NCJ Number
148013
Date Published
1994
Length
115 pages
Annotation
This study of decisions on the status of juveniles in New York's criminal justice system identifies the legal and organizational reasons for bringing juveniles into the adult legal process.
Abstract
The report first describes the event and the legislation that triggered New York's current recriminalization of delinquency. This includes a summary of the 1978 Juvenile Offender Law, which lowers the age of criminal responsibility for designated felony offenses so that a relatively large number of juveniles are initially placed in the adult criminal justice system. The report's third section extends the legal reasons for assigning criminal responsibility to juveniles into a theory for viewing the interjurisdictional and intrajurisdictional context of case-processing decisions. In the fourth section, qualitative and survey data sources are presented on initial case processing decisions. Section five analyzes State data on the arrest, adjudication, and disposition of approximately 8,000 juveniles initially placed in New York's criminal justice system. This includes an examination of the effects of the offense, offender characteristics, and their temporal and jurisdictional context on the assignment of criminal responsibility by various criminal justice officials. The next section highlights the organizational context of criminal punishment for juveniles with additional State data on annual rates of incarceration for convicted juveniles. Findings on the organizational context of legislative waiver decisionmaking in New York indicate that criminal justice reforms satisfy diverse official needs and interests. Consequently, there is no simple measure of success or failure in this evaluation of waiver in New York. Future research should continue to trace the manner in which juveniles are labeled as offenders within and between systems of juvenile and criminal justice. 42 tables