Due Process and the Juvenile System: The Effects of In Re Gault (original) (raw)

Juvenile Delinquency and the Legal System: Potential Implications and Investigations

The term delinquency covers more difficult forms of associal, antisocial, socio-pathological and criminal behavior such as theft, deliberately causing damage and fire, misdemeanor, deviant behavior, hooliganism, robbery, carrying out criminal acts etc. The term delinquency is used when it comes to juvenile perpetrators of criminal offenses. It is an inconsistent form of behavior, a dangerous and complex social-pathological phenomenon, a very delicate criminological, legal, economic and sociological, and serious family, pedagogical, medical and difficult general-social problem. The implications for juvenile justice and the factor underlying the juvenile delinquency have not clearly understood. In this review, we reported in details the potential investigations of juvenile delinquency and the legal system."

Introduction (Treatment for Crime)

This is a draft prepared for Treatment for Crime] Philosophers have recently found fertile ground in the area of intersection between neuroscience and criminal law. They have, for example, entered lively debates concerning the extent to which findings in neuroscience might undermine attributions of criminal responsibility, and whether and how neuroscientific evidence, such as brain scan results, should be used in criminal trials. 1 This philosophical attention has, for the most part, been limited to examining the ways in which neuroscience may bear on assignments of guilt and responsibility in criminal trials. Yet neuroscientific technologies are already playing other roles in the criminal

Cracking down on juveniles: The changing ideology of youth corrections

Notre Dame JL Ethics & Pub. Pol'y, 1990

note 2; S. SCHLOSSMAN, supra note 2. CRACKING DOWN ON JUVENILES tion, and the juvenile court-to ensure that juveniles completed this development. Furthermore, their socialization process was to be supervised by professional educators and, when necessary, by social workers and treatment experts. By invoking the doctrine of parens patriae-that is, the responsibility of the state to care for persons who are unable to care for themselves or whose families are unable to care for them 4-juvenile court judges were given the authority to assert the state's guardianship over youthful offenders. Rather than subjecting juveniles to the rigors of the criminal trial or the harsh conditions of prisons and jails used to house adult offenders, juvenile court judges were to act benevolently and protectively toward the minor. In the words of one of the pioneers of the juvenile court, Judge Julian Mack, it was the obligation of the judge when assessing a juvenile offender to find out what he is physically, mentally, and morally, and then, if. .. [the judge] learns he is treading the path that leads to criminality, to take him in charge, not so much to punish as to reform, not to degrade but to uplift, not to crush but to develop, not to make him a criminal but a worthy citizen. 5 Because youths, almost by definition, were impulsive yet malleable, the Progressives asserted they were not completely responsible for acts of wrongdoing. They should not be held liable in the way the criminal law holds adults liable, because they had not yet achieved the cognitive or moral maturity associated with adulthood. Moreover, the Progressives believed that the causes of crime did not lie within the will of the individual-especially not within an individual whose moral code was only partially formed. Rather, they believed the causes of crime came from the broader social environment-the neighborhood, the family, and the specific childrearing practices of parents. Delinquency was viewed as an illness brought on by the social diseases of poverty, parental neglect, ignorance, and urban decay. 6 The sentencing structure proposed by the Progressives for the juvenile justice system was a logical extension of the under-4. For a review of the history of the parens patriae doctrine as the legal authority for the juvenile court, see Rendleman,