$10.00
W I N T E R
1 9 9 9 / 2 0 0 0
V O L . 2 3
N O . 2
Defending Liberty
Pursuing Justice
What’s Inside?
Societies have many ways of acknowledging that children have attained their majority. In some, adulthood is
reached when a certain level of hunting prowess has
been achieved. In others, the celebration of a traditional rite after the attainment of a particular chronological
age is the mark.
Perhaps only recently has the notion of adulthood
been linked with the severity of an offense a child is
alleged to have committed. And this notion—common
What’s certain is that the juvenile justice system’s
second 100 years dawned in a storm of disagreement
over how society should deal with youth who have run
afoul of the law. We thank the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Street Law, Inc., and
all the academics, lawyers, judges, and educators who
furnished us with the excellent materials in this edition
in their continuing effort to formulate the answer to this
difficult question.
sense to some, anathema to others—is the single most
emphasized phenomenon the Update team that prepared this edition encountered, and discussed, as it was
developed.
Seva Johnson
Editorial Director
Youth Education Publications
If a violent offender, who happens to be a child, is
waivered to adult court, society’s increasingly punitive
agenda with regard to such offenders is satisfied, and
certain protections available only to adults are guaranteed. Something so fundamental as representation by a
lawyer is one. On the other hand, adult court doesn’t
allow social information about the youthful offender to
be considered. Only the juvenile court takes the child’s
developmental level, experiences, and environment into
account, for example, and provides the connecting link
to services that have been shown to help troubled kids
and their families turn their lives around.
Cover Illustration by David Lee Csicsko
Design by DePinto Graphic Design
Produced by Creative Services Associates, Inc.
© 2000 American Bar Association
ISSN 0147-8648
PC #738-0100-2302
Funding for this issue has been provided by the American Bar Association Fund for
Justice and Education; we are grateful for its support.
Prepared under Grant #95-JS-FX-0017 from the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice.
Update on Law-Related Education is published by the American Bar Association
Standing Committee on Public Education. Chair: Allan J. Tanenbaum; Director,
Division for Public Education: Mabel C. McKinney-Browning; Director, School
Programs: John Paul Ryan; Director, Publishing and Marketing: Seva Johnson;
Contributing Editor: Kenneth F. Fenske.
Update helps secondary teachers of civics, government, history, and law, as
well as law-related education program developers, to educate students about
the law and legal issues. The views expressed in this document are those of the
authors and have not been approved by the House of Delegates or the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association and, accordingly, should not be construed
as representing the policy of the American Bar Association, the U.S. Department of
Justice, or the Standing Committee on Public Education.
For back-issue information, contact American Bar Association/Division for Public
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Contents
Volume 23, Number 2
Winter Edition, 1999–2000
Juvenile Justice Edition
4
Foreword Shay Bilchik
6
American Youth Violence: Implications for National Juvenile Justice
Policy Franklin E. Zimring explores how the perception of increasing youth
violence is based on fear, not fact.
10
The Juvenile Court: Changes and Challenges Barry C. Feld explains where
the juvenile justice system has been and where it is going.
15
Lawyers and Legal Advocacy in Juvenile Courts: An Assessment Patricia
Puritz, Sue Burrell, Robert Schwartz, Mark Soler, and Loren Warboys report on a
national assessment that reveals the many shortcomings of the juvenile justice system.
18
Juvenile Court: Today & Tomorrow looks at the forecast for the juvenile
courts.
21
An Effective Response to Teenage Crime Is Possible—and Cities Are
Showing the Way Jack Levin examines how programs in some cities have helped
reduce teen crime and violence.
24
At the Supreme Court Charles F. Williams discusses three High Court cases
that affirmed the constitutional rights of juvenile offenders and changed juvenile
court proceedings.
27
A Close Look at Stanford v. Kentucky offers excerpts from the opinion of the
Supreme Court delivered by Justice Scalia.
Update on Law-Related Education
Editorial Advisory Board
29
Lee Arbetman
Street Law, Inc.
Washington, D.C.
31
Marshall Croddy
Constitutional Rights Foundation
Los Angeles, California
Frank Kopecky
University of Illinois
Center for Legal Studies
Springfield, Illinois
From the Bench—Juvenile Courts: How and Why They Have Changed
Four judges recount their experiences with and offer their opinions on the juvenile
court system.
The LRE Alternative: Can It Replace Formal Court? Deborah Williamson
reports on Kentucky’s LRE program and results.
34
Youth Court: An Alternative Juvenile Court? Michelle E. Heward explains
why and how youth courts are on the rise.
37
Teaching Strategy—The Case of Gerry Gault This adaptation of a Street Law
program offers ideas for teaching about a significant juvenile justice case—In re
Gault.
40
Teaching Strategy—Today’s Juvenile Court Another Street Law adaptation,
this strategy helps students understand modern juvenile court laws and procedures.
Gayle Mertz
Law-Related Education Network
Boulder, Colorado
44
Juvenile Justice Puzzle
45
Juvenile Justice Glossary
Michael H. Reggio
Oklahoma Bar Association
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
46
Teaching Strategy—Using the Juvenile Justice Poster Students conduct and
David Schimmel
Department of Educational Policy,
Research, and Administration
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts
analyze a survey on possible changes in the juvenile justice system.
Foreword
We have come a long way since the first juvenile court was established by the Illinois legislature in 1899. Children were summarily tried
At the end of the 19th century, the juvenile
court was clearly a concept whose “time had
come.” Now, at the close of the 20th century,
in the same courts and under the same laws as
adults. When convicted, they were sentenced to
the same prisons and, on occasion, even con-
some seem to be asking, is it an idea whose time
has passed? Listening to some of its harshest
critics, you would think so. They question the
demned to the same gallows. It was an urgent
time for juveniles, prompting the Illinois Juvenile Court Act to ensure justice for youth.
very existence of the juvenile court, as well as
the distinction of the juvenile justice system
from the adult criminal justice system.
Children have different developmental needs
It cannot be said often enough that national pol-
than adults and require adult protection and
guidance in order to meet those needs and
achieve their full potential. The children’s court
in Chicago was founded on that same common-
icy on youth violence should be based on facts
and not fear; Franklin Zimring tries once again
to place this important issue in a factual context.
Barry Feld provides an excellent overview of
sense recognition. The humane and progressive
founders of juvenile court believed that few—if
any—children were beyond saving and that
these children deserved a chance to redeem
themselves. Accordingly, they created a court
that focused on the recovery and rehabilitation
the juvenile court as it has changed since its
beginnings 100 years ago and how it continues
to address challenges as we move into the 21st
century.
of juvenile offenders while holding them
accountable for their actions. The concept
describes the areas that need most improvement
in juvenile courts—access to counsel and the
caught on, and by 1915, 46 states, three territories, and the District of Columbia had established juvenile courts of their own.
quality of representation—and provides
promising approaches that can be replicated
across the country. Information regarding what
must be considered when making national poli-
4
A complementary piece by Patricia Puritz
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
VOL. 23
NO. 2
cy on youth violence is provided by Jack Levin
in his review of effective responses by cities to
teenage crime.
Changes came to juvenile courts after three
Supreme Court cases affirmed the constitutional
rights of juvenile offenders and altered juvenile
court proceedings, as Charles Williams
describes in “At the Supreme Court.” In the latter half of the 20th century, two programs—lawrelated education and youth courts—were
developed to help youth gain a working knowledge of the protection citizens have under the
rule of law and the court process and to hold
first-time juvenile offenders accountable for
from their program Save Our Streets: A Positive
Choices Curriculum. You and your students will
come away with an understanding of the breadth
of the juvenile court’s history these past 100
years and its new direction for the next 100
years.
Shay Bilchik
Administrator
Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention
U.S. Department of Justice
their actions by a jury of their peers. Deborah
Williamson and Michelle Heward each provide
specific information on these innovative programs that provide positive youth development
and less recidivism.
I encourage you to take the time to read this edition of Update on Law-Related Education.
Incorporate the featured lessons into your classroom activities, particularly those furnished by
Street Law, Inc., and The Conflict Resolution
Education Network, which have been adapted
VOL. 23
NO. 2
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
5
American Youth Violence:
Implications for National
Juvenile Justice Policy
The perception of increasing youth violence is based on fear, not fact.
Franklin E. Zimring
U
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 6–9. © 2000 American Bar Association.
nwarranted panic caused by the
misperception that youth violence is dramatically increasing
has led to a proposed national youth
policy based on fear rather than fact.
Juvenile crime statistics, reinforced
with recently released FBI data, show
that juvenile crime has actually been
on the decline for the past few years.
But more important is the fact that
over the past two decades, there has
been no sustained trend of either
increase or decrease in juvenile
violence.
Law Based in Fiction
In recent years, virtually every state
has enacted laws designed to cope
with a worsening general pattern of
violent juvenile crime that does not
exist. One of the more popular statelevel measures has been lowering the
age at which juveniles can be tried as
adults. Many local governments are
placing new restrictions on youth, and
Congress gave serious consideration
in 1998 to a law that, if passed, would
have enabled federal prosecutors
rather than judges to decide when to
prosecute, in adult courts, juveniles
Franklin E. Zimring is William G.
Simon Professor of Law and Director
of the Earl Warren Legal Institute
at the University of California at
Berkeley.
6
accused of serious crime. The proposed legislation further provided for
federal financial incentives for punitive state juvenile justice policies.
Another version of the federal juvenile
justice bill is currently before a HouseSenate conference committee as of
late 1999.
Such proposals are the direct result
of the belief that American cities are
witnessing the emergence of a more
dangerous breed of juvenile offender
whose vicious behavior is unprecedented and whose numbers can only
grow in the first decade of the next
century. But the prediction of a “coming storm of juvenile violence” is science fiction rather than social science.
The only conclusion to be drawn from
the data with any confidence is that
there was no consistent pattern of
youth arrests for violent crime from
1980–96.
The Facts
Juvenile vs. Adult Violence Adolescent violence differs from adult patterns in the United States in three
respects: its high rate, its relatively
low death toll, and its high level of
group involvement. For American
males, the most violence-prone years
are adolescence, with about 10 percent
of all 15- to 19-year-old boys involved
in serious assault each year. But the
death rate from assault is lower in the
teen years than later. For example,
boys aged 12–15 are assault victims
just as often as males aged 20–24, but
the younger group has a death rate
Important LRE Resource
American Youth Violence by Franklin E. Zimring, one of the nation’s leading
authorities on juvenile justice, examines juvenile violence statistics from
1980–96, offering a thorough review of the data, including national juvenile
crime statistics and trends, population demographics, public policy trends,
and media coverage of juvenile violence. Conclusions are drawn that provide
important new information about what juvenile crime rates are today and
what might be expected in the future. A critical finding is that a misreading of
the statistics has been driving a nationwide trend toward much harsher
approaches to juvenile justice than are necessary. Readers are encouraged to
obtain and familiarize themselves with this important book, which is available
at better bookstores and directly from the Oxford University Press by calling
1-800-451-7556 or visiting the Web site at www.oup-usa.org
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
VOL. 23
NO. 2
Figure 1 Multiple Offender Cases as a Percentage of Total Juveniles Charged, by Crime,
New York City. Source: Zimring (1981).
100
90
87
86
78
80
67
60
Percentage
60
40
20
0
Gun Robbery (n = 78)
Burglary (n = 481)
from assault that is less than one-tenth
as high. At the same time, teens, far
more than adults, commit crimes in
groups (see fig. 1), with many of the
offenses deriving from efforts to
“show off” or gain group status.
Youth Violence Trends Since 1980,
trends in youth violence have been
mixed in the following ways:
• Since 1980, arrest rates for juveniles aged 13–17 accused of rape
and robbery show no identifiable
trend over time either up or down,
and they in fact have declined over
the past five years (see fig. 2). Only
one index of crime of violence
shows a large and sustained
increase since 1980: aggravated
assault.
• Most of the increase in the arrest
rate for aggravated assault for juveniles aged 13–17 between 1984–92
was not the result of increased
numbers of assaults but of a change
in the way police report and classify assaults. Supporting this is the
fact that, even though there were
more arrests for simple and aggravated assault during this period, the
assault rate—measured through vic-
VOL. 23
NO. 2
Sex Crimes (n = 21)
Homicide (n = 8)
Assault (n = 146)
tim surveys—did not change during
the same period. Further, assault
arrests reported by police increased
substantially, even
for age groups in
Figure 2 Arrest Rates for Offenders, Ages 13–17, for Four
Violent Offenses. 1980–1996. Source: U.S. Department
which homicide rates
of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (1980–1993,
were declining.
1994a, 1995–1996).
• The homicide arrest
250
rate for juveniles
aged 13–17 rose
sharply
between
1984–92 but fell
200
back by more than
one-third by 1996;
and, according to
recently released FBI
150
figures, this rate
dropped an additional 16 percent in 1997.
The homicide arrest
100
rate in 1997 was
about 12 percent
above that in 1980. If
the problematic ag50
gravated assault cate1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995
gory is put aside,
1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996
youth violence in
1997 was no greater
Homicide
than in 1980.
Rape
Arrest rates (normalized to 100 percent)
Other Robbery (n = 333)
The fallacy of predicting future
arrest rates from past history is obvious when the historical data are examined. During the 1980–96 period, there
were only three times in which the
arrest rates for any one of four violent
offenses (homicide, rape, aggravated
assault, and robbery) rose or fell for
more than three consecutive years.
Arrest rates often change substantially
in a short period of time.
Population Trends Part of the alarm
expressed over the “coming storm of
youth violence” concerns the growth
in the youth population expected
between 1995–2010; yet the population in the high-arrest years (ages
13–17) will increase only 15 percent
during that period, and the proportion
of the total population in these higharrest-rate years will remain quite low
by historical standards (see fig. 3).
Youth between the ages of 13 and 17
will be 7.2 percent of the total U.S.
population in 2010, a smaller proportion of society than during the 1960s,
Robbery
Aggravated assault
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
7
Figure 3 Proportion of U.S. Population, Ages 13–17, 1960–2010.
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census
(1960–1994, 1995a).
9.9
10
9.8
9.1
8.7
8
8.6
7.7
7.1
6.7
Percentage
6
4
2
0
1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995
* Projection
1970s, and early 1980s. There will be
no explosive “echo boom” of adolescents in the next decade.
Some widely publicized projections of future behavior from these
data are even more flawed. One muchtrumpeted prediction, for example,
claimed that there will be an additional 270,000 extremely violent young
people by 2010. However, that statistic, which was widely reported in the
national media, included all young
people under 18—even babies. The
major influence on the amount of serious youth violence in the United
States over the next decade will not
be an increase in the number of
adolescents.
Legal Policy Issues
There are three pivotal issues of legal
policy toward adolescent violence:
adolescent gun policy, transfer (waiver) of adolescents to criminal (adult)
court, and the penal treatment of adolescent killers.
Adolescent Gun Policy Adolescent
gun use and its legal regulation are
critical to the control of youth violence
because all of the increase in juvenile
killings experienced after 1980 was
8
the result of gun
use (see fig. 4).
Current
policies
rest on two inconsistent views of
adolescent maturity. The laws that
restrict youth ac7.4 7.2
7.2
cess to guns are
based on the immaturity and inexperience of young people. About 90 percent of all the people prohibited by
federal law from
purchasing handguns are children
and youth; yet
mandatory mini2000* 2005* 2010*
mum penalties and
compulsory transfer of juveniles
involved in gun cases to criminal court
seem to assume that juveniles should
be regarded as equally capable of
exercising judgment as adults. One of
these assumptions must be wrong, and
it is the latter.
Transfer to Criminal Court There
are standards governing when youth
under the maximum age of juvenilecourt jurisdiction should be transferred
to the jurisdiction of criminal court.
The present analysis suggests that the
practice should be restricted to cases
in which the maximum punishment
available in juvenile court is plainly
inadequate, a determination that
should be made by judges on a caseby-case basis.
The current trend in state legislation—to make wholesale exclusions
from juvenile courts on the basis of the
offense charged—is wrong in two
respects. First, it does not rely on
judges to determine the seriousness of
individual cases, and, second, the law
currently does not spell out the extent
to which a defendant’s youth and
immaturity should influence the punishment to be imposed in criminal
court after transfer. To imagine that
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
transferring a 14-year-old from one
court building to another has made
him or her into an adult is a form of
magical thinking we usually associate
with primitive civilizations, yet such
thinking plays an important role in
current legislative activity in the United States.
Penal Treatment Erroneous thinking
about juvenile defendants can be
replaced through rigorous analysis of
the penal treatment of adolescent
killers. Difficult questions that must be
contemplated include the following:
• Do the rules and assumptions that
make adults liable for first-degree
murder if they merely aid a robber
who causes a death also apply to
teen homicide defendants?
• Should the diminished responsibilities of teen defendants result in
fixed discounts from adult murder
penalties or in separately determined punishments?
• What about the death penalty for
the adolescent who kills?
Policies that aim to protect youth
must give way when they conflict with
MacArthur Foundation
American Youth Violence by
Franklin E. Zimring was supported by the MacArthur Foundation
in Chicago. The Research Network on Adolescent Development
and Juvenile Justice was established by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in
1997 to develop new knowledge
regarding the assumptions on
which the juvenile justice system
functions and to determine how a
fuller understanding of adolescent
development might influence
legal and social policies concerning juvenile crime and juvenile
justice. The network’s agenda
bridges research, policy, and
practice in social science, law,
and juvenile justice. For more
information on the network, visit
its Web site at
www.mac-adoldev-juvjustice.org
VOL. 23
NO. 2
Figure 4 Number of Gun, Nongun, and Total Homicides by Offenders,
Ages 10–17, 1976–1992. Source: U.S. Department of Justice,
Federal Bureau of Investigation (1994b).
2000
Number of homicides
1500
1000
500
0
1977
1976
1979
1978
1981
1980
1983
1982
1985
1984
1987
1986
1989
1988
1990
1991
1992
Gun homicides
Nongun homicides
To t a l h o m i c i d e s
the minimum punishment necessary in
homicides, but the interests of young
offenders can be accommodated even
in homicide cases much more effectively than in common practice.
