Judging Juveniles: Prosecuting Adolescents in Adult and Juvenile Courts (review)

In the United States, more than 70 people currently serve life without possibility of parole sentences for crimes they committed before age 15.¹ Professor Kupchik’s comparative study of court personnel who prosecute, defend and judge adolescents in juvenile and adult criminal courts is a timely contribution to the literature on juvenile justice and to policy debates about young offenders. Kupchik takes as his cases New York City Criminal Courts that process juvenile offenders charged with serious felonies and New Jersey juvenile courts in contiguous counties, collecting data through interviews, observation and review of administrative records. He describes parallel systems of justice for young offenders that are similar in operation, but very different in outcome.

His comparison of juvenile and criminal courts leads him to conclude that the latter apply a “sequential model of justice” to juvenile offenders, “borrow[ing] from both… criminal justice… [and] juvenile justice model[s].”(2) In the early stages of processing, “[c]riminal court actors follow rigid formal procedures.”(68) Their focus is on characteristics of the offense as they work to establish guilt or innocence. However, after this judgment is made, criminal courts begin to act like juvenile courts: “court actors incorporate a vision of malleability and reduced culpability… They… follow a juvenile justice model,” shifting their focus from offense to offender, and “relying on social workers, using a less formal and more personal style… and including defendants in case processing.”(65–66) Kupchik argues that while criminal court actors “do their best to filter case processing and circumvent the law to reintroduce notions of juvenile justice to criminal court case processing,”(119) statutes limit their discretion, requiring them to impose on young offenders harsher sentences than they would like. Certainly, the sentences offenders received differed markedly between the two settings. For example, juveniles tried for robbery in criminal courts faced an 800 percent greater chance of incarceration than those tried in juvenile courts (Figure 5.4, Appendix Table 1.5).

Kupchik argues that criminal court actors’ attitudes toward treating juveniles as adults are characterized by an “awkward ambivalence.”(2) However, little of this ambivalence appears in the quotes from prosecutors, who evidence a twostage understanding that dovetails with the sequential model implemented in these courts. Prosecutors of juveniles in criminal courts believe that “adolescents’ capacities for decision making” and “cognizan[ce] of future consequences of their behaviors” are, on average, not as well developed as adults’(99); they, nevertheless, also believe that “adolescents who commit serious crimes should be held responsible for those crimes at an adult level.”(99) Criminal court judges in the study did express “frustration” at the lack of noncustodial and treatment-oriented options to which they can sentence young offenders (122). Whether the more rigid model of criminal court is better able to reduce class and race bias than the more informal and flexible model of juvenile court cannot be determined from this study, as the juveniles in both courts are overwhelmingly black and Latino, and courts do not collect reliable information about family socioeconomic status (Appendix Table 1.6). These facts are in themselves findings of note.

Kupchik concludes that the sequential model of juvenile justice should be rejected because it is incompatible with broad cultural understandings of justice and youthful culpability. However, we do not know from his study whether what ambivalence he documents among judges is shared by the public, many of whom have little personal contact with juvenile offenders, and many of whom supported the laws that have led to the prosecution of young people as adults. What the study does provide is a valuable descriptive account of these courts in action.