The United States today has a well-developed system of juvenile justice, which has been formed over decades. Juvenile justice as a kind of set of specialized rules has its roots in ancient civilizations. In Roman law, for example, in the Pater family, the head of the family, was initially responsible for the sins of his children. Only later, with the emergence of separate rights for family members and their growing independence from the head of the family, were they recognized as separately responsible (The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2020). In a more or less modern interpretation, juvenile justice has been enshrined in the legal canons since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This process was prompted by the need to regulate the attitude of the judicial and penitentiary systems to crimes committed by juveniles.
The logic of legislators of the past followed the path of recognizing the responsibility of children for offenses and allocating separate legal niches for these needs. A consequence of this was the development of a system to protect the rights of minors. Western communities recognized children not only a certain responsibility for violating the law, but also the need to protect them. As a result, there was a peculiar split of the concept of juvenile justice between the two. There was a legal basis for the recognition of separate responsibility for minors, different from the norms of traditional criminal law, and the system for the protection of children itself. The pioneers in this issue were the United States, which already at the end of the 19th century created the first children’s court. According to the norms developed at that time, the concept of “criminal” was not applied to minors, it was replaced by “delinquent” (The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2020). The basis for this was the concern for child offenders who, because of their age and life experience, still have the potential to become better human beings.
In most states of the modern U.S., the juvenile justice system is independent of the justice system applied to adult citizens of the country. It is administered by Social Services in most states, namely, the Social Service Agency in 23 states and Family and Children’s Services in six states (The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2020). In eleven states, the juvenile justice system is under the control of the adult justice system. There are two purposes of juvenile justice in the United States: to rehabilitate the juvenile and to ensure public safety. Policemen, probation officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, juvenile judges, and social workers work to protect and nurture young people.
At this stage, the United States has sufficient tools to deal effectively with juvenile crime. The key features of the U.S. juvenile criminal justice process are simplicity and speed. The main thing about it is the discussion of the offense and the imposition of punishment for it. Certainly, such a process achieves its goal of influencing the offender. It is known that any delay in the court’s response to the offense is dangerous precisely in the cases of juveniles and leads to the recidivism of the offense. However, the rapidity of the judicial process has its negative side: the real possibility of human rights violations, incomplete investigation, gaps in evidence, and doubts about the sources of evidence. The further gradual development of the system will completely avoid the complexities that sometimes arise in cases involving juveniles.
References
The Annie E. Casey Foundation. (2020). What is juvenile justice?