Conclusion
The issue of adolescent violence must
be put into the larger perspective of
legal policy toward youth. There is no
large conflict between the philosophy
and capacity of the modern juvenile
court and most cases of adolescent
violence. A special danger of the
recent debate about youth violence is
the fact that future crime patterns are
the only feature of a generation of
young children that has been
addressed. It is both peculiar and
destructive when members of Congress discuss only the future crime
rates of children currently four and
five years old.
The largest failure of perspective in
the youth crime panic of the mid1990s was a refusal to comprehend the
multiple potentials and the contingency of a generation of young children not yet starting school when the
bloodbath predictions were made. If
the only measure of any generation in
the United States was the worst acts
that any of its members might commit,
each new generation would be viewed
as an unqualified disaster. In fact, to
see only the negative in any generation
of a nation’s youth is almost implausibly silly. Such an unbalanced vision of
the future can be put forward only by
advocates with no real sense of the
American past. ♦
The Coming Storm
Juvenile violence in the United States is frequently depicted as a difficult current problem that will inevitably get worse.
United States Representative Bill McCollum, chair of the House Subcommittee on Crime, touches all the usual bases in
testifying before a House Committee on Early Childhood, Youth, and Families in 1996:
In recent years, overall crime rates have seen a modest decline—nevertheless, this general decline masks an
unprecedented surge of youth violence that has only begun to gather momentum. Today’s drop in crime is only
the calm before the coming storm. ...
It is important to keep in mind that [the current] dramatic increase in youth crime over the past decade
occurred while the youth population was declining. Now here is the really bad news: This nation will soon have
more teenagers than it has had in decades. In the final years of this decade and throughout the next, America
will experience an “echo boom”—a population surge made up of the children of today’s aging baby boomers.
Today’s enormous cohort of five-year-olds will be tomorrow’s teenagers. This is ominous news, given that
most [sic] violent crime is committed by older juveniles (those fifteen to nineteen years of age) than by any
other age group. More of these youths will come from fatherless homes than ever before, at the same time that
youth drug use is taking a sharp turn for the worse. Put these demographic facts together and brace yourself
for the coming generation of “super-predators.” (Emphasis in original.)
—Bill McCollum. Testimony Before the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth, and Families. April 30, 1996. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, pp. 1–3.
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J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
9
The Juvenile Court:
Changes and Challenges
Where has the juvenile justice system been, and where is it going?
Barry C. Feld
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 10–14. © 2000 American Bar Association.
T
he juvenile court is a by-product
of changes in two cultural ideas
that accompanied industrialization and modernization a century
ago—childhood and social control.
Social structural changes associated
with the shift from an agricultural to
an urban society and the separation of
work from the home produced a new
perception of children as innocent,
dependent, and vulnerable.
Political progressives lobbied for
and won a number of reforms in the
legal system to protect and control
youth: compulsory school attendance,
restrictions on child labor in sweatshops, and welfare benefits for children of indigent parents. Legal
changes also led to reform in the arena
of juvenile crime to change youths’
behavior through rehabilitation rather
than punishment. The juvenile court
combined the new conception of children with new strategies of social control to produce an alternative to criminal justice, to remove children from
the adult judicial system, to enforce
the dependency of children, and to
substitute the state as parent for children whose inadequate families failed
in their child-rearing responsibilities.
Barry C. Feld is the Centennial Professor of Law at the University
of Minnesota Law School in Minneapolis and a member of the ABA
Section of Criminal Justice and Juvenile Justice.
10
Procedure and substance intertwined in juvenile courts. Procedurally, juvenile courts used informal
processes, conducted confidential
hearings, and used euphemisms and
clinical language to obscure the reality
of social control. Substantively, juvenile courts emphasized treatment and
supervision rather than punishment
and focused on children’s future welfare rather than their past offenses.
Despite their rehabilitative rhetoric,
however, the reformers who created
the juvenile court system actually
designed it to discriminate—to Americanize immigrant children, to control
the poor, and to provide a means with
which to distinguish between “our
children” and “other people’s children”—an orientation that persists
today.
The Great Black Migration, the
Supreme Court, and Civil Rights
In the decades before World War II,
the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North and the West increased the
urbanization of blacks and placed the
issues of racial equality on the national agenda. Between 1910 and 1920,
more than half a million blacks left the
South, and by the 1940s, more than
one and a half million more blacks
migrated to other parts of the country.
When blacks left the South, they
moved primarily to cities. In the span
of a half century, blacks shifted from
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
about three-quarters living in rural
environments to three-quarters residing in urban settings.
The post-World War II era also witnessed the suburbanization of America, as whites simultaneously moved
from cities to suburbs and isolated
blacks in blighted inner-city ghettos.
Federal housing, mortgage, and highway policies contributed to and
favored the development of predominantly white suburbs around the major
cities and encircled urban poor and
minority residents.
The great black migration made
race a national rather than a regional
issue, increased the visibility and
awareness of the “American dilemma,” and moved matters of race to the
center of the nation’s and the Supreme
Court’s concerns about civil rights,
crime policy, social welfare, and
social justice. In the 1960s, the U.S.
Supreme Court under Chief Justice
Earl Warren handed down a number of
civil rights, criminal procedure, and
due process decisions to protect the
rights of racial minorities.
In the juvenile justice arena, the
Supreme Court’s decision in In re
Gault, 387 U.S. 1 (1967), required
juvenile courts to provide delinquents
The great black migration
made race a national rather
than a regional issue ...
VOL. 23
NO. 2
with some procedural safeguards, for
example, notice, a hearing, the right to
counsel, the right to confront and
cross-examine witnesses, and the privilege against self-incrimination. These
procedural reforms shifted the focus of
delinquency hearings from the “real
needs” of youth to the proof of legal
guilt and formalized the connection
between criminal conduct and imprisonment. Providing some procedural
safeguards also enabled juvenile
courts to impose more punitive consequences. It is a historical irony that
race provided the initial reason for the
liberal-minded Warren Court to
expand the procedural rights of youths
and today juvenile courts increasingly
impose those harsher sentences disproportionately on minority offenders.
In McKeiver v. Pennsylvania, 403
U.S. 528 (1971), the Supreme Court
denied juveniles the constitutional
right to trial by jury in delinquency
proceedings. Although the Supreme
Court could deny delinquents the
criminal procedural rights of adults, it
could not require states to deliver
social welfare services to juveniles. As
a result, many juvenile courts punish
delinquents, but without providing
them with the criminal procedural
rights that adult criminals receive.
There remains a gap between the
law on the books and the law in action
in juvenile courts. States manipulate
the fluid concepts of children and
adults or treatment and punishment to
maximize the social control of young
people. On the one hand, states’ laws
and policies treat juveniles just like
adults when formal equality results in
practical inequality. For example,
almost all states use the adult standard
to gauge juveniles’ waivers of rights—
”knowing, intelligent, and voluntary
under the totality of the circumstances”—even though research clearly demonstrates that juveniles lack the
legal competence of adults. On the
other hand, even as juvenile courts
have become more punitive, most
states continue to deny juveniles
VOL. 23
NO. 2
access to jury trials and to other procedural rights guaranteed to adults
because juvenile courts supposedly
treat them rather than punish them.
During the last 30 years, judicial
decisions, legislative amendments,
and administrative changes have transformed juvenile courts from nominally rehabilitative social welfare agencies into scaled-down, second-class
criminal courts that provide youngsters with neither therapy nor justice.
Today, juvenile courts are a wholly
owned subsidiary of the criminal justice system. Legislators and judges
have manipulated the competing
views of innocence and responsibility
to maximize the control of young people who violate the law. At the “soft
end” of juvenile courts’ jurisdiction,
state laws and courts have developed
new strategies to deal with status
offenses—the prohibited conduct of
juveniles that would not be a crime if
committed by an adult, like truancy,
runaway, curfew, and use of tobacco
or alcohol. Many of these noncriminal
minor offenders have been shifted out
of the juvenile justice system into a
hidden system of social control in private sector mental health and chemical
dependency industries. At the “hard
end,” states transfer more juveniles to
criminal courts for prosecution as
adults. And they punish more severely
those delinquent offenders who
remain within the jurisdiction of the
juvenile court. As a result of this
“triage,” juvenile courts have been
transformed from a social welfare
agency into deficient criminal courts
for young offenders.
Getting Tougher
Social changes and race account for
the greater punitiveness of current
juvenile justice policies. Between
World War II and the early 1970s,
semiskilled high school graduates
could get well-paying jobs in automobile, steel, and construction industries,
and many urban black workers benefited from these opportunities. Begin-
ning in the 1970s, the transition from
an industrial to an information and service economy reduced employment
opportunities in the manufacturing
sector, and economic success depended increasingly on technical skills and
education. At the same time, government highway, housing, and mortgage
policies encouraged white middleclass people to move out of the city
and into the suburbs. The migration of
whites to the suburbs, the growth of
information and service jobs in the
suburbs, and the decline of industrial
employment in the urban core
increased racial segregation and the
concentration of poverty among
African Americans in major cities.
In the mid-1980s, the emergence of
an urban underclass, the introduction
of “crack” cocaine into inner cities,
and the proliferation of guns among
the young produced a sharp escalation
in homicide rates among African
American youth. This age-raceoffense-specific increase provided
politicians with the political incentive
to “get tough” on “youth crime,”
which became a “code word” for
young African American men. This
“crackdown” resulted in an increased
waiver—transfer of juveniles normally subject to the jurisdiction of a juvenile court to an adult criminal court—
and a broader change in attitude about
juvenile justice policies from rehabilitation to retribution.
As a result of legal changes in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, juvenile
and criminal courts began to sentence
more harshly juveniles who were convicted of serious offenses. Juvenile
justice and criminal punishment partially merged when laws enable judges
or prosecutors to transfer juveniles to
criminal court for prosecution as
adults. In an effort to crack down on
youth crime, legislators have made it
easier for judges to transfer juveniles
or simply excluded various combinations of age and offenses from juvenile
courts’ jurisdiction. Other states allow
prosecutors to charge some youths in
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
11
The First Juvenile Court—Chicago
In 1899, the Illinois legislature adopted the pioneering Illinois Juvenile Court
Act. The law was in part a response to a growing incidence of reversals of jury
verdicts, concerns about the growing number of immigrants in Chicago’s dominant sectarian industrial schools, and the package of reforms known as the Progressive Reform Movement.
Progressives felt that government had the responsibility to protect and help
the citizen and that there was a need for an alternative to the punitive and insensitive criminal justice system’s treatment of children and families. They proposed instead a court that would be sensitive to these needs. Rehabilitation
would be the primary objective of juvenile justice, and convicted youths would
not be placed in adult facilities.
The Juvenile Court Act gave the new courts, in addition to jurisdiction over
children charged with crimes, jurisdiction over any child who
• Was for any reason destitute, homeless, or abandoned
• Was dependent on the public for support
• Lacked proper parental care
• Begged
• Lived in a house of “ill fame” or with any vicious or disreputable person
• Lived in a home that was otherwise an unfit place for a child
• Was under the age of eight years and sang or played a musical instrument
on the street for money.
The act was unique in that it
• Created a special court for neglected, dependent, or delinquent children
under 16
• Defined a rehabilitative rather than punishment purpose for that court
• Established a policy of confidentiality for the records of juveniles
• Required the separation of juveniles from adults in jails
• Provided for informal proceedings in the court.
The first juvenile court in the world opened its doors in Chicago in 1899.
Jane Addams and Clarence Darrow were among the many prominent individuals who played a role in its development. Jane Addams was one of the founders
of the social work profession and the director of Hull House, the most famous
U.S. settlement house, which served as a neighborhood center for Chicago
immigrants. Clarence Darrow was perhaps America’s most famous trial lawyer
of the time.
Within 20 years, virtually every state in the country and many foreign
nations had developed a juvenile court similar to the one founded in Illinois.
Roscoe Pound, legal scholar and dean of Harvard Law School, proclaimed the
establishment of the juvenile court as one of the most significant advances in
the administration of justice since the Magna Carta.
The juvenile court’s procedure frequently consisted of a judge gaining the
trust of a child through informal conversations. Children brought before the
court were made to understand that they were face to face with the power of the
state yet, at the same time, and more emphatically, made to feel that they were
the object of its care.
The early court alluded to three major issues in handling juveniles: whether
the judge should sit at a desk or table or on the usual bench, looking down at
the child (considered intimidating); whether the judge should wear a robe; and
whether it was sufficient for the judge to be a social or behavioral professional
or legally trained.
12
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
either criminal court or juvenile court,
and as a result of these charging decisions, prosecutors in Florida, for
example, waive more juveniles to
criminal courts than do all of the juvenile court judges in the country
combined.
Politicians’ “sound bites” such as
“adult crime, adult time” produce laws
that transfer more kids who committed
crimes to the adult criminal justice
system. Once states try youths in the
adult system, criminal court judges
sentence them just as if they are adults,
impose the same sentences, send them
to the same prisons, and even execute
them for the crimes they committed as
children.
Other changes in juvenile waiver
and sentencing laws include more
extensive use of prior juvenile records
to increase the sentences that judges
impose both on adolescent and adult
offenders who have a history of juvenile criminal activity. Increasingly,
states’ juvenile sentencing laws
emphasize responsibility and accountability and provide for mandatory
minimum sentences for specific
crimes rather than sentences based on
judges’ evaluations of the juveniles’
“real needs” or “best interests.” Evaluation studies of juvenile court judges’
sentencing practices report two general conclusions. First, juvenile court
judges apparently use the same factors
that criminal court judges look at
when they sentence offenders—the
seriousness of the present offense and
the length of the prior record. The
other general finding is that apart from
the legal and offense variables, the
individualized justice of juvenile
courts produces racial disparities in
the sentencing of minority offenders.
Virtually every study of sentencing to
detention facilities and institutions
reports that judges confine minority
youths at a much higher rate than they
do white juveniles with the same
offenses and prior records. In part,
juvenile court sentencing laws still
instruct judges to consider juveniles’
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NO. 2
“real needs.” In a discretionary justice
system, youths from single-parent
families or who appear more threatening are more likely to be confined.
According to juvenile courts’ treatment ideology, judges’ discretionary
decisions should affect minority
youths more. The Progressive reformers intended for judges to focus on
youths’ social circumstances rather
than simply their offenses and
designed juvenile court policies to discriminate between “our children” and
“other people’s children.” In a society
like ours with great social and economic inequality, those most “in need”
are also those most “at risk” for more
severe juvenile court sentences.
Unfortunately, evaluations of juvenile “treatment” programs provide little evidence that training schools, the
most common form of institutional
treatment for the largest number of
serious and chronic delinquents, effectively treat youths or reduce their
future criminality. Evaluations of
these facilities reveal the continuing
gap between the rhetoric of rehabilitation and the reality of doing hard time,
which includes staff beatings of
inmates, the use of medical drugs for
control purposes, extensive reliance
on solitary confinement, and a virtual
absence of rehabilitation programs.
While there are some types of treatment and services that can improve the
life chances of some youths—small
programs that provide intensive and
integrated treatment for juveniles’
multiple problems—most states do not
provide them to delinquents generally.
Instead, juvenile court judges increasingly sentence a disproportionate
number of minority offenders to overcrowded custodial facilities that are
little more than youth prisons. These
punitive sentencing laws increase the
severity of juvenile dispositions and
allow legislators symbolically to
demonstrate their toughness.
Although both the rate and seriousness of juvenile crime have dropped
dramatically in the past few years, the
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NO. 2
recent spate of school shootings has
contributed to a growing fear of youth
crime, which the public incorrectly
perceives as having significantly
increased. Sensational media coverage
of young people as a different breed of
“super-predators” only heightens the
public’s concerns about the ability of
juvenile courts to rehabilitate chronic
and violent youth offenders and at the
same time to protect public safety.
Some politicians’ desire to demonstrate their toughness and to not
appear to be “soft on crime” leads
them to propose policies to transfer
even more youths to adult court or to
impose more severe penalties for
delinquents in juvenile courts even
though no evidence supports these
public policies as effective or sensible.
The creators of the juvenile court
envisioned a social service agency set
in a judicial forum, and they attempted
to combine social welfare and social
control into one forum. This has
proven to be an unworkable idea in
practice, because juvenile courts tend
to subordinate welfare considerations
to crime control concerns and to punish rather than treat youthful offenders. States do not define juvenile court
jurisdiction based on characteristics of
children for which they are not responsible and for which effective intervention could improve their lives. For
example, juvenile court law does not
define eligibility for welfare services
or create any enforceable rights
because of young people’s lack of
access to quality education, lack of
adequate housing or nutrition, unmet
health needs, or impoverished families—none of which are their fault.
Instead, states define juvenile court
jurisdiction based on a youth committing a crime, a factor that detracts from
a compassionate response. Unlike
social conditions that are not the fault
of young people, criminal behavior
represents the one characteristic for
which adolescent offenders do bear at
least some responsibility.
Integrate the Juvenile and
Criminal Justice Systems?
Some people suggest that if states separated social welfare goals from crime
control policies, then there would be
no need for a separate juvenile court
system. States could try all offenders—juveniles and adults—in one
integrated criminal justice system. But
states would need to modify their procedures and sentences to take account
of the fact that some of these offenders
are younger. They would need to sentence younger offenders differently
and more leniently than adults because
their youthfulness mitigates the seriousness of their crimes. They also
would need to provide them with additional procedural safeguards to offset
youths’ disadvantage in the justice
system. Combining enhanced procedural safeguards with shorter sentences could give youths greater protections and justice than they now
receive in either the juvenile or the
criminal justice system.
Some politicians argue that children are just as responsible for their
criminal behavior as any adult “old
enough to do the crime, old enough to
do the time.” But most other laws recognize that children do not have the
same level of maturity of judgment or
responsibility as adults and that’s why
they don’t have the right to vote, to
drink, or even to enter into a binding
contract. So, even when young people
commit serious crimes, states must
recognize youthfulness as a mitigating
factor when they sentence them.
The seriousness of a crime is based
on two factors—the harm and the
intent. While an offender’s age does
not change the nature of the injury
caused, it does affect the quality of the
person’s choice to engage in the conduct that caused that harm. To some
degree, young people differ socially,
physically, and psychologically from
adults. They don’t have the same
appreciation of consequences, the
same experience and knowledge, or
the same degree of self-control. Even
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
13
when young people commit serious
crimes, they are not as blameworthy as
adults and don’t deserve as severe a
punishment.
