Rethinking Juvenile Justice System

Rethinking Juvenile Justice System

Latricia Austin

CRJ-180

Professor Williams

Strayer University

March 11, 2014

Rethinking Juvenile Justice System

The juvenile justice system is relatively new being less than 100 years old in our history of crime and justice. With all new things there are periods of transition and periods of oppression. The response you get at first may not always be the one you are looking for. In the beginning someone decided there should be a separate area of the justice system that we should use for juveniles. However, in turn, this may have created more conflict’s than it was designed to cure. Labeling theory suggests that even the act of making a child appear before a judge labels them as criminals and therefore can set their future spiraling down a path of criminal behavior.

Other issues with juveniles and the system is recidivism. It is shown that at least one third of the people we place in prisons are due to return to a prison not long after being released (Slobogin, 2011). If the point of the place is rehabilitation than less and less people should be coming back to prisons. Stick a child in a prison and the recidivism rates may only increase because the child has a longer life to live than an adult (typically speaking). We want to make children and adolescents better people in our society, not just like everyone else. Adolescents and adults differ from each other as do their crimes so we cannot charge them or handle them the same. Although, it is the authors opinion that even adults can’t be considered mature half the time. However, adolescents tend to show less ability to really perceive future consequences than adults. Teenagers do not think about work and relationships the same, not do they see these