Chapter 7 Flashcards
What types of harsh punishments were used for youthful offenders?
Death penalty
What is nullification?
Refusal to enforce the law and sanctions against children
What was the first instiution established in New York in 1825?
Houses of refuges
What is the house of refuge?
Early institutions handling youths in need, particularly the poor, which focused on education, skill training, religious training, hard work, and discipline
What are reformatories?
Early institutions for handling youths that largely substituded houses of refuge. They focused on education, religious training, hard work, and discipline
involved serogate parental figures
When was the first recognized indivudal juvenile court establisthed?
Cook County (Chicago), Illinois, 1899
What beliefs did Illinois court reflect?
juveniles needed assistance to overcome the disadvantages they faced in society and that they could be reformed through a system of benevolence rather than one that punsihed problematic behavior
What ages did juvenile court have jurisdiction over?
Ages 15 and younger
What elements were excluded from the juvenile system?
Due process, attorneys, juries
What did these courts rely on for youths?
Probation rather than incarceration for problem youths
Juvenile system took the stand that youths were incapable of forming what?
Mens rea (criminal intent) required for criminal acts
What legal response to juvenile misbehavior was adopted to the juvenile courts?
Parens patriae philosophy
What is the Parens patriae philosophy?
Focused on protecting, nurturing, and training the youths to make better decisions and avoid problems
What did parens patriae do?
Opened door to increased involvement in lives of juveniles and their families
What was involved with Ex Parte Crouse (1838)?
Parents rights can be superseded by the rights and interests of society
What was involved with Commonwealth v Fisher (1905)?
The objective of the state is not to punish or simply restrain a youth, but provide care and protection
*state has the right to step in and take custody of the youth
What was involved with Kent v United States (1966)?
First case to question parens patriae cotrine and lack of due-process rights for juveniles
What 5 clauses assist with driving juvenile justice?
1) balanced justice orientation that focuses on the needs of all parties involved, youth and victims
2) Standard Juvenile Court Act emphasize care, guardianship, and control of the youth
3) legislative guide focuses on care, protection, supervision, and rehabilitation of children
4) criminal court orientation focuses on deterrene, punishment, and accountability
5)traditional child welfare focuses on best interests of child
What is delinquency?
Term referring to juvenile misbehavior that could refer to criminal acts or status offenses
What is criminal law?
a definition in which a delinquent is any juvenile who violates the criminal code
What is a status offence?
An action that is illegal only for juveniles.
Ex: use of alcohol or tobacco, curfew violations, disobeying one’s parents, running away, and swearing
What are youthful offender statuses?
Provisions whereby the juvenile justice system can retain jurisdiction over individuals who were adjudicated in the system but have since passed the age of majority
What are transfers/waivers?
A process whereby someone who is legally a juvenile is determined to be beyond the help of the juvenile justice system
What are two primary approaches to measuring delinquency?
1) use of official records
2) administration of self-report surveys
What is a uniform crime report?
The most common official source of information on offending and offenders and reflect those offenses that came to the attention of the police
What are the traditional UCR reports referred to as?
Summary Reporting System (SRS)
What is the national incident-based reporting system (NIBRS)?
Replaces the UCR Summary Reporting system and provides much more detailed information on 23 categories of crimes with 52 total offenses
What do self-report measures do?
Attempt to gauge the level of delinquency by asking individuals to admit to their participation in deviant activity
What did Short and Nye do?
developed the earliest self-report surveys to tap the level of misbehavior of youths
What did Dentler and Monroe do?
Created a similar self-report survey focusing on minor delinquent offenses
What are monitoring the future surveys? (MTF)
A self-report survey that includes many more serious offenses than earlier self-report surveys and elicits significantly fewer positive reponses.
It includes questions on hitting teachers, group fighting, use of weapons, robbery, and aggravated assault
What are the National Youth Survey (NYS)?
Self-report survey that included many more serious offenses than other surveys and elicited significantly fewer postive responses
What is sexting?
involves the transmission of sexual images across an electronic medium
What is detention?
In the juvenile system, detention is the courterpart to the bail decision in adult court
Who makes detention decisions?
Probation officers or special detention workers, final decision to continue detention is made by juvenile court judge
What is the Model Juvenile Delinquency Act?
A guideline for state codes, stipulates that a detention hearing be held within 36 hours
What was involved in Schall v Martin?
Preventive detention was declared constitutional by US Supreme Court
What is the secure detention?
The equivalent in the juvenile system of the local jail for adults
What is the nonsecure detention?
The placement of youths in group homes, halfway houses, foster care, or other community-based alternatives to a secure facility
What is the token economy?
Method of controlling or rewarding behavior in juvenile facilites
Youths recieve points or tokens for acting appropriately and lose them for inappropriate behaviors.
Tokens are good toward extra priviledges or purchases from a store or vending machine
What are Day-evening centers?
Provide educational programming, treatment programs, or other activities during the day, but send the youths home at night
What are home detentions?
Involves ordering youths to remain at home at all times, unless given permission by the court to leave the premises
What is bail?
A system requiring a guarantee by defendants to return to court dates
Judges decide whether defendants must pay a certain amount of money to be released prior to trial or must be detained due to flight risk, public safety, and so forth
What is the intake decision?
The decision is made to file a petition with the court to hear the case or to handle the youth in another way
Who makes the decision to file a petition?
probation officers or intake officers after they review facts of the case, met and discussed it with the youth and the family, background gathered about youth and considered alternatives
What is the informal adjustment?
Decision to handle youths in a manner that doesn’t involve full formal court processing
What is restorative (reparative) justice?
Programs that use interventions to return victims, offenders, and communities to their pre-offense states.
Generally, involves voluntary participation of offenders, victims, and community members in seeking an outcome acceptable to all parties
AKA: reparative justice
What is a family group conference (FGC)?
Facilitators lead the participants through a discussion of the facts of the cases, the impact of the events on all parties, the feelings of all participants toward actions and the offenders, and the development of mutually agreed-upon resolutions
What are two forms of specialty courts?
1) teen courts
2) drug courts
What is teen court? (youth court)
Rest on the restorative justice philosophy which seeks to help the offender, the victim, their families and friends, and society at large
These courts rely on youths to act as judges, attorneys, and jury members
What is drug court?
Courts that focus on rehabilitation and treatment of drug offenders instead of criminal punishment
What is the process where youths transfer or waive?
Youths are sent to the adult court for processing
It may take various forms, including judicial waiver, prosecutorial waiver, statutory exclusion/legislative waiver, or demand waiver
What is a judicial waiver?
Requires a waiver hearing in front of a judge who determines the suitability of removing the case to the adult court
What is a prosecutorial waiver (direct file)?
The decision to try to juvenile in the adult court is made by the prosecutor, who has sole discretion in the matter
What is a legislatie waiver or stutory exclusion?
The legislature has dictated, through a statute, that certain youths must be tried in the adult court; the juvenile court is excluded from hearing the case
What is a once/always provisions?
once a youth has been adjudicated in adult court, the youth is permanently under the adult court’s jurisdiction
What is a reverse waiver?
Where the adult court can return a waived youth to the juvenile system for processing
What is adjudication?
The counterpart to finding guilt or innocence and sentencing in the adult court
What is a zealous advocate role?
Emulate the role of an attorney found in the adult criminal court
What is the concerned parent role?
This approach often leads attorneys to push youths to admit to petitions in order to secure the help and assistance of the court
What is a disposition?
The equivalent to a sentence in an adult court
What is blended sentencing?
A disposition that relies on both the juvenile and adult systems, such as when a youth begins his or her disposition in a juvenile facility and is automatically transferred to an adult facility after reaching the age of majority
What is the President’s commission on law enforcement and the administration of justice (1967)?
A widespread investigation of the deficiencies and needs of the criminal justice system in America ordered by President Johnson.
What are two reasons the Kent case was important?
1) outlined the procedure by which transfer decisions must be made
2) established some due process protections for the first time in juvenile procedures
What was involved with the In re Gault case?
juveniles have certain rights, like right to an attorney, right to know the charges against him or her, right to confront the accuser, and right to remain silent
What was involved with In Re Winship case?
the higher standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” used in adult court also be used in juvenile proceedings when there is the possibility of committing a youth to a locked facility
What was involved in the McKeiver v Pennsylvania (1971) Case?
Didn’t mandate jury trials in juvenile cases, it did note that jurisdiction could allow for juries if it desired to do so
What was involved with the Standford v Kentucky (1989) Case?
Statues allowing the death penalty for individuals committing criminal acts aged 16 or 17 were permissible
What was involved in the Roper, Superintendent, Potosi Correctional Center v Simmons (2004) Case?
Legal status of the death penalty for youthful offenders was overturned
What was involved in Graham v Florida (2010) Case?
Court ruled that youths must be given the opportunity to demonstrate their maturity and rehabilitation
What was involved in the Miller v Alabama (2012) Case?
Sentencing courts has to provide “individualized” sentences that consider the possibility of rehabilitation in light of “children’s diminished capacity and heightened capacity for change”
What was involved in the Montgomery v Louisiana (2016) Case?
Ruled that life-without-parole cannot be imposed even in homicide cases unless the court finds that the child “exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible”
What are State training schools?
The juvenile justice system alternative to adult institutions
What are behavior modifications?
A system that rewards positive behavior and punishes poor behavior as a means of changing or controlling behavior; typical approach used in institutions
What are wilderness programs?
Programs in which youths are placed in situations where they must learn survival skills and rely on one another succeed.
Can be either short-term or long-term and can take a variety of different forms, including sailing trips, wagon trains, or back-country camps.
The underlying idea is to build self-esteem and show the youths that hard work and perseverance pay off
What is aftercare?
The juvenile justice system equivalent to adult parole
What is the social worker approach/model?
attempts to find solutions to the problems underlying the behavior
What is the balanced approach?
probation or aftercare workers are responsible for addressing youths needs while taking the safety and security needs of the larger community into account
What are the typical responses under the balanced approach?
Restitution, community service, counseling, rehabilitation, and punishment
What are group hazard hypothesis?
the claim that society responds to group transgressions more strongly than to individual violations; thus, youth gangs are singled out for intervention more often than individual offenders
What does the term gang refer to?
characteristics setting them apart from other affiliations of juveniles
What are the 6 elements to most definitions of a gang?
1) typically, a min number of members for a group
2) symbols used to identify them, including certain clothing, colors or hand signs
3) demarcated by both verbal and nonverbal forms of communication, hand signs and graffiti
4) degree of permanence to the gang, lasting a year or more
5) often claim territory
In 1993 who identified 5 common intervention strategies?
Spergel and Curry
What are the 5 common intervention strategies?
1) Suppression
2) Social internvention
3) Organizational change and development
4) Community organization
5) Opportunities
What is the most common out of the 5 intervention strategies but least effective?
Suppression
What is a detached worker program?
This type of program sought to place gang workers directly with the gangs in the communities
The workers were to spend time with the gangs and try to redirect their activities to noncriminal behavior
What is Civil Abatement?
Use of legal codes to fight gangs is to employ civil, rather than criminal, codes
What is civil gang injunctions?
Court orders that prohibit certain behaviors linked to criminal activity
What is the Boston Gun Project?
This project used an approach called pulled levers
What is the pulling levers approach within the Boston Gun Project?
Pulling levels sought to deter behavior by taking a zero-tolerance response with regards to any transgressions by any member of a gang
The entire gang was held responsible for the acts of all its members
What is the G.R.E.A.T (Gang Resistance Education and Training)?
Program involves using police officers to teach anti-gang, antiviolence lessons in middle schools.
The thrusts of G.R.E.A.T. is to provide youths with the necessary skills to identifying high-risk situations and resisting the peer pressure and allure to take part in gangs and gang activity
What is the disproportionate minority contact (DMC)
Recognizes the overrepresentations of minority youth at almost all stages of the juvenile system, including arrest, court referral, detention, and probation
What is the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA)?
jurisdictions document the extend of DMC at different points in the juvenile justice system processing.
States required to report findings and how they are addressing the problem
What is a criminalized juvenile court?
providing juveniles with all the procedural protections of criminal court