Shorter sentences for reduced
responsibility provide a more modest
and attainable reason to treat younger
offenders differently than adults than
the treatment claims advanced by Progressive child savers. It holds young
offenders accountable for their acts
because they possess some culpability
but reduces the severity of the consequences because youths’ choices are
less blameworthy than those of adults.
Adolescent development psychology,
criminal law doctrines, and sentencing
policy all provide reasons for judges to
give youthful offenders shorter sentences. Adolescence and criminal
careers may develop in tandem, and a
sliding scale of criminal sentences
based on an offender’s age would simply accomplish directly what the
blended jurisdiction statutes have indirectly attempted to do for years.
Because children do not have the same
degree of criminal responsibility as
adults, they could receive shorter sentences for reduced blame based simply
on their age. For example, a 14-yearold offender might receive 25 percent
of the adult penalty, a 16-year-old
defendant 50 percent, and an 18-yearold adult the regular penalty as currently occurs.
The “youth discount” justice system—a graduated age and culpability
sentencing scheme in an integrated
criminal justice system—would avoid
the inconsistencies that presently
occur when states try some young
offenders as juveniles and others as
adults, would avoid the punishment
gap that sometimes occurs when
youths make the transition from one
justice system to the other, and would
ensure similar consequences for similarly situated offenders.
An integrated system in which to
try and sentence younger offenders
would not require integrated prisons.
States should still maintain age-segregated youth correctional facilities in
14
order to protect young offenders from
adults and also to protect older prisoners from young toughs. Because all
young offenders eventually will return
to society, the state should provide
them with resources and opportunities
for self-improvement. A youth correctional policy should facilitate offenders’ constructive use of the time they
spend in the justice system and offer
them room to reform.
The original idea of the juvenile
court characterized delinquents as victims rather than as criminals and sent
them to state-run farms or training
schools to control and treat them. This
ideology denied youths’ personal
responsibility, reduced their duty to
exercise self-control, and eroded their
obligations to change. If there is any
silver lining in the current cloud of
get-tough policies, it is the affirmation
of responsibility. A culture that values
autonomous individuals must emphasize both freedom and responsibility.
A criminal law that bases sentences on
blameworthiness and responsibility
must recognize the physical, psychological, and social differences between
youths and adults. The real reason
states now bring young offenders to
juvenile courts is not to deliver social
services but because they committed a
crime. While youths should assume
some responsibility for their actions,
criminal justice policies also must
honestly recognize that these offenders are children and not the equals of
adults. Affirming youth’s partial
responsibility requires politicians to be
honest when a kid is a criminal and a
criminal is a kid. Once people recognize that simple truth, then justice can
follow. ♦
References
Ainsworth, Janet E. “Re-imagining
Childhood and Reconstructing the
Legal Order: The Case for Abolishing
the Juvenile Court.” North Carolina
Law Review 69 (1991).
Bishop, Donna M., and Charles S. Frazier. “Race Effects in Juvenile-Justice
Decision-Making: Findings of a
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
Statewide Analysis.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (1996).
Blumstein, Alfred. “Youth Violence,
Guns, and the Illicit-Drug Industry.”
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (1995).
Cauffman, Elizabeth, and Laurence
Steinberg. “The Cognitive and Affective Influence on Adolescent Decision-Making.” Temple Law Review 68
(1995).
Feld, Barry C. Bad Kids: Race and the
Transformation of the Juvenile Court.
New York: Oxford University Press,
1999.
——. “Criminalizing the American
Juvenile Court.” In Michael Tonry,
ed., Crime & Justice: An Annual
Review of Research. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993.
——. Justice for Children: The Right
to Counsel and the Juvenile Courts.
Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1993.
——. “The Transformation of the
Juvenile Court—Part II: Race and the
‘Crack Down’ on Youth Crime.”
Minnesota Law Review 84 (1999).
Grisso, Thomas. “Juveniles’ Capacities to Waive Miranda Rights: An
Empirical Analysis.” California Law
Review 68 (1980).
Platt, Anthony M. The Child Savers:
The Invention of Delinquency. 2d ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977.
Podkopacz, Marcy Rasmussen, and
Barry C. Feld. “The End of the Line:
An Empirical Study of Judicial Waiver.” Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology 86 (1996).
Snyder, Howard N., and Melissa Sickmund. Juvenile Offenders and Victims: A National Report. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1999.
Streib, Victor L. Death Penalty for
Juveniles. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Zimring, Franklin E. American Youth
Violence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
VOL. 23
NO. 2
Lawyers and Legal Advocacy in
Juvenile Courts: An Assessment
A national assessment reveals the many shortcomings
of the juvenile justice system.
Patricia Puritz, Sue Burrell, Robert Schwartz, Mark Soler, and Loren Warboys
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 15–17. © 2000 American Bar Association.
I
n 1967, In re Gault established a
constitutional right for children to
receive counsel in juvenile delinquency
proceedings.
Congress
expressed similar concern over the
need to safeguard children’s rights
when it enacted the Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention Act in
1974. During the past 20 years, a number of researchers have described and
analyzed the difficulties of children in
many jurisdictions in obtaining access
to counsel. Others have raised serious
concerns about the quality of representation when children obtain counsel.
Commentators have noted a variety
of barriers to appropriate counsel (e.g.,
parental reluctance to retain attorneys,
judicial hostility to appointment of
counsel, and improper “waivers” of
counsel by juveniles) and to effective
Adapted from A Call for Justice: An
Assessment of Access to Counsel and
Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings by Patricia
Puritz, Sue Burrell, Robert Schwartz,
Mark Soler, and Loren Warboys. 2nd
ed. A Report of the American Bar
Association Juvenile Justice Center,
Juvenile Law Center, and Youth Law
Center. Washington, D.C.: American
Bar Association, 1996. The project
was accomplished with funding from
the U.S. Department of Justice Office
of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention.
VOL. 23
NO. 2
representation by attorneys (such as
inadequate training, high turnover,
low status of juvenile court work,
insufficient support services). Overwhelming caseloads for many juvenile
defenders impede both access to counsel and quality of representation.
Juvenile Defender’s Job
The juvenile defense attorney’s job is
enormous. The assessment showed
that the average caseload carried by a
public defender often exceeded 500
cases per year and of that number
more than 300 were juvenile cases.
In addition to all the responsibilities involved in presenting the criminal case, juvenile defenders must also
gather information regarding clients’
individual histories, families, schooling, and community ties in order to
assist courts in diverting appropriate
cases, preventing unnecessary pretrial
detention, avoiding unnecessary transfers to adult court, and ordering individualized dispositions. Juvenile
defenders have an important role in
protecting their clients’ interests at
every stage of the proceedings, from
arrest and detention to pretrial proceedings, from adjudication to disposition to post-dispositional matters.
How effectively did these attorneys
fulfill their obligations to their clients?
Disturbing Findings
Many defenders vigorously and enthusiastically represented their young
clients despite extremely difficult
cases and tremendous systemic burdens. But this type of representation
was not widespread, raising serious
Promising Approaches
While the ABA assessment revealed substantial deficiencies in access to counsel and in the quality of representation in juvenile court, the system continues
to lumber along without breaking down and there are even some bright spots.
Project staff observed many individual defenders around the country who are
delivering first-rate legal services to their young clients. Defender programs
that appear to be of a high quality share a number of characteristics:
• Ability to limit or control caseloads
• Support for entering cases early and the flexibility to represent, or refer,
clients in related collateral matters such as special education
• Comprehensive initial and ongoing training and available resource materials
• Adequate nonlawyer support and resources
• Hands-on supervision of attorneys
• Work environments that value and nurture juvenile court practice
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
15
In Re Gault
In 1964, Gerald Gault, 15 years old, was accused of making a lewd phone call
to a neighbor. In the events that followed, Gault was jailed without notice to his
parents, and they were not informed of the charges against him. No counsel was
provided, and the accusing woman was not required to attend the proceedings.
Gault was sentenced to six years in a state training school. An adult convicted
of the same charge would have paid a maximum $50 fine or would have
received a sentence of two months in jail. The case went before the Supreme
Court, In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 40 (1967). Its decision more than 30 years ago
guaranteed a child’s right to counsel and reversed the informality and paternalism of juvenile courts. Justice Abe Fortas wrote, “Juvenile Court history has
once again demonstrated that unbridled discretion, however benevolently motivated, is frequently a poor substitute for principle and procedure.” Children are
to be afforded some of the protections given to adults accused of criminal
behavior—the right to be represented by an attorney, for example.
concerns that the interests of many
young people were being significantly
compromised and that many children
were being left literally defenseless.
General Office/Program Characteristics More than half the public
defender offices surveyed had at least
some attorneys working exclusively
on juvenile cases. In most offices,
public defenders rotated from other
courts to juvenile court, with the
option of continuing to work there. In
other offices, attorneys had to rotate to
adult criminal court in order to be promoted. Many public defenders did not
stay in juvenile court very long.
Among survey respondents, 55 percent stayed less than 24 months.
Most appointed counsel who represent children in juvenile court have
2–20 years’ experience in law practice, and in juvenile court from less
than one year to more than five years.
The caseloads shouldered by appointed attorneys are much less than those
of public defenders, but open files are
the single greatest impediment to the
effective disposition of juvenile cases.
Waiver of Counsel One of the most
disturbing findings was that large
numbers of youth appear in juvenile
court without lawyers: 34 percent
waive their right to counsel at the
detention hearing. Waivers of counsel
by young people are sometimes
induced by suggestions that lawyers
16
are not needed because no serious dispositional consequences are anticipated—or by parental concerns about
having to pay for any counsel that is
appointed.
Impact of High Caseloads High
caseloads are the single most important barrier to effective juvenile representation. They plague public defenders everywhere, and their negative
impact at every stage of the delinquency process cannot be overstated.
Almost none of the offices surveyed had a cap on the number of
juvenile cases it may handle, even
though more than two-thirds of public
defenders feel that caseload pressures
limit their ability to adequately represent youthful defendants. Appointed
counsel reported fewer such problems,
unless such counsel were representing
200 or more defendants.
Attorneys with heavy caseload burdens found it difficult to meet with
young clients to explain the proceedings before the all-important detention
hearings or to conduct the necessary
fact-finding investigations. Site visits
revealed the issues in more detail.
At several sites, children met their
lawyers for the first time as they sat
down at counsel table in detention
hearings. There were no prehearing
interviews, investigations, or research
—only a cursory introduction and a
quick look through the defendant’s
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
file. The impact of such proceedings is
devastating on the youth involved,
who take them as a clear signal that
their lawyers do not care about them
and are not going to make any real
effort on their behalf. One youngster
said that his hearing “went like a conveyor belt.”
High caseloads have a corrosive
impact on attorneys as well. Burnout,
job dissatisfaction, and anxiety over
never having enough time to do a
complete job are serious problems for
juvenile defenders who care about
their clients. Ultimately, the system as
it stands is likely to result in detention
for youth who pose no significant danger to themselves or others, a reduction in the accuracy of judicial decision making, unnecessary transfers of
juveniles to the adult system, and a
denial of fundamental fairness.
Some defender offices have
attempted to address the problem of
caseload pressures internally by allowing attorneys to ask for temporary
relief from new case assignments
when their existing workloads threaten
to erode the quality of their representation. Other offices provide for a team
approach, involving social workers
and investigators, as well as lawyers.
Appointment of Counsel It is critical
for counsel to appeal early in the life
of a case, as opposed to appearing for
the first time at the deposition. At first
appearances in court, judges may ask
about the events surrounding alleged
offenses, the circumstances of arrests,
the roles of other youths involved, or
clients’ prior contacts with the juvenile justice system. Attorneys who do
not have the answers to these questions may lose the initial opportunity
to present their client’s case in a favorable light. A better-prepared opposition may sink the defendant’s case at
the very outset of formal proceedings.
This is not to say that losing the
case is entirely the fault of the defense
for lack of preparation, even considering the heavy caseloads being shouldered by public defenders. Many
VOL. 23
NO. 2
defenders are not appointed until the
detention hearing and, in many locations, a single attorney handles most
detention hearings and accepts the
appointment of counsel for a panel of
attorneys. The cases are then sent
“downtown” for proper assignment to
members of the pool, a procedure that
may delay the beginning of actual representation for many days.
Pretrial Preparation/Trial Performance It goes without saying that
attorneys who barely have time to
cover all their cases on any particular
day do not have the time and energy to
write effective pretrial motions. The
inadequacy of training in this area
adds to the problem, as does the lack
of access to specialized texts, computerized legal research, paralegals, bilingual staff or translators, and adequate
space for interviewing clients.
In addition, courthouse culture may
deter attorneys from filing motions or
aggressively pursuing sound defenses
at trial. In many juvenile courts, there
is a high premium placed on “going
along” and “getting along.” Many
judges, themselves swamped by their
trial calendars, frown on defense attorneys who take on active adversarial
roles.
Post-trial Maneuvers Most attorneys
who responded to the ABA survey
reported that they are able to adequately prepare for post-trial work that may
be needed to wrap up a case. On-site
visits, however, revealed a very different picture. Many attorneys openly
acknowledged that their representation
was deficient at this phase. The main
reasons cited were the lack of time to
keep up with placement (jail, farms,
camps, probation) and other options
for the client and an overall lack of
alternatives in the system itself.
As at the other stages of representation, high caseloads make it difficult,
if not impossible, for public defenders
to provide effective representation at
the end of a trial. The problem is compounded by the lack of resources and
support.
VOL. 23
NO. 2
About This Report
A Call for Justice: An Assessment of Access to Counsel and Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings is a national assessment of the state of
representation of youth in juvenile court and an evaluation of training, support,
and other needs of legal practitioners. Concluded in 1995, it sought information
about successful work being done in the field as well as problems in the representation of youth. It examined all stages of representation, from the time of
arrest to that of discharge from the juvenile justice system, and it covered all
regions of the country including urban, suburban, and rural areas.
The assessment consisted of a national survey of hundreds of juvenile
defenders, site visits to a variety of jurisdictions, interviews with people working in the field, client interviews, an extensive literature search, and meetings
and consultation with the project’s national advisory board. The assessment
focused on public defenders and court-appointed counsel. Also examined was
the small but important role played by law school clinical programs and nonprofit children’s law centers. Observations were compared with the Juvenile
Justice Standards developed by the Institute for Judicial Administration and the
American Bar Association.
Appeals An alarming aspect of juvenile defense is the infrequency with
which appeals are taken. Among the
public defender offices responding to
the survey, 32 percent are not even
authorized to handle appeals. Of the
remaining 68 percent of the offices
that may file appeals, 46 percent took
no appeals during the year prior to the
survey. Appointed lawyers also rarely
file appeals: three-quarters are authorized to appeal, but 80 percent did not.
Among the public defenders surveyed, almost one-third routinely
ended their involvement once their
clients had been sentenced, with
appointed attorneys at about 40 percent.
Training and Support There are
serious gaps in the training available
to juvenile defenders: 78 percent of
public defender offices do not even
have a budget for lawyers to attend
training programs. About half the others lack a training program for all new
attorneys, an ongoing training program, or a section in the office training
manual devoted to juvenile justice.
About two-fifths do not have a specialized manual for juvenile court
lawyers, and about a third do not
include juvenile delinquency work in
the general training program.
Of those offices offering training,
three-quarters do not cover pretrial
motions; two-thirds, transfer to adult
courts; three-fifths, client-specific
detention alternatives; and over half,
child development issues. Similarly,
only 38 percent of the appointed
lawyers reported the availability of a
criminal law training program for representing indigent juvenile defendants.
Attorneys at a number of sites
voiced a need for staff social workers
to assist in client needs assessment and
alternative disposition plans. Others
spoke of the need for secretarial support, investigators, paralegals, and
computers. In one jurisdiction,
lawyers did not have even the very
basics of law practice—desks, telephones, files, or offices. They simply
used the bare counsel table in the
courtroom—even when the judge and
court clerk were present—to conduct
their business.
Over half the public defender
offices lack bilingual attorneys available to communicate directly with
Spanish-speaking clients (the most
commonly spoken language other than
English), and a quarter do not have
Spanish-speaking translators on their
staffs. ♦
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
17
Juvenile Court:
Today & Tomorrow
What is the forecast for the juvenile courts?
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 18–20. © 2000 American Bar Association.
T
he legal climate for youth is
changing. Today, there is no
state that retains an inviolate
legal distinction between the status of
“juvenile” and “adult,” and the threshold between the two categories seems
to narrow each time a new incident of
youth violence captures the news
media’s attention. For example, when
four Arkansas students and their
teacher died in a schoolyard shooting
in 1998, many people demanded that
the shooters, boys aged 11 and 13, be
tried in criminal (or adult) court. Such
extreme violence by the very young is
rare, but it does sway public opinion—
as well as voters, elections, laws, and
judicial renderings.
Should the concept of delinquency
disappear from the law? Should all
people, irrespective of age, who commit criminal law violations be tried in
the same courts? This question is
being hotly debated by those who wish
to abolish juvenile court, those who
wish to preserve it, and the policy
makers who must make the final decision on what to do with juveniles who
run afoul of the law.
addition, others argue for the abolition
of the juvenile court because it does
not provide adequate due process protections for children while imposing
severe punishment. According to abolitionists, all delinquency cases should
be processed through criminal court,
while juvenile court would remain a
noncriminal, quasi-civil court handling truancy, curfew, and other such
cases.
On the other side, preservationists
continue to support the juvenile
court’s rehabilitative goals and would
retain its exclusive jurisdiction over
youthful offenders, fine-tuning the
system to better distinguish between
delinquency and the underlying problems of abused, neglected, and dependent children. This camp holds that the
law places fundamental restrictions on
youth; for example, they cannot vote,
make wills, enter into enforceable contracts, independently join the military,
or hold property in their own names. If
the law makes these distinctions, why
not make a distinction when youth are
brought before the courts for criminal
law violations?
The Argument
Transfers
As yet, no state has formally abolished
juvenile court’s jurisdiction over
youthful offenders, but every state has
taken significant steps in that direction. Supporting this trend, most abolitionists insist that the juvenile court is
not equipped to handle the serious
crimes committed by youth today. In
A transfer is a legal mechanism used
to move youth to criminal court. All
states have such mechanisms, and
almost all have been using them in a
greater number of cases. There are
three types of transfer.
