ft to the discretion of the individual states. However, in order to receive federal grants, states are required to have separate facilities for adult and juvenile offenders in the correctional system. The reasons for keeping juvenile and adult offenders apart is for the protection of the juveniles and to ensure that they do not learn criminal behavior from the adult prisoners. States must ensure that juveniles are not detained in a facility where contact with adult inmates is possible.
In the early 1990s, criminologists predicted that violent crime by teenagers would skyrocket, and that is why these measures to try juveniles as adults proliferated (Smith and Bilchik 21). Nearly every state passed legislation making it easier to try juveniles as adults, yet the rush of juvenile violence never occurred, and rates of violent juvenile crime have continued to fall, due to a stronger economy, a decline in drug use and related gang activity, and an increase in youth preventive programs, yet these laws have never been repealed. Today, most decisions to transfer juveniles to the adult justice system come at the hands of prosecutors or the legislature's mandatory guidelines instead of from a judge. The result is that each year approximately 200,000 youths are sent directly to adult courts, mostly for property crimes and drug offenses.
This more severe approach increases the chances that youths will leave prison and continue to commit crimes (Smith and Bilchik 21). In the under-funded juvenile justice system, youths are often sentenced, then sent home for months before there is space in the overcrowded juvenile detention system, and they quickly learn that there is no swift and appropriate consequence to their criminal actions. Youths tried as adults in the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice had a 49 percent recidivism rate compared to a 35 percent rate for those who remained in the juvenile system. A study by the Miami Hera...