The State of the Juvenile Justice System, Essay Example

Juvenile Delinquency and the State of the Juvenile Justice System

Prior to the twentieth century there was almost no difference between the punishments handed out to adult offenders and juvenile offenders.While judges took the age of the child into account during sentencing, children were able to receive the same punishment as adults including corporal punishment and capital punishment.In the mid-19^th century as immigrant populations swelled, adults and legal professionals began to recognize that children were different from adults in the way they thought, behaved, felt and in their ability to understand complex relationships.Due to the efforts of many advocates, the special needs of children became recognized and they were ultimately given a different legal status than adults. This led to the establishment of a formal juvenile justice system, kept separate from the adult court system (Siegel & Welsh, 2011).

Today we have begun to move back to viewing juvenile offenders as worthy of adult punishment and many in society believe in removing violent offenders from society.These individuals do not seem to care what is done with juvenile offenders as long as they no longer can annoy and endanger law abiding citizens.The discrimination against youth that commit crimes is compounded by racial and status discrimination frequently fueled by the media.Fear of youth violence spiked between 1986 and 1994 resulting in moral outrage. Subsequent reform has led to many juveniles being remanded to criminal courts rather than juvenile courts, even before a ruling allowing a youth to be tried and/or sentenced as an adult. The fact that almost all of juvenile offended sentenced as adults come from lower income, minority backgrounds, shows the degree of discrimination evident in the treatment of juvenile offenders (Snyder, 1998).

The state of the juvenile justice system today represents a daunting challenge to advocates for social change in this country.The U.S. is currently the only country that allows juveniles to be sentenced to life in jail without the possibility of parole.While some may believe this is equivalent to under ten years prior to release, the sad reality is that these juveniles will grow to adulthood and ultimately die behind bars.Many seeking to show the improvements in the sensitivity to the special needs of juveniles tout the decreased rates of juvenile arrests that occurred after the peak in 1994. However, in 2011 alone, more than 1.4 million individuals under the age of 18 were arrested.To date, seven states have declared that life in prison without parole is unconstitutional as it violates the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment yet more than 2,500 individuals remain behind bars serving life sentences for crimes committed as juveniles.Minority youth continue to make up a disproportionate number of youth behind bars and the disparity increases as they proceed through the justice system(Center for Children’s Law and Policy, 2010).

References

Center for Children’s Law and Policy. (2010). Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities. Retrieved from http://www.cclp.org/DMC.php.

Siegel, L. and Welsh, B. (2011).Juvenile Delinquency: Theory, Practice, and Law. Independence, KY: Cengage Learning.

Snyder, H. (2011). Arrests in the United States 1980-2009. Retrieved from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2203

Snyder H.M. (1998). Serious, violent and chronic juvenile offenders: An assessment of extent of and trends in officially recognized serious juvenile behavior in delinquent population. In R. Loeber and D.P. Farrington (Eds.) Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions, pp. 68-85. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.