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Violent crime is committed disproportionately by young men, but government never has conducted a coherent, aggressive campaign against serious juvenile delinquency. The fragmentation has been evident since the late 1960s, when federal authority was divided between health and justice agencies. A 1974 law created a federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to take charge. The law set progressive standards, but the administration of Ronald Reagan tried to kill the agency in the early 1980s and downgraded it after Congress refused to end funding. The Reagan Justice Department did forge an alliance with the MacArthur Foundation to start a long‐term study of juvenile crime's causes. Meanwhile, a steady increase in arrests of juveniles prompted to require that more teen suspects be tried in adult courts, even when studies showed the tactic ineffective in preventing repeat criminality. Congressional Republicans helped enact a large “juvenile accountability” program designed to provide federal aid to programs that got tough on young lawbreakers. Some measures failed on a broad scale, such as ‘boot camps’ aimed at instilling more discipline in delinquents. Despite many promising crime prevention programs, the Congress under Republicans control starting in 1995 generally refused to fund them. Juvenile crime arrests declined sharply since the mid‐1990s, but there was no solid proof of what caused the change, whether government programs, the improved economy, or a lower number of teens in the population.

This chapter presents selected preliminary findings from an exploratory, qualitative study that began in 2008 utilizing grounded theory, analytical and methodological procedures to investigate Canada's compliance with alternative standards for juvenile justice found within numerous United Nations frameworks. This chapter's authors' research aim was twofold: first, to uncover barriers to compliance and secondly, to identify mechanisms to address these impediments. The analytical focus of the study relied on the concept of ‘rights-based restorative justice’, one that integrates the core principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and those found within the Basic Principles on the Use of Restorative Justice Programmes in Criminal Matters. Data were organized by contextualizing current statutory and local practices of rights-based restorative justice programming across the country within international legal frameworks, by constant comparison of data to data and data to literature, and by presenting thematic findings elicited from eight key informant interviews through salient quotes.

This chapter identifies some of the key policy choices that must be made in reducing injustices found in American juvenile courts. It argues that reducing the hazards of juvenile court processing may be a better approach to protecting minority youth than just trying to reduce the proportion of juvenile court cases with minority defendants. The chapter is organized into two sections. The first section concerns the conceptual equipment necessary to assess the impact of legal policies on minority populations. The second section attempts to apply the apparatus developed in the first section to discuss recent chapters in juvenile justice law reform: changes in transfer policy, the deinstitutionalization of status offenders, and the embrace of diversion programs.

This chapter provides an account of this paradoxical and tragic reformulation of racial oppression and domination in the post-civil rights period. Formal integration reconfigured black youth opportunity and community influence in American juvenile justice, but it failed to institutionalize racially democratic control. Instead, subsequent cultural and institutional changes related to a more general late-twentieth-century retraction of the liberal welfare state drained the progressive utility of integration, reducing black youth and community incorporation to more symbolic forms of inclusion. In contemporary juvenile justice, the “accountability movement” reconfigured the social contractual terms of juvenile justice and the organization of decision-making in juvenile justice in ways that undermined the potential for racially democratic control.

It has been posited that the juvenile justice system was designed around the needs of boys, who traditionally have constituted the majority juvenile court-involved population. As girls have become a larger and better understood minority in this system, however, scholarship has begun to recognize their specific pathways and needs. Chapter 4 focuses on gender and violent offending, emphasizing the most recent empirical evidence on similarities and differences in boys’ and girls’ violent behavior. The chapter addresses the following questions: What proportion of violent crimes do male and female youth commit? Are boys and girls becoming more or less violent? Why do youth behave violently in the first place, and why do girls seem to be less violent than boys? What can protect boys and girls from committing violent behavior? How do race, ethnicity, and gender impact violence and the juvenile justice system’s response to it? What are the potential young adult outcomes of violence among girls? Finally, what can we do about boys’ and girls’ violence, and what do we still need to learn in order to respond to appropriately?

This chapter presents a framework for reconceptualizing due process in juvenile justice with the ultimate aim of striking an optimal balance between fairness, accuracy, and efficiency in handling delinquency cases. The first part recaps the procedural history of the juvenile court. Its primary message is that the Supreme Court's procedural reform of the juvenile justice system was based on the Due Process Clause and general principles of fundamental fairness, which leaves the door open to flexible approaches to juvenile justice procedure. The second part then plumbs developments in the broader constitutional jurisprudence of procedure, particularly in the administrative and civil law arenas, which enthusiastically endorse a flexible view of due process. With the legal groundwork laid for the proposition that juvenile justice procedure can be rethought, the third part summarizes research on “procedural justice,” which suggests that the adversarial model of procedure is not necessarily the most “just” model, whether viewed from a subjective or objective perspective. The chapter closes with a discussion of the implications of this research, and a proposal that due process in juvenile justice be reconceptualized in a way that allows empirical research and a performance-based management system to identify those procedures that best promote fairness, accuracy, and efficiency.

Chapter 4 looks at the discourses and practices of juvenile justice policy in the county. A new and large juvenile facility enjoyed substantial and passionate support in the community, including from the few local leaders suspicious of or hesitant about the overall justice campus proposal. Through discourses of child saving, racialized notions of so-called real criminals inhabiting facilities outside of the city, and a belief in the capacity of the community to create benevolent institutions, local officials at once imagined an exceptional community capable of extraordinary incarceration and relied on racial and class tropes from prior eras to justify increased detention of youth. This chapter looks at the expansion of both institutional and non-institutional capacity for adjudicated youth as reflecting once again the work neoliberal punishment performs in structuring its own reproduction.

