Juvenile Justice There Are Both

Juvenile Justice

There are both risks and benefits of transferring juveniles to the adult system. In many ways, the juvenile system is still meant to be a form of substitute parent for children who are at-risk. As such, it is not equipped to deal with some of the serious issues in modern juvenile criminality. Kupchik points out that the juvenile justice system and the criminal justice system differ in three significant ways: evaluative criteria, sentencing goals, and the formality of the proceedings (Kupchik, 2003). The formality of the proceedings can be a significant issue. Pogrebin et al. pointed out that one of the problems with the juvenile justice system is that it fails to protect the constitutional rights of the youth that are involved in it (Pogrebin et al., 1984). Therefore, a youth in the criminal justice system may have a better chance of a not-guilty verdict than a youth in the juvenile justice system. However, while the juvenile justice system may have significant problems, the common assumption is that the criminal justice system is more difficult on offenders.

The literature did not all directly address whether the risks/benefits of transfer were more or less apparent in certain forms of transfer. However, they did look at the fact that automatic transfer is almost certainly not appropriate, which suggests that legislative transfer would present greater risks to the children involved because they would not consider the individual circumstances underlying a crime. The legislature wants to be tough on crime, but transferring juveniles to the adult system is not necessarily a good approach for ending crime. Bishop et al. discovered that transferring juveniles to the criminal justice system from the juvenile justice system did have an impact on recidivism rates, but that impact was not the desired one; juveniles in the criminal justice system were more likely to reoffend than their matched controls in the juvenile justice system (Bishop et al., 1996). Moreover, historically transfer to the adult system was reserved for those juveniles whose pattern of criminal behavior demonstrated that they were not benefitting from the juvenile justice system, rather than due to the nature of the underlying offense. In fact, for more than five decades, juveniles charged with murder were more likely than not to be retained in the juvenile court, beneficiaries of both its diversionary and stigma avoidance rationales" (Fagan, 2008).

Social learning theory is one of the ways to explain the findings regarding the transfer policies reported by Bishop et al. Criminals in the adult criminal justice system are often likely to be career criminals. Moreover, simply to survive in an adult institution, juveniles may have to adopt increasingly anti-social behavior. If the goal is to keep these children from reoffending, putting them in the same system as more experienced criminals, which does not have a deterrence effect on the adults in that system, simply seems like the wrong approach.