Violent Youth in Juvenile and Adult Court: An Assessment of Sentencing Strategies in Texas
This paper examines the effectiveness of two sentencing strategies for managing serious and violent juvenile offenders: judicial waiver to adult court and determinate sentencing in juvenile court. Corrections data were analyzed and it was found that both groups consistently receive longer terms of incarceration than are available through normal juvenile justice processing. However, this finding changed when actual time served was taken into consideration. A discriminant analysis showed that juveniles determin-ately sentenced in juvenile court are more likely to be younger and receive and serve shorter sentences than juveniles waived to adult court and sentenced to prison.
Mechanisms of Juvenile Transfer: Variations in Incarceration and Sentence Length in Criminal Court
Title: MECHANISMS OF JUVENILE TRANSFER: VARIATIONS IN INCARCERATION AND SENTENCE LENGTH IN CRIMINAL COURT Benta Katrine Samuelson Master of Arts, 2010 Thesis Directed By: Dr. Brian Johnson Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice The judge’s ability to transfer a juvenile to adult court through judicial waiver has been in existence since the inception of the juvenile court in 1899. However, in response to increases in violent juvenile crime, state legislatures created and expanded juvenile transfer policies in the mid to late 1990’s. Although many of these policies have been in effect for almost 15 years, there is little empirical work looking at how the type of transfer can affect sentencing outcomes in adult court. This study examines three of the most common juvenile transfer mechanisms (judicial waiver, statutory exclusion, and direct file) and their sentencing outcomes using a large, multi-jurisdictional sample. Results from this study indicate that juveniles transferred through direct file have the highest likelihood of incarceration while youths transferred through statutory exclusion face the harshest incarcerative sanctions. Findings regarding legal and extralegal characteristics are discussed as well as limitations and suggestions for future research.
The Social Scientist and Rehabilitative Crime Policy
Social scientists are in a quandary about crime policy. On the one hand, the tools of their discipline incline them naturally toward a search for the causes of differences in delinquent behavior, an inclination which appears to be supportive of the potential for rehabilitative components to crime policy. Both the premise of determinism and the methodology of differentiation are intellectually compatible with the prospects for rehabilitation, because both are requisites for a crime control strategy that seeks the impact of purposeful changes in the lives or attitudes of delinquents on subsequent behavior. On the other hand, social scientists are being confronted with a number of arguments that question the utility for social policy of adherence to these assumptions. The validity of some of these arguments is explored briefly in this article. They are found to suffer from an erroneous conception of the logic of determinism, an underdevelopment of the notion of deterrence, or an artifactual conception of the requisites for rehabilitation.