Introduction

 

Ever since my earliest days in graduate school, one of my primary interests has been the subject of juvenile delinquency. I wrote a Masters thesis and a doctoral dissertation on the subject and I have taught a course on this subject almost every year since the fall of 1972.  So it is only natural that many of my essays over the years have dealt with this issue.

The juvenile court today has jurisdiction over youths under a certain age who (1) violate laws applicable to adults, (2) commit what are known as status offenses and, (3) are dependent or ne­glected.  The upper age of juvenile court jurisdiction is, in most states is 17.  In eight states, however, the upper age limit is 16 and in three states it is 15. In a growing number of states youths who commit certain offenses turned over to the adult system, a process known as certification or waiver. One of the most controversial aspects of the juvenile law involves status of­fenses. Most of this controversy stems from the vagueness of the stat­utes; some of it no doubt stems from the parens patriae justification for state intervention; much of if stems from the differential application of such offenses, especially the use of a double standard treatment for males and females brought within the juvenile court jurisdiction. Status offenses involve such behaviors as truancy, violating curfew, running away from home, and such vague concepts as  “ungovernable, incorrigibility, wayward," "unruly."  Many states use such terms as CHINS (children in need of supervision), MINS (minors in need of supervision), PINS (persons in need of supervision), and even FINS (families in need of supervision).

The ambiguity of such statutes gives those in authority a tremendous amount of discretionary power and often leads to arbitrary decisions based on subjective value judgments often imbued with class, race, and sexual biases. These laws also tend to reinforce the dependent status of youth; indeed, one gets the impression that youth are little more than slaves who must remain in their "place." One text on juvenile law noted that: "The rela­tionship between the child, his parents and society is fundamentally a property relationship.  Most of the laws relating to children reflect the prevailing attitude that they are the possessions of their parents “or the state and not very valuable possessions at that.”

The centerpiece of the juvenile justice system is the Juvenile Court.  These courts vary from one jurisdiction to another in terms of size and functions. Some jurisdictions do not have a juvenile court as such and hear cases on special days in other courts. Those areas that have juvenile courts may have anywhere from a small courthouse with a skel­eton staff to a large, bureaucratic complex with many separate divisions (often occupying different buildings over several acres of land) and em­ploying over 100 personnel, Some juvenile courts (e.g., Honolulu, New York City, Las Vegas) are called family courts and handle a wide variety of family- related problems (e.g., child custody, child support, etc.).

While the juvenile court differs in many significant ways from the adult system, their similarities are more numerous.  For instance, cases proceed generally from arrest, through pretrial hearings, through the actual court process, to disposition and finally to some form of punishment and/or treatment in a "correctional institution."  Juvenile court terminology, however, differs significantly.  For instance, in the juvenile court a petition is the equivalent to an indictment, a trial is called an adjudicatory hearing, which is often followed by a dispositional hearing, roughly the equivalent of a sentencing hearing in the adult system.  Parole is known as aftercare, while a sentence is called a commitment.  The term detention is a form of jailing, while taking into custody is the same as being arrested.

The juvenile court has been plagued with controversy since its founding in 1899 in Chicago, which finally took center stage in the 1960s with two landmark Supreme Court cases. The first was that of Kent v. United States (383 U.S. 541, 1966), where a minor's waiver from the jurisdiction of a juvenile court to that of an adult court was reviewed. This case involved sixteen-year-old Morris Kent who, in September 1961, raped a woman and stole her wallet. The juvenile court judge waived Kent to the jurisdiction of an adult court, but without a hearing, without having talked with Kent's lawyer, and without having released a copy of the information contained in Kent's social service file, upon which the waiver decision was partly based. Kent was convicted and sentenced in adult court to a term of thirty to ninety years in prison.

On appeal, the case came before the Supreme Court in 1966. The Court reversed the conviction, holding that the District of Columbia Juvenile Court Act's waiver provisions were invalid. The ruling specified that prior to being waived to an adult court a juvenile had a right to (1) a hearing on the move, (2) access to social service reports, and (3) a statement of reasons for the waiver. In the decision the Court stated that a juvenile gets the worst of both worlds: neither the protection of the Constitution adults take for granted, not the care and treatment promised by the juvenile court.