Modern Day Juvenile Justice System

Placing a juvenile in a detention center early in the court process increases the risk that youths will be found to be delinquent and damage their prospects for future success. A majority of the youths that are placed in these facilities pose little or no threat to the public and essentially do not need to be there. This portion of the juvenile court process is detrimental to the future and mental aspects of a youth’s life. We desperately need to change the way that we handle the juvenile court system because we are only reinforcing the delinquent behavior that these youths have been exposed to. We need to focus on the rehabilitation and prevention efforts for these youths not the punishment aspect and until then (insert a better ending).

It has been one hundred years since the creation of the juvenile court in the United States. The court and the juvenile justice system has made some positive changes in the lives of millions of young people lives over the course or those years, within the last thirteen years there has been some daunting challenges in the system.

Four current big themes in juvenile justice are as follows: (1) revising the criteria under which juveniles can be waived to criminal court; (2) assessing and serving the mental health needs of juvenile offenders; (3) increasing the use of evidence-based program; and (4) estimating the benefits of improved outcomes that are possible with evidence based programs.

The Juvenile Justice system, since its conception over a century ago, has been one at conflict with itself. Originally conceived as a fatherly entity intervening into the lives of the troubled urban youths, it has since been transformed into a rigid and adversarial arena restrained by the demands of personal liberty and due process. The nature of a juvenile's experience within the juvenile justice system has come almost full circle from being treated as an adult, then as an unaccountable child, now almost as an adult once more.

InThe agencies that comprise of the youth justice system vary from the Police to youth courts. There have been areas to tackle such as the disproportionate number of BAME children together with considering the welfare of a child via the 1933 Children Act. In light of the Ameen Jogee case and other joint enterprise convictions , the trust between the police is only degraded , as they are depicted as an oppositional force for imposing the law amongst the youth population many of whom are also victims of serious crime. The distrust was illustrated in the report by Jenny Jones focusing on young people in London. She proclaimed in order to prevent crime young people must have in the Police force. It is likewise imperative that the Police develop

The juvenile justice system of the 1800’s is much improved in today’s society and it's still undergoing lots of changes in order to develop a better strategy of dealing with juveniles. Moreover, drastic changes made such as young offenders being tried different from adults in all states depending on the crime. These changes can be seen under the English common Law, the colonial America era, and the industrial revolution era. Today’s juvenile systems, changes made during the late 1800s were to protect the right of young offenders from harsh punishment but rehabilitate them back into the society.

The juvenile justice system and criminal justice system also known as the adult justice system is two different systems. The juvenile justice system is children who are under the age of 18 years old. After the age of 18, it is considered to be an adult it will enter through the adult justice system. There ate states that allows youth to stay in the juvenile justice system from age 18 until 21. The main differences between the juvenile justice system and criminal justice system is rehabilitation and parole.

Early in U.S. history, children who broke the law were treated the same as adult criminals. If you are a young person under the age of 18 and you commit a crime, you will have your case heard in the juvenile justice system. The thing is that, it hasn’t always gone that way. The idea of a separate justice system for juveniles is just over one hundred years old (American Bar). Where did juvenile justice come from? The law was in the image of the common law of England. William Blackstone, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in the late 1760s, was admired by the United States founders.

Discussed earlier was the idea of rehabilitating youths in reformatories at the House of Refuge, but only youths deemed reformable (Fox, 1996). What about the youth who were not reformable? What about the youth that commit a serious violent offense such as murder, rape, torture, or armed robbery? In the 1980’s during the “get tough” on juvenile crime movement, states passed waiver legislation that allowed for the transfers of youths to adult court (Kupchik, 2003). Not only has there been no significant findings that trying juveniles as adult does not lower the potential for recidivism, but it has not been found to be an effective means of crime control (Fagan, 2008). Although being tried as an adult opened up even more constitutional safeguards than had been provided post-Gault, the transfer of juveniles to adult court went against the moral notion of keeping youths out of court and out of the system (McGowan, A., Hahn, R., Liberman, A., Crosby, A., Fullilove, M., Johnson, R., … Stone, G., 2007). How does the juvenile justice system, after years of reform and change get back to being a therapeutic and focused on individualized justice? Is it possible?

