Introduction
There has been a lot of controversy in trying to understand the reason the spirit in which juvenile courts were created since a lot of people are currently arguing that children should be tried as adults when it comes to crime. Generally the essence of creating the juvenile courts more than a century ago was to ensure that children would not face the same trial as adults in the normal criminal courts. Some scholars argue that the juvenile courts usually concentrate on the fact that the junior offenders are naïve or could commit the crimes without motive rather that basing justice on the type of the crimes that are committed. This could be true in most cases since the establishment of the courts also focused on the fact that juniors could be corrected, guided and counseled and hence focused on correction rather than on taking punitive measures. However with the current changes in the societal norms, many people want the rules to be toughened for the teens and charge them as adults because the crime rates and seriousness of the offenses among the youths have been increasing drastically. Many states of the United States of America have been working on this subject and some have established regulations that allow particular youthful felons to be tried as adults; some states are even considering the proposed doing away with of the juvenile courts in totality.
Purpose of Study
The main objective of establishing special courts for children and young adults was to pay attention on their rehabilitation rather than on the offenses and punishments. This paper seeks to distinguish juvenile justice for young offenders as fundamentally different from the present justice system for adult offenders and capable of offering the best solution to juvenile justice. Minors’ basic human right to be treated as minors is violated when they are taken to adult courts (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006, p. 5). These children should not be given the same kind of justice treatment as adults in the current society because this does not help in curbing crime. Bad quick fixes that propose minors should be referred to the adult court do not offer valid solution but they just send the society a step back in justice progress.
Literature Review
What is Juvenile Justice?
Charging the youths differently from the way adults are tried in the court means that the youth are tried in different court system which is an alternative to the usual adult system. In this system, the youthful felons are heard and charged by peers. The guidelines in most state systems provide that the others youths have to volunteers to take part in the process of passing a sentence (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006, p. 5). The participants are trained, examined, mentored and are certified after having complied with the code of conduct. Real cases are handled here just like in the normal adult courts and as a result, the participants usually take oaths of confidentiality with regards to any of the information they may get to know about in the process of doing their duty in case presentation (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006, p. 5).
These courts come to administer justice in the event of a criminal offense committed by a youth person considered to be a minor. The exact age to act as the cutting point is usually debatable. The difference in the age is therefore set up by the state regulation and each state in the US has its own age limit which determines whether and individual is charged in an adult court or the youth court (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006, p. 7). The states also approve the courts that would work to restore justice and to try to reintegrate the young person who committed the crime back to the society and also conveying relevant message to the young felon regarding the intolerable character (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006, p. 8).
The main principle that is behind the formation of the juvenile courts was to protect the community having observed the crime rates in the young people as well as enhance competence and responsibility. Actually the way the youths are charged in the youths courts is different from the way are tried in the adult criminal courts (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006, p. 9). This brings in the questions “do children instantly become adults when they commit an offense? How can young people be singled out as adults? Were they regarded as adults before they committed the criminal act? Or should they be treated are juniors in spite of the intensity of their crimes?”
Why Charge Youths as Adults
In 1899, a different court was created in Chicago to try young people for committing criminal offenses before a court termed the juvenile court. In some odd cases the judges could decide that the young person involved was “not acquiescent to the juvenile court’s treatment”. This meant that the youths were to be referred to the adult criminal court as the jurisdiction of their courts was relinquished (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006, p. 9). In the recent past, most states have implemented their rules and regulations to increase the number of incidences when the youths would be referred for prosecution in the adult court.
There are several ways in which the youths are referred to adults courts in the US today but vary in each state;
- Judicial waiver – this allows the judge’s diplomacy to take the youth’s case to be tried in the adult court (Bartollas & Miller, 2005, p. 202)
- Prosecutorial discretion of the direct file which allows the prosecutor of the case to refer it to the adult criminal courts for trial (Bartollas & Miller, 2005, p. 202)
- The mandatory waiver – the youth court judges decide to automatically refer the juvenile criminal case to the adult courts for some crime due to nature, age of the offender or the previous criminal record (Bartollas & Miller, 2005, p. 202)
- Statutory exclusion – this demands that the juvenile case be tried at the adult criminal court depending on the age of the alleged criminal or the intensity of the crime or both the cases
Charging Youths as Adults Does Not Decrease Crime
An analysis of the re-arrest rates for the youthful offenders tried in the adults criminal courts in Florida, 2001 indicated that even after regulating, initial changes, race, and age, the youths who received adult sentencing had a probability of 4.90 for repeating the same crime and this included technical violations and had a probability of 2.26 for repeating the crime without inclusion of technical violations (implying that the new crime was tried against the youth) (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006, p. 12).
In the 2002 juvenile transfers study for criminal cases to the adult courts, final report indicated that the youths who received juvenile trial had lower rates of recidivism compared to those who were charged as adults. By making a comparison of the 315 best matched pairs, the report discovered that about 49 percent of the youthful felons transferred to the adult courts recidivated while only 37 percent of the one charged in the juvenile courts recidivated (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006, p. 12).