Judicial Waiver A juvenile court
judge waives the jurisdiction of the
18
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
juvenile court over the accused after
considering the merits of the transfer.
Most states have removed the judge’s
role in making these decisions in cases
involving serious offenses, and the
majority of transfers are made either
automatically (by law) or by state or
local prosecutors.
Legislative Exclusion These increasingly popular laws automatically
place certain types of cases (such as
those involving murder, robbery, and
rape) into criminal court when other
criteria are met (e.g., these may
involve age and prior record).
Prosecutorial Discretion At their
own discretion, prosecutors select the
arena in which the juvenile is to be
tried. Prosecutor transfers are not subject to judicial review or to the procedural standards set by the U.S.
Supreme Court for other transfer
cases. Usually, the youth so transferred have been charged with serious
offenses or have lengthy arrest
records, although research indicates
that a significant number of first-time
offenders and nonserious offenders
have been prosecuted as adults under
this scheme.
Today, about half of juveniles
transferred to criminal court receive
sentences comparable to what they
would receive from juvenile court.
Some 20 percent actually get lighter
sentences because of the stricter judicial scrutiny required. Research in
Florida and New York shows that children who are tried as adults are more
VOL. 23
NO. 2
likely to re-offend and commit more
serious offenses than comparable
youth retained in juvenile court.
Despite inconsistent results, transfer is
viewed as offering a potential solution
for handling youthful offenders
thought to be beyond redemption. It
sustains a high degree of support.
Even though transfer does not guarantee any particular outcome, including harsher sentences, voters disillusioned by gang activity, drive-by
shootings, and school violence have
interpreted its existence as an example
of “tough-on-crime” policies by politicians. And once transfer is allowed for
the harshest law violations alleged
against youth, its expanded use for
lesser offenses tends to be encouraged.
Illinois, for example, began using
transfer in 1982 only for juveniles
over the age of 14 who were charged
with murder, rape, armed robbery, and
other such violent crimes. By 1995, its
transfer provisions had been expanded
to include felonies committed by
gangs and drug activities within 1,000
feet of schools or public housing.
Process and Proposals
The juvenile court was invented to
combat youth crime in a rehabilitative
rather than punitive manner. While
created with an informal, social welfare approach, the original juvenile
court has been replaced by a network
of more formal courts that run the
gauntlet of preliminary hearings,
motions for appointment of counsel,
subpoenas to appear, speedy trial procedures, and sentencing guidelines.
If juvenile delinquents are to be
assimilated more and more into the
criminal court system, lawmakers
must decide what type of court process
is to be used for what type of crime.
Considerations include the age/mental
competence of the accused and the
nature of the crime. Should juveniles
alleged to have committed unlawful
acts resulting in “harm” be separated
from those accused of lesser criminal
law violations? Should the case of a
VOL. 23
NO. 2
13-year-old accused of shoplifting be
processed through the same system as
that of a 17-year-old accused of drug
dealing? Would the conviction of a
10-year-old constitute the “first strike”
under a “three-strikes-and-you’re-infor-life” rule? The choices are currently limited by restrictive state laws that
tend to have an “all-or-nothing”
nature.
Many delinquent youth come from
families in which a multitude of interrelated legal issues are presented but
lost in the existing system, where
jurisdictional responsibility is sometimes split among different courts. A
common result is that critical issues
such as mental health needs, parental
abuse, retardation, lack of competence
to stand trial, and problems at school
are downplayed in the rush to criminal
justice.
Family Court
One proposal is to develop a system of
unified family courts to handle virtually all the affairs of youth who are
brought to the attention of the judicial
system for whatever reason. Such
courts would handle, in a single setting
before one judge, all issues dealing
with the family and its problems,
which might include delinquency, status offenses, dependency, abuse,
domestic relations, paternity, emancipation, domestic violence, adoption,
termination of parental rights, and
mental health and mental retardation
placements.
Supporters of this plan emphasize
that a single court can deal with a variety of problems more creatively and
comprehensively than is possible
under the current dual juvenile/criminal system. Even if a formal unified
family court structure is unfeasible in
a particular jurisdiction, lawmakers
could seek better coordination of all
family-related legal issues among the
various courts that hear these matters
through docket coordination and the
assignment of a single judge to hear
multiple cases.
Specialty Courts
Alternative court models have been
established in the United States and
abroad that narrowly focus on specific
problems or apply innovative systems
of case resolution. These are some of
the more interesting experiments:
Drug Courts First appearing in the
1980s, these courts offer legal incentives such as deferred prosecution for
drug addicts willing to undergo drug
treatment. With judges, prosecutors,
defenders, and drug treatment specialists working as a team, drug courts
monitor compliance with the treatment
plan. As of 1997, nearly 250 drug
courts were functioning in the United
States, with at least 25 designed exclusively for juvenile offenders.
Gun Courts Similar in function to
drug courts, gun courts such as those
in Detroit and Indianapolis use intensive behavioral and attitudinal interventions in cases involving weapons
charges to decrease an orientation
toward guns and increase the awareness of the harm guns can do.
Teen Courts With several hundred
programs already in place nationwide
and spreading rapidly, teen courts are
providing a voluntary, nonjudicial
alternative for youths charged with
minor law violations. Rather than
remaining within the traditional court
system, young offenders are referred
to teen courts for sentencing by their
peers. Some programs allow peer
determination of guilt or innocence.
Teen courts are often sponsored by
schools, juvenile courts, probation
offices, or law enforcement agencies.
Community Courts Described as
M.A.S.H. units for neighborhood
crime problems, community courts,
which draw on local knowledge of
offenders and their families, offer a
less bureaucratic and more timely
response to local criminal behavior.
Typically, an offender in community
court will be required to complete an
agreement that may include but is not
limited to restitution payments, counseling, and community service. One of
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
19
the more widely known community
court programs is Manhattan’s Midtown Community Court, which is one
of the busiest arraignment courts in
New York City.
Alternative Dispute Resolution
(ADR) A process rather than a court,
ADR usually involves relatively
minor, nonviolent offenders who participate in carefully structured meetings among offenders, victims and
their families, and other community
members. Discussions involve the
harm resulting from the offender’s
behavior and ways to repair any damage that was done. When used with
young offenders, the process is
designed to encourage families to
exert their natural influence over the
youngsters. Preliminary findings show
that juveniles who meet with their victims in the company of family members seem unlikely to engage in future
illegal behavior.
Federal Activity
While the administration of juvenile
justice has traditionally been in the
hands of state and local governments,
the U.S. Congress has at times
imposed some influence over this
authority by setting goals for and providing grants to juvenile courts that
follow federal guidelines. The recent
rash of school shootings has further
piqued the federal government’s interest in asserting more control over
details such as mandatory minimum
sentencing and the availability of
youths’ police records to schools.
Congress took its first major step
into the juvenile justice arena in 1974
by passing the Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention Act, which
• Introduced a strong federal presence in juvenile justice by creating
the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention.
• Committed the federal government
to separating juvenile offenders
from adults in institutional settings.
20
• Recognized that the primary
responsibility for effecting this policy lies with state and local governments, who received grants for following these policies. A separate
grant program was set up to give
money to public and private nonprofit agencies to develop innovative techniques for dealing with
youthful offenders.
Subsequent amendments in 1980
encouraged the removal of status
offenders (children charged with
offenses based solely on their age,
such as truancy from school or running away from home) from institutions and, in 1988, mandated a study
on the disproportionate number of
children of color in the juvenile justice
system and steps to address that disproportionality, if it existed.
More recently, both the House and
the Senate approved different versions
of the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of
1999. When the measure was sent to a
conference committee for resolution,
disagreement over different provisions
in the bills left the proposal in limbo
for the Second Session of the 106th
Congress to take up again in 2000.
(Since Congressional sessions are for
two years, bills not disposed of one
way or the other during the first session are carried over to the second session with no change in status.) Since
the Senate and House versions emphasized different points and conflicted in
some areas, the final provisions of the
bill are yet to be determined by the
conference committee. However, the
final legislation could permit the
following:
• Reauthorization of the Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act with a weakening of its
provisions relating to the level of
separation required between juveniles and adults in adult prisons and
jails, and the overrepresentation of
children of color in the juvenile justice system
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
• Sole discretion on the part of prosecutors as to whether youths 14 or
older who are charged with serious
felonies or gang offenses may be
tried as adults in federal court; with
approval by the attorney general,
similarly situated 13-year-olds
might also be charged as adults
• Availability to the public of federal
juvenile records to the same extent
as adult records
• Requirement of a minimum 24hour secure detention of any youth
who brings a firearm to school as a
condition of states receiving funds
“Cultural provisions” of the draft bill
include allowing the display of the
Ten Commandments on state property, including schools; condemning the
portrayal of violence by the entertainment industry, including TV, concerts,
and comic books; implementing studies of such violence; and providing
block-grant funding for character education in schools. ♦
Resources
American Bar Association, Juvenile
Justice Center. “House Passes Juvenile Justice Bill,” www.abanet.org
/crimjust/juvjus/61799hill.html,
December 11, 1999.
Butts, Jeffrey A., and Adele V. Harrell. Delinquents or Criminals: Policy
Options for Young Offenders. Crime
Policy Report, The Urban Institute,
June 1998.
Coalition for Juvenile Justice. A Celebration or a Wake? The Juvenile
Court After 100 Years, 1998 Annual
Report. Washington, D.C.
VOL. 23
NO. 2
An Effective Response to Teenage Crime Is
Possible—and Cities Are Showing the Way
Jack Levin
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 21–23. © 2000 American Bar Association.
Obscured by the tragic shootings last month in Littleton,
Colo., and by recent, similar incidents at schools in Paducah, Ky.; Pearl, Miss.; Jonesboro, Ark.; and Springfield,
Ore., there is actually encouraging news to report on the
subject of crime, especially crime by and among young
people in urban areas.
To cite a positive trend, even as we try to fathom the horrific rampage at Littleton’s Columbine High School, is not
to minimize that calamity. Recognizing effective methods
of reducing violence in urban areas may, in fact, even help
suburban and rural communities devise preemptive programs of their own.
For several years now, the rate of serious crime in localities around the United States has been declining. Indeed,
the homicide rate for the nation as a whole recently plummeted to a level that hasn’t been seen since the late 1960s.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the rate
of murders, for example, fell from 9.4 per 100,000 in 1993
to 6.8 per 100,000 in 1997. Part of the reason for the drop
is that as baby boomers mature, they are becoming less
likely to engage in criminal—or other risky—behavior.
What’s exciting, however, is that the reduction in serious offenses over the past few years includes teenage perpetrators as well. The rate of homicides committed by
young people had risen sharply in the late 1980s, but it
started dropping in the early ’90s, although it is still above
the low levels reached in the 1970s and early ’80s.
Explaining the Drop in Teenage Crime
To explain decreasing teenage crime, studies have focused
on a recent decline in the crack epidemic and its accompanying street wars. Experts have also cited zero-tolerance
policing, greater handgun control, and other factors. Evidence suggests that all of those phenomena have indeed
helped to reduce serious offenses committed by youngsters.
Jack Levin is director of the Brudnick Center on Violence
and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston.
Reprinted from The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol.
XLV, no. 35 (May 7, 1999): B10–11. This article is reprinted by permission of the author.
VOL. 23
NO. 2
But more important than all of those elements, I believe,
is an incipient cultural revolution: a profound change in
how Americans meet the needs of children and teenagers,
especially in urban areas.
According to my Northeastern University colleague, the
criminologist James Alan Fox, the murder rate for perpetrators in the 14-to-17 age group declined to 16.5 per
100,000 in 1997, after having soared to 30.2 per 100,000 in
1993. Similarly, the homicide rate for young adults aged 18
to 24 rose to 41.3 per 100,000 in 1993, then dropped to 33.2
in 1997. The criminologist Alfred Blemstein, of Carnegie
Mellon University, has suggested that the competition to
sell crack and other drugs, after a decade of unabated warfare among youthful dealers, has finally subsided. Many of
the victors are, of course, still on the streets, peddling their
wares. But the losers are no longer causing trouble for bigcity residents—they are, Blemstein says, dead or incarcerated. At the same time, a beefed-up criminal-justice system
has taken many handguns off the streets and away from
teenage predators.
That explanation is fine, as far as it goes. But there is
more to the story. Young people have reduced their
involvement in a broad range of serious offenses, even in
neighborhoods where crack has been virtually absent, and
in types of illegal activities unrelated to crack.
For example, hate crimes—usually committed by young
people—have declined, too. In 1997, the FBI recorded an
unprecedented decrease nationwide in assaults, threats,
harassments, and vandalism based on hate or bias. And
according to the Anti-Defamation League, since 1994 there
has been a decline in anti-Semitic hate crimes, including
those on college campuses, following a protracted period of
increase through the 1980s and early 1990s.
Consider another example. Northeastern University
sociologist Benjamin Steiner and I have studied riots in
which young people, in groups
of 50 or more, looted, damaged
property, and/or injured people.
We have discovered that nationwide the number of such acts in
urban high schools and colleges,
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
21
at concerts, or on city streets fell from 23 in the academic
year 1990–91 to only nine in 1996–97. Moreover, most of
the recent riots we documented could be regarded not as
collective expressions of unbridled emotion, but as instrumental and rational acts of protest precipitated by a specific episode—for example, a perceived act of racism, an
apparently unjustified arrest by the police, or budget cutbacks with a major impact on a certain group. In other
words, even those few riots were not, for the most part, acts
of senseless violence.
Although this fact will provide no solace to those grieving in Littleton, violence in elementary and secondary
schools is also in decline. Notwithstanding the several highly publicized cases, the American Association of School
Administrators reports that violent deaths in schools nationwide fell last year by some 30 percent from 1997. According to a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, the number of shooting deaths at schools around the
country decreased to 40 during the academic year 1997–98,
compared with 55 in 1992–93. Even in the wake of last
month’s tragedy in Colorado, the downward trend may well
continue through 1999. It is worth noting that the recent
spate of school shootings by teenagers has, by and large,
occurred in rural, suburban, and small-town America—
areas that the crack-cocaine wars hardly touched.
dents what parents used to teach: to
have empathy for victims, to control
one’s anger, and to manage impulsive
behavior. Finally, through athletics
and other extracurricular programs,
schools are increasingly providing
what is lacking after the school day
ends—adult supervision, guidance, and control.
Schools are not the only institutions that have stepped
forward to play guiding roles in children’s lives. Churches
run athletics and gun–buy-back programs. Municipalities
have beefed up funds for community policing, and residents
have formed partnerships with police. In Boston, which is
seen as a model in dealing with youth crime, 34 teenagers
were arrested on murder charges in 1990—but the number
dropped to three in 1998. During the same period, the city
saw a proliferation of programs geared toward at-risk
teenagers: the Thousand Black Men Basketball Mentoring
Program, Teen Empowerment, Gang Peace, the Ten Point
Coalition of urban ministers, the Boston Private Industry
Council, Choice Through Education, Baker House, Summer of Opportunity, Operation Night Light, the Street
Workers Program, Youth Violence Strike Force ... the list
goes on.
Some Localities Lack Resources
A Grass-Roots Effort Paid Off
The depth and breadth of the recent turnaround in teenage
crime beg for an explanation that includes but goes beyond
crack, zero-tolerance policing, gun control, and other
important variables. That fuller explanation is that, in urban
centers across the country, residents are re-establishing a
sense of community as they begin to recognize that they can
make a difference in the lives of local youths. At the grassroots level, parents, teachers, psychologists, religious and
business leaders, social workers, college students, and
police officials are working together to take the glamour out
of destructive behavior and to provide constructive activities for after-school hours. Through myriad new programs,
adults are giving inner-city teenagers what they have lacked
for more than two decades—supervision, structure, guidance, and hope for the future.
Schools have been at the center of effective community
efforts to minimize teenage violence, often taking on
responsibilities that families previously performed. More
and more high-school principals have adopted a zero-tolerance policy regarding students who carry firearms to
school. According to the Education Department, during the
1996–97 school year—the first in which such statistics
were compiled—there were an astonishing 6,093 expulsions for firearm violations in schools around the country.
In addition, by means of conflict-resolution programs built
into the curriculum, many schools are teaching their stu-
22
Not all localities have accomplished as much. While cities
such as Boston and New York have enjoyed great success
fighting crime by youths and bringing down the associated
murder rates, other cities—New Orleans, Baltimore, and
Detroit among them—have fared less well. They are poorer, cannot afford to devote sufficient resources to law
enforcement and social programs, and tend to regard crime
as out of control and beyond grassroots intervention.
New Orleans, for example, has a population close to that
of Boston—both have about a half-million people. But New
Orlean’s median household income is $18,000, little more
than half of Boston’s $30,000. New Orleans has 1,302
police officers patrolling the streets, about half the number
that Boston has. And New Orleans does not have nearly the
number of youth-oriented community programs that Boston
has. New Orleans’ murder rate—though improved somewhat from that of the early 1990s—was seven times as high
as Boston’s last year.
In Baltimore, where more than 300 people have been
murdered in each of the past nine years, widespread poverty prevents companies in the city from generating enough
summer jobs to keep most local teenagers busy. In contrast,
thanks to a combination of public and private contributions,
Boston provides in excess of 10,000 summer jobs for
teenagers, more than twice Baltimore’s total—even though
Baltimore’s population is roughly 150,000 more than
Boston’s.
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
VOL. 23
NO. 2
Similarly, unlike Boston, cities such as Detroit and New
Orleans simply cannot afford to support a range of afterschool programs for teenagers between 2 P.M. and 7 P.M.
Moreover, in many cities, when youngsters are expelled for
carrying a weapon to school, they are likely to walk the
streets unsupervised. Typically, Boston schools refer the
students they expel for violence to the Public Schools
Counseling and Intervention Center, an alternative school
that last year alone worked with almost 6,000 youths.
