THE DISPARITY IN SENTENCING

The disparity in sentencing for whites and minorities in the juvenile justice system for the same crimes

The disparity in sentencing for whites and minorities in the juvenile justice system for the same crimes

Introduction

Politicians and the public have repudiated judicial original rehabilitative premises and endorsed punishment of young offenders.

Judicial opinions and statutory changes have rejected procedural informality and incorporated imperfectly many of the safeguards of criminal courts. These substantive and procedural reforms have converted the historical ideal of the juvenile court as a welfare agency into a quasi-penal system that provides young offenders with neither therapy nor justice.

The Progressive reformers who created the juvenile court conceived of it as an informal welfare system in which judges made dispositions in the "best interests" of the child, and the state functioned as parens patriae, as a surrogate parent (Nanette, 1999).

Discussion

In 1967 the Supreme Court in re Gault granted juveniles some constitutional procedural rights in delinquency hearings and provided the impetus to modify juvenile courts' procedures, jurisdiction, and purposes. The ensuing procedural and substantive convergence in juvenile courts; as Nanette discuses in the second chapter of the his book on Youth Crises; eliminated virtually all the conceptual and operational differences in strategies of social and society risks control for youths and adults. Even proponents reluctantly acknowledge that juvenile courts often fail either to "save" children or to reduce youth crime.

Changes in ideas about childhood and social control during the nineteenth century led Progressive reformers to create the juvenile court in 1899. The social construction of childhood and adolescence provided a conceptual rationale for a separate system of social control for young people (Baker, 1992).

The juvenile court culminated a century-long evolution in the control of young offenders and their differentiation from adults. Although the earlier houses of ...