Sentencing Juveniles as Adults

In the federal official corrections trunk, the policy is that a person under age 18 not be housed in an adult correctional facility, tear down though he has been processed through the adult system and sentenced as an adult. In the state correctional system, the decision to puddle separate correctional facilities for offenders under age 18 has been left to the discretion of the individual states. However, in order to receive federal grants, states ar required to lead separate facilities for adult and teenage offenders in the correctional system. The reasons for keeping teenage and adult offenders unconnected is for the protection of the freshs and to ensure that they do not learn iniquitous behavior from the adult prisoners. States must ensure that juveniles are not detained in a facility where contact with adult inmates is possible.

In the early 1990s, criminologists predicted that violent crime by teenagers would skyrocket, and that is why these measures to attempt juveniles as adults proliferated (Smith and Bilchik 21). Nearly every state passed legislation reservation it easier to try juveniles as adults, yet the rush of juvenile madness never occurred, and rates of violent juvenile crime have continued to fall, due to a stronger economy, a decline in drug use and related gang activity, and an increase in jejuneness preventive programs, yet these laws have never been rep

There are 3,000 juveniles under commitment in the mammy juvenile justice system at any given time (Rose A 101). Most are detained in prisons surrounded by barbed wire, in facilities which surface to be locked dormitories. Because of the lack of resources at the Department of Youth Services, at that place are fewer hobby areas or outside spaces, so the youths spend hours watching television in a cafeteria. among 80 percent and 90 percent of youths in the juvenile system nationwide end up in the felon justice system as adults, and as a result, racial disparities continue in the adult system. The Human Rights Watch open that while Blacks make up only 5.4 percent of the Massachusetts general population, the constitute 26.3 percent of its adult prison population.

Maine has few lawyers and no judge who focus solely on juvenile cases, and the fee cap of $350 per case discourages lawyers from helping these youths (Few 4). Because there are few community shelters available, judges have no superior but to lock up the youths. Pennsylvania has adequate serve in Pittsburgh and in the Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties, but the rest of the state has over-worked judges and inadequate support staff. In Maryland, most youths appear to begin with a judge without ever having seen a public defender, extract in Baltimore which operates a delinquency docket staffed by adjunct public defenders.

In Massachusetts, racism charges are being leveled at the juvenile justice system (Rose 101). The state has long admit that it has a serious problem with over-representation of minority youth in the juvenile justice system. Once arrested, African American youth are imprisoned at a far higher(prenominal) rate that white youths. Black youth represent 23 percent of the Commonwealth juvenile population and about a quarter of all youth arrested, but they constitute 63 percent of all juveniles incarcerated in the juvenile justice system, suggesting institutional racism is rampant in
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