Neither criminologists nor municipalities pay appropriate heed to the effectiveness of civic programs. It is, after
all, easier to focus on easily quantifiable phenomena—
homicide rates, arrests on drug or firearm charges, the number of youths incarcerated, the number of police officers on
the street—than it is to try to understand how much of a
positive effect an army of involved parents and teachers and
clerics and mentors can have. Police—who are invariably
blamed when crime rates go up—are understandably quick
to take most of the credit when those rates go down, even if
OJJDP: Excellent Juvenile Justice
Resources ...
Juvenile Justice, “100th Anniversary of the Juvenile
Court: 1899–1999” Issue (vol. 4, no. 2)
Available online at ojjdp.ncjrs.org/pubs/general.html
#178255, this issue of Juvenile Justice highlights the
many reasons to celebrate the court’s centennial;
describes its inception and traces its progress; looks at
how its past will help direct its future; offers ways to put
research to work for prevention; and introduces the
OJJDP’s Juvenile Court Centennial Education Initiative,
which has been designed to help revitalize the court and
restore public confidence in the work of the juvenile justice system. Lead article by Judge J. Dean Lewis, past
president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Excellent companion piece to this
VOL. 23
NO. 2
a range of other civic factors contribute substantially to the
welcome trend. But law-and-order tunnel vision immensely underplays the value, and the potential, of civic activity.
We can all take credit for civic programs that keep some
children safer. But then we must all be concerned when, in
locales lacking a sustained commitment to such programs
or enough resources to support them, so many other children are left behind.
Moreover, the mayhem of Littleton and similar locales
reflects a sad paradox. Because nonurban communities
have considered themselves largely immune from the
plague of city violence, they haven’t organized the kind of
preemptive civic programs that some metropolises were
scared into starting within the past decade. If Littleton has
startled the nation’s suburban and rural areas out of their
complacency, then cities’ hard-won experience might benefit the United States as a whole.
In city, town, and country, a stimulating place to go, a
constructive thing to do, and family and friends to do it with
are still our best insurance against youths becoming perpetrators, or victims, of violence.
Update edition. To order and to join the Juvenile Justice
Clearinghouse (JJC) mailing list, e-mail your request to
[email protected]; write JJC, P.O. Box 600,
Rockville, MD 20849-6000; or phone (800) 638-8736.
Mention order number NCJ 178255.
Giving Kids a Chance to Make a Better Choice: A
Guide for Youth Advocates This user-friendly guide
gives juvenile-justice practitioners, child advocates, and
youth-serving organizations tools to engage communities in an exciting campaign mobilizing local and national support for the juvenile court’s rehabilitative
approach. Ideas for events and activities included. For
a free copy, call the Juvenile Court Centennial Initiative
at (202) 637-0590; FAX (202) 347-0493; E-mail:
[email protected].
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
23
At the Supreme Court
Three High Court cases that affirmed
the constitutional rights of juvenile offenders
and changed juvenile court proceedings
Charles F. Williams
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 24–26. © 2000 American Bar Association.
L
ess than 35 years ago, the rules
and policies governing juvenile
court proceedings remained rooted in “social welfare philosophy.”
Hearings were deliberately “informal”
and free of the due process protections
accorded adult criminal defendants.
The state was said to be acting as
parens patria—as a kind of parent or
guardian of the children within the
juvenile court’s jurisdiction. The aim
of the juvenile courts was not to assign
criminal responsibility and punishment but to rehabilitate and protect the
child.
Juvenile court proceedings were
supposed to be cooperative rather than
adversarial. In theory, the hearings
were civil, not criminal, in nature, and
all the players—including the judge
and the state—had the same paternalistic goal of helping the child. In practice, juvenile courts afforded children
with fewer rights than adult courts
accorded criminal defendants charged
with committing the same acts.
Kent v. United States
In Kent v. United States, 383 U.S. 541
(1966), the Supreme Court was confronted with the case of 16-year-old
Morris A. Kent, Jr., who, after being
“waived” into adult court in the District of Columbia, was tried and conCharles F. Williams is editor of
Preview of U.S. Supreme Court
Cases, a publication of the ABA Division for Public Education in Chicago.
24
victed on six counts of housebreaking
and robbery and acquitted on two rape
counts by reason of insanity.
Like juvenile courts in other states,
the D.C. Juvenile Court had procedures in place that allowed it to
“waive” its jurisdiction over serious
juvenile offenders and send them to
adult court so that they could be prosecuted and punished as adults. So, facing a sentence of up to 90 years in
adult prison, as opposed to a maximum of five years’ juvenile detention,
Kent challenged the adequacy of the
procedures the D.C. Juvenile Court
had followed in determining that he
was not amenable to treatment as a
juvenile and had to be tried as an
adult.
Writing for the Supreme Court,
Justice Abe Fortas agreed at the outset
that the law envisioned the state’s role
as one of parens patriae rather than
one of prosecuting attorney and judge.
“But,” he added, “the admonition to
function in a ‘parental’ relationship
is not an invitation to procedural
arbitrariness.”
After reviewing the record in
Kent’s case, Fortas declared that the
juvenile court’s order waiving him to
adult court was invalid: the juvenile
court’s procedures had violated Kent’s
rights under the District of Columbia’s
own Juvenile Court Act. Fortas reasoned that, before Kent could properly
be waived to adult court, he had a
statutory right to “a hearing, including
access by his counsel to the social
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
records and probation or similar
reports which presumably are considered by the court, and to a statement
of reasons for the Juvenile Court’s
decision.”
“We believe,” Fortas wrote, “that
this result is required by the [D.C.
Juvenile Court] statute, read in the
context of constitutional principles
relating to due process and the assistance of counsel.” Thus, Fortas suggested, although the Supreme Court
was deciding Kent’s case on the basis
of the statutory rights guaranteed to
juveniles by statute in the District of
Columbia, the Constitution itself also
might require procedures beyond
those typically accorded juveniles in
other waiver proceedings around the
country.
Fortas noted, for example, that there
was no indication that “the denial of
rights available to adults was offset,
mitigated or explained by action of the
Government, as parens patriae, evidencing the special solicitude for juveniles commanded by the Juvenile
Court Act.” And he cautioned:
While there can be no doubt of
the original laudable purpose of
juvenile courts, studies and critiques in recent years raise serious
questions as to whether actual performance measures well enough
against theoretical purpose to make
tolerable the immunity of the
process from the reach of constitutional guaranties applicable to
adults. There is much evidence that
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NO. 2
some juvenile courts, including
that of the District of Columbia,
lack the personnel, facilities and
techniques to perform adequately
as representatives of the State in a
parens patriae capacity, at least
with respect to children charged
with law violation. There is evidence, in fact, that there may be
grounds for concern that the child
receives the worst of both worlds:
that he gets neither the protections
accorded to adults nor the solicitous care and regenerative treatment postulated for children.
Still, Kent cannot be described as
more than a strong warning that the
Fourteenth Amendment’s due process
clause might apply to juveniles facing
the prospect of being committed to a
state institution. A year later, however,
this holding was made explicit. The
case was In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1
(1967), and once again, the author was
Justice Fortas.
In Re Gault
Gerald Gault was 15 years old when
he was charged with making “lewd
telephone calls,” which Justice Fortas
later described as being “of the irritatingly offensive, adolescent, sex variety.” At the time, Gerald was still subject to a six months’ probation order
stemming from his having been in the
company of another boy who had
stolen a wallet from a woman’s purse.
What happened next seemed to
confirm Justice Fortas’s worst fears
about the consequences of the juvenile
courts’ studied informality. Gerald’s
neighbor, “Mrs. Cook,” phoned the
police to complain about the obscene
call. When Gerald was picked up and
taken to the Detention Home, his
mother and father were both at work.
No steps were taken to advise them
that their son had been seized.
When “Officer Flagg,” the deputy
probation officer (who was also superintendent of the Detention Home),
filed a delinquency petition with the
court, it was not served on the Gaults.
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The petition in any event made no reference to the factual basis for the judicial action it was initiating. It stated
only that “said minor is under the age of
eighteen years, and is in need of the protection of this Honorable Court; [and
that] said minor is a delinquent minor.”
The complaining neighbor, Mrs.
Cook, did not attend the hearing
regarding “the care and custody of
said minor.” No one was sworn at this
hearing, and no transcript, recording,
or memorandum of the proceeding
was prepared, leading to later disputes
over whether Gerald had made any
incriminating statements in response
to the judge’s questions. At the conclusion of the hearing, the judge simply said that he would “think about it.”
Gerald was taken back to the Detention Home.
On June 11 or 12, after having been
detained since June 8, Gerald was
released and driven home. There was
never any explanation of why he was
kept in the Detention Home nor any
explanation of why he was released.
But at 5 P.M. on the day of Gerald’s
release, Mrs. Gault received a note
from Officer Flagg. It was on plain
paper, not letterhead, and consisted of
the following sentence:
Mrs. Gault:
Judge McGhee has set Monday June 15, 1964 at 11:00 A.M.
as the date and time for further
Hearings on Gerald’s delinquency
/s/Flagg
On June 15, Mrs. Cook once again
was not present at the hearing. Gerald
Gault’s mother asked that Mrs. Cook be
present “so she could see which boy
that done the talking, the dirty talking
over the phone.” The juvenile judge
responded that “she didn’t have to be
present at that hearing.” The judge
never once spoke or communicated
with Mrs. Cook. A “referral report”
written by the probation officers was
then filed with the court, but it was
never disclosed to Gerald or his parents.
When this second “hearing” had
ended, the juvenile court judge simply
declared Gerald a juvenile delinquent
and committed him to reform school
for six years. Under Arizona law, an
adult charged with the same crime
would have been subject to a fine of
between $5 and $50, or imprisonment
for not more than two months.
Gerald’s parents challenged the
constitutionality of both the Arizona
Juvenile Code and the procedure that
was used in their son’s case. The state
Supreme Court agreed with the Gaults
that the Constitution’s due process
guarantees apply to juvenile delinquency proceedings, but it also held
that the Arizona Juvenile Code
“impliedly” implemented the “due
process concept,” and that due process
was not offended by any of the
procedures that lead to Gault’s
commitment.
Justice Fortas disagreed and for the
first time flatly declared that, under
the Fourteenth Amendment, a juvenile
who faces proceedings that might
result in his confinement has constitutional rights
• to notice of the exact charges
against him (and to have this notice
provided to his parents as well)
• to counsel (and the right to have
counsel appointed if his parents
cannot afford to hire one)
• to confront and cross-examine the
witnesses against him
• to the privilege against self-incrimination (and the right to be
informed of this privilege)
In the 1970s, the Supreme Court
proceeded to answer some of the lingering procedural questions left open
by Gault. Yes, juveniles must be
proven guilty of a delinquent act
“beyond a reasonable doubt” rather
than by the less challenging “preponderance of the evidence” standard
applicable in civil trials, said In re
Winship, 397 U.S. 385 (1970). But no,
juveniles do not have a constitutional
right to a trial by jury, said McKeiver
v. Pennsylvania, 403 U.S. 528 (1971).
Still, it did not seem likely that any
juvenile justice case could rival Gault
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
25
in sheer drama until, in the late 1980s,
one did.
Thompson v. Oklahoma
The case was captioned Thompson v.
Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 815 (1988), and
the question was one of life or death.
William Wayne Thompson was 15
years old when he brutally murdered
his former brother-in-law, Charles
Keene. His motive was Keene’s abuse
of Thompson’s sister. His method was
to shoot Keene in the head, cut his
throat, and throw him in the river.
Thompson was waived into adult
court, where he was convicted and
sentenced to death. The Court of
Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma
affirmed.
In the Supreme Court, Justice
O’Connor’s concurrence, combined
with an opinion by Justice Stevens that
was joined by Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Blackmun, formed a bare
plurality to reverse on the grounds that
the “cruel and unusual punishment”
clause of the Eighth Amendment prohibits the execution of a person who
was under 16 years of age at the time
of his or her offense. The vote was
close, and Justice Kennedy did not
participate in the case.
A year later, in Stanford v. Kentucky, 492 U.S. 361 (1989), Justices
Kennedy and O’Connor demonstrated
why they are referred to as the Court’s
“swing votes.” Both justices left Justices Brennan, Marshall, Blackmun,
and Stevens alone in dissent as the
Court affirmed a death sentence meted
out to a juvenile who was 17 years old
when he committed murder in Kentucky. Writing for the Court, Justice
Scalia concluded that the imposition
of capital punishment on an individual
for a crime committed at 16 or 17
years of age does not constitute cruel
and unusual punishment under the
Eighth Amendment.
With this decision, the Supreme
Court ended three decades of
wrestling with juvenile justice issues,
leaving the area relatively settled—at
least in the appeals courts—in the
1990s.
Does the Juvenile Death Penalty Violate International Law?
In the decade since the Supreme Court’s 1989 decision in
Stanford v. Kentucky, desperate defense attorneys have
raised numerous arguments in the hope of persuading the
Supreme Court to reconsider the constitutionality of the
death penalty for 16- and 17-year-olds. So far none has survived appeal in either state or federal court.
Perhaps recognizing these long odds, the counsel for
one juvenile on Nevada’s death row tried a new tack on
behalf of his young client: international law. The public
defender representing Michael Domingues realized that a
human rights treaty the United States had just ratified in
June 1992—the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—states that the “sentence of death shall not be
imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen
years of age. ...” Yet Domingues had been sentenced to die
for a double murder that he committed at the age of 16.
Therefore, the public defender argued, since international
treaties take priority over state law, Domingues’s sentence
was illegal.
The state defended the death sentence in Domingues’s
case by pointing to a “reservation” to the International
Covenant made by the U.S. Senate that purported to
“reserve” the states’ rights to execute juvenile offenders
despite the treaty. Domingues countered that this reservation was itself illegal. In Domingues v. State, P.2d 1279
(1998), the Nevada Supreme Court decided by a narrow
3-2 vote that the Senate’s reservation did permit
Domingues’s execution.
26
Domingues then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for
certiorari. He argued that the Court should review the
Nevada courts’ opinions, which he said erred in concluding
that the Senate’s reservation permitted his execution. He
argued, among other things, that
Nothing in the Constitutional structure suggests
that the Senate can simply pick and choose among
the provisions of a proffered treaty, and “consent” to
only those it likes. This would allow the Senate to
exercise, in effect, a “line-item veto” over the treaty
provisions and thus “ratify” a treaty that is materially different from the one negotiated with, and accepted by, multiple treaty partners. This is a legislative
usurpation of the president’s powers, and it is particularly offensive when, as here, the treaty itself prohibits derogation from the very article the Senate
places a “reservation” upon.
Domingues also argued that a “continued toleration of
the execution of children would place the United States in
the company of only a small number of rogue countries
that have carried out executions of children in the past fifteen years.” He stressed that only eight countries have carried out such executions: Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the United States.
Many juvenile justice and antideath penalty advocates
were hopeful that Domingues might persuade the Supreme
Court to hear his case. But on Monday, November 1, 1999,
the Court denied certiorari, leaving Domingues to continue
his wait on death row.
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
VOL. 23
NO. 2
A Close Look at Stanford v. Kentucky
Excerpts from the opinion of the Supreme Court delivered by Justice Scalia
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000,
pp. 27–28. © 2000 American Bar Association.
These two consolidated cases require us to decide whether
the imposition of capital punishment on an individual for a
crime committed at 16 or 17 years of age constitutes cruel
and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.
The first case, No. 87-5765, involves the shooting death
of 20-year-old Barbel Poore in Jefferson County, Kentucky. Petitioner Kevin Stanford committed the murder on
January 7, 1981, when he was approximately 17 years and
4 months of age. Stanford and his accomplice repeatedly
raped and sodomized Poore during and after their commission of a robbery at a gas station where she worked as an
attendant. They then drove her to a secluded area near the
station, where Stanford shot her pointblank in the face and
then in the back of her head. ...
Stressing the seriousness of petitioner’s offenses and the
unsuccessful attempts of the juvenile system to treat him for
numerous instances of past delinquency, the juvenile court
found certification for trial as an adult to be in the best
interest of petitioner and the community.
Stanford was convicted of murder, first-degree sodomy,
first-degree robbery, and receiving stolen property and was
sentenced to death and 45 years in prison. The Kentucky
Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence, rejecting Stanford’s “deman[d] that he has a constitutional right to treatment.” 734 S.W.2d at 792. Finding that the record clearly
demonstrated that “there was no program or treatment
appropriate for the appellant in the juvenile justice system,”
the court held that the juvenile court did not err in certifying petitioner for trial as an adult. The court also stated that
petitioner’s age and the possibility that he might be rehabilitated were mitigating factors appropriately left to the
consideration of the jury that tried him. ...
The second case before us today, No. 87-6026, involves
the stabbing death of Nancy Allen, a 26-year-old mother of
two who was working behind the sales counter of the convenience store she and David Allen owned and operated in
Avondale, Missouri. Petitioner Heath Wilkins committed the
murder on July 27, 1985, when he was approximately 16
years and 6 months of age. The record reflects that Wilkins’s
plan was to rob the store and murder “whoever was behind
the counter” because “a dead person can’t talk.” While
Wilkins’s accomplice, Patrick Stevens, held Allen, Wilkins
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stabbed her, causing her to fall to the floor. When Stevens
had trouble operating the cash register, Allen spoke up to
assist him, leading Wilkins to stab her three more times in
her chest. Two of these wounds penetrated the victim’s
heart. When Allen began to beg for her life, Wilkins stabbed
her four more times in the neck, opening her carotid artery.
After helping themselves to liquor, cigarettes, rolling
papers, and approximately $450 in cash and checks, Wilkins
and Stevens left Allen to die on the floor. ...
The thrust of both Wilkins’s and Stanford’s arguments is
that imposition of the death penalty on those who were
juveniles when they committed their crimes falls within the
Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishments.” Wilkins would have us define juveniles as
individuals 16 years of age and under; Stanford would draw
the line at 17.
Neither petitioner asserts that his sentence constitutes
one of “those modes or acts of punishment that had been
considered cruel and unusual at the time that the Bill of
Rights was adopted.” ... Nor could they support such a contention. At that time, the common law set the rebuttable
presumption of incapacity to commit any felony at the age
of 14, and theoretically permitted capital punishment to be
imposed on anyone over the age of 7. ... In accordance with
the standards of this common law tradition, at least 281
offenders under the age of 18 have been executed in this
country, and at least 126 under the age of 17.
