Youth, Crime, and Justice
Police officers, armed security guards, surveillance cameras, and metal detectors are common features of the disturbing new landscape at many of today’s high schools. You will also find new and harsher disciplinary practices: zero-tolerance policies, random searches with drug-sniffing dogs, and mandatory suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, despite the fact that school crime and violence have been decreasing nationally for the past two decades. While most educators, students, and parents accept these harsh policing and punishment strategies based on the assumption that they keep children safe, Aaron Kupchik argues that we need to think more carefully about how we protect and punish students.
In Homeroom Security, Kupchik shows that these policies lead schools to prioritize the rules instead of students, so that students’ real problems—often the very reasons for their misbehavior—get ignored. Based on years of impressive field research, Kupchik demonstrates that the policies we have zealously adopted in schools across the country are the opposite of the strategies that are known to successfully reduce student misbehavior and violence. As a result, contemporary school discipline is often unhelpful, and can be hurtful to students in ways likely to make schools more violent places. Furthermore, those students who are most at-risk of problems in schools and dropping out are the ones who are most affected by these counterproductive policies. Our schools and our students can and should be safe, and Homeroom Security offers real strategies for making them so.
This
is a hopeful but complicated era for those with ambitions to reform the
juvenile courts and youth-serving public institutions in the United States. As advocates plea for major reforms, many fear the public backlash in
making dramatic changes. Choosing the Future for American Juvenile Justice
provides a look at the recent trends in juvenile justice as well as suggestions
for reforms and policy changes in the future. Should youth be treated as adults
when they break the law? How can youth be deterred from crime? What factors
should be considered in how youth are punished?What role should the police have in schools?
This essential volume, edited by two of the leading
scholars on juvenile justice, and with contributors who are among the key
experts on each issue, the volume focuses on the most pressing issues of the
day: the impact of neuroscience on our understanding of brain development and
subsequent sentencing, the relationship of schools and the police, the issue of
the school-to-prison pipeline, the impact of immigration, the privacy of juvenile records, and the need for national
policies—including registration requirements--for juvenile sex offenders. Choosing
the Future for American Juvenile Justice is not only a timely collection, based
on the most current research, but also a forward-thinking volume that
anticipates the needs for substantive and future changes in juvenile justice.
Winner, 2020 ACJS Outstanding Book Award, given by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences
A major statement on the juvenile justice system by one of America’s leading experts
The juvenile court lies at the intersection of youth policy and crime policy. Its institutional practices reflect our changing ideas about children and crime control. The Evolution of the Juvenile Court provides a sweeping overview of the American juvenile justice system’s development and change over the past century. Noted law professor and criminologist Barry C. Feld places special emphasis on changes over the last 25 years—the ascendance of get tough crime policies and the more recent Supreme Court recognition that “children are different.”
Feld’s comprehensive historical analyses trace juvenile courts’ evolution though four periods—the original Progressive Era, the Due Process Revolution in the 1960s, the Get Tough Era of the 1980s and 1990s, and today’s Kids Are Different era. In each period, changes in the economy, cities, families, race and ethnicity, and politics have shaped juvenile courts’ policies and practices. Changes in juvenile courts’ ends and means—substance and procedure—reflect shifting notions of children’s culpability and competence.
The Evolution of the Juvenile Court examines how conservative politicians used coded racial appeals to advocate get tough policies that equated children with adults and more recent Supreme Court decisions that draw on developmental psychology and neuroscience research to bolster its conclusions about youths’ reduced criminal responsibility and diminished competence. Feld draws on lessons from the past to envision a new, developmentally appropriate justice system for children. Ultimately, providing justice for children requires structural changes to reduce social and economic inequality—concentrated poverty in segregated urban areas—that disproportionately expose children of color to juvenile courts’ punitive policies.
Historical, prescriptive, and analytical, The Evolution of the Juvenile Court evaluates the author’s past recommendations to abolish juvenile courts in light of this new evidence, and concludes that separate, but reformed, juvenile courts are necessary to protect children who commit crimes and facilitate their successful transition to adulthood.
Juveniles possess less maturity, intelligence, and
competence than adults, heightening their vulnerability in the justice system.
For this reason, states try juveniles in separate courts and use different
sentencing standards than for adults. Yet, when police bring kids in for
questioning, they use the same interrogation tactics they use for adults,
including trickery, deception, and lying to elicit confessions or to produce
incriminating evidence against the defendants.
In Kids, Cops, and Confessions, Barry Feld offers the
first report of what actually happens when police question juveniles. Drawing
on remarkable data, Feld analyzes interrogation tapes and transcripts, police
reports, juvenile court filings and sentences, and probation and sentencing
reports, describing in rich detail what actually happens in the interrogation
room. Contrasting routine interrogation and false confessions enables police,
lawyers, and judges to identify interrogations that require enhanced scrutiny,
to adopt policies to protect citizens, and to assure reliability and integrity
of the justice system. Feld has produced an invaluable look at how the justice
system really works.
Six compelling histories of youth crime in the twentieth century
Ages of Anxiety presents six case studies of juvenile justice policy in the twentieth century from around the world, adding context to the urgent and international conversation about youth, crime, and justice. By focusing on magistrates, social workers, probation and police officers, and youth themselves, editors William S. Bush and David S. Tanenhaus highlight the role of ordinary people as meaningful and consequential historical actors.
After providing an international perspective on the social history of ideas about how children are different from adults, the contributors explain why those differences should matter for the administration of justice. They examine how reformers used the idea of modernization to build and legitimize juvenile justice systems in Europe and Mexico, and present histories of policing and punishing youth crime.
Ages of Anxiety introduces a new theoretical model for interpreting historical research to demonstrate the usefulness of social histories of children and youth for policy analysis and decision-making in the twenty-first century. Shedding new light on the substantive aims of the juvenile court, the book is a historically informed perspective on the critical topic of youth, crime, and justice.
An unprecedented comparison of juvenile justice systems across the globe, Juvenile Justice in Global Perspective brings together original contributions from some of the world's leading voices.
While American scholars may have extensive knowledge about other justice systems around the world and how adults are treated, juvenile justice systems and the plight of youth who break the law throughout the world is less often studied. This important volume fills a large gap in the study of juvenile justice by providing an unprecedented comparison of criminal justice and juvenile justice systems across the world, looking for points of comparison and policy variance that can lead to positive change in the United States.
Distinguished criminology scholars Franklin Zimring, Máximo Langer, and David Tanenhaus, and the contributors cover countries from Western Europe to rising powers like China, India, and countries in Latin America. The book discusses important issues such as the relationship between political change and juvenile justice, the common labels used to unify juvenile systems in different regions and in different forms of government, the types of juvenile systems that exist and how they differ, and more. Furthermore, the book uses its data on criminal versus juvenile justice in a wide variety of nations to create a new explanation of why separate juvenile and criminal courts are felt to be necessary.
