Choosing the Future for American Juvenile Justice

10. On Strategy and Tactics for Contemporary Reforms

216 > 217 • The juvenile court’s commitment to the welfare of all the young persons subject to its jurisdiction extends as well to young persons without immigration documentation. The juvenile court cannot become a branch of the national government’s immigration policing without violating its own distinctive mission. And court policy toward immigrant youth should be designed to minimize harmful immigration consequences. • The trend in recent policy to increase the collateral consequences of juvenile adjudications is a critical battleground for regaining the protections that the juvenile court provides from stigma and permanent disadvantage. Increasing the breadth and duration of collateral consequences increases the negative effects of disseminating juvenile record information and of disproportionate overrepresentation of minorities. Reducing collateral consequences thus becomes a priority method of reducing the stigma and the disadvantage to minorities of juvenile justice exposure. That shopping list of law reforms is one important product of this volume. There is, however, a world of difference between a shopping list and a pantry full of groceries. Even a detailed and well-articulated agenda of reform proposals stops well short of improving anyone’s life chances. The central task of juvenile law reform and the central topic of this concluding chapter is identifying the proper places in government where changes need to take place and listing some of the political and institutional developments that can make changes possible. Our survey of the means to reform the legal world of adolescent development is divided into a discussion of the governmental structures and institutions that determine policies toward young persons and an analysis of the institutional, political, and public attitudes that influence policy. The governmental structures we discuss in Part A are the hardware for governing juvenile justice and education. The attitudes and values discussed in Part B are the software that will motivate and sustain reforms. The final section of this chapter will address some of the leading indicators of future directions for juvenile justice. A. Government Structures and Juvenile Justice A precondition to creating change in juvenile justice policy is locating the places in the governmental structure where policies are determined. 218 > 219 US Constitution to restrict penal excesses on young offender cases like In re Winship (1970), Graham v. Florida (2010), and Miller v. Alabama (2012) did not have much significant operational impact on juvenile or criminal justice. These cases sent important signals out to other branches and levels of government that diminished responsibility was a significant legal principle for younger offenders (and this we will mention in the next section), but the Supreme Court has been more than reluctant to use constitutional doctrine to make structural changes in juvenile justice. Schall v. Martin (1984) is the most explicit example of this reluctance, and there have been no strong indications that the current court is less cautious. The rest of the national government is not deeply concerned with youth crime or juvenile justice. The federal office established in the late 1970s, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), is both underfunded and a low priority in the executive branch. The two federal initiatives that this book has identified as hot topics for reform efforts (sex and immigration) are both governmental activities not centered in juvenile justice that threaten both the youth before the court and the court’s mission. Federal immigration enforcement threatens to create an adversarial relationship between the court and undocumented juveniles in any of its traditional jurisdictional categories—abuse and neglect, dependence and delinquency. The extension of registration requirement standards to some juvenile sex offenders was a policy spillover in the Adam Walsh Act’s crusade against older sex offenders. The best strategy for juvenile damage control in these collateral damage categories is to mobilize youth welfare lobbies and organizations to create special exemptions for minors in the administration of immigration detection programs (involving both arrest and juvenile courts in immigration) and federal standards for sex offender registration. For sex offender registration some legislative changes will also be necessary, but the federal juvenile offender standards in the 2006 act are unpopular with state governments and may be vulnerable to the kind of reexamination that would best protect young offenders. The other major involvement of federal policy is an extensive financial and regulatory relationship to education and school governance. Here juvenile justice interest groups can and should become interested and outspoken in reducing police presence in schools and the deemphasis of security in...