Juvenile and Criminal Justice Systems' Responses to Youth Violence

Within the past decade, nearly every state has amended its juvenile code in response to perceived increases in serious, persistent, and violent youth crime. These changes diminish the jurisdiction of juvenile courts as judicial decisions and statutory changes transfer more youths from juvenile courts to criminal courts so that young offenders can be sentenced as adults. Amendments to juvenile sentencing laws increase the punitiveness of sanctions available to juvenile court judges. Other strategies attempt to "blend," or merge, juvenile and criminal court jurisdiction and sentencing authority over violent young offenders. These "get tough" policies affect the numbers and types of youths confined in adult and juvenile correctional facilities and pose fundamental problems for administrators in both systems; accelerate procedural, jurisprudential, and substantive convergence between the juvenile and criminal justice systems; and erode the rationale for a separate juvenile court. Public frustration with crime, fear of the recent rise in youth violence, and the racial characteristics of violent young offenders fuel the desire to "get tough" and provide political impetus to prosecute larger numbers of youths as adults. These initiatives simplify the transfer of young offenders to criminal courts and expose many waived youths to mandatory minimum sentences as adults, or require juvenile court judges to impose determinate or mandatory minimum sentences on youths who remain in the juvenile system. Both approaches deemphasize rehabilitation and individualized consideration of the offender, stress personal and justice system accountability and punishment, and base waiver and Barry C. Feld is Centennial Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. © 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0192-3234/98/0024-0005$02.00