Case Studies
Nathaniel Brazill was charged with a second degree murder case for allegedly killing his English teacher. In the adult law courts, the crime usually bears a sentence of up to 30 years imprisonment. However the defense team behind Brazill begged for leniency for charging him as an adult since he was only 14 years old and not a young adult (Greathouse et al, 2008, p. 23). The court ruling was to be made with some sensitivity due to the age of the criminal and not the intensity of the crime. In another case, a jury in the Florida passed a sentence against Lionel Tate for life imprisonment without parole; she was also 14 years old and was accused of killing a younger girl as they were trying out wrestling moves (Greathouse et al, 2008, p. 24). The concurrent of these two comparable cases served as an eye opener to the public misunderstanding that the youthful aggressive offenses are on the increase; in fact the latest statistics indicate a drastic decline over the recent years.
Could the drop be attributed to the fact that the children are thinking carefully about the type of crimes they commit, bearing in mind that they would receive adult sentencing. Another case that involved sentencing a minor in an adult court is that of a Michigan boy aged 12 years (Greathouse et al, 2008, p. 25). Nathaniel Abraham was the youngest child ever to be tried as an adult after psychiatrists affirmed that the frail boy could receive a sentence similar to an adult for a murder case though he was functioning like a 6 year old.
These are not the only cases, it’s been found out that over the last 20 year, over 150 children have received a death sentence in the United States of America and every year, more than 750,000 delinquency cases are heard by judges and tens of thousands receive an adult kind of trial (Greathouse et al, 2008, p. 26). Of all the nations that allow children to be executed when they commit serious crimes, the US has carried out the most number of executions and over the past years the number of cases that have been referred to the adult cases have increased by an overwhelming 70% rate.
Methodology
This research will explore the currently scholarly researchers on the effectiveness of juvenile justice system. Basically it will as the efficiency in trying juveniles in a court set for minors. It will as assess the effectiveness of adult courts in charging the young offenders. It’s been realized that in some extreme cases, young people with varying ages have committed very brutal crimes that the justice system deem it appropriate to charge these persons in adult courts. The reason for this is that such kinds of crimes are not acceptable in the normal frame of minds of young people. The juvenile therefore have to be tried in adult to be sentenced accordingly.
The research method to be used in this study will be systematic literature search. The researcher will review published literature material on juvenile justice and related topics. The research will have entail five steps. Step 1 is the specification of the research problems and the objectives of the study. Step 2 will entail describing inclusion and exclusion criteria of the materials to be searched. Step 3 will be the formulation of the plan for conducting the search. Step 4 will be the actual search and retrieval of the literature works. The final step will be interpretation of the evidence and integration of the findings into the paper this will also help in final refining and formulation of the thesis depending on the quality of evidence obtained.
The limitations concerning dates of publication will also be factored in because the research intends to use papers that were published from 1995 to 2010. The search design will be set to identify as much relevant information as possible from published literature by use of the systematic database search, concentrating on sensitivity instead of specificity. The sources of literature will be the criminal databases. The National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) Databases offers extensive literature on juvenile criminal justice will over 195,000 articles and hence will form the larger source of this search. The research will also use other databases like Juvenile Court and Probation Statistical System (JCPSS), the Model Program Guide database for information on juvenile court and probation system and finally the juvenile justice tracking database.
Analysis of the literature search will be done by abstraction. The researcher will use the abstracts and summaries of the articles picked for study. This will help the researcher to determine whether to include or exclude. The analysis process will include four stages; previewing, questioning, reading and summarizing. A final review will be written as a way of data presentation.
Conclusion
Most of the researches in this area have found out that the youthful felons who are transferred for trials and sentencing in the adult law courts are more likely to commit same crimes again than those who are tried in the juvenile courts for the similar type of crime and with comparable previous records. Similar researches also indicate that out of the youthful felons charged in court for committing new crimes, those sent to adult courts re-offended at a double rate compared to their counterparts charged in the juvenile court. It’s evident that there are juvenile crimes and these youth commit violent and heinous crime. Nonetheless, it’s not at the rate or the violent level that it’s depicted to the public. In fact, statistic indicate that crimes among minors in falling. As matter of fact, finding a solution to this issue may not be as simple as it seems and it cannot be solved by taking these children in prisons. It requires a rehabilitator program to try and correct behavior of these young adults.
References List
Bartollas, C., & Miller, S. J. (2005). Juvenile justice in America. (4th Ed) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall
Greathouse, S. M., Sothmann, F.C., & Levett, L.M., & Kovera, M. B. (2008). The Potentially Biasing Effects of Voir Dire in Juvenile Waiver On juror decisions in juvenile waiver cases. Paper presented at the 116th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. Boston, MA: APA
Snyder, H. N., & Sickmund, M. (2006). Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 2006 National Report. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. Web.