The New Rehabilitation

Youth & Society, 1993

This article examines the decline of rehabilitation in juvenile justice throughout much of the United States over the past 20 years. This decline was facilitated by the progressive community's abandonment of rehabilitation and their acceptance of the justice model as a means to restrict the growing number of youths in correctional institutions. The justice model was conceived as a means to impose confinement limitations through standardized sentencing while accommodating conservative demands for retribution and punishment. However, contrary to expectations, the justice model promoted an unprecedented rise in the number of incarcerated youths and a deterioration in institutional conditions. This was occurring despite mounting evidence demonstrating the superior effectiveness of rehabilitation models in altering patterns of delinquency. Conclusions were based on an analysis of juvenile correction systems in California, Massachusetts, Utah, and Washington. The evidence shows that r...

Notre Dame JL Ethics & Pub. Pol'y, 1990

note 2; S. SCHLOSSMAN, supra note 2. CRACKING DOWN ON JUVENILES tion, and the juvenile court-to ensure that juveniles completed this development. Furthermore, their socialization process was to be supervised by professional educators and, when necessary, by social workers and treatment experts. By invoking the doctrine of parens patriae-that is, the responsibility of the state to care for persons who are unable to care for themselves or whose families are unable to care for them 4-juvenile court judges were given the authority to assert the state's guardianship over youthful offenders. Rather than subjecting juveniles to the rigors of the criminal trial or the harsh conditions of prisons and jails used to house adult offenders, juvenile court judges were to act benevolently and protectively toward the minor. In the words of one of the pioneers of the juvenile court, Judge Julian Mack, it was the obligation of the judge when assessing a juvenile offender to find out what he is physically, mentally, and morally, and then, if. .. [the judge] learns he is treading the path that leads to criminality, to take him in charge, not so much to punish as to reform, not to degrade but to uplift, not to crush but to develop, not to make him a criminal but a worthy citizen. 5 Because youths, almost by definition, were impulsive yet malleable, the Progressives asserted they were not completely responsible for acts of wrongdoing. They should not be held liable in the way the criminal law holds adults liable, because they had not yet achieved the cognitive or moral maturity associated with adulthood. Moreover, the Progressives believed that the causes of crime did not lie within the will of the individual-especially not within an individual whose moral code was only partially formed. Rather, they believed the causes of crime came from the broader social environment-the neighborhood, the family, and the specific childrearing practices of parents. Delinquency was viewed as an illness brought on by the social diseases of poverty, parental neglect, ignorance, and urban decay. 6 The sentencing structure proposed by the Progressives for the juvenile justice system was a logical extension of the under-4. For a review of the history of the parens patriae doctrine as the legal authority for the juvenile court, see Rendleman,

2013

Unlike my fellow panelists who are lawyers, I am a historian and have been professionally trained—in the past tense—to answer questions such as, “Do (or should) juveniles have more, less, the same, or different rights than adults?” In my remarks today, I will explain how conceptions of children’s rights have been used to shape the American juvenile justice system’s development. First, I will argue that we should take a long view of this history. Next, I will focus on three specific eras of twentiethcentury reform. Finally, I will conclude with a call for more research on the prosecutor’s role in administering juvenile justice. This historical perspective, I believe, can help us to answer the challenging question of what children’s rights should be. Before discussing the history of American juvenile justice in the twentieth century, I want to emphasize that the idea that children are different from adults predates the American Revolution and was inscribed by the nation’s founders int...

legalstudies.berkeley.edu, 2011

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy, 2012

Juvenile and Family Court Journal, 1992

2012

Critical Criminology, 2019

This article draws on contemporary policy discourse in order to advance claims about the intractable figure of the “bad” child in contemporary juvenile justice reforms in the United States (US). The article focuses in particular on the discourses of trauma and “brain science” to point to a form of neo-positivism that has arguably emerged and which challenges efforts to engage in systematic decarceration. The article also focuses on the idea of the “bad child” that persists in the commitment of some reformers to the necessity of confinement for some children. The article questions the extent to which new forms of positivism challenge our ability to leverage structural claims.

Boston College Law Review, 1995

The juvenile court has been a part of the American institutional landscape for nearly a century.' Born of the redemptive ideology of Progressivism, the juvenile justice system promised to divert youthful offenders from the rigors of the criminal justice system, both at adjudication and for disposition, and its advocates claimed that in doing so, the juvenile justice system would be able to rehabilitate young lawbreakers and derail their incipient criminal careers. As it reaches its hundredth birthday, however, the juvenile court has come under serious attack. Even its staunchest supporters acknowledge that, as it currently functions, the juvenile justice system is deeply flawed. 2 The unhappy truth is that we as a society do not particularly value young people," and inequities in the current juvenile justice system