Juvenile Justice: An Overview

An Overview of Juvenile Justice

Introduction

The history of juvenile justice in both the 19th and 20th centuries is rife with sobering accounts of juveniles confined to various institutions where they were subjected to punitive treatment rather than rehabilitation (Bartol and Bartol , 2004

.378 . Nevertheless , almost all types of juvenile violent and property crimes have been declining each year since the mid-1990s . Most legislators , agency administrators practitioners , and students are unaware of the latest model juvenile offender treatment and prevention programs and of the growing research evidence of their

success in sharply reducing recividism (Roberts , 2004 br

.6 . The study discusses justice system in the United States development of juvenile justice in court , development of juvenile probation , history of aftercare and juvenile confinement , house of justice and reformatory school , the cottage system , police , juvenile courts and correction departments , philosophies and strategies on correcting juveniles , and lastly , the models involved in juvenile management

Juvenile Justice and Probation Development in the United States

The American model for the juvenile courts , and more broadly , the juvenile justice system , was created in Chicago in 1899 . Just as the discipline of sociology emerged out of a period of massive economic and related social changes in Europe , the juvenile justice system was created during the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy , and from a rural to an increasingly urban society in the U .S .A (Jensen and Jepsen , 2006

.83 . Several million juveniles commit delinquent acts each year . Violent and property crimes committed by juveniles are one of the major social and public health problems in American society . Newss and other media saturate us with graphic depictions of individual youths and gangs committing violence in the schools , in the streets , in parking lots , and in the home . The reality is that although almost 2 .4 million juvenile arrests were reported by the Federal Bureau of Inspections (FBI ) and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP ) in 2000 , the approximate number of juvenile delinquent acts could be between 13 and 15 million annually because many crimes committed by juveniles go unreported or undetected , or no arrest is made (Roberts , 2004

.6 . The period from 1880 to 1920 , referred to as the Progressive Era by historians , was a time of major change in the United States . The pace of industrialization , urbanization , and immigration quickened during this period , and the diversification of the population continued . The stream of Irish and German immigrants trailed off at the end of 19th century but they were replaced by Italians , Russians , Jews , Greeks , and other immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe (Elrod , 1999

.110 . The juvenile court movement quickly spread across the United States . In its early form , it provided youths with quasi-legal , quasi-therapeutic personalized justice . The court was paternalistic , not adversarial in nature (Siegel and Senna ,

.551 . In the United States , juvenile probation developed as part of the wave of social reform characterizing the latter half of the 19th century . Massachusetts took...