harsh legislative action. The chapter concludes with an examination of data on indictments in New York City from 1984 to 2004 in discussing demographic trends among youths prosecuted as adults in the city.

This chapter reiterates events that lead to the founding of the Mettray, which was instigated by concerns on increase in juvenile crime by penal reformers, philanthropists, and jurists during mid-nineteenth-century France. Mettray was founded during a period that invited experimentation in corrections, as evidenced by the allure of carceral innovations abroad. With the advent of the Second Empire, the focus of justice policy shifted to emphasize reinforcing mechanisms of repression. Louis Napoléon conceived of punishment as a retributive and intimidating force and relegated rehabilitative corrections to a secondary position. Rather than improving conditions inside prisons and adapting punishments to facilitate rehabilitation, Louis Napoléon shored up the police forces and manipulated the penal codes to assure more prompt, certain, and harsh punishments.

This chapter reviews the existing theory and evidence about how and why government efforts to reduce family- or neighborhood-level poverty might influence aggregate crime rates, and is organized as follows. Section 9.2 presents descriptive patterns for poverty and crime, while Section 9.3 provides a conceptual framework that lays out how additional income might affect crime, focusing on juvenile crime. Section 9.4 reviews the available empirical evidence about the relationship between family or neighborhood poverty and crime, particularly how policies designed to change these social conditions affect crime. The final section discusses what is known about how intervention programs would operate at a large scale as well as the difficulties that would arise from trying to substantially expand the scope of these types of programs. It also discusses what is known about the benefits and costs of these types of interventions compared to alternative crime-control efforts, including mass incarceration and human capital interventions. A commentary is included at the end of the chapter.

This chapter argues that much can be gained by considering teenage childbearing for girls and crime for boys as two variants of antisocial behavior, and contends that the same developmental process which led boys to grow up willing to violate the social norms necessary to commit crime leads girls to violate the social norms in their own domain. The chapter is organized as follows. section 12.4 then takes a brief look at randomized controlled trials that try to manipulate directly aspects of parent–child interactions. A commentary is included at the end of the chapter.

Hooligan violence plagues many countries. Governments employ police to combat the problem, and while the methods differ, a common feature is that vast resources are spent. This chapter reports recent evidence on how different types of policing can mitigate hooliganism. It is argued that discriminative police, such as the use of intelligence units and surveillance cameras, should reduce violence. However, indiscriminate policing, i.e., the use of tear gas or jailing groups of hooligans overnight, can backfire. The reason is that leaders of hooligan organizations may respond by letting the individuals least prone to fight exit and instead focus on smaller but more brutal organizations. I also report evidence from two unique natural experiments where a Swedish police intelligence unit was shut down subsequent to the 9/11 terrorist attack and the 2004 Tsunami catastrophe. It is found that hooligan violence increased significantly during these periods.