JUVENILE JUSTICE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Tougher Criminal Measures vs. Early Intervention
The Welfare, Justice & Corporate Models
The Failure Of The Juvenile Justice System
JUVENILE JUSTICE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
In May of 1997, the House passed a bill that allowed juvenile offenders as young as 13 years of age to be tried as adults for certain violent crimes. The House approved the measure that is part of a “$1.5 billion package aimed at curbing the rise in violent crimes by the young...under the GOP bill, virtually all of the $1.5 billion would go to states that agree to stricter prosecution and longer imprisonment of violent young offenders,” (Hess, 1997: 1). The Democrats and the White House favored a bill that allowed for 60 percent of the funds to go for alternative measures for young offenders, such as crime prevention and early intervention. Yet, the passage of the bill is a symptom of an unresolved debate that has been an issue in Congress for over a decade now; whether tougher criminal measures should be imposed on young offenders, or whether the effort should be on crime prevention through early intervention. This analysis will review the traditional models of criminal justice for young offenders and discuss why today’s stricter punishments are leading to a corporatist viewpoint of criminal justice for young offenders in the United States.
The traditional models of dealing with juvenile offenders fall into three broad categories, the welfare, justice, and, corporatist models. However, like a lot of disciplines, from human motivation and behavior theory to the mental health profession, there are many different models used for dealing with juvenile offenders and not much agreement by those in the field of which ones are necessarily most effective. Humphry Osmond first used the term “model muddle” to describe the situation in the field of mental illness; the term applies equally well to...