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Within the past three decades, social and legal changes have transformed the juvenile court from a nominally rehabilitative welfare agency into a second-class criminal court for young offenders. Recent efforts to "toughen" juvenile justice policies have resulted in increasingly harsh sanctions that fall disproportionately on minority youths. In this provocative new book, Barry Feld examines what went wrong with the juvenile court and proposes an alternative model for youth crime control and child welfare. The Progressive reformers who created the juvenile court a century ago saw children as relatively blameless and innocent. But recent decades of rising crime rates associated with urban decay have strained this tolerant view of young offenders. Feld relates the 1967 Supreme Court decision In re Gault to the broader social and legal changes associated with the civil rights movement and the Warren Court's "Due Process Revolution." Although gault mandated more elaborate procedural safeguards in delinquency hearings, ironically, those protections legitimated the imposition of more punitive sanctions. Since Gault, Feld argues, three decades of judicial, legislative, and administrative reforms have conducted a form of "criminological triage." At the "soft end," reforms have shifted noncriminal status offenders, primarily female and white, out of the juvenile justice system into a "hidden system" made up of private sector mental health and chemical dependency facilities. At the "hard end," states transfer increasing numbers of young offenders, disproportionately minorities, to criminal court for prosecution as adults. Meanwhile, juvenile courts punish more severely those delinquents-again disproportionately minorities-who remain within the increasingly criminalized juvenile justice system. Feld attributes the current state of affairs to a conceptual flaw inherent in the juvenile court. The juvenile justice system attempts to combine social welfare and social control functions in one organization, but inevitably fulfills both missions badly because of the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions between them. Progressive reformers situated the juvenile court on a number of cultural, legal, and criminological fault lines, where the ideas of child and adult, determinism and free will, immature and responsible, treatment and punishment collide. The past three decades have witnessed a shift from the former to the latter of these binary pairs in response to the racial transformation of cities, the increase in serious youth crime, and the erosion of the rehabilitative assumptions of the juvenile court. The solution, Feld argues, is to uncouple social welfare from criminal social control. States could try all offenders in one integrated criminal justice system with appropriate modifications to accommodate the youthfulness of younger defendants: a graduated, age-culpability sentencing system, separate youth correctional facilities, and the like. Formally recognizing youthfulness as a mitigating factor would provide youths with greater protections and justice than they currently receive in either the juvenile or criminal justice systems. At the same time such a strategy would enable public policies to address directly the social welfare needs of all young people.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Figures and Tables(p. xv)
• Introduction(p. 3)
• 1 The Social Construction of Childhood and Adolescence(p. 17)
• 2 The Juvenile Court and the "Rehabilitative Ideal"(p. 46)
• 3 The Constitutional Domestication of the Juvenile Court(p. 79)
• 4 Procedural Justice in Juvenile Courts: Law on the Books and Law in Action(p. 109)
• 5 Social Control and Noncriminal Status Offenders: Triage and Privatization(p. 166)
• 6 Delinquent or Criminal? Juvenile Court's Shrinking Jurisdiction over Serious Young Offenders(p. 189)
• 7 Punishment, Treatment, and the Juvenile Court: Sentencing Delinquents(p. 245)
• 8 Abolish the Juvenile Court: Sentencing Policy When the Child Is a Criminal and the Criminal Is a Child(p. 287)
• Epilogue(p. 331)
• References(p. 343)
• Index(p. 367)

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This is the latest title in Oxford's "Studies in Crime and Public Policy" series, much of which deals with youth crime and its relationship to society. Feld (Minnesota Law Sch.) is a leading scholar in the field of juvenile justice administration. Here he briefly traces the evolution of the juvenile court from its inception in the early 1900s, with an emphasis on the past three decades. Early juvenile courts were seen as rehabilitative welfare agencies, but with the Supreme Court's emphasis in the 1960s on due process, children began to be seen as defendants. As a result of a series of Supreme Court decisions, Feld asserts, juveniles now receive the "worst of both worlds." He explores the complex relationship between race and youth crime in an attempt to understand the court decisions that lead to procedural justice. He also discusses the recent political impetus to treat juveniles as adults in some cases. His points are well made and persuasive. Recommended for libraries with an interest in juveniles and criminal justice.‘Sandra K. Lindheimer, Middlesex Law Lib., Cambridge, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

From church and library to the impeachment debate, "protecting kids" is used to justify all kinds of questionable behavior. These authors just say no. University of Minnesota law professor Feld has studied the juvenile justice system for 25-plus years. In Bad Kids, he argues that procedural and substantive changes over the last three decades "have converted the historical ideal of the juvenile court as a welfare agency into a quasi-penal system that provides young offenders with neither therapy nor justice." Even when Progressives established juvenile courts, he notes, they were meant for "other people's children": a century ago, southern and eastern European immigrants' kids; today, the children of the poor, particularly the African American poor. Feld traces changes that have made the Progressives' mixed vision inadequate and calls for "uncoupling social welfare from social control": abolishing juvenile courts, viewing youth as a mitigating factor in setting sentences within the same courts where adults are tried, and forcing public officials to address child welfare directly. Males' The Scapegoat Generation (1996) drew some attention; here, he directs his scorn at 10 myths that are conventional wisdom. Today's teens are not, he insists, America's worst generation ever--violent thugs; druggie wastoids; drunken killers; Camel clones; reckless, suicidal, and "at risk"; or in "moral meltdown." Furthermore, they don't need more policing; teen moms aren't ruining America; the media don't tell the truth about young people; and youth are, in fact, oppressed. Males devotes a chapter to debunking each myth. Every chapter is full of (often startling) data: for example, who really has a drug and crime problem (adults, far more than kids) or the fact that parents have much more influence on whether young people smoke than a certain cartoonish ungulate. Lively, stimulating disputation. --Mary Carroll

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Barry Feld is Centennial Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. He has written five books and more than three dozen law review and criminology articles on juvenile justice administration with specil emphases on serious offenders, procedural justice, and youth sentencing policy.