NCJ Number
192712
Journal
Criminal Justice Magazine Volume: 15 Issue: 1 Dated: Spring 2000 Pages: 1-5
Date Published
2001
Length
5 pages
Annotation
This article assesses Florida's policy of allowing prosecutors, not judges, to decide whether children arrested for crimes ranging from shoplifting to robbery should be dealt with in the juvenile justice or criminal justice system.
Abstract
Although 43 States have changed their laws since 1993 to make it easier for judges to send children into the adult criminal justice system, Florida is leading the Nation in using prosecutors to make the decision to try children as adults. Although waiver provisions were initially intended to ensure that violent juvenile offenders were being detained, a 1991 study of two representative Florida counties found that only 29 percent of the youths prosecutors waived to adult court were accused of violent crimes. More than half (55 percent) were charged with property offense that involved no violence; fully 5 percent were tried as adults for misdemeanors; almost a quarter of the cases waived were first-time, low-level offenders. Minority youth were overrepresented in the ranks of juveniles being referred to adult court. A 1998 report prepared for the Federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention involved in-depth interviews with 50 youths sent to prison by Florida prosecutors compared with 50 sent to a State "maximum risk" juvenile detention facility. Sixty percent of the sample sent to juvenile detention said they did not expect to reoffend. Of those expected not to reoffend, 90 percent attributed their resolve to juvenile justice programming and services. Only one individual in juvenile detention said he was learning new ways to commit crimes. By contrast, 40 percent of the transferred youth said they were learning new ways to commit crimes through their prison contacts. Most reported that the guards and staff in prisons were indifferent, hostile, and showed little concern for them. Despite having prosecutorial waiver on the books since 1981, Florida has the second highest overall violent crime rate of any State in the country, and this status has remained virtually unchanged throughout the 1990's. By almost every measure, Florida's system of prosecutorial discretion waiver has failed.