Over the past 50 years the Juvenile Justice system has seen many changes to their philosophy and how they handle juvenile matter. Supreme Court cases like In re Gualt, In re Winship, New Jersey v. TLO, Roper v. Simmon have helped shaped the juvenile justice system. Juvenile courts can no longer ignore the constitutional rights of juveniles. Tennessee has 98 juvenile courts, 109 juvenile court judges and 45 magistrates. In 1982, The Juvenile Court Restructure Act amended Tennessee Code Annotated §§37-1-201 through 37-1-214. The purpose of this act is to provide adequate juvenile court services in every county in Tennessee. The Tennessee Code Annotated §37-1-203 states, “general sessions courts shall exercise juvenile court jurisdiction except

The border between juvenile justice and criminal justice did not endure the juvenile court’s first century. By the 1980s, there was general disappointment with both the means and the ends of normal juvenile justice. As with every other social repair efforts, it is difficult to say whether frustration with juvenile justice was born of erroneous concept or of wretched execution. The administering accepted by justice policy, however, was unmistakable. Juvenile courts began to adopt the sentiment and standpoint of criminal courts. Many States redesigned their laws to curtail the confidentiality of juvenile court proceedings and juvenile court records. Most States increased the legal etiquette used in juvenile court and shifted the objective of the juvenile justice process away from individualized intervention. Instead, juvenile courts and juvenile justice agencies began to focus on public safety and criminal accountability. In addition, nearly All States enacted laws to toss more youths to criminal court where they could be tried and punished as adults. In the span of a single century the American justice system had favorably embraced and then largely abandoned the concept of using a alternative legal system for crimes committed by the young. No single concern in juvenile justice has captured the attention of the public or of policymakers like criminal court transfer. Conflicts over the transfer issue command the clearest and most candid dispute over the juvenile-criminal

“The juvenile justice system was first created in the late 1800s to reform United States policies on how to handle youth offenders. Since that time, a number of reforms - aimed at both protecting the "due process of law" rights of youth, and creating an aversion toward jail among the young - have made the juvenile justice system more comparable to the adult system, which is a shift from the United States’ original intent (2008,Lawyer Shop.com).” The

Because there was no real separate court or jail for juveniles in the nineteenth century, juveniles were treated on the same level as every other adult justice system allowing them susceptible to the same punishments as adults. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, society changed their views and how they viewed juvenile offenders. During the early years of the juvenile justice system, three major milestones have occurred; the child-saving movement, the concept of parens patriae, and the Illinois Juvenile Court Act. In our modern society, juvenile offenders are now

In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States faced a problem of enormous impact on society negatively affecting families, the economy, and the future of American children: the vast, and ever-increasing number of youths being processed through the juvenile justice court system. In the years since the turn of the century, through implementation of legislation sponsored by activists, lawyers, community organizers, educators and other reformers focusing mainly upon curbing youth incarceration, and instead promoting community and social alternatives, the most recent trends reflect a stemming and actual decline of youths entering the United States juvenile justice system. Most recently, leading the way in the effort to decrease the number of children processed through the courts is the State of Georgia, recent legislation of which has drastically reduced the number of juveniles incarcerated by an amazing rate. This paper will analyze the importance of continuing this trend of a lower rate of juvenile arrests and incarceration by moving away from the practices in effect in the United States during the twentieth century that created the unsustainable increase in same; an exploration of whether or not these practices led the United States juvenile justice system away from its original policy mandate of

This paper will discuss the history of the juvenile justice system and how it has come to be what it is today. When a juvenile offender commits a crime and is sentenced to jail or reform school, the offender goes to a separate jail or reforming place than an adult. It hasn’t always been this way. Until the early 1800’s juveniles were tried just like everyone else. Today, that is not the case. This paper will explain the reforms that have taken place within the criminal justice system that developed the juvenile justice system.