Thus, petitioners are left to argue that their punishment
is contrary to the “evolving standards of decency that mark
the progress of a maturing society. ...” They are correct in
asserting that this Court has “not confined the prohibition
embodied in the Eighth Amendment to ‘barbarous’ methods that were generally outlawed in the 18th century,” but
instead has interpreted the Amendment “in a flexible and
dynamic manner.” ... In determining what standards have
“evolved,” however, we have looked not to our own conceptions of decency, but to those of modern American society as a whole. ... As we have said, Eighth Amendment
judgments should not be, or appear to be, merely the subjective views of individual Justices; judgment should be
informed by objective factors to the maximum possible
extent. ...
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
27
This approach is dictated both by the language of the
Amendment—which proscribes only those punishments
that are both “cruel and unusual”—and by the “deference
we owe to the decisions of the state legislatures under our
federal system.” ...
Of the 37 States whose laws permit capital punishment,
15 decline to impose it upon 16-year-old offenders and 12
decline to impose it on 17-year-old offenders. This does not
establish the degree of national consensus this Court has
previously thought sufficient to label a particular punishment cruel and unusual. ...
To be sure, the absence of a federal death penalty for 16or 17-year-olds (if it existed) might be evidence that there
is no national consensus in favor of such punishment. It is
not the burden of Kentucky and Missouri, however, to
establish a national consensus approving what their citizens
have voted to do; rather, it is the “heavy burden” of petitioners ... to establish a national consensus against it. As far
as the primary and most reliable indication of consensus is
concerned—the pattern of enacted laws—petitioners have
failed to carry that burden. ...
Wilkins and Stanford argue, however, that even if the
laws themselves do not establish a settled consensus, the
application of the laws does. That contemporary society
views capital punishment of 16- and 17-year-old offenders
as inappropriate is demonstrated, they say, by the
reluctance of juries to impose, and prosecutors to seek, such
sentences. ...
Granted, however, that a substantial discrepancy exists,
that does not establish the requisite proposition that the
death sentence for offenders under 18 is categorically unacceptable to prosecutors and juries. To the contrary, it is not
only possible, but overwhelmingly probable, that the very
considerations which induce petitioners and their supporters to believe that death should never be imposed on
offenders under 18 cause prosecutors and juries to believe
that it should rarely be imposed.
This last point suggests why there is also no relevance to
the laws cited by petitioners and their amici which set 18 or
more as the legal age for engaging in various activities,
ranging from driving to drinking alcoholic beverages to
voting. ... These laws set the appropriate ages for the operation of a system that makes its determinations in gross, and
that does not conduct individualized maturity tests for each
driver, drinker, or voter. The criminal justice system, however, does provide individualized testing. In the realm of
capital punishment in particular, “individualized consideration [is] a constitutional requirement” ... and one of the
individualized mitigating factors that sentencers must be
permitted to consider is the defendant’s age. ... The application of this particularized system to the petitioners can be
declared constitutionally inadequate only if there is a consensus, not that 17 or 18 is the age at which most persons,
28
or even almost all persons, achieve sufficient maturity to be
held fully responsible for murder; but that 17 or 18 is the
age before which no one can reasonably be held fully
responsible. ...
Having failed to establish a consensus against capital
punishment for 16- and 17-year-old offenders through state
and federal statutes and the behavior of prosecutors and
juries, petitioners seek to demonstrate it through other indicia, including public opinion polls, the views of interest
groups, and the positions adopted by various professional
associations. We decline the invitation to rest constitutional law upon such uncertain foundations. ...
We also reject petitioners’ argument that we should
invalidate capital punishment of 16- and 17-year-old
offenders on the ground that it fails to serve the legitimate
goals of penology. According to petitioners, it fails to deter
because juveniles, possessing less developed cognitive
skills than adults, are less likely to fear death; and it fails to
exact just retribution because juveniles, being less mature
and responsible, are also less morally blameworthy. In support of these claims, petitioners and their supporting amici
marshall an array of socioscientific evidence concerning
the psychological and emotional development of 16- and
17-year-olds. ...
But as the adjective “socioscientific” suggests (and insofar as evaluation of moral responsibility is concerned perhaps the adjective “ethicoscientific” would be more apt), it
is not demonstrable that no 16-year-old is “adequately
responsible” or significantly deterred. It is rational, even if
mistaken, to think the contrary. The battle must be fought,
then, on the field of the Eighth Amendment; and, in that
struggle, socioscientific, ethicoscientific, or even purely
scientific evidence is not an available weapon. The punishment is either “cruel and unusual” (i.e., society has set its
face against it) or it is not. The audience for these arguments, in other words, is not this Court, but the citizenry of
the United States. It is they, not we, who must be persuaded. For, as we stated earlier, our job is to identify the
“evolving standards of decency”; to determine not what
they should be, but what they are. We have no power under
the Eighth Amendment to substitute our belief in the scientific evidence for the society’s apparent skepticism. ...
We discern neither a historical nor a modern societal
consensus forbidding the imposition of capital punishment
on any person who murders at 16 or 17 years of age.
Accordingly, we conclude that such punishment does not
offend the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel
and unusual punishment.
The judgments of the Supreme Court of Kentucky and the
Supreme Court of Missouri are therefore
Affirmed.
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
VOL. 23
NO. 2
From the Bench
Juvenile Courts: How and Why They
Have Changed
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 29–30. © 2000 American Bar Association.
In my many years as a judge, the biggest change
I’ve seen in the juvenile court is the rise in serious violent, deadly crime among juveniles, with
some involving the use of firearms. Years ago,
typical crimes included shoplifting and joyriding. Now we
have drive-by shootings. Yet the juvenile court remains a
special place. Far more so than the adult system, it allows
great flexibility in reaching out to juveniles and their parents for rehabilitation and services.
I enjoy working with the young people who come
through the court and seeing them mature and become
responsible people. I also very much enjoy working with
the staff and volunteers—the adults who have great enthusiasm for helping juveniles and who strongly believe in
youth, which is why they are committed to juvenile justice.
My two goals are to start a drug court within our juvenile
court with a very active outreach to all of our county’s
schools, and to partner with the schools to improve the justice system and student understanding of it.
—Hon. Heather Van Nuys, Superior Court Judge,
Yakima, Washington
During the last decade, the perception of youth
violence has dominated the juvenile justice scene.
Virtually every state in the country and the District of Columbia have revisited and revised their
juvenile codes to facilitate trying children as adults. There
is a danger that we have succumbed to legislation by anecdote, as legislators and policymakers react to highly publicized reports of notorious cases. This process has endangered the delinquency jurisdiction and, perhaps, the future
of the juvenile court.
In reality, while violent juvenile crime justifiably
remains a paramount concern, Justice Department figures
indicate that the rate of violent juvenile offending peaked in
1994 and has declined steadily since then. In addition, allegations of violent juvenile crime constitute a small percentage of the cases in our juvenile and family courts. Unfortunately, as transfer or waiver cases become the lens through
which the public views the court, we lose focus on other
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cases that are within the jurisdiction of the court. These
matters include abuse and neglect cases, perhaps our most
important responsibility, status offense cases, and property
crimes.
I acknowledge the need to improve the juvenile court
system. Recent ABA studies such as Children at Risk and
A Call to Justice have documented concerns about the quality of legal advocacy and judicial training. We can still
deliver on the vision of the Supreme Court in In re Gault if
we address such problems and realize that a viable juvenile
court is an essential component of an effective violenceprevention and public-safety program. Experience has
shown that recidivism among juvenile offenders has been
reduced in states where juvenile court systems and socialservice and youth-correctional systems are adequately supported. The juvenile court is the only venue in which there
is even a pretext of discussing prevention and treatment.
Public safety will be compromised if we abolish the juvenile court system.
With the goal of ensuring that all the children and families in our state receive equal justice before the juvenile
courts and have their cases prioritized, Massachusetts in
1992 decided to create a statewide juvenile court. This
entailed hiring 21 new juvenile court judges, creating a specialized statewide juvenile court, and hiring specialized
probation and support staff.
I have enjoyed the opportunity to attempt to empower
the children and families who appear before me. I also try
to persuade state and social service agencies to collaborate
and share very limited resources. At the end of the day, it is
very important to me that the people who have appeared in
my court feel as if they have been heard.
—Hon. Jay Blitzman, Associate Justice, Trial Court
of Massachusetts, Juvenile Court Department
Most often in the past, few public issues involved
the juvenile court, so that it was viewed as working in relative obscurity. Now high-profile crime
and violence among juveniles, and the public’s
punitive response, have brought the court under more
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
29
scrutiny. The result is that it has become a more integral
part of the community rather than the isolated institution it
was once thought to be. Today, we in the court realize that
we don’t have all the answers—that what we really need to
be is a catalyst and source of services for our young people.
So we’ve reached out to social-service agencies and the
religious and educational communities to work with us to
help youth overcome difficulties. This has helped the court
to be a better court and the community to respond better to
young people’s needs.
Abolishing the juvenile court is absolutely the wrong
step to take. Today, it’s needed more than ever, for several
reasons. First, clearly a lot of young people are violating the
law, and despite those unique cases that shock us, most
youth who enter the court system are salvageable if we can
furnish them with the proper intervention. Also, the court
provides the only stability in the lives of many youth, and it
gives them many needed services to which it is the only
connecting mechanism.
To me, the most gratifying feeling is to have actually
made a difference in someone’s life. I’ve been involved in
the justice system for a number of years. My experience in
juvenile court has provided me with the opportunity for that
feeling more than any other court I have ever been in,
including the one now.
—Hon. William Hibbler, U.S. District Court Judge,
Northern District of Illinois
While there has been a long history of discussion
in Colorado as to whether there should be a juvenile court, operations have remained very similar.
There has been no major move to do away with
juvenile court as it has existed in my 20 years as a judge.
On the other hand, the juvenile system is the focus of much
public interest, so that key issues involving it have changed
along with the public’s special concerns.
For example, every conference I attended in the 1970s
stressed the importance of identifying and treating juveniles
with learning abilities because of the huge perceived—and
well-supported—connection between delinquency and antisocial behavior. This discussion has disappeared—I
haven’t heard a reference to it in probably 15 years. By contrast, a conference I attended in February emphasized cooccurring disorders—juveniles with both substance-abuse
and mental-health problems, for example. And drug courts
are a big deal today.
In January, I attended a conference in Phoenix where
1,200 people came together from all around the United
States to discuss nothing but drug courts. One reason for the
huge current push for them is that’s where federal dollars
are. In Colorado, drug courts actually started in the adult
30
system and found their way into the juvenile system in the
last two to three years. I run the one in Denver.
In the past 20 years, early permanency planning is where
there’s been a major shift in child-abuse cases. Juveniles
used to remain in foster homes for five to seven years; now,
the juvenile court no longer has that time frame to work in.
In the area of dependency and neglect, kids are being
pushed through the system much faster. However, the
biggest shift I’ve seen in juvenile court during my time on
the bench is an outgrowth of the nation’s change in recent
years to a more conservative law-and-order approach—
more violent juvenile offenders are being waived to the
adult system. There are two ways juveniles can end up
there: by the prosecution directly filing in adult court or by
the juvenile court judge being asked to waive the case to the
adult system. Colorado has both systems, and their use was
once balanced. Things changed in the late 80s with the
growth of violent juvenile crime. In 1989 alone, for example, I had more cases involving shootings than in the previous nine years combined. In an uncommonly fast response
to the public’s “law-and-order” agenda, the Colorado legislature changed the law just four years later so that today the
district attorney can directly file most cases I once had the
authority to transfer. This takes away the juvenile court’s
open forum, where both sides are heard from, so that no
social information on the juvenile is considered. Only the
police report is used, and the decision to waiver is based
solely on the crime charged.
Yet I still think that teens are different from adults and
that society continues to have a custodial oversight interest
in helping them grow up properly. Handling juvenile
offenders involves more than just responding to the crimes
they commit; it requires a different expertise and focus. The
juvenile court’s work is of the highest importance to society as a whole because, through it, we can affect and influence people’s lives with decisions that have far-reaching
effects.
The juvenile court holds out hope that people’s lives can
get better. This is a real challenge, and it makes for interesting work. The families that come through my court are
just people who have fallen on hard times. The drug court
especially helps these families see their way successfully
through them. I have tried to make a difference by being
good at what I do and by striving to treat every family and
each of its members with the respect I’d want to have
shown to me.
—Hon. Dana Wakefield, Denver Juvenile Court
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
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The LRE Alternative: Can It Replace Formal Court?
Kentucky reports on its LRE program and results.
Deborah Williamson
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 31–33. © 2000 American Bar Association.
In keeping with the overarching philosophy of juvenile
court, and earnestly seeking to deter young clients from further involvement in the juvenile justice system, the nation’s
juvenile justice professionals scramble for the latest information regarding delinquency prevention research. When
Sherman et al. (1998) released Preventing Crime: What
Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, staff at the Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts’ Department of
Juvenile Services were nothing short of elated. After rigorous evaluation of several crime prevention assistance programs funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, Sherman et
al. (1998: 6–7) noted that programs that incorporate discussion and classification of norms for appropriate behavior
through rules, reinforcement of positive behavior, and social
competency building such as problem solving are likely to
prevent crime or positively impact the risk factors associated with crime. Kentucky’s court-sponsored law-related education program places heavy emphasis on citizenship in a
constitutional democracy (norms) and provides incentives
for young people to continue to contribute to society (positive reinforcement) and activities that strengthen the ability
to think abstractly, reflectively, critically, and flexibly
(problem solving) (see also Hawkins 1992; Wright 1994).
The purpose of this article is twofold: to describe the use
of law-related education as an alternative to formal court in
Kentucky’s juvenile justice system, and to encourage practitioners in similar settings to pilot a law-related education
program. The article begins with a discussion of the Kentucky intake and diversion program, moves to a brief discussion of the state’s participation in the national law-related/juvenile justice initiative and outline of the diversion
program model, highlights a culminating service learning
project, and concludes by presenting findings from a current external evaluation.
Court-Designated Worker Program
In 1986, in an attempt to divert increasing numbers of
minor offenders from the formal court process, the Ken-
tucky General Assembly provided funds for the creation of
a statewide Court Designated Worker (CDW) Program
(Clary and Isaacs 1991). Under the direction of the Administrative Offices of the Courts’ Department of Juvenile Services, CDWs provide intake and diversion services for the
Kentucky Court of Justice. In this capacity, CDWs process
public (delinquent or criminal) and status (beyond parental
control, truancy, and runaway) complaints on individuals
under 18 years of age.
Uniform criteria, based on American Bar Association
standards, determine which juveniles must appear before
the juvenile division of District Court, and which are eligible for informal processing in the CDW Program. Juveniles
who are involved in relatively minor offenses, such as
shoplifting or harassment, are typically eligible for informal
processing and may voluntarily enter diversion agreements
with a CDW.
A diversion agreement is a contract that is negotiated
between the CDW and the juvenile to resolve a complaint.
The goals of the diversion program include accountability,
deterrence, and education. A formal diversion typically
includes conditions such as victim restitution, community
services to nonprofit entities, drug/alcohol assessments,
counseling, and educational workshop attendance. Emphasis is placed on connecting (and sometimes reconnecting)
juveniles to a host of community entities; hence, when the
diversion program jurisdiction ends, additional safeguards
are readily available.
CDWs monitor each case, ensuring a juvenile’s compliance with the conditions set forth in the diversion contract.
By statute, a juvenile has up to six months to complete the
terms of diversion. In cases in which the youth has successfully completed all of the specified terms, the CDW dismisses the originating charge. Cases of noncompliance are
referred to formal court for disposition. In 1998, 17,142
cases were diverted by CDWs, and 86 percent of those
juveniles successfully completed their diversion contracts.
LRE Introduced
Deborah Williamson is the general manager of the Division
of Youth, Families, and Community Services at the
Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts in Frankfort.
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A successful diversion program must be substantive and
requires that the CDW be adept at marshaling local
resources, which in many geographic areas of the state are
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
31
scant, creative, and energetic (the latter is
particularly difficult as CDWs are statutorily
mandated to provide 24-hour on-call service
to law enforcement). In 1990, when the Kentucky courts became aware of the National
Law-Related Education/Juvenile Justice Initiative sponsored by the Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention, CDWs
and their program administrators literally
jumped at the chance to become involved in
the initiative. Field-tested curricular materials, training, and follow-up technical assistance were being offered to juvenile justice
agencies free of charge.
With assistance from Street Law, Inc., the
Center for Civic Education, and the American Bar Association, the CDW Program
embarked on a pilot law-related education
program. Twelve of the state’s 116 CDWs
were trained to utilize law-related education curricular
materials, interactive teaching strategies, proper use of
legal resource persons, and basic evaluation instruments
with the first-time offender population.
The program format established during this pilot phase
continues to be utilized to date, and new CDWs are provided with intensive law-related education training each year.
A typical program commences with an orientation and
pretest of the participant’s knowledge level of the legal system. Parents are frequently invited to participate in the orientation, thereby gaining their support and confidence in
the endeavor. Again, lessons emphasize social norms and
include topics such as rules, authority, justice, responsibility, family law, environmental law, community issues, and
Court-designated workers and resource persons in an
Administrative Office of the Courts law-related education
training program.
32
Mock mediation tournament showcase in Kentucky—
Shelby West, the winning school.
conflict resolution. A traditional lecture format is not
employed; rather, emphasis is placed on active learning and
skill building. Legal resource persons from the youth’s
community assist in facilitating small-group discussions,
role playing, critiquing participant responses to the various
activities, and/or assisting with the program’s culminating
service learning activity. Posttests are used as evaluation
tools during the final week of the program. Finally, in order
to provide positive reinforcement for a job well done, juvenile participants are frequently recognized during culminating ceremonies, typically attended by parents, judges, and
the legal resource persons serving the program. The event
is designed not only to congratulate the participants for
completing the program, but in many instances to formally
recognize them for contributions to the community via the
service learning component. The community’s gratitude provides an incentive for
ongoing participation.
