Choosing the Future for American Juvenile Justice

Introduction

>> 1 Introduction Franklin E. Zimring and David S. Tanenhaus The juvenile court and the system of juvenile justice that it produced was invented in Illinois in 1899 and is now 115 years old. While it is the youngest of the major institutions of Anglo-American law, it has also become the most popular. There are juvenile courts in all 50 American states and in almost all the nations of the modern world. But while the mission of the court is universally popular, the moving parts of juvenile justice in the United States have been changing almost from the beginning. The basic principles of the court in 2014 still reflect the intentions of its founders, but the priorities and power relations in juvenile justice have changed importantly in the past half-century. Enduring Principles The first enduring principle of the juvenile court was the radical idea that the law should treat children differently from adults. This radical idea is also an old one, predating the American Revolution. The political philosopher John Locke argued that children’s lack of reasoning capacity, which disqualified them from participating in government, also made them less culpable for their criminal acts. By the turn of the twentieth century, child advocates embedded the principle that children are different from adults—and thus require individualized handling of their cases—into the foundation of the world’s first juvenile courts. That bedrock assumption is still alive and well in 2014. A second principle is closely and inextricably related to the first. Once juvenile courts were established, children’s advocates argued that 2 > 3 Thus, the time is ripe to rediscover the first principles of American juvenile justice and to do less harm to young people. Justice Elena Kagan’s clear statement about children being different from adults in Miller v. Alabama (2012), for example, is an emphatic reminder of why we created the juvenile court in the first place, and why no state has abolished its juvenile justice system. * * * This book aims to provide resources for choosing the future of the policies and institutions of the juvenile court’s delinquency jurisdiction. The volume is divided into three parts. The first section sets the stage for current reform discussions by profiling the attitudes and legislative changes that were the legacies of the 1990s. Chapter 1 concerns the youth homicide trends after 1985 in the United States and the fears they generated. Chapter 2 shows how public concerns and prosecutorial ambition produced legislation that reduced judicial and probation authority and increased prosecutorial power. The second section of this volume identifies six important priorities for law reform in the immediate future. Michael Caldwell profiles the changes in law that were imposed on juvenile sex offenders and demonstrates the lack of fit between current policies and scientific evidence. Aaron Kupchik shows how the increasing presence and power of police in schools has become a disturbing part of the “school-to-prison pipeline .” James Forman discusses a pioneering and successful effort to educate kids even while they are subject to secure confinement. David Thronson explores the consequences of policy choices that juvenile justice systems must make in cases involving immigrant youth. James Jacobs analyzes the conflict between the increasing availability of juvenile arrest and adjudication records and diverting young offenders from permanent legal and economic disabilities. Franklin Zimring provides a new approach to reducing the harms suffered by disadvantaged minority youth in juvenile courts. The concluding section of the book searches for appropriate strategies and appeals to achieve progressive reforms in juvenile justice. Terry Maroney explores the promises and limits of appeals based on the evolving neuroscience of adolescent development. Zimring and David 4 << Franklin E. Zimring and David S. Tanenhaus Tanenhaus provide a consumer’s guide to the rhetoric of law reform in juvenile justice. The aim of this book is to close the gap between theory and practice in American juvenile justice, and to start a conversation about progressive reform that is both disciplined and practical. ...