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With increasing numbers of juvenile offenders being forced into adult courts, the School of Social Work and the Law School sponsored a two-day symposium, "The Future of the Juvenile Court," May 29 and 30.
"Most states have passed laws to treat more juveniles as adults," said School of Social Work Dean Ira M. Schwartz. "There's a question of whether the juvenile court and the youth corrections system will survive."
The symposium was attended by more than 70 people from across the country involved in juvenile justice and the study of juvenile justice, including policy-makers, legislators and theoreticians, said Stephen J. Morse, Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law and professor of psychology and law in psychology, who was one of the conference organizers.
The overwhelming majority of speakers argued for the separation of juvenile justice from adult courts because research shows that punishment and rehabilitation efforts, when tailored to the age and the criminal history of the offender, are more effective and efficient than blanket crack-downs on all criminals.
"Can we say the adult system does a better job?" Little Rock Court of Appeals Judge Terry Crabtree asked rhetorically.
University of Virginia Law School Professor Elizabeth Scott made a case for diminished responsibility of adolescents who commit crimes. Teenagers are unable to judge risks and calculate consequences, while they are overly sensitive to peer pressure and the desire to conform.
"For most kids who offend, criminal conduct is adolescent-limited," she said. Adolescent crime is usually a developmental stage that is more likely to pass if the offender is not treated as an adult criminal.
"It raises questions about policies likely to sweep numerous adolescents into the criminal justice system," she said. "From a utilitarian perspective, it is not effective. ... It makes sense to give kids room to reform."
Some questioned whether reform is ever possible. "People who had chocolate and coke for lunch ... and don't exercise for the next 48 hours, think about how hard it is for you to change your behavior," said Professor Richard Gelles of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island.
But Professor Mark Lipsey of Vanderbilt argued that it was possible, based on his meta-analysis of more than 500 studies. While treatment on an average effects only a 10 to 15 percent improvement in recidivism rates, excellent treatment programs that meet criteria such as adequate dosage and high quality can effect a 40 to 50 percent improvement.
Participants discussed the need to get the facts of what works and what doesn't work across to policy-makers and the public.
"Mental health programs lobby judges every day," Crabtree said, wondering how a judge was to know which one worked best. Which of those programs gets funding is often determined by legislators more knowledgeable about politics than the effectiveness of the programs, he said.
Lipsey agreed. "We let anyone who can get money from the legislature run a program affecting the lives of juveniles," he said, referring to the rush to fund boot-camp programs, which, he said, do not have good success rates in reducing recidivism.
Closing Panel member Delbert Elliott, a professor from the University of Colorado's Institute of Behavioral Science, echoed an earlier statement by the symposium moderator, Penn criminology Professor Marvin Wolfgang, that teenagers in the '90s are no different from earlier groups, but the crimes they commit are more violent. Elliott said the percentage of adolescents who become involved in criminal behavior has held steady over the years, but the peak years for criminal involvement have increased from one year--age 15--to four years--ages 15 through 19, and the crimes are more frequently lethal because of the availability of guns.
Adult sentences do not reduce juvenile crime, he said. "Evidence suggests that you can change the degree of sanction all you want, but if the risk of apprehension is low, it will have no effect. Informal social controls are more effective deterrents than formal controls. Yet when we look at a plan for controlling the problem, we look first at the formal social controls."
After the symposium, Morse said he had hoped to get "multidisciplinary perspectives on the juvenile courts' delinquency jurisdiction, and the conference produced them at the highest level." He included on his long list of conference points of interest University of Florida Professor Charles E. Frazier's research showing lower recidivism for juveniles handled in juvenile courts than those handled in adult courts. He also included University of Minnesota Law School Professor Barry Feld's suggestion that welfare system interventions made after a juvenile criminal offense are made too late.
Although Feld spoke against juvenile court, he was a minority. Schwartz expressed the view of the overwhelming majority after the meeting ended:
"Juveniles who commit very serious violent crimes probably should be tried as adults, but that represents a very small number of the juveniles involved in committing crimes. There's very little evidence that sentencing juveniles as adults has a positive impact at all. It may be good politics, but it's not very good public policy."
Return to Compass Features for June 17, 1997