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Juvenile Justice System and Sentencing

The social issue being studied in the article is the criteria that judges in the juvenile justice system use to sentence juveniles who commit serious crimes. The problem arises because of the authors' assessment that studies of juvenile sentencing have either consisted of nonrepresentative samples or have not taken into account enough variables to make their evaluations of sentencing practices truly informative. In addition, very little research appears to have been done on juvenile offenders who commit felony crimes. Accordingly, the research problem is to identify variables that inform judges' sentencing criteria--including but not limited to the profiles of the offender and the crime, which appear to have dominated most studies of juvenile-case disposition in the past--in order to determine the reasons for which judges dispose of their cases.

There was a clearly developed research design to this study. That is because it sought data input from primary sources of sentencing: the judges themselves. In the background of the decision to accumulate data by that method was the authors' critique of previous studies of juvenile court sentencing practices. They cite multiple limitations on establishing independent variables from which valid inferences might be drawn. For example, using race, sex, and social demographic information in conjunction with disposition records may "indicate what sentences have been handed down, [but] they may be less useful for understanding why judges make particular sentencing choices" (Applegate, et al., 2000). The authors' examination of studies in which such factors as the offenders' family characteristics have been brought under analysis leads them to conclude that the descriptive family variables have not been very nuanced or informative regarding the family culture. That is complicated by what they term "aggregation bias," the name given to the research practice of lumping all juvenile offenders--from th...

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Juvenile Justice System and Sentencing. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:19, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681023.html