Service learning projects range in duration and scope and attempt to provide juveniles with the opportunity to apply knowledge gained via the law-related education
program to real-life situations (see ASLER
1994; Furco 1996). One example of a service learning project is found in a diversion
program in southwestern Kentucky, where
participants recently opted to address the
issue of date rape as their service learning
project. The participants are designing a
date rape prevention board (Youth in Service 1999). Essentially, the prevention
board simplifies language contained in the
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
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Kentucky Revised Statutes, enabling young people to
understand the law regarding sexual offenses. The board
also contains state date rape statistics, crisis hotline telephone numbers, and support center information. The CDW
facilitating the program intends to hang the board in area
high schools and local malls. In short, juveniles formally
charged with criminal mischief, minor assault, and harassment are now engaging in activities that benefit an entire
community.
References
Research Briefs
Clary, S., and P. Isaac. Kentucky Juvenile Law. Cleveland,
Ohio: Banks Baldwin Publishing, 1991.
Vignettes highlighting successful program outcomes
abound, but what about scientific evaluation? Is law-related education truly effective and worthy of the expenditure
of valuable time and money? Kentucky’s law-related education initiative utilizes a variety of programs in both court
alternative and school-based settings. Since the program’s
inception in Kentucky in 1990, numerous evaluations lend
strong support to the merits of the law-related education in
both alternative and school-based settings and suggest that
policy makers and founders give serious consideration to
the endeavor (see Fox, Minor, and Pelkey 1994; Knepper
1994; Wells and Minor 1997; Williamson et al. 1999).
Examples of programs that have undergone evaluation
include Street Law Court Alternative Program, peer mediation, teen court, and Teens, Crime, and Community.
Teens, Crime, and Community, developed by the
National Crime Prevention Council and Street Law, Inc., is
designed to prevent young people from becoming victims
or perpetrators of crime. One recent evaluation revealed
that this program promoted positive changes in the area of
resiliency, i.e., social competence, problem-solving skills,
and a sense of autonomy (Scharf et al. 1999). The authors
note that “... feedback from the participants and other informants, regarding community service projects, exposure of
justice officials to the students, and similar activities, strongly supports the view that this is an excellent vehicle to build
a greater sense of community and alliance between the students and established social systems” (Scharf et al. 7).
In Kentucky and elsewhere, when properly implemented, law-related education helps young people avoid delinquent behavior and develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes for effective citizenship. As the law-related education/juvenile justice initiative approaches its 10th anniversary, Youth for Justice will once again afford the opportunity for state juvenile justice agencies to pilot a program.
(Youth for Justice sponsors law-related education in alternative settings and is comprised of five national organizations: the American Bar Association, Center for Civic Education, Constitutional Rights Foundation, Street Law, Inc.,
and Phi Alpha Delta Public Service Center.) Juvenile jus-
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tice program administrators and practitioners have very little to lose and much to gain by accepting the invitation to
cultivate the system’s citizens of tomorrow.
Association for Service-Learning in Education Reform.
“Partial List of Experiential Learning Terms and Their Definitions.” Raleigh, N.C.: National Society for Experiential
Education, 1994.
Fox, J., K. Minor, and W. Pelkey. “The Relationship
Between Law Related Education Diversion and Juvenile
Offenders’ Social- and Self-Perceptions.” American Journal of Criminology 19 (1994): 61–77.
Hawkins, D. The Social Development Strategy: Building
Protective Factors in Your Community. Seattle: Developmental Research and Programs, Inc., 1992.
Knepper, P. Attitudinal Change Among Teen Court Participants. Frankfort, Ky.: Administrative Office of the Courts,
1994.
Scharf, S., A. Martin, and R. Katz. Final Report: Teens,
Crime, and Community Program Evaluation. Morehead,
Ky.: Morehead State University, 1999.
Sherman, L., D. Gottfredson, D. Mackenzie, J. Eck, P.
Reuter, and S. Bushway. Preventing Crime: What Works,
What Doesn’t, What’s Promising. Washington, D.C.:
National Institute of Justice, 1998.
Wells, J., and K. Minor. An Evaluation of Kentucky’s
1996–97 Teen Court Program. Frankfort, Ky.: Administrative Office of the Courts, 1997.
Williamson, D., D. Warner, P. Sanders, and P. Knepper.
“We Can Work It Out: Teaching Conflict Management
Through Peer Mediation.” Social Work in Education 21
(1999): 89–96.
Wright, N. “From Risk to Resiliency: The Role of Law
Related Education.” In D. Williamson, K. Minor, and J.
Fox, eds., Law Related Education and Juvenile Justice:
Promoting Citizenship Among Juvenile Offenders. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, Ltd., 1997.
Youth in Service. National Bulletin on the Teens, Crime,
and Community Program. Washington, D.C.: Street Law,
Inc., and National Crime Prevention Council, 1999.
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
33
Youth Court: An Alternative to Juvenile Court?
Why and how youth courts are on the rise
Michelle E. Heward
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 34–36. © 2000 American Bar Association.
Aggravated assault, drive-by shootings, aggravated robbery, murder. As a result of youth involvement in these
offenses, society cries out for more protection from violent
youthful offenders. As legislatures change waiver statutes
across the country, youth are being transferred into the
adult system in unprecedented numbers. At the same time,
while serving a different population, youth courts have
experienced large increases in numbers. This article will
discuss why youth courts have enjoyed such an explosion
in popularity, whether youth courts are displacing juvenile
courts, and whether the rise in the popularity of youth
courts is related to the changes in the juvenile justice
system.
Youth courts (also called teen and peer courts) are dispositional alternatives to the juvenile justice system in
which trained youth volunteers hold youthful offenders
accountable for their wrongful actions. Youth courts are as
different as the communities they serve. Some courts look
much like an adult court with youth filling all of the positions, others have youth juries that advise an adult judge of
a recommended disposition, and still others have a panel of
youth judges who make a sentencing decision. Youth courts
may be school based, community based, or a combination
of both. Most youth courts are dispositional, handling only
those cases in which the youth has admitted the offense. A
few, like the Anchorage, Alaska, Youth Court, are factfinding courts determining guilt. In light of the broad differences in youth courts, this article speaks in generalizations about the majority of youth courts, recognizing that
exceptions exist. A 1998 survey of 335 responding youth
courts by the Urban Institute found that two-thirds of these
courts had existed for fewer than five years and of those, 20
percent had been operating for less than one year (Butts
1999).
Michelle E. Heward is an associate professor of criminal
justice at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah; a former
juvenile court prosecutor; chair of the Utah Youth Court
Board; and a member of the National Youth Court Project
Advisory Committee. If you would like to comment on the
article, you may reach her at [email protected].
34
Why Are Youth Courts So Popular?
The popularity of youth courts has steadily increased.
Although it is difficult to determine because there are no
registration requirements, best estimates indicate there are
presently approximately 630 active youth courts in all but
four states. (These data come from the American Probation
and Parole Association [APPA], July 1999, based upon a
pending national survey of youth courts. They do not have
records of youth courts in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, or New Jersey.) This is up from only 250 known
youth courts in October 1995, in 30 states and the District
of Columbia. The states where youth courts could not be
found at that time included Alabama, Connecticut,
Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota,
Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota,
Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming (Godwin
11). This trend is nowhere more apparent than in my home
state of Utah. Ten years ago, there were fewer than five
active youth courts operating. In July 1999, the Utah Youth
Court Board reported the state as having 33 active youth
courts with several more in the planning stages. Interestingly, Utah has had at least one youth court (Payson Youth
Court) that reports operation for 22 years, making it one of
the oldest in the nation.
Grass-Roots Community Involvement The popularity of
youth courts has risen along with increased efforts in community-oriented policing. Citizens are taking more pride in
and responsibility for their communities, building partnerships with police and other government agencies. Youth
courts fit in particularly well with community-oriented
policing efforts. They allow youth and adult volunteers to
work hand in hand with schools, law enforcement, and
courts. Through these partnerships volunteers take responsibility for a segment of youthful offenders who need consequences, but not necessarily the full resources of the juvenile justice system. Youth are truly our future, and people
are willing to give their time and talents to help them.
Educational Tool Far too often, the media depicts violent
and angry youth who have no respect for authority, their
community, or humanity. Youth courts teach youth to
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
VOL. 23
NO. 2
understand and respect their community through service to
their fellow youth. Youth volunteers learn problem-solving
and conflict-resolution skills and gain a sense of belonging
and need in their community. They learn about the juvenile
and criminal justice systems and recognize that education
fosters respect. Participation in youth courts provides an
incredible hands-on experience cementing classroom
instruction.
In the Roy (Utah) Youth Court, students at Roy High
School learn about the criminal and juvenile justice systems, the different players in the systems, conflict resolution, and listening and questioning skills and then participate as volunteers in the extracurricular Roy Youth Court.
The partnership between the school and local law enforcement has helped particularly with truancy and daytime curfew concerns.
Service Opportunities Youth volunteers take their court
responsibilities seriously and become positive role models.
Youth offenders are often required to serve the court; sometimes they voluntarily do so. Offending youth are often
taught concepts of restorative justice, giving back to the
very community they have offended and becoming a part of
a movement to make positive societal change. Some community service options that Utah youth courts have required
include helping renovate a church, winterizing a church,
working at community centers, working at convalescent
homes, helping elementary children read, and helping with
community recreation programs and at fairgrounds,
to name just a few. Community service options are
limited only by the creativity and needs of the youth and
community.
Informal Resolution Forum and Use of Positive Peer
Pressure Most adults made minor youthful errors that
were, or could have been, referred to juvenile court. Youth
court offers a quick forum for accountability that does not
leave a juvenile record. It also allows peer pressure to be
used in a positive way by volunteer youth who expect and
demand positive changes from the offending youth.
In an age when school shootings and violent gang crime
are riddling the headlines, it is no wonder that communities
are forming youth courts. They provide youth positive
alternative activities and educational experiences that bring
about the advantages discussed above, and these examples
are merely illustrative of the positive effect youth courts
can have. Youth courts answer the concerns raised by the
National Crime Prevention Council when discussing crime
prevention programs for juveniles: “We are faced with a
choice: we can focus on pathologies and delinquencies, or
we can rethink attitudes and myths about adolescence. We
can isolate young people, or we can engage them in activities that decrease their risk of victimization, give them a
stake in the community, and make our neighborhoods safer,
better places to be.” (National Crime Prevention Council 1)
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Juvenile Court vs. Youth Court
Unfortunately, there are youth courts that think they can replace the juvenile courts. Likewise, there are juvenile courts
that believe youth courts are an affront to their authority and
evidence of a community’s dissatisfaction with their ability
to handle cases. Neither position is accurate.
In most respects, youth courts are capable of educating
volunteer youth, involving the community, and using positive peer pressure better than the juvenile justice system.
There are, however, many cases that should not be handled
by youth courts.
Serious Offenses Requiring Expertise When offenders
need professional assessment and services, they should be
handled where those services are available. If a youth is an
alcoholic, he or she needs more than the support of peers.
While not underestimating the positive effect that a peer
could have in this situation, we must recognize that these
and other serious problems require the services of trained
professionals who are generally only available in the juvenile justice system. Further, youth courts traditionally
spend 15 to 30 minutes of in-court time with an offending
youth to gather information for dissemination. This limitation emphasizes the need for careful screening of youth
court cases.
Disposition Limitations Offenders who are not receptive
to intervention or who are a danger to the community
should be handled in the juvenile justice system. Youth
courts are generally voluntary and have little, if any, ability to enforce their dispositions. A youth who needs to be
incapacitated to protect the community does not belong in
youth court. Youth court may be of assistance even in these
cases, but it should be as part of the continuum of services
available, not the only service offered. The broader jurisdiction and expertise of the juvenile justice system must be
employed to work in the child’s best interests.
Based on the respective strengths of youth courts and
juvenile courts, a community is best served by both. Cooperation and a healthy, mutual respect between them can
provide youth services that neither can effectively provide
alone.
Is the Rise of Youth Courts Related to Changes
in Juvenile Courts?
Two of the main changes affecting the juvenile justice system are increased waivers into the adult system of particularly violent youth and increased demand on resources. It is not
a stretch of logic to conclude that communities have mobilized themselves and started youth courts in response to the
perception of increasing youth violence. Community volunteers want to actively involve themselves in making a difference, and youth are a worthy target of their enthusiasm.
While violent youth are not well served by youth courts
alone, youth courts may provide preventive measures
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
35
addressing the needs of youth before they act out violently.
Youth courts are proactive, focusing on offending and
nonoffending youth. Youth volunteers receive as much, if
not more, benefit from youth court involvement as offending youth. At a time when youth are developing skills,
habits, and attitudes that will prepare them for transition
into adulthood and help them make responsible decisions,
youth courts engage youth in activities that decrease their
risk of victimization and give them a sense of community
(Godwin 4).
Increased demand on juvenile court resources may likewise be addressed by youth courts. By allowing youth
courts to handle minor offenses that do not require the full
panoply of juvenile court resources, those resources are
freed up to be used on the violent, aggressive, or needy
offenders.
Finally, the younger offender often does not fit into the
range of services offered by juvenile courts. In a recent
meeting with youth court advisors from around Utah, I was
surprised to learn that some of the youth courts received
referrals from elementary schools for minor school rule and
law violations. Their perception was that the process of
being held accountable in front of older peers was extremely effective on this population. While this anecdotal conclusion needs to be studied, I found it an interesting observation that the juvenile justice system may find fruitful to
explore.
Conclusion
Youth court is not, and was not intended to be, a substitute
for the juvenile justice system. Communities are best
served by a healthy juvenile justice system, supplemented
by a youth court that is part of the available continuum of
services. While youth courts may enjoy popularity based
upon changes in the juvenile justice system, their strengths
are in widely different areas. Both the juvenile justice system and youth courts must understand the roles they can
best serve and work together toward their common goal: the
best interests of the child.
References
Butts, Hoffman, and Buck. Teen Courts in the United
States: A Profile of Current Programs. OJJDP Fact Sheet
Number 118, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice
Programs, Oct. 1999.
Godwin, T.M. Peer Justice and Youth Empowerment: An
Implementation Guide for Teen Court Programs. Lexington, Ky.: American Probation and Parole Association,
1998. (Available from the Juvenile Justice Clearinghouse,
(800) 638-8736)
National Crime Prevention Council. “Young People in
Crime Prevention Programs,” 1989.
Youth Court Conference 2000 . . .
Over 30 workshops offered with topics such as volunteer training
and recruitment and national teen/youth court evaluation. Gain valuable information and learn new approaches, enhance your volunteer
skills. Network with other youth court staff, volunteers, and national
leaders in the juvenile justice field.
Dates: October 22–24, 2000
Location: Albuquerque Hilton, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Registration Fee: Before 9/15/00: $110 for youths, $140 for adults
After 9/15/00: $140 for youths, $175 for adults
For more information please contact
National Youth Court Center
c/o APPA
P.O. Box 11910
Lexington, KY 40578-1910
(606) 244-8209
FAX (606) 244-8001
E-mail: [email protected] or visit our Web site at www.youthcourt.net
36
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
NCSS Calls
for Awards/Grants
Nominations
The National Council for the
Social Studies is currently calling
for nominations for its major
grants and awards. All winners
receive a commemorative gift,
recognition and publicity, and an
opportunity to present their work
at the NCSS annual conference.
Several receive cash grants.
For descriptions and deadlines,
see socialstudies.org/awards or
contact Ana M. Chiquillo Post,
(202) 966-7840, ext. 114;
FAX (202) 966-2061;
E-mail: [email protected]
VOL. 23
NO. 2
Teaching Strategy
The Case of Gerry Gault
Adapted from Save Our Streets: A Positive Choices Curriculum, a program of Street Law, Inc.
and The Conflict Resolution Education Network, by permission of the publisher.
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 37–39. © 2000 American Bar Association.
Objectives
As a result of this lesson, students will
• Learn about the events that led to
the case In re Gault
• Recognize the importance of In re
Gault to juvenile rights and juvenile court proceedings
Target Group: Secondary students
Time Needed: 2 classes
Materials Needed: Student Handouts
1 and 2
Procedures
1. Give each student a copy of Handout 1 to read. Then ask students to
define the words hearing, charges,
testifies, record, testimony, and
delinquent as they are used in the
text. Refer students to the Glossary
if they have difficulty with any of
the terms. Remind them to consult
the Glossary anytime they meet an
unfamiliar legal term in this or the
next lesson.
2. Ask students, “Who was involved
in the case? What happened?” On
the board, make two columns with
the headings Fair and Unfair. Ask
students what they would list in
each column. Write some of their
responses.
3. Divide the class into groups of
three. Each group appoints a
recorder to make a chart like the
one on the board. Ask each group
to discuss and identify the fair and
unfair things that happened to
Gerry Gault. Example:
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NO. 2
Fair
A juvenile court judge heard his
case.
Mrs. Cook complained.
Gerry went to court.
Gerry was not held in adult jail.
Unfair
The police didn’t call his parents
first.
Mrs. Cook didn’t show up in court.
The punishment was too harsh.
4. Have the groups take turns giving
their ideas about what was fair or
unfair. List all their responses on
the board. Discuss why students
thought these events were fair or
unfair. Ask them, “Do you think
the overall result of this case was
fair?” Mark entries in the Unfair
column that students think are the
most unfair and should be
changed.
5. Point out that Gerry’s parents also
thought their son’s case was handled unfairly and that he had been
denied his due process rights, so
they appealed the case. Review the
terms appeal and due process.
Explain that due process means
that legal proceedings must be carried out according to established
rules and principles in order to be
fair. Point out to students that they
have already decided that Gerry’s
case was unfair. Ask them, “Do
you think Gerry received due
process of law? Why or why not?”
See articles on pages 10, 15, and
24 for more information on the
case of Gerry Gault.
6. Explain that eventually Gerry’s
case went to the Supreme Court.
Refer students back to their list of
fair and unfair actions. Ask them,
“What issue do you think the U.S.
Supreme Court had to decide in
Gerry’s case?” Explain that the
question before the Court was
“Were Gerry’s Fifth Amendment
due process rights violated?”
7. Give each student a copy of Handout 2 to read. Then review the
rights now accorded to juveniles
based on Gerry’s case, In re Gault.
Make sure students understand
what each right means.
8. To check students’ understanding,
have them write answers to these
questions: What events led to the
case In re Gault? Why did the case
go to the Supreme Court? What
did the Supreme Court decide and
why? How did the Supreme Court
decision affect juveniles in juvenile court?
