Some Compiled Review Materials in Juvenile Delinquency

Compiled by: JBDAVID/2009

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY & CRIME PREVENTION

DEFINITION OF TERMS

ABANDONMENT - The most