a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Restorative justice Victim offender mediation Apology Juvenile offender Victim-sensitive communication This qualitative study examined the multiple perspectives of participants' experiences of a Victim Offender Mediation (VOM) program operating in a Midwestern city. Thirty-four face-to-face interviews were conducted with 37 participants, including juvenile offend...

Traditionally, the juvenile justice system has emphasized the goals of treatment and rehabilitation of young offenders, while protecting them from punishment, retribution, and stigmatization. Violent juvenile offenders have posed a challenge to this rehabilitative ideal because of mounting public pressure to ensure societal protection. Juveniles who are perceived as dangerous or persistent in t...

This article considers the origins of the juvenile court and the degree to which developmental life-course (DLC) criminology might inform aspects of juvenile justice policy and practice. We discuss the foundations of the juvenile court in developmental science and also consider insights on delinquency from similar contemporary traditions. From there, the article provides a sense of what the juv...

Over the past twenty years, neuroscientists have discovered that brain maturation continues through an individual’s midtwenties. The United States Supreme Court cited this research to support its abolition of the juvenile death penalty in Roper v. Simmons. Now the Court is faced with two cases that challenge the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to life imprisonment without parole. Many...

THE FAMILY GROUP CONFERENCE HAS BEEN MUCH DISCUSSED SINCE 1989, when legislation made the process a key part of the New Zealand juvenile justice system. The process was adopted in Australia in 1991, when police in the New South Wales city of Wagga Wagga began to use family group conferences as part of their "effective juvenile cautioning scheme". The relative merits of the two schemes one nati...

I n a context where more than 1,000,000 American adolescents are processed by juvenile courts annually and approximately 160,000 are sent to residential placements, this paper examines “what works” and “what doesn’t work” in reducing the criminal behavior of juvenile offenders and presents examples of government initiatives that have successfully promoted the adoption, implementation, and susta...

Stefan Schulz and Marthinus Hamutenya* Polytechnic of Namibia 2003 Abstract: Namibia is a newly independent nation, which in the wake of colonial oppression and foreign rule has yet to develop a comprehensive juvenile justice system. The current criminal justice system is informed by stereotyped common sense concepts of ‘criminality’ and ‘the criminal’. Simplistic views undergirded by utilitari...

Youth courts provide an efficient—albeit unconventional—alternative to the formal juvenile justice system. Although structures of youth courts vary, the purpose remains the same: to rehabilitate and deter youth offenders in a forum largely governed by their minor peers—one free of the stigma associated with the traditional justice system. This Note examines the expansion of youth courts; variou...

In the present context of ‘get tough on crime’ and ‘back to criminal justice’ campaigns that continue to dominate political agendas throughout Australia, critics point to the inadequacy of ‘welfarist’ or reformist criminological and sociological theories that have informed interventions in the past, and reinforce the need for ‘retributive justice’ models of penal policy. This paper examines his...