NCJ Number
184896
Date Published
1996
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This chapter reviews the rationale of the reformers who instituted the first juvenile court system, patterned largely after the Massachusetts system for processing juvenile cases.
Abstract
Massachusetts' processing of juveniles provided an example on which to build a system that would relieve child offenders of the undeserved burden of criminal responsibility and yet prevent them from going astray again. Perhaps the most influential idea in shaping the juvenile court system was the thesis that the defect which produced juvenile crime lay not so much in the child as in the environment from which he/she had come; therefore, no child should be treated as a criminal. The child, naturally or at least potentially innocent and moral, learned antisocial behavior from contact with corrupt adults. Accordingly, the first principle of the new court apparatus and its ancillary institutions was to separate the child from adult offenders at all times. Juvenile court legislation usually prohibited the confinement of children with adults, and occasionally made nonsegregated confinement itself punishable as a misdemeanor. In the literature and the laws, founders of the juvenile court demanded not only separate reformatories but separate detention centers and separate sessions or courtrooms as well. In pursuit of the ideal of individualized treatment, the reformers seemed to imagine an infinite range of choices in tailoring the disposition to fit the child. Nevertheless, both practical considerations and premises of the movement itself circumscribed the judge's choice of disposition. Also, one of the distinctive features of the juvenile court movement was its primary, if not exclusive, commitment to probation as the most desirable disposition for child offenders. 44 notes