This chapter evaluates youth justice policies and practice in Europe from a comparative perspective. It focuses on tendencies in youth justice legislation and on the sentencing practice of prosecutors and judges in youth courts. It also considers the traditional “welfare” and “justice” models of youth justice and how they have become intertwined in modern European practice. It questions the claim that a “new punitiveness” is the prevailing strategy, and draws attention to the practice of many youth justice systems, which seem to be fairly resistant to neoliberal policies. The chapter concludes that youth justice policy, as reflected in legislation and practice in the majority of European countries, has successfully resisted a punitive turn.

This chapter argues that the empirical facts about juvenile offending and intervention programs described in Chapter 2 most directly bolster the individual prevention vision of juvenile justice while providing only a modicum of support for the rehabilitation and retribution visions. It first shows why the rehabilitation model is flawed. It then does the same for the retribution models, focusing primarily on the diminished retribution variant, which has gained considerable support among policy makers. Finally, the chapter presents a positive case for the individual prevention model, from both theoretical and pragmatic perspectives.

This chapter provides a detailed description of what a preventive system of juvenile justice would look like. The chapter also presents case studies that allow comparison between the rehabilitative, individual prevention, and retributive regimes. The individual prevention system would be administrative rather than criminal in nature and would rely on modern risk-assessment and risk-management techniques. In further contrast to the current system, it would not permit transfer to adult courts.

This chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to explore whether the separate juvenile justice system should continue to exist and, if so, in what form. It proposes a reimagination of the legal basis for juvenile courts that facilitates their use as a way of ensuring that juvenile offenders end up on the right track rather than in prison. Four models of juvenile justice are discussed from a historical perspective. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

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 provides an overview of the history of Latin American juvenile justice systems until today. The evolution of Latin American juvenile justice presents two crucial moments: (1) its creation at the beginning of the twentieth century with the importation of the American model of juvenile courts; and (2) its transformation in the past twenty-five years with the incorporation of international human rights law into domestic law. The chapter also assess whether the goal of juvenile justice of removing children and adolescents from criminal law has actually been put into action, and considers the recent wave of juvenile justice reforms in Latin America using the Chilean reform as a case study. The chapter shows that while the Chilean reform has brought more due process protections for deviant youth by reducing the percentage of juveniles in pretrial detention, it has likely substantially increased the absolute and relative levels of juvenile confinement.

While researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and service providers ask increasingly for solutions to the enduring problems of youth violence, key issues have gone unaddressed. For example, questions remain about the disparity in the prevalence of violence for African American adolescents. It is unclear whether risk and protective factors for violent behavior differ for youth of color as compared to White youth, although several theories suggest that African American youth may be socialized differently to the use and outcomes of violence. To the extent that differences in violence and associated variables are understood, researchers and practitioners will be positioned to more fully meet the needs of particularly vulnerable and marginalized groups. The purpose of Chapter 3 is to distill key race differences in violence, as well as the many risk and protective factors found in the literature. Theories that position race in the etiology of violence are reviewed. The chapter examines race and ethnic differences in the prevalence of violence as well as group variation in risk and protective factors for violence.

This book brings together findings from the author's years spent pondering the questions related to black adults' experience and how they have shaped the development of American juvenile justice, and the legacies or lessons today of this racial history. It details the sociohistorical origins and organization of Jim Crow juvenile justice as well as the social movement by generations of black Americans to replace the white supremacist parental state with an idealized racial structure of democratic social control. The anticipated racially democratic juvenile justice system was thought to provide for equal black youth opportunity and black adult representation or authority in the administration of liberal rehabilitative ideals, enlisting the supposed manufactory of citizens in the production of a racially inclusive liberal democracy. Over a century after the birth of Jim Crow juvenile justice, this book offers a detailed account of this peculiar institution and how it collided with black freedom dreams to spawn a long movement on behalf of that entity W. E. B. DuBois called “the immortal child,” in a veiled reference to group fate. This book argues that this racial history of juvenile justice helps fill the research gaps in the historical literature and challenges much of what has been established as general institutional history.

Many opportunities exist for scholars to conduct research in juvenile justice settings including pathway studies of arrest and system entry, characteristics of juveniles, law enforcement-juvenile relations, individual change in incarcerated settings (state and local), system changes and courts, and aftercare or reentry back to the community. Despite the need for these, and other, types of studies in juvenile justice settings, there are many challenges to conducting research in the juvenile justice system. This chapter explores these challenges and suggests a number of insights and solutions to research problems that often arise in juvenile justice settings including how to gain and maintain IRB approval, how to manage a project across multiple agencies, courts, and institutions, and how to maintain relationships with key stakeholders. Furthermore, issues related to planning a research project in juvenile justice settings, including research designs, assessment and measurement, recruitment, and retention, are discussed.

Nationally, African Americans and Hispanic youths are arrested in numbers greatly disproportionate to their representation in the general population. Despite decades of research, there is no clear consensus on why minority youths enter and penetrate the juvenile justice system at such disproportionate rates. Both public and academic discourses have tended to highlight two explanations: (1) minority overrepresentation reflects race and ethnic differences in the incidence, seriousness, and persistence of delinquent involvement (the “differential offending” hypothesis) and (2) overrepresentation is attributable to inequities—intended or unintended—in juvenile justice practice (the “differential treatment” hypothesis). This chapter reviews the research literature bearing on the second of these claims and, more specifically, explores the mechanisms through which race and ethnicity influence juvenile justice system responses.