Treating juveniles as adult criminals: an iatrogenic violence prevention strategy if ever there was one.

T he Task Force on Community Preventive Services presents recommendations in this supplement to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine relating to the transfer of juveniles to the adult criminal justice system. 1,2 The questions the Task Force considered are whether transfers reduce or prevent violent crimes by people younger than 18 by means either of individual deterrence (reducing future violence by the individuals transferred) or general deter-rence (reducing juvenile violence generally). The Task Force concludes that transfer has iatrogenic effects for individuals transferred: their levels of future violence increase relative to those of comparable young offenders not transferred, and that insufficient evidence exists on which to reach conclusions about general deter-rence. Overall, transferred juveniles were 33.7% more likely to be re-arrested for a violent or other crime. The commission recommended " against policies facilitating the transfer of juveniles from juvenile to adult courts for the purpose of reducing violence. " The Task Force's findings are illustrative of a more general pattern of findings concerning undesirable and unwanted consequences of harsh juvenile and criminal justice policies adopted in the United States between 1975 and 2000. In the 1970s and earlier, most informed observers would have predicted what the Task Force found: transferring juveniles to adult courts does harm to them, which diminishes their life chances, thereby increasing their likelihood of committing crimes in the future. That is why the Joint Commission on Juvenile Justice Standards of the American Bar Association and the Institute for Judicial Administration 3 generally opposed transfer and recommended the creation of strong legal presumptions against its use. Before 1980, the notions were widely shared that juveniles are qualitatively different from adults— emotionally and intellectually immature, less responsible , more malleable—and accordingly that their crimes should be handled differently. The juvenile justice system was seen as a mechanism for responding responsibly but constructively to serious juvenile misconduct in hopes of enhancing young peoples' social capital and life chances and thereby preventing future crime. Since then, though, as a by-product of the politiciza-tion of criminal and juvenile justice policy, many states have changed their laws to deny juvenile court handling to many juveniles. Some, New York for example, reduced the age of adult court jurisdiction across the board from 18 to 16 or 17, thereby eliminating juvenile court jurisdiction over the affected young people. Some, New York again is an example, removed the juvenile court's jurisdiction over people …