Juvenile justice was a reform hatched by the >child-savers= of the nineteenth century. Its paternalism, middle-class bias, and absence of due process make it seem less progressive after eighty-five years than it did to the good people of its day@ (p. 599).
Alex Kotlowitz (1991) chronicles Illinois= system more than 90 years later, in which 250 probation officers and 137 state=s attorneys, public guardians, and public defenders struggle to handle 75 to 80 cases each day, twice as many as the average adult court. Lawyers, many of whom see children=s court as a necessary stepping stone to Areal@ court, often handle 400 active cases at a time, frequently with about five minutes to prepare for each one (p. 68).
Public attitudes toward juvenile justice have been cyclical, as the system has alternately tried to focus either on rehabilitation or chastisement, depending on the prevailing force of public sentiment. Jenson and Howard (1998, July) note that 1970-85, for instance, were a period of decriminalization and deinstitutionalization, while the mid-1980s saw a swing back to punishment and criminalization, the result of several highly-publicized crimes that influenced the public perception, largely erroneous, that juvenile crime was becoming both more prevalent and more violent. While some statistics do in fact show crime rates among minors to be on the rise, experts disagree about whether or not this is an accurate record. Kotlowitz (1991) notes that the increase Acould be [due to] the rampant use of drugs or the unwillingness of the police to let juveniles go with just a warning, or the greater effort, for political reasons, to prosecute even the most minor of offenses@ (p. 268). In times when criminality is defined more strictly, more actions are defined as crimes and the recorded rate cannot help but rise.
The perception has also helped make it easier for many prosecutors to transfer more serious cases to adult courts. Am...