The United States' high incarceration rate gets a lot of attention from scholars, policy makers, and the public. Yet the most common form of criminal justice supervision is not imprisonment but probation--and that is just as true for juveniles as for adults. Probation was originally promoted as an alternative to imprisonment that would spare…

Over the past three decades, the number of people housed in local jails has more than tripled. Yet when it comes to reforming the nation's incarceration policies, write Jennifer Copp and William Bales, researchers, policymakers, and the public alike have focused almost exclusively on state and federal prisons. If you took a snapshot on a single…

In the context of juvenile justice, writes Traci Schlesinger, "diversion" can mean two things. Informal diversion includes police officers' decisions to warn and release, probation officers' decisions not to report violations, prosecutors' decisions not to prosecute, and judges' decisions to dismiss cases. Informal diversion sends youth…

Children who experience foster care, write Youngmin Yi and Christopher Wildeman, are considerably more likely than others to have contact with the criminal justice system, both during childhood and as adults. And because children of color disproportionately experience foster care, improvements to the foster care system could reduce racial/ethnic…

Children's school experiences may contribute in many ways to disproportionate minority contact with the juvenile justice system, writes Paul Hirschfield. For example, research shows that black students who violate school rules are more often subject to out-of-school suspensions, which heighten their risk of arrest and increase the odds that once…

The U.S. legal system gives parents the authority and responsibility to make decisions about their children's health care, and favors parental rights over society's collective responsibility to provide for children's welfare. Neither the federal government nor state governments have an affirmative obligation to protect and promote children's…

Rising juvenile crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s spurred state legislatures across the country to exclude or transfer a significant share of offenders under the age of eighteen to the jurisdiction of the criminal court, essentially redrawing the boundary between the juvenile and adult justice systems. Jeffrey Fagan examines the legal…

The dual requirement to ensure community safety and promote a youthful offender's positive development permeates policy and frames daily practice in juvenile justice. Balancing those two demands, explain Edward Mulvey and Anne-Marie Iselin, requires justice system professionals at all levels to make extremely difficult decisions about the likely…

D. Wayne Osgood, E. Michael Foster, and Mark E. Courtney examine the transition to adulthood for youth involved in social service and justice systems during childhood and adolescence. They survey the challenges faced by youth in the mental health system, the foster care system, the juvenile justice system, the criminal justice system, and special…

Although boys engage in more delinquent and criminal acts than do girls, female delinquency is on the rise. In 1980, boys were four times as likely as girls to be arrested; today they are only twice as likely to be arrested. In this article, the author explores how the juvenile justice system is and should be responding to the adolescent female…

Elizabeth Scott and Laurence Steinberg explore the dramatic changes in the law's conception of young offenders between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. At the dawn of the juvenile court era, they note, most youths were tried and punished as if they were adults. Early juvenile court reformers argued strongly…

For many years, notes Alex Piquero, youth of color have been overrepresented at every stage of the U.S. juvenile justice system. As with racial disparities in a wide variety of social indicators, the causes of these disparities are not immediately apparent. Some analysts attribute the disparities to "differential involvement"--that is, to…

Over the past decade researchers have identified intervention strategies and program models that reduce delinquency and promote pro-social development. Preventing delinquency, says Peter Greenwood, not only saves young lives from being wasted, but also prevents the onset of adult criminal careers and thus reduces the burden of crime on its victims…

Laurie Chassin focuses on the elevated prevalence of substance use disorders among young offenders in the juvenile justice system and on efforts by the justice system to provide treatment for these disorders. She emphasizes the importance of diagnosing and treating these disorders, which are linked both with continued offending and with a broad…

In this paper, the author points out that youth with mental disorders make up a significant subgroup of youth who appear in U.S. juvenile courts. And he notes that juvenile justice systems today are struggling to determine how best to respond to those youths' needs, both to safeguard their own welfare and to reduce re-offending and its…