Check Out
Street Law, Inc.’s Web site at
www.streetlaw.org
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
37
Student Handout 1
The Case of Gerry Gault
Gerry Gault, age 15, is accused of making an obscene phone call to
a neighbor. The police pick up Gerry and take him to the juvenile
detention center. His parents are at work. The police do not call to tell
them what is happening to their son. His parents are told later that a
hearing will be held the next day. They are not told what the charges
are against Gerry.
The neighbor, Mrs. Cook, complained about the phone call but does
not show up for court. Instead, a police officer testifies about what
Mrs. Cook said. Gerry blames the call on a friend. He says he did not
make the obscene remarks. There are no lawyers present and no record
is made of the court testimony.
Juvenile court does not allow juries, so instead a judge hears the
case. The judge finds that Gerry is delinquent and orders him to be sent
to a state reform school. He can stay there until he is 21 years old. An
adult found guilty of the same crime could be sent to county jail for no
longer than 60 days.
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UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
VOL. 23
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Student Handout 2
Supreme Court Decision in In Re Gault
The U.S. Supreme Court decided that Gerry Gault did not receive due process of law.
The Court said that the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees that no
one, including juveniles, can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due
process of law. This decision ensures that juveniles are given due process in juvenile
court, and it lists the rights that juveniles must have when they are in juvenile court.
In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that juveniles have the following rights when
accused of offenses for which they can be incarcerated:
I. Right to notice of charges: Juveniles and their families must be told exactly what
they are accused of before their hearing in order to prepare their case.
II. Right to counsel: Juveniles must be told they have a right to a lawyer. If a juvenile does not have enough money to pay the lawyer, the court must appoint one.
III. Right to confront and cross-examine witnesses: Juveniles are entitled to hear the
testimony of any witnesses and their accusers.
IV. Privilege against self-incrimination and the right to remain silent: Juveniles must
be told they have a right to refuse to answer a question or give testimony against
themselves. They also must be told they have a right to remain silent and that
anything they say may be used against them.
Note: In a few states, juveniles have the right to a jury trial. The Supreme Court did
not grant this right because the justices thought confidentiality in juvenile court
was more important. Today there is a movement to change many of the confidentiality rules and “open up” the juvenile court.
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39
Teaching Strategy
Today’s Juvenile Court
Adapted from Save Our Streets: A Positive Choices Curriculum, a program of Street Law, Inc.
and The Conflict Resolution Education Network, by permission of the publisher.
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.2, 2000, pp. 40–43. © 2000 American Bar Association.
Objectives
As a result of this lesson, students will
• Understand the juvenile court
process and procedures
• Review the case In re Gault as it
applied to the juvenile court
process
• Discover how their state’s juvenile
laws and court procedures compare
to those laws and procedures in
general
3.
4.
Target Group: Secondary students
Time Needed: 2 classes
Materials Needed: Student Handouts
1 and 2; also, the Teaching Strategy,
“The Case of Gerry Gault” and its two
Handouts, pp. 37–39
Resource Person: Member of the
court staff or a lawyer who specializes
in juvenile court
Procedures
1. Introduce the resource person to
the class. Explain that the resource
person is very familiar with the
juvenile justice process. Then
review the terms juvenile and
delinquent. Remind students that
these terms may mean different
things in different states. Have
the resource person tell what the
local laws say. Begin a Local Laws
chart on the board using your
state’s definitions of juvenile and
delinquent.
2. Briefly review the Supreme Court
decision in In re Gault and its
impact on juvenile rights and court
40
5.
6.
procedures. Ask the resource person to explain local law regarding
confidentiality in juvenile courts.
Add this information to the Local
Laws list on the board.
Give students Handout 1. Have
them take turns reading aloud and
answering Questions 1–8 on the
handout. Have the resource person
comment on their responses.
Give students Handout 2. Using
the Gerry Gault case as an example, have the resource person trace
the rest of Gerry’s experience with
the local juvenile court system.
Point out to students that the handout shows the general procedures
in juvenile courts, but the resource
person will identify if and how
your state’s laws differ from these
procedures. Each time he or she
does so, add that information to the
Local Laws list on the board.
Have students ask the resource
person Questions 9–17 on Handout 1. Encourage them to take
notes as the resource person
describes the steps in the juvenile
court process. These notes will
help them understand and remember the diagram shown on Handout
2.
After the resource person has finished explaining the process,
encourage students to ask the person questions about the juvenile
justice system. Is there anything
they still don’t understand? Is
there anything else they would like
to know about the juvenile court?
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
See articles on pages 10, 15,
and 24 and the Teaching Strategy
on page 37.
Answers to the Questions
on Handout 1
1. In Gerry Gault’s case, the answer is
no. The arresting officer and courts
must notify parents in a reasonable
amount of time. The definition of reasonable will vary depending on the situation and circumstances. Most officers try to reach the parents/
guardians before doing anything with
a juvenile. This is policy in many
police departments.
2. Complaints can take a variety of
forms. In Gerry’s case, the complaint
was made when Mrs. Cook called the
police and told them that Gerry had
made an obscene phone call to her.
3. Gerry has the right to notice of
charges. If he is detained, then a detention hearing must be held in a reasonable amount of time. His parents must
be notified of when the hearing will be
held and given a written notice of
explicit charges against him.
4. The charge against Gerry was that
he made an obscene phone call.
5. Gerry is entitled to an attorney to
represent him (right to counsel) at the
detention hearing and at all other hearings. Gerry’s parents would also be
allowed to attend the hearing.
6. No, Gerry’s family and his lawyer
must have adequate time to prepare a
case to defend Gerry against the
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11. If Gerry is detained, he must have
For additional information
on Save Our Streets and other
Street Law lessons, go to—
www.streetlaw.org/pubs.html
charges. In Gerry’s case, he had to go
to court the very next day. This would
not be enough time for his lawyer to
prepare for the hearing. Note that
Gerry did not have a detention
hearing.
7. The complaining witness must testify at the adjudicatory hearing. There
may also be other witnesses who testify at the hearing. The respondent
chooses whether or not to testify. In
Gerry’s case, Mrs. Cook would have
had to testify. Gerry could have testified if he had wanted to, but he was
not required to. Either side could also
have called other witnesses.
8. No, Gerry has the privilege against
self-incrimination. He has the right to
remain silent because anything he says
could be used against him.
9. The police fill out a report about
their contact with Gerry Gault and call
his parents or guardians. Gerry does
not have to answer questions about the
offense. The officer may let Gerry go
or may place him in a youth detention
facility or receiving home where he
would stay until his first hearing. Usually, Gerry would be released to his
parents.
10. The officer refers the charges to
the juvenile court. If released, Gerry
and his parents will be given an
appointment to meet with a court
intake officer within 48 hours. If Gerry
is detained, the intake interview would
be conducted at the detention facility.
Gerry could be asked if his plea to the
charge will be guilty or not guilty. A
lawyer should be present. The intake
counselor can decide to detain Gerry
or leave him in the custody of his parents. The intake officer then files a
petition to the court and an initial hearing is set.
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a detention hearing within a reasonable amount of time to determine if he
will remain in the custody of the
courts or be released to his parents.
12. The charges against Gerry are
read. He will speak to probation officers and social workers and be given a
date to return to court. A lawyer
should be present. Gerry may also be
given the choice of participating in a
court alternative program such as
Street Law. Many states do not have
initial hearings; in these states there is
often an intake meeting.
13. Since Gerry says he did not make
the obscene phone call, the courts and
lawyers must plan for the adjudicatory
hearing in which all the facts and evidence are presented by both sides. The
judge will decide if the juvenile is
delinquent (guilty) or not delinquent
(not guilty). At this time, the juvenile
court prosecutor and Gerry’s lawyer
present the evidence. They may ask
witnesses to testify. Gerry has the right
to confront and cross-examine all witnesses. The person who accused Gerry
should also be present at the hearing.
The judge will then decide if Gerry
made the obscene phone call.
14. The prosecutor doesn’t have to
meet either burden of proof. Since the
responsibility of the court is to do
what is best for the youth and protect
the community, the prosecutor only
has to show the judge reasonable evidence of delinquency. If the judge
thinks the youth committed the act that
he is charged with, the judge finds the
youth delinquent.
15. If Gerry is found not delinquent,
he will be released. If he is found
delinquent, he will have a disposition
hearing. Disposition will often take
place on the same day as the adjudicatory hearing. Before the disposition
hearing, the judge will read the reports
produced by the social workers. The
judge will make the final decision
about what happens to Gerry. There
are a variety of options open to the
judge, including probation, suspended
sentence, restitution, referral to community treatment programs or services, and sentencing to a community
residential program. Occasionally,
youth may be sent out of state to participate in a special program. Upon
recommendation of the probation
staff, or completion of restitution, a
community treatment program, or the
correctional school, the juvenile
returns to the court for the last hearing.
This hearing is for release of custody.
The judge reviews the juvenile’s
progress and determines whether the
juvenile will get into more trouble.
The juvenile is then released to the
custody of parents or guardians. In
some cases, when the person is finally
released, he or she is an adult.
16. In most states, juvenile court
records are sealed and cannot be
opened without a judge’s order. They
are confidential and cannot be used
against the youth in court when he or
she is an adult. However, the record
may be reopened if the youth is adjudicated delinquent a second time or is
convicted of a felony in some states.
17. If the juvenile stays out of trouble
in the future, he or she may be able to
file a petition to have his or her juvenile records expunged.
Answers to Puzzle, page 44
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
juvenile
due process
waiver
appeal
respondent
testimony
complaint
hearing
judge
expunge
testify
petition
delinquent
record
cross-examine
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
41
Student Handout 1
Questions About Juvenile Court
1. Would the procedure the police used to take Gerry into custody be legal today?
Would the way the police handled contacting Gerry’s parents be legal today?
Why or why not?
2. Was there a complaint against Gerry? Who made it?
3. What information should the police officer or court give Gerry’s parents?
4. What were Gerry’s charges?
5. Who else would be present at Gerry’s hearing today?
6. Should any hearing other than the detention hearing be held the day following
Gerry’s arrest?
7. Who would testify at Gerry’s hearing today?
8. Would Gerry have to tell the officers of the court anything that he said or did
regarding the phone call?
_____________________________________________________________________
9. What happens when the police first take Gerry into custody?
10. What happens at juvenile court intake?
11. How long can Gerry be detained before a hearing is required?
12. What happens at the initial hearing?
13. What is an adjudicatory hearing?
14. Does the court prosecutor have to show a preponderance of evidence or proof
beyond a reasonable doubt to find a youth delinquent?
15. What happens after the judge announces the decision?
16. What happens to juvenile court records?
17. Is there anything a juvenile can do about his or her juvenile court records?
42
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
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Released
at police
station
Taken Into
Custody
Custody
of parents
(home)
Case
dismissed
Diversion
Juvenile Court
Intake
Detention
Hearing
Pretrial Detention
Facility
Prosecuting
Attorney
Transfer
Hearing
Serious
crimes may
be referred
to criminal
court
Aftercare
Juvenile
Institution
• Restitution
• Community
Service
Disposition
Hearing*
* Dispositions may include several of
the listed options or other options.
Probation
Case
Dismissed
Adjudicatory
Hearing
Found Not
Delinquent
Juvenile Court Process
Student Handout 2
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
43
Juvenile Courts—Terms to Know
Match each clue to a term you have learned in this edition of Update on Law-Related
Education. Write each letter of the term on a blank in the puzzle. The letters in the boxes spell
the answer to this question: What do juvenile courts try to offer to juveniles?
1.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
2.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
3.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
4.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
5. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
6.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
7.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
8.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
9.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___
10.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
11.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
12.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
13.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
14.
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
15. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___
1. any person who is not an adult
2. fair procedures accorded to any person involved
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
in court proceedings
transfer of a juvenile offender to adult criminal
court
take a case to a higher court
the juvenile accused of committing a delinquent
act
information given by a witness under oath
an accusation or charge of wrongdoing
any appearance in court before a judge by a
juvenile
9. the person who hears and decides juvenile court
cases
10. destroy or erase a person’s criminal record
11. give evidence under oath
12. a request to the court for a particular action
13. a juvenile convicted in juvenile court of
committing an illegal act
14. a transcript or recording of everything said
during a hearing
15. ask a witness questions that challenge the
reliability of the witness’s testimony
Answers can be found on page 41.
44
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
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Glossary
appeal
to take a case to a higher court for a rehearing
charges
the formal accusation that the juvenile has committed an offense
complaint
an accusation or charge of wrongdoing
cross-examine
ask a witness questions that challenge the reliability of the witness’s testimony
delinquent
a juvenile who has been convicted in juvenile court of committing an illegal act. In
most states, a juvenile 16 years old or older who is charged with a serious crime can
be tried as an adult.
due process
fair procedures provided in court, as promised by the Fifth Amendment of the United
States Constitution
expunge
destroy or erase a person’s criminal record. Expungement is also called erasure,
destruction, sealing, setting aside, expunction, or purging.
hearing
any appearance in court before a judge by a juvenile
judge
the public official who hears and decides cases in juvenile court
juvenile
any person who is not an adult. State laws decide the age limit for juveniles. In most
states, a juvenile is anyone under the age of 18.
juvenile court
a special court system designed especially for juveniles
petition
a request to the court for a particular action, such as to expunge a juvenile’s court
records
record
a written transcript or recording made of everything said during a hearing
respondent
the juvenile who is accused of committing the delinquent act
self-incrimination testimony that a person gives that might connect him or her with a crime
VOL. 23
testify
to give evidence under oath at a hearing
testimony
information a witness gives under oath to questions from lawyers
waiver
the transfer of a juvenile from juvenile court to adult criminal court to be tried
as an adult
NO. 2
J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
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Teaching Strategy
Using the Juvenile Justice Poster
Update on Law-Related Education, 23.1, 2000, pp. 46–47. © 2000 American Bar Association.
Objectives
As a result of this lesson, students will
• Summarize what they have learned
about the juvenile justice system in
the United States
• Discuss how that juvenile justice
system can be improved
• Construct a survey to gauge
people’s opinions about such
improvements
• Conduct the survey and analyze
the data collected
Target Group: Secondary
Time Needed: 2 classes plus time outside of class to conduct the survey
Materials Needed: Student Handout
Procedures
1. As students conclude their study of
this edition of Update, you can use
this activity to help them review
and summarize what they have
learned about the juvenile justice
system as it was in the past and as
it is now and to speculate about
juvenile justice as it might be in
the future.
2. Indicate the poster as you encourage students to share their thoughts
and feelings about the juvenile justice system. Ask students these
questions: What do you think was
the motivation for the establishment of a separate court system for
juveniles? Was such a court system a good idea? Why or why not?
What was the most surprising
thing you learned about the juvenile justice system as it was in the
past? As it is now?
3. You might also ask more specific
questions to check students’
46
understanding of juvenile court.
Encourage them to look for the
answers in this edition of Update.
Refer them to the glossary and the
teaching strategies, in particular.
Possible questions: What does
juvenile mean? Why is the case In
re Gault important to juvenile justice? What happens when a juvenile offender receives a waiver?
Why would someone want to
expunge his or her record?
4. After reviewing the past and past
juvenile justice systems, indicate
the poster again and read the title,
Juvenile Justice: Serving Youth in
the Next Century. Point out that
many people (including some writers in this Update) think that the
juvenile justice system should be
changed. Ask students what
changes they would make to the
juvenile justice system and why.
List their suggestions on the board.
5. Distribute copies of the Student
Handout, one copy to each student
or to each pair of students. Explain
that the handout is a survey that
asks questions about possible
changes in the juvenile justice.
Have volunteers read the three
questions aloud. Make sure students understand what each question means.
6. Review students’ suggestions that
you listed on the board. Have students decide which suggestions
could be made into questions and
added to the survey as Questions
4–6. If there are more than three
possibilities, either have the class
vote on the questions and add the
three questions with the most
UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION/ J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e
votes, or add more boxes and put
all the questions on the survey.
7. Explain that each student (or pair
of students) is to ask five people
(A, B, C, D, E) to answer Yes or
No to each of the six questions on
the survey. The student writes Yes
or No in each box under the person’s letter.
8. At the bottom of the survey, the
student notes basic information
about each person surveyed (but
not his or her name). Encourage
students to ask people of different
genders, ages, and races.
9. When students have finished their
surveys, use the information to
make generalizations about changing the juvenile justice system.
First, tally the numbers of Yes and
No responses for each question.
Then sort that information according to gender, age, and race. Display the results on the board for
the class to study.
10. As a class, discuss which questions
received the most approval and
which did not. Speculate as to
why. Also, can any conclusions be
drawn about who does and does
not favor changes in the juvenile
justice system? Young people
more than older people? Males
more than females?
11. After discussing the survey, return
to the subject of students’ feelings
about and proposed changes to the
juvenile justice system. Did conducting the survey cause them to
reconsider their own positions? If
so, what impact did it make and
why?
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Student Handout
Changing the Juvenile Justice System
You are conducting a survey on how the juvenile justice system might be changed in the future.
Ask five people if they would be willing to answer the questions. Try to choose people of different genders, ages, and races. Record Yes or No for each question under the letter A, B, C, D, or E
(one letter for each of your five respondents). Remember to thank each person and to record his
or her gender, age, and race in the box below the survey. Do not write any names on your survey.
A
B
C
D
E
1. Should juvenile offenders have
the right to a jury trial?
2. Should juvenile offenders be guaranteed
adequate legal representation?
3. Should juvenile offenders receive
shorter sentences based on their age?
4.
5.
6.
Gender
Age
Race
A
B
C
D
E
VOL. 23
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J u v e n i l e J u s t i c e / UPDATE ON LAW-RELATED EDUCATION
47
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W I N T E R
1 9 9 9 / 2 0 0 0
V O L . 2 3
N O . 2
THIS EDITION
Juvenile Justice:
Serving Youth in the Next Century
Articles, lessons, and educational resources
focusing on
• Juvenile Courts—Today and Yesterday
• Supreme Court, Gault, and Legal Advocacy
• Trends Toward Reform
• Youth Courts and Youth Accountability
• Perspectives, Activities, and Resources
Defending Liberty
Pursuing Justice
Division for
Public
Education
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