Juvenile Justice System

Introduction

The Juvenile Justice System has remained a Debatable subject since the advent of the first juvenile court in the Progressive Era. The system has remained and is acknowledged to be an integral part of the mechanism that is meant to sustain the fabric of society. Considering the fact that the Juvenile Justice System aims to assist in law enforcing at a grass root level in society, it is imperative to continuously identify and address the weaknesses that are present in the system. This discussion will attempt to highlight a major issue in the Juvenile Justice System and engage in an argumentative discussion based on the usage of information gleaned from credible written sources such as scholarly journals, newspapers, and pamphlets. As a thesis statement, the discussion asserts that there is a critical need for change in the Juvenile Justice System; because the current model is failing to deliver adequately rehabilitate the children who are entered into the system.

The discussion will make extensive use of critical thinking skills to determine the validity and reliability of each source used. More precisely, the discussion will give shed light on the controversial perspective that the Juvenile Justice System puts good apples with bad ones. Children who enter the system for minor offences are grouped with other children who are in for major offences. As a result, children who had a chance to improve fall victim to the destructive peer pressure that comes with the bad crowd.

Discussion & Analyses

A common perception holds the juveniles are arrested when they break the law or commit acts that make them eligible for entry into the Juvenile Justice System (Champion). However, the truth is that juveniles are detained - not arrested. Juveniles are rarely brought in front of a judge. The normal course of action is one in which the case takes place in a family court. These are only a few of the minor factors that make juveniles special elements of the justice system (Dressler). It is important to come to terms with the fact that juveniles cannot be expected to cope with traditional elements of the justice system and that the justice system needs to be customized further in order to address the minute yet undeniably important needs of juveniles (Finley).

Children who are in for minor shoplifting charges end up in the same detention centers as children with physical assault charges (Hubner). As a result, there is now a school of thought that has begun to question the degree to which the Juvenile Justice System is capable of genuinely rehabilitating adjudicated juvenile delinquents. There is little doubt in the fact that the essential purpose of the Juvenile Justice System is to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents and to ensure that they become productive members of society when they become adults (Kuklin). However, as the influx of adjudicated juvenile delinquents continues to exceed the capacity of the system to process them, the system is forced to group them together in a barnyard methodology (Leverich). This allows bad ...