Future of Childhood and Juvenile Justice

• NCJ Number: 72579
• Editor(s): L T Empey
• Date Published: 1979
• Length: 428 pages
• Grant Number(s): 78-JA-AX-0001
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice
• Sale Source: University of Virginia Press
• Publication Type: Historical Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Papers from a conference held at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, under the auspices of the Kenyon Public Affairs Forum.

Annotation

A series of essays is presented on the ways in which American society has historically and currently treated its youth, with emphasis on handling youth's deviant behavior through the juvenile justice system.

Abstract

The essays generally agree that American society has viewed children as parental possessions whose primary obligation is to be obedient to the demands and values of parents and the broader adult world represented by authoritative institutions such as the school and the criminal justice system. The juvenile justice system was originally formed under the theory that the court would act as parent to normalize youth who had failed to become socialized under parental influence. Restraint and punishment have been considered important aspects of the social control of children and youth and have been persistently used by the juvenile justice system as aspects of 'treating' youth. Recent decades have seen the growth of the children's rights movement, which has seen the need to protect children from the excessive controlling and abusing actions of parents and social and legal institutions. The criminal justice system is currently experiencing both the influence of the children's rights movement, which is aiming at decriminalizing status offenses, deinstitutionalizing juveniles, and diverting them from the criminal justice system entirely, and the counterrevolutionary movement of a 'heavy-handed' approach to dealing with youth according to a 'just deserts' philosophy that punishes an offender according to the severity of the crime in the interests of justice, deterrence, and the protection of society. The essays generally advocate increasing the power of youth to choose and mold their own destinies, even in the context of the criminal justice system, where a range of possible case dispositions could be presented to the youthful offender from which he/she could choose one. Tabular data are provided for empirical studies, and references are included for each essay.