Trying Juveniles as Adults: Policy, Ethics, and Outcomes
This paper examines U.S. transfer laws that allow or require juvenile offenders to be tried in adult criminal courts. It traces the legislative expansion of these laws from the 1980s through 2003, outlines the three primary legal mechanisms for transfer — judicial waiver, prosecutorial transfer, and statutory exclusion — and identifies the key stakeholders involved in implementation. The paper then evaluates the ethical dilemmas these policies create, including questions of competency, due process, and proportionality, as well as documented negative outcomes such as increased rates of abuse, suicide, and recidivism among juveniles housed in adult facilities. Racial disparities in transfer rates are also highlighted. The paper concludes by recommending that juvenile offenders remain within the juvenile justice system while facing adult-level sentencing standards.
- Overview of Juvenile Transfer Laws: History and expansion of juvenile transfer legislation
- Legal Mechanisms for Transfer: Three legal grounds enabling juvenile court transfers
- Stakeholders and Implementation: State governments, courts, and judges as actors
- Ethical Dilemmas and Negative Consequences: Abuse, suicide risk, and competency concerns
- Racial Disparities and Policy Effectiveness: Minority overrepresentation and recidivism evidence
- Recommendations and Conclusion: Case for keeping juveniles in juvenile justice system
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds policy claims in concrete data — citing specific percentages for recidivism, suicide risk, and racial disparities — which gives the argument an empirical foundation rather than relying solely on opinion.
- The paper moves logically from policy description to stakeholder analysis to ethical critique to recommendation, making its structure easy for readers to follow.
- The conclusion connects the critique directly back to the stated goal of American correctional programs (rehabilitation), creating an internally consistent argument for reform.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of comparative evidence: it places outcomes from adult versus juvenile court dispositions side by side (e.g., Fagan's 1996 recidivism study) to argue that the policy fails on its own terms. This technique — testing a policy against its intended goals using empirical comparison — is a core method in criminal justice policy analysis.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a historical and legislative overview of transfer laws, then explains the three legal transfer mechanisms. It surveys who enacts and enforces these laws before pivoting to a sustained critique covering ethical concerns, documented harms, and racial disparities. A brief concluding section synthesizes the findings and proposes keeping juvenile offenders in the juvenile system while applying adult sentencing standards. The structure follows a classic policy-analysis format: describe, evaluate, recommend.
Overview of Juvenile Transfer Laws
Many states in the U.S. allowed the prosecution of juveniles in adult courts through transfer laws, as part of an expansion program that ran through the 1980s and 1990s (Griffin, Addie, Adams & Firestine, 2011). Transfer laws for juveniles outline the conditions under which underage defendants may be tried as adults in criminal cases. Earlier in the history of the American justice system, the criminal courts sought to separate adults from underage offenders. However, the laws were revised to allow youthful suspects to be transferred and tried in adult courts. This revision was triggered by a notable and serious escalation of violent crime committed by juvenile offenders (Burgess-Proctor, Holtrop & Villarruel, 2008).
Many attempts were made between 1979 and 2003 to modify transfer laws across numerous states. Some of these efforts were aimed at eliminating the minimum age requirement for trial in a criminal court, while others sought to expand the range of offenses subject to such prosecution. These efforts varied in approach: some combined both goals, while others focused on one or the other.
The spirit of the transfer laws was to make it an extremely serious consequence for juvenile offenders who engaged in criminal acts. There remains considerable public support for transfer laws, even though some states, such as Indiana, have moderated their application in recent years.
References
Burgess-Proctor, A., Holtrop, K., & Villarruel, F. A. (2008). Youth transferred to adult court: Racial disparities. Washington, DC: Campaign for Youth Justice.
Champion, D. J. (2001). The juvenile justice system: Delinquency, processing, and the law. Prentice Hall.
Fagan, J. (1996). The comparative advantage of juvenile vs. criminal court sanctions on recidivism among adolescent felony offenders. Law and Policy, 18, 77–112.
Forst, M., Fagan, J., & Vivona, T. S. (1989). Youth in prisons and training schools: Perceptions and consequences of the treatment-custody dichotomy. Juvenile and Family Court Journal, 40(1), 1–14.
Griffin, P., Addie, S., Adams, B., & Firestine, K. (2011). Trying juveniles as adults: An analysis of state transfer laws and reporting. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 20–21.
Grisso, T. (1997). The competence of adolescents as trial defendants. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 3(1), 3.
Strom, K., Smith, S. K., Snyder, H. N., & Justice, J. (1998). Juvenile felony defendants in criminal courts. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
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