Juvenile Justice Administration in a Nutshell
Authors:
Feld, Barry C. / Moriearty, Perry L.
Edition:
5th
Copyright Date:
2023
15 chapters
have results for juvenile
Chapter 3. Police and Juveniles: Pre-Trial Criminal Procedure 92 results (showing 5 best matches)
- No statements or admissions of a juvenile made as a result of the custodial interrogation of such juvenile by a law enforcement official concerning delinquent acts . . . shall be admissible in evidence against such juvenile unless a parent, [or] guardian . . . was present at such interrogation and the juvenile and his or her parent, [or] guardian . . . were advised of the juvenile’s right to remain silent and that any statements made may be used against him or her in a court of law, of his or her right to have counsel appointed if he or she so requests at the time of the interrogation; except that, if a public defender or counsel representing the juvenile is present at such interrogation, such statements or admissions may be admissible even though the juvenile’s parent, [or] guardian . . . was not present.
- The juvenile court is part of a larger system of social control of youth that interacts with multiple stakeholders. Police encounter youths’ criminal and non-criminal behavior in the community and may refer them to juvenile court. Parents may also enlist the juvenile court to help them to control their children’s criminal and non-criminal conduct. School officials respond to students’ truancy and behavior in school and may refer them to the court. Probation officers informally and formally supervise youths referred to juvenile court and may invoke the court to sanction those who violate the terms of their probation. And juvenile courts, in turn, both re-enforce the authority of, and rely on, these actors to enforce court orders and supervise youth in the community.
- The Supreme Court has not explicitly addressed the applicability of the Fourth Amendment to arrests and searches of juveniles outside of the school context. Legislatures and courts consistently treat “custody” as the equivalent of arrest and use the adult constitutional criminal procedural framework to analyze the validity of juvenile arrests and searches in settings other than schools. “Being ‘in custody’ is a restraint of liberty. When a juvenile is taken into custody, whether it be shorter-termed or not, the juvenile is not free to leave. The taking into custody of a juvenile is analogous to the arrest of an adult.” ...generally qualify the statutory language that custody is not an arrest to mean except for purposes of determining its constitutional validity. “While the term ‘arrest’ is not to be used to describe taking a juvenile into custody, it will be so used in this opinion for the purpose of evaluating the lawfulness of the search. . . . The criteria for the lawful arrest...
- Interrogating juveniles implicates both the punitive or rehabilitative roles of juvenile courts and the developmental competencies of children to exercise rights. The Progressive reformers envisioned non-adversarial juvenile courts in which judges presided as “benevolent fathers” and in which an errant child bared his soul. By contrast, the privilege against self-incrimination is the bulwark of the adversary system and a procedural device to formalize equality between the individual and the state. Courts have struggled with how to reconcile issues of reduced competence and procedural justice when police question juveniles.
- Should the law treat juveniles’ Miranda waivers and confessions differently than adults’ because juveniles are less competent than adults to make legal decisions, “confession is good for the soul,” juveniles’ sentences are less severe than adults’, or encouraging children to deny responsibility teaches a bad moral lesson?
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Chapter 2. Juvenile Court Jurisdiction over Delinquent and Status Offenders 53 results (showing 5 best matches)
- records the numbers of reported violent crimes—murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults—and serious property crimes—burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson—in its Violent and Property Crime Indexes as well as the numbers of arrests and the characteristics of arrestees by age, sex, and race. In 2019, police arrested juveniles—persons under the age of eighteen—for 9.7% of all index violent crimes. Juveniles accounted for 7.7% of homicide, 7.1% of aggravated assault arrests, 16.5% of rape arrests, and 19.6% of robbery arrests. Police arrested juveniles for 11.3% of all index property crimes, including 12.5% of burglaries, 10.4% of larceny, 16.1% of auto theft, and 19.7% of arson. F.B.I., . Juvenile arrest statistics overstate somewhat juveniles’ actual contribution to the overall volume of crime. Juveniles commit their crimes in groups to a greater extent than do adults and police may arrest several juveniles in conjunction with single criminal incident which inflates their...
- In 2019, police arrested 485,964 juveniles for felonies, misdemeanors, and status offenses. FBI, , Table 38. Female juveniles accounted for nearly one-third (31%) of all juvenile arrests, 21% of all juvenile arrests for violent index crimes, and 33% of arrests for property index crimes. Although black juveniles constitute about 16% of the youth population aged 10–17, police arrested Black juveniles for 48% of all violent index crimes, and 42% of all property index crimes committed by juveniles.
- In most states, juvenile courts exercise original and exclusive jurisdiction over a youth below the age of eighteen and charged with a violation of a criminal law or local ordinance. Original and exclusive jurisdiction means that the state initially must file all charges of criminal violations against a child below the maximum age of jurisdiction in juvenile court, although the judge may the juvenile court’s jurisdiction through a from juvenile court jurisdiction. For example, in Minnesota, youths sixteen years of age or older who are charged with first-degree murder automatically fall within criminal court jurisdiction. By legislative definition, these youths are adults for purposes of criminal responsibility. Still other states allow cases involving youths of certain ages and charged with certain serious crimes to be brought in either a juvenile a criminal court. In these states, the juvenile and criminal courts exercise ...decision to charge a case in juvenile or criminal...
- Most states give juveniles the right to a competency hearing.
- States define juvenile courts’ delinquency jurisdiction based on a youth’s age and the nature of the offense. The maximum age of jurisdiction varies from state to state. Typically, the maximum age of juvenile court jurisdiction is seventeen years of age, i.e., an eighteen-year-old is an adult. However, three states set the maximum jurisdictional age at sixteen years of age. Unless their offenses are especially severe, youths below the statutory maximum age normally will be treated as juveniles. Most states define juvenile court jurisdiction in terms of a youth’s age at the time of offense or misconduct. Juvenile courts in most states may impose a disposition on a youth adjudicated delinquent that can continue beyond the maximum age of jurisdiction until age nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, or older.
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Chapter 6. Waiver of Juvenile Court Jurisdiction 108 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Juvenile courts in most states exercise original and exclusive jurisdictions over youths below the age of eighteen years who violate the criminal law. From juvenile courts’ inception, judges could transfer some youth to criminal court. Judicial waiver hearings reflect juvenile courts’ individualized approach to deciding whether to treat a youth as a juvenile or to punish him as an adult.
- Blended sentencing laws attempt to meld the rehabilitative sentences of juvenile courts with the threat of criminal sanctions, and to provide longer delinquency sentences than would otherwise be available in juvenile courts. Torbet, . Juvenile courts lose authority over offenders when they attain the maximum dispositional age or some other statutory termination date. As a result, when juvenile courts sentence older chronic offenders or those convicted of serious crimes, they may be unable to impose proportional sanctions. Statutes that increase juvenile courts’ punishment capacity or give criminal courts juvenile sentencing options represent another offense-based strategy for violent and persistent offenders. E.g., Feld,
- Changes in waiver laws increased the numbers of juveniles charged, tried, and sentenced as adults. States annually try about 200,000 chronological juveniles as adults because their juvenile court jurisdiction ends at sixteen rather than seventeen years of age, and because of transfer provisions. Feld and Bishop, “Transfer of Juveniles to Criminal Court.”
- Beyond its application to the death penalty and juvenile life without parole, the Court’s “children are different” framework will continue to influence juvenile sentencing policies and practices. Logically, if juveniles who commit homicide are inherently less culpable than adults who commit the same offense, juveniles who commit less serious offenses are as well. Thus, mandatory minimum sentencing laws, legislative offense exclusion statutes, sexual offender registration requirements, and other laws that purport to treat juveniles and adults identically are all now susceptible to
- Every state uses one or more statutory devices to prosecute some youths below the maximum age of juvenile court jurisdiction as adults. Although states’ transfer laws vary considerably, all rely on variations of three general strategies—judicial waiver, legislative offense exclusion, and prosecutorial direct file—to prosecute children in criminal court. Barry C. Feld and Donna M. Bishop,
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Chapter 1. Introduction 47 results (showing 5 best matches)
- protection against governmental oppression. Indeed, Gault held that juvenile defendants required the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to protect against governmental oppression even though it might impede accurate fact finding. However, the McKeiver Court denied that juveniles required protection from the state, invoked the mythology of the paternalistic juvenile court judge, and rejected the argument that the inbred, closed nature of the court could prejudice the accuracy of fact finding. In part, the Court denied juries because it perceived that juvenile courts juveniles them, although the Court did not analyze the differences. The distinction between treatment and punishment remains one of the fundamental justifications for a separate juvenile court and for its procedural differences.
- Since the creation of the first juvenile court more than a century ago, the U.S. juvenile justice system has evolved through four periods—the Progressive Era, the Due Process Era, the “Get-Tough” Era, and the more recent “Kids Are Different” Era. Barry C. Feld,
- , Progressive child-savers described juvenile courts as benign, non-punitive, and therapeutic. The juvenile court combined the new conception of children with the new strategies of crime control to create a judicial-welfare alternative
- Rather than accepting uncritically the rehabilitative rhetoric of Progressive reformers, the Court examined the punitive realities of the juvenile justice system. In reviewing the history of the juvenile court, the Court noted that the traditional rationales for denying procedural safeguards to juveniles rested on the belief that the proceedings were neither adversarial nor criminal and that because the State acted as , the child was entitled to custody rather than to liberty. The Court rejected these assertions, however, because denial of procedures frequently resulted in arbitrariness rather than “careful, compassionate, individualized treatment.” Although the Court hoped to retain the potential benefits of the juvenile process, it insisted that it would candidly appraise the claims of the juvenile court process considering the realities of recidivism, the failures of rehabilitation, the stigma of a delinquency label, the breaches of confidentiality, and the arbitrariness of the...
- Nearly a century after its creation, widespread public, policymaker, and political dissatisfaction with the juvenile justice system produced contradictory impulses. Some politicians advocated “get tough” policies and criticized juvenile courts for failing to adopt harsher, retributive strategies to hold young defendants accountable and to treat them like adults. Supporters of juvenile courts criticized them for failing to meet the needs of their clientele from mental health challenges, lack of educational opportunity, poverty, and, sometimes, abuse and neglect. They condemned the racial disparities in juvenile justice administration that produced disproportionate minority contact. The public perceived the juvenile justice system as incapable of rehabilitating offenders, reducing youth crime, or protecting the public safety.
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Chapter 5. Pretrial Detention 35 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Initially, a police officer decides whether to take a youth into custody. If the officer brings a juvenile to a detention facility, then an intake probation officer or detention worker attempts to contact a parent or guardian and decides whether to release or detain the youth. If the detention facility staff decide to hold the juvenile in custody, then the prosecutor must promptly file a delinquency petition. Finally, at a detention hearing, a juvenile court judge must decide whether to release the juvenile pending adjudication and disposition. Under statutory time limits, these different actors make their respective decisions within 48 to 72 hours after police take a youth into custody. If a judge detains a youth, the juvenile may
- Juvenile courts’ jurisdictional authority defines the power of police officers to take juveniles into custody, and probation intake workers and juvenile court judges to detain youths. Recall that statutes authorize police to take juveniles into custody for criminal law violations, for non-criminal status offenses, and when they find children in circumstances that endanger their health, safety, and welfare. Although states give police broad authority to intervene, it does not follow that all youths taken into custody require detention pending further proceedings.
- Justice Marshall noted that most detained juveniles are not dangerous or violent, which thwarted the state’s crime prevention goals. Although states detain larger proportions of defendants charged with violent offenses than they do those charged with property offenses, the latter comprise a larger part of juvenile courts’ dockets. As a result, prosecutors charge most detained juveniles with property or drug crimes rather than violent offenses. The dissent also criticized the Court for denigrating juveniles’ liberty interests and characterizing confinement in a detention facility as like parental custody.
- The Schall Court denigrated juveniles’ liberty interests and trivialized the institutional conditions under which most states detain juveniles. States confine most juveniles in pretrial detention centers prior to trial rather than in post-adjudication commitments to training schools or other correctional facilities. E.g., Feld, . Unfortunately, custodial jail-like conditions prevail in many juvenile detention facilities around the nation. States detain more than half of all youths in overcrowded facilities operated above their designed capacity. Feld,
- States’ detention statutes define the criteria for holding juveniles. Although statutory language varies greatly, detention criteria focus on three general elements: the danger a youth poses to themself; the danger they pose to others; or their likelihood of flight. E.g., (release of the juvenile poses an unreasonable danger to the person or property of others, a substantial threat of serious harm to the juvenile, or the juvenile has threatened to abscond or has a record of willful failure to appear in court); (release to parents unless there is reason to believe that the child would endanger self or others or not return for a court hearing). Pretrial detention differs from how states process adult criminal defendants because of juvenile courts’ broader jurisdiction and states’ protective policies toward children.
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Chapter 7. Adjudication of Delinquency: Procedural Rights at Trial 95 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In a multi-purpose system, at what point on a continuum from a purely rehabilitative juvenile court to an explicitly punitive one, do legislative changes “cross the line” and create the functional equivalent of a criminal court? The Louisiana Supreme Court in , concluded that the legislature crossed the line when it denied juveniles confined in adult correctional institutions the right to a jury trial. In In re C.B., the legislation provided for youths’ transfer to adult prisons at age seventeen to complete their remaining juvenile sentences. The court concluded that once the juvenile code allowed judges to sentence delinquents to the same institutions as adults convicted of crimes, then no differences existed to justify dispensing with a jury trial. The court in Hezzie R. struck down a provision of the Wisconsin juvenile code that allowed the state to transfer juveniles convicted without a jury trial to the adult correctional system. If a state sentences juveniles to adult...
- Procedure and substance intertwine in juvenile courts. Progressive reformers assumed juveniles lacked competence to exercise procedural rights and envisioned an informal court acting in the child’s “best interests.” The Supreme Court in In re Gault recognized the disjunctions between juvenile courts’ rehabilitative rhetoric and their punitive reality and required procedural safeguards for youths charged with criminal violations. Although Gault provided the impetus for a procedural convergence between juvenile and criminal courts, a substantial gulf remains between constitutional theory and reality, between the “law on the books” and the “law in action.”
- Despite the convergence of juvenile and criminal courts, most states provide neither special procedures to protect youths from their own immaturity nor the full panoply of adult criminal procedural rights. In some instances, states treat juvenile defendants just like adult criminal defendants when formal equality redounds to their disadvantage, for example, as we saw in Chapter 3 where juveniles waive their Miranda rights under the adult standard—“knowing, intelligent, and voluntary.” Most states allow youths to waive their right to an attorney at trial under the same standard and without consultation with counsel. In other instances, states use juvenile court procedures that provide a comparative advantage to the state, for example denying a right to a jury trial or allowing expansive pretrial detention. Chapter 5.
- Recall from Chapter 1, Gault was based, in part, on the “law in action” rather than the “law on the books.” Gault confronted the reality of a juvenile court quite different from the rhetoric of its Progressive creators. The Court’s decision reflected contemporaneous empirical studies of juvenile courts as well as changes in attitudes about the importance of procedural safeguards. See . The Court observed that juvenile courts’ failure to provide procedural safeguards sometimes resulted in unfair and inaccurate fact-finding. It noted that high adolescent crime rates and youths’ recidivism contradicted juvenile court proponents’ claims of successful intervention. Gault saw no significant constitutional difference between commitment to an industrial school for youths and to a reformatory for criminals. Although the Court accepted juvenile courts’ rehabilitative goals, it insisted that they must provide some procedural safeguards to achieve those objectives.
- Rather than provide a systematic analysis, McKeiver simply listed reasons why judges provided an adequate alternative to a jury’s fact-finding capabilities, why a jury would disrupt or impair the informality of delinquency proceedings, and why it would not affirmatively improve the operations of juvenile courts. The Court balanced the function of a jury against its impact on the juvenile system. It also considered whether jury trials were less critical in the juvenile than in the criminal justice system.
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Chapter 4. Preliminary Procedures: Intake and Diversion 29 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The juvenile justice decision-making process is a cumulative one; decisions made by the initial participants, for example, the police or juvenile court intake, affect the decisions made by subsequent participants, for example, juvenile court judges. Those decisions cumulate and compound and become a youth’s prior record which further affects subsequent judgements. Thus, juvenile courts’ sentencing practices reflect decisions made by actors at prior stages who screen and winnow the cases that comprise the formal docket.
- Once a delinquency petition is filed, the juvenile court arraigns the juvenile on the petition. The right to counsel attaches only after the state files a petition—the formal initiation of the process. Judges appoint counsel to represent juveniles at the arraignment and at subsequent hearings. However, rates of representation vary widely from state to state and from county to county within a state. Barry C. Feld,
- , provided impetus for the Supreme Court due process decisions that reformed juvenile court procedures. The Crime Commission critically examined many aspects of juvenile justice administration, acknowledged that the great hopes Progressives held for juvenile courts often remain unfulfilled, and made several policy recommendations that Gault adopted and state legislatures later enacted. The Crime Commission suggested that the juvenile justice system might evolve into a two-track organization with separate crime control role for youth charged with serious offenses and social welfare functions for most youths. In such a two-track system, public officials would divert and handle informally most youth charged with minor offenses and status offenders. Most juveniles commit trivial offenses, out-grow their delinquencies normally, and do not require formal intervention. By the 1970s, the Crime Commission recommendations led to changes in judicial and ...less serious offenses from juvenile...
- Should a probation officer administer a Miranda warning to a juvenile at intake screening? Should intake appoint counsel for a juvenile? If a juvenile admits involvement in an offense at intake, can the probation officer testify about those statements if the child is formally prosecuted? Because the intake conference occurs prior to filing formal charges, unless privately retained, attorneys rarely accompany juveniles at this stage of the proceedings.
- Probation officers in a juvenile court intake unit may refer a youth to the juvenile court for formal adjudication or may dispose of the case through informal supervision or diversion to a program run by the juvenile court or some other social services agency. Juvenile court intake workers and judges review the cases of any youth held in pretrial detention. After formal adjudication, a judge may choose from a wide array of dispositional alternatives ranging from continuing a case without a finding of delinquency, staying adjudication of a case for a
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Chapter 8. Dispositional Decision 75 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Two primary factors influence juvenile court judges’ sentencing practices. First, states define delinquency jurisdiction based on criminal law violations. The same factors that influence criminal court sentences—present offense and prior record—influence delinquency sentences as well. Feld,
- Judicial sentencing decisions reflect the prior justice system actors’ judgements that winnow the cases presented to court. As we saw in Chapter 4, if police refer a case to juvenile court, an intake
- What are the goals of a justice system for young people who violate the criminal law? As juvenile courts pursue multiple goals, how should state laws and juvenile court judges balance social welfare and criminal social control when these goals conflict?
- Since the creation of the juvenile court in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899, the historical purpose of juvenile court law has been
- While changes in purpose clauses signal changes in juvenile courts’ orientation, courts find that punishment can be a form of treatment. In , the Washington supreme court reasoned that “sometimes punishment is treatment,” and upheld the legislature’s conclusion that “accountability for criminal behavior, the prior criminal activity and punishment commensurate with age, crime, and criminal history does as much to rehabilitate, correct, and direct an errant youth as does the prior philosophy of focusing upon the particular characteristics of the individual juvenile.” The Nevada Supreme Court endorsed punishment as an appropriate function of juvenile courts. “By formally recognizing the legitimacy of punitive and deterrent sanctions for criminal offenses juvenile courts will be properly and somewhat belatedly expressing society’s firm disapproval of juvenile crime and will be clearly issuing a threat of punishment for criminal acts to the juvenile population.”
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Preface 6 results (showing 5 best matches)
- How should the State respond when a young person breaks the law? The answers implicate youth policy and crime policy, both of which change over time. In the field of juvenile justice, states truly constitute “laboratories of experimentation.” No single source of law governs juvenile courts. Rather, a combination of United States Supreme Court constitutional decisions, state court constitutional and non-constitutional decisions, statutes, juvenile court procedural rules, and administrative procedures govern different aspects of juvenile justice administration. Consequently, states’ laws and policies toward juvenile defendants vary considerably. This Nutshell focuses exclusively on the criminal and non-criminal conduct of children that bring them within the jurisdiction of juvenile courts. It examines how schools, law enforcement, prosecutors, legislators, judges, and administrative agencies respond to youthful misconduct. It does not address child abuse, dependency and neglect, or
- The organization of the Nutshell follows the flow of a typical delinquency case. Chapter 1 addresses the origins and history of the juvenile court. Chapter 2 focuses on the delinquency and status offense jurisdiction of the juvenile court. Chapter 3 analyzes law enforcement and selected issues of criminal procedure—search and seizure, interrogation, and the like—in the context of juvenile justice administration. It examines procedural variations that occur because the defendant is a child or located in youth-specific settings like schools. Chapter 4 analyzes case screening, diversion, and other informal methods to resolve delinquency referrals without formal juvenile court intervention. Chapter 5 examines pretrial detention and the use of methods other than bail to secure a child’s presence at trial. Chapter 6 examines how and when states try youths in criminal court rather than in juvenile court. It examines the principle statutory mechanisms—judicial waiver, legislative offense...
- Despite the Supreme Court’s “Constitutional Domestication,” states’ statutes create juvenile courts and reflect legislative policy judgments. Three contending policy themes affect variations in juvenile justice administration: the legal and administrative consequences of regulating
- Competing conceptions of children—immaturity, incompetence and diminished culpability versus maturity, competence, and blameworthiness—and differing strategies of crime control—treatment or diversion versus punishment—affect juvenile and criminal courts’ substantive goals and procedural means. Ideas about youths’ culpability and responsibility affect juvenile courts’ decisions to detain and sentence children charged with delinquency offenses, transfer youth to criminal court, and sentence children as adults. Views about youths’ competence to participate in the legal process influence policies about waivers of
- Since the publication of the First Edition of this Nutshell more than two decades ago, there have been two major changes in juvenile justice policy. First, advances in developmental psychology and neuroscience have led to greater understanding of how adolescents differ from adults in judgment and self-control, reinforce the idea that “children are different,” inform our understanding of adolescents’ competence and culpability, and influence Supreme Court decisions and state legislative policies. Second, legal advocacy and criminological research has highlighted the extreme racial disparities in juvenile justice administration. We identify policies and practices that contribute to racial disparities and some remedial strategies.
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Table of Books and Articles 61 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Feld, Barry C. and Donna M. Bishop, Transfer of Juveniles to Criminal Court, Oxford Handbook of Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice (2012), 210
- Berkheiser, Mary, The Fiction of Juvenile Right to Counsel: Waiver in the Juvenile Courts, 54 Fla. L. Rev. 577 (2002), 320
- Bishop, Donna M. and Michael Leiber, Racial and Ethnic Differences in Delinquency and Justice System Responses, Oxford Handbook of Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice 445–84 (2012), 344
- Feld, Barry C., The Evolution of the Juvenile Court: Race, Politics, and the Criminalizing of Juvenile Justice (2017), 1
- McCord, Joan, Cathy Spatz Widom, and Nancy A. Crowell, Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice (2001), 35
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Index 22 results (showing 5 best matches)
Outline 18 results (showing 5 best matches)
Table of Cases 7 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Publication Date: February 22nd, 2023
- ISBN: 9781685613402
- Subject: Juvenile Justice
- Series: Nutshells
- Type: Overviews
- Description: This Nutshell focuses on the criminal and non-criminal misconduct of children that bring them within the jurisdiction of juvenile courts. It examines how police, parents, schools, courts, and other agencies respond to that misconduct. It addresses children's rights during the investigation and prosecution of youths for delinquency and status-offenses. Like all Nutshells, it provides a succinct exposition of the law for students studying juvenile justice, for lawyers who do not regularly practice in juvenile court, and for legislators and policy officials involved in juvenile justice law reform efforts.