This research paper summarizes the principal features of the juvenile justice system in the United States and comments on some major issues facing it. The juvenile justice system involves all the parties involved in dealing with the juvenile, parents and surrogate parents, schools, the police and prosecutors, probation departments, the courts, correctional institutions and a variety of community and social agencies which deal with the juvenile after he or she comes into contact with the law.
Judge L. P. Edwards (1992) explained:
Established in the later nineteenth century, the juvenile court was for some a humanitarian institution intended to rehabilitate youthful offenders and protect children. It was in part a recognition that children are different from adults and in part a reaction to the treatment of children as adults in the criminal justice system. For others it was an attempt to exert a new form of social control over children (p. 3).
At its core was the concept that the juvenile court judge, acting on behalf of the state as parens patriae and with the benefit of information concerning the juvenile's background could and would make disposition of each case in such a manner as to promote family unity and ensure that the child was properly raised and provided the opportunity to become a productive, crime-free member of society, while at the same time ensuring public safety.
As Judge Julian Mack put it in 1909, the juvenile court judge had the following duty:
"instead of asking merely whether a boy or girl has committed a specific offense, to find out what he is, physically, mentally, morally, and then if it learns that he is treading the path that leads to criminality, to take him in charge, not so much to punish as to reform, not to degrade but to uplift, not to crush but to develop, not to make him a criminal but a worthy citizen" (p. 107).
In order to carry out these purposes, juvenile courts were de...