legated by state legislatures and exercised very broad powers over the liberty of the child. One author says that "though reformist, the juvenile court movement from the beginning had an authoritarian impulse . . . its belief in the need for firm control of delinquents and its sense of children as helpless dependents" (Wizer, 1972, p. 102).
Since the 1960s, largely as a result of Supreme Court decisions and new legislation, the formerly informal system for adjudicating the status and the corresponding discretion of the juvenile court judge were replaced by a more adversarial adjudicatory system in which basic procedural due process rights of juveniles were guaranteed for those juveniles who were adjudged to be delinquent or otherwise became wards of the state and before they were released on probation or committed to confinement in state reformatories.
At the same time the public became disillusioned by the evident inability of state correctional institutions to rehabilitate most juvenile offenders and by rising rates of juvenile crime, especially violent crime. According to Cochran et al. (1996), "a small number of delinquents . . . are responsible for a majority of all crimes and two-thirds of all violent crimes" (p. 153). Altschuler (1994, Fall) said that, "during the last fifteen years numerous states have initiated accelerated 'get tough' juvenile correction policies" in the form of stiffer penalties, longer terms of confinement (incarceration) and waivers of jurisdiction by juvenile courts permitting juveniles to be tried in adult criminal courts and possibly to face the death sentence for capital crimes (p. 236).
Parallel with this development has been overcrowding of juvenile detention and correctional facilities, and the failure of more punitive policies to address some of the fundamental causes of juvenile delinquency which Altschuler (1994, Fall) identifies as "dysfunctional family relations, school behavior pr...