Juvenile Detention System

Juvenile Detention System

Introduction

Poverty is one cause of juvenile crime. In addition, poor youngsters are more likely to end up in jail than well-off youngsters who commit the same crimes. To help disadvantaged young people, including those who are accused of committing crimes, social reformers have worked to create a system of juvenile courts and rehabilitation facilities to help these youngsters grow up to contribute to society. Juvenile detention has several meanings in the criminal law. In the context of law enforcement, detention occurs whenever a law enforcement officer stops a person and briefly questions them. Nonetheless, the person is not free to go at this point; the detention is not equivalent to a formal arrest. The confinement of persons before trial even if they might qualify for bail is known as preventive detention, which is a recent development in U.S. criminal law.

Some people fear that the juvenile justice system has recently started turning away from its roots of helping to rehabilitate young people in trouble. Since 1992, forty-seven states have passed laws to make punishment more central in the juvenile justice system. These laws have allowed juveniles accused of a crime to be transferred to adult courts, and have given courts more power in sentencing juvenile offenders. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court in effect opened the door to imposing the death penalty on youths who were sixteen at the time they committed their crime (Champion, 2007, 64). Before the 1970s, criminal courts generally set bail for all criminal defendants. However, Congress enacted the Federal Bail Reform Act of 1984, which established preventive detention for federal defendants. Under this act, the prosecutor is entitled, under certain conditions, to file a request for a court hearing in which the prosecutor will ask the court to deny bail and hold the defendant in custody until and through the trial.

Problems with Juvenile Detention System

Public concern about juvenile delinquency also reflected new ideas about childhood becoming prominent in nineteenth-century urban settings. Middle-class family values challenged the older Puritan belief in infant damnation and showed little sympathy for the farm family's economic need to use child labor. Instead, childhood in middle-class culture came to be seen as an age of innocence, a time that required careful nurturing of character. Humanitarian reformers usually believed the urban poor—especially the expanding population of immigrants in cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago—did not measure up to new standards for child welfare (Emrey, 2006, 61-67). Evidence of delinquency among urban youths led some reformers to look to age-segregated institutional training as a substitute for the children's faulty families.

Activists in many cities created separate detention facilities for miscreants and special provisions to hear charges against young people in separate court sessions (Emrey, 2006, 61-67). Particularly controversial is the use of the death penalty to execute juvenile offenders. Few countries authorize the use of the death penalty on juvenile offenders, and among those few, the United States is the only non-third world country to impose this ultimate punishment ...