Abstract
The juvenile justice system was meant to help reduce the rate of crime in the United States by taking children engaged in criminal activities through a rehabilitation process. The process is meant to transform them into responsible and law-abiding citizens. However, studies indicate that this system has failed to achieve its goals. Instead of transforming these delinquents, these facilities are offering them the ability to learn more about crimes and develop dangerous networks that they can rely on once they are released. The rationale for the study is to identify the source of weakness of the system that makes it ineffective in transforming the young offenders. The following is the hypothesis that will be tested:
H1o. The current practices in the juvenile justice system are not directly linked to the increase in the crime rates among young adults in the United States.
The study will use a sample of 20 participants. They will include children who have gone through the juvenile justice system, their parents, officers working within the system, and experts in this field. Using a questionnaire, the research will involve a face-to-face interview with the participants. It is anticipated that the results will identify major weaknesses in the current juvenile justice system that makes it less effective in rehabilitating young offenders. The outcome of the study will have major implications on the practices that the system uses. The recommendations will help in transforming this department.
Introduction
The United States juvenile justice system was created to handle youths below the age of 18 years who engage in criminal acts. The system, which comprises the law enforcement officers, courts, and correctional facilities, has the primary goal of rehabilitating delinquents so that they can become law-abiding and responsible citizens. However, a study conducted by May et al. (2018) shows that there is a major problem with the juvenile justice system that makes it less capable of achieving its primary mandate. Children who have gone through the system are more likely to commit a crime and be taken through the system once again than those who have never been through it (Stinson & Watkins, 2014).
It would be expected that those who have gone through the system will avoid engaging in criminal activities because of the rehabilitation, but statistics show that the opposite is true. It is an indication that the system is not achieving its primary goal of rehabilitating these children. According to Schoemaker et al. (2020), an overwhelming majority of adults who engage in criminal activities and find themselves in the criminal justice system had once gone through the juvenile justice system.
The problem, which is at the center of this research, is that the approach the system takes in dealing with juvenile delinquency in the country is one of the main areas of weakness. Merlo and Benekos (2017) observe that although the system is designed to rehabilitate, it is more of a punitive system than a rehabilitative one. When a child is found guilty of a crime, the presiding judge may sentence them to a specific period in jail with the expectation that the correctional facilities will help them reform.
The problem is that the affected child and her loved ones would view the sentence as a punishment instead of an opportunity to reform. As such, these children would start serving their terms knowing that they are under punishment for the crime. In their mind, their goal is to serve the time of the sentence so that they can get back to their criminal ways. They will rarely focus on the need to reform because they believe they are being punished.
The correctional facilities meant for the delinquents have proven to be more harmful than being beneficial based on recent studies. According to Merlo and Benekos (2017), correctional facilities have become the breeding ground for hardened criminals. Some of these children would be incarcerated for trespassing, while the unfortunate ones would be there because their parents could not afford the fees of a good attorney that could prove their innocence.
Once in these facilities, they get to interact with hardened criminals, some in their late teens who have been in and out of the system severally (May et al. 2018). They learn new tactics for committing serious crimes. They learn that sometimes criminal activities pay if one is smart enough. Above all, they get to have a dangerous network of hardcore criminals who they can work with to engage in unlawful activities. As Barros and Maia (2017) put it, these correctional facilities for juveniles are the perfect training ground for criminals. They get to learn the tricks and obtain the right contacts in case they need assistance in pulling out a major criminal act.
The rationale of conducting this study is to help address the current weaknesses of the county’s juvenile justice system. The system is critical in reforming children who engage in criminal activities. Merlo and Benekos (2017) believe that children must grow up knowing that their actions have consequences, and the juvenile justice system has the role of doing that. The problem is that it often exposes them to a toxic environment where they become hardened criminals instead of being law-abiding citizens.
Something should be done to address the problem. Scholars have suggested a raft of reforms that will help ensure that these institutions do not become training grounds for future hardcore criminals (Young et al., 2017). In this paper, the researcher will investigate some of the current practices within the system that has made it less effective in reforming children who engage in petty crime. The study will then propose ways that the identified weaknesses can be addressed based on findings from other scholars and raw data collected from a sample of respondents.
Addressing the current problem with the juvenile justice system would require close coordination of all the parties involved, and a major reform in the current policies and practices. A section of stakeholders believes that the current approach of incarcerating children, some of whom have committed minor crimes, is not the best way of reforming them into responsible citizens. It only hardens them and creates enmity between them and law enforcement agencies. Others believe that incarceration is the only way of reminding them that their actions have consequences. This study will address the controversy by proposing ways of eliminating the weaknesses and strengthening the system. The following hypothesis will guide the study.
- H1o. The current practices in the juvenile justice system are not directly linked to the increase in the crime rates among young adults in the United States.
- H1a. The current practices in the juvenile justice system are directly linked to the increase in the crime rates among young adults in the United States.
Method
In this section, the primary goal is to discuss the methodology that will be used to collect data and analyze it. This section discusses the research design for the study, the rationale of using the design, potential challenges such as various threats to external and internal validity, participants in the study, instruments used to collect data from them, and procedures. It enables readers to understand how the findings in the report were arrived at and how reliable the study is in addressing the identified problem (Lankoski & Bjork, 2015).
Participants
It will be necessary to collect data from a group of people who can provide insight into the issue under investigation. The issue of juvenile justice system and its weakness in addressing delinquency in the country affects so many people. However, the study will only use a small group of people to ensure that data can be collected from them at the right time. The study will be collected from four groups of people. The first group will be juveniles who have gone through the system within the past five years. This category of participants must be under 18 years. They will share their experience with the system. The second category of participants will be parents (both male and female) whose children have gone through the juvenile justice system.
These parents will help explain whether they think the system was beneficial to their children. The third category is the correctional officers responsible for handling these children when in prison or during the period of probation. The last category will be highly educated experts in the criminal and juvenile justice system who have been actively been involved in policy formulation or implementation. Given the limited time and specific inclusion criteria that participants have to meet, convenience sampling will be the most appropriate approach to identifying respondents for the study (Lankoski & Bjork, 2015). A sample of 20 individuals will be adequate for the collection of the primary data.
Research Design
Once data is collected from participants, the next step will be to analyze in a way that responds to the research question. Merlo and Benekos (2017) advise that the chosen design should respond directly to the research question and be capable of addressing the hypothesis. The ANOVA for 2×2 independent groups design will be appropriate in analyzing the relationship between the dependent variables (increase in crime rates among young adults) and the independent variables (current practices in the juvenile justice system).
When using this design, Lankoski and Bjork (2015) advise that one should understand pitfalls of the design in terms of potential threats to external and internal validity and identify any confounding variables if they exist. The main weakness of this design is that it does not provide a detailed explanation of why a phenomenon happened the way it did. It involves using descriptive and inferential statistics, not phenomenology. However, the internal and external validity will not be compromised as long as accurate data is obtained from the sources and analyzed correctly.
Materials
When planning to collect primary data from a sample of participants, it is important to have material that can help in the data collection process. In this case, the researcher decided to use a questionnaire to help in the data collection process. The questionnaire had three parts. The first part focused on the demographical factors of the participants such as their gender, age, race, and social status. The second part of the tool focused on the academic qualifications of the participants. The last part of the tool focused on specific issues relating to the effectiveness of the juvenile justice system in rehabilitating delinquents as a way of reducing crime rates among young Americans.
Procedures
The final step after developing the right tools for data collection is to get to the field and obtain the actual data. In this project, the researcher intends to conduct a face-to-face interview with the selected 20 participants. The researcher will allow each participant to select a date, within a specific period, and place where they feel comfortable. This method was chosen because it was considered more effective in collecting the desired data.
Results
When data has been collected from the participants, the next step will be to conduct an analysis. The statistical tests that will be used to analyze primary data will include both descriptive and inferential analysis. The descriptive analysis will primarily focus on determining the central tendency to understand the common claims made by the participants about the main weaknesses of the system. This analysis will help in ranking the major weaknesses of the juvenile justice system.
The inferential statistics will help in establishing the relationship between the independent variables (current practices in the juvenile justice system) and the dependent variable (crime rate among young Americans). It will help to determine if it is true that children who have gone through the system are more likely to engage in criminal activities. A 2-way analysis of variance will be used at this stage.
The findings made from the analysis will then be subjected to detailed discussion. It will be possible to understand if indeed they get negatively influenced, and would then embrace the idea that crime pays (Barros & Maia, 2017). There has been a perception that the justice system is skewed against a section of society. According to Merlo and Benekos (2017), it is more likely for an African American child to be sent to prison than a white when they commit the same crime. Such beliefs create an environment where a section of the society feels that the system is meant to punish them while benefiting the other section of the society.
The affected group would end up distrusting the system and its claim of rehabilitating the young offenders. Instead of learning how to obey the law, these children would embrace extreme doctrines on how the system is against them hence should be defeated. The correctional facilities would then become grounds of extremism for the children. When they leave these facilities, they will have unique capabilities of committing major crimes. Some of them would even consider joining extremist groups just to ensure that they can inflict maximum punishment on the perceived enemy. In such a case, the juvenile justice system would have succeeded in achieving the complete opposite of what it was expected to realize.
Discussion
The United States Department of Justice has been keen on fighting crime at various stages to ensure that people and property are protected. The creation of the juvenile justice system was a result of understanding the fact that young offenders cannot be taken through the normal justice system (Barros & Maia, 2017). It was meant to ensure that young offenders are rehabilitated so that they can transform to become responsible citizens. Under this system, child offenders are not supposed to be treated as adults when they are taken to the court.
The justice system understands that their tender age may make them act irrationally; hence they need to be subjected to a more lenient form of punishment. However, it does not mean that they should not feel the consequences of their actions. As such, depending on the severity of their crime, these children can be sentenced to probation or jail term so that they understand that their actions have consequences.
A section of the society feels that this system is ineffective in addressing the concerns it is expected to address. The potential results would indicate that children who are sentenced to prison terms are more likely to engage in criminal acts once they are freed compared with those who have never been in prison before. It is also likely that once they are free, these children are likely to engage in more serious crimes than what they went to prison for in the first case. Several studies have found this claim to be true, as Merlo and Benekos (2017) observe. The problem is that the system failed to take into consideration the kind of influence that some hardened criminals would have on the young offenders.
The fact that these children are able to mingle freely and share their experiences, the only common factor that they will find easy talking about is their criminal lives. Older children who have probably been arrested and incarcerated a number of times will share their experience with those who have just been there for the first time. They will become inspirational figures to the younger ones, explaining to them how to avoid arrest and the returns that they can get when they engage in major crimes.
The facility brings together young offenders with varying capabilities. By the time they are leaving the facility, they will not only have more knowledge about how to commit specific crimes but also a network of crime partners.
It is important to appreciate the fact that there are potential problems that the study may face, which may affect the outcome. One of the issues that may arise is the unwillingness of some potential respondents to participate in the study. Some parents may not be willing to admit that their children have gone through the juvenile justice system. Other parents may be uncomfortable allowing their children to talk about their experiences before, during, and after incarceration. In such a situation, it becomes difficult to have an adequate number of participants who have the right information needed in the study (Barros & Maia, 2017).
In other cases, a participant may deliberately provide misleading information to protect the system or self-image, making it difficult to understand the truth about the issue being investigated. Such challenges may compromise the validity and reliability of the study. However, mechanisms will be put in place to address such issues. Future scholars should focus on understanding how different stakeholders can work together to ensure that the juvenile justice system is a success. It is necessary to determine if it is appropriate to use non-jail terms to help correct young offenders. The outcome of this study will have major implications on policies currently used in the juvenile justice system.
References
Barros, M. P., & Maia, A. C. (2017). Juvenile delinquency, crime and social marginalization: Social and political implications. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited.
Lankoski, P., & Bjork, S. (2015). Game research methods: An overview. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
May, D. C., Barranco, R., Stokes, E., Robertson, A. A., & Haynes, S. H. (2018). Do school resource officers really refer juveniles to the juvenile justice system for less serious offenses? Criminal Justice Policy Review, 29(1), 89-105.
Merlo, A. V., & Benekos, P. J. (2017). Reaffirming juvenile justice: From gault to Montgomery. New York, NY: Routledge.
Schoemaker, N. K., Juffer, F., Rippe, R. C., Vermeer, H. J., Stoltenborgh, M., Jagersma, G. J., Maras, A, & Alink, L. (2020). Positive parenting in foster care: Testing the effectiveness of a video feedback intervention program on foster parents’ behavior and attitudes. Children and Youth Services Review, 110(1), 1-11.
Stinson, P. M., & Watkins, A. M. (2014). The nature of crime by school resource officers: Implications for SRO programs. SAGE Open, 4(1), 1-10.
Young, S., Greer, B., & Church, R. (2017). Juvenile delinquency, welfare, justice and therapeutic interventions: A global perspective. BJPsych bulletin, 41(1), 21-29.