Juvenile Justice: Juvenile Court - Origins, Expansion, Retrenchment, Structure, Personnel, Process, Caseload, Juvenile Rights, Continuing Controversies
courts law offenders violations
Juvenile courts in the United States are legally responsible for young people who are arrested by the police or otherwise accused of breaking the criminal laws of their community. Some areas of the country do not have courts actually called juvenile courts. Law violations by young people may be handled by probate courts, juvenile divisions of a circuit court, or even comprehensive family courts. In every community, however, some form of court is charged with responding to cases in which a person under the age of adulthood (a juvenile) is suspected of breaking the law. Since these courts have jurisdiction over juveniles and they follow the same general principles of juvenile law, it is conventional to refer to them simply as juvenile courts.
Many juvenile courts handle other types of cases. They often handle dependency cases (or matters involving abused and neglected children) and youth charged with noncriminal acts (or status offenses) such as curfew violations, running away from home, and truancy. Other juvenile courts (especially those known as family courts) may handle domestic violence and child custody matters. Typically, however, a juvenile court's caseload is made up of law violations, status offenders, and dependency cases. Law violations usually account for about half of this workload.
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Young people who violate the law before reaching the legal age of adulthood are referred to as juveniles in order to indicate that they are under the jurisdiction of the juvenile court rather than the criminal (or adult) court. Technically, juveniles cannot be arrested for committing crimes because the criminal code does not apply to young people under a certain age (usually age seventeen or eight…
The nation's first juvenile court opened in Chicago in 1899. By 1909, twenty states had established juvenile courts and all but a few had done so by the end of the 1920s. Although each jurisdiction established its juvenile court system with its own procedures and structure, juvenile courts across the United States were generally designed to focus on early intervention and rehabilitation and…
Within a few decades of the juvenile court's founding, some observers began to wonder whether lawmakers' ambitions for the juvenile court had been excessive. Public criticism of the juvenile court intensified. Juvenile courts, especially those in urban areas, began to exhibit the worst features of criminal courts. Caseloads swelled, courtrooms fell into disrepair, and staff became di…
By the end of the juvenile court's first century, it had been largely redesigned in the image of the criminal court. Yet, every jurisdiction in the United States continued to operate some form of juvenile court. The structure of juvenile courts across the country varied considerably. As the juvenile court concept spread across the United States in the early twentieth century, lawmakers inve…
The people who work in juvenile courts often include judges, attorneys (prosecution and defense), administrators, clerks, bailiffs, and a wide range of other staff such as secretaries, security guards, and maintenance workers. For the most part, however, when one thinks of juvenile court personnel, the primary categories are judges, attorneys, caseworkers (probation officers), and court administra…
The official purpose of the juvenile court is to decide whether a youth should be adjudicated (or judged) as a delinquent. Part of this decision is based upon evidence of the youth's unlawful behavior, but the decision also involves an assessment of each youth's individual situation. When a youth is adjudicated delinquent, the juvenile court does not simply impose a sentence
Fi…
In 1997 juvenile courts throughout the United States handled an estimated 1,755,100 delinquency cases. This was equivalent to nearly 5,000 cases per day. The national caseload in 1997 was more than double the number of cases handled by juvenile courts in 1970. A property offense was the most serious charge involved in 48 percent of delinquency cases nationwide in 1997. The most serious charge was …
Prior to the 1960s, juveniles accused of delinquent offenses had virtually no due process rights in American juvenile courts. Since the official purpose of the juvenile court process was to help rather than to punish, it was thought to be unnecessary to protect juveniles in the same ways that adult defendants were protected in criminal court. Juveniles arrested for delinquency had no right to an a…
Justice Stewart's comments seemed quite prescient as the twentieth century ended. For thirty years following the Gault decision, state legislatures across the U.S. continued the due process reforms endorsed by the Supreme Court. Using various mechanisms, lawmakers greatly limited the discretion of juvenile court judges and made the juvenile court process more evidence-driven and formalized.…
Lawmakers throughout the country began to experiment with an array of new policy options for young offenders. For example, some states gave judges the power to "blend" criminal court sentences with juvenile court dispositions. Some jurisdictions passed blended sentencing laws that allowed judges to sentence juveniles directly to either juvenile or adult corrections. Other jurisdictio…
Every jurisdiction in the United States continues to operate a separate juvenile court system, but many youth are ineligible for juvenile court and those that remain experience a juvenile court process that is far more criminalized. Juvenile court procedures are more complex and evidence-driven. Cases are more likely to be formally charged by prosecutors instead of being handled informally by prob…
——. "Role of Defense Attorneys in Juvenile Justice Proceedings." Juvenile Justice Update 2, no. 2 (1996): 1–2, 10, 11. …
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User Comments
about 3 years ago
I just happened upon this material and found that many of the sub-sections are lifted verbatim from something I wrote. Unless each page makes clear where the source material can be located and unless each passage is set off in quotation marks or uses some other way of indicating that the text is taken verbatim from someone else's work, this entire "encyclopedia" would seem to be guilty of plagiarism.
Jeff Butts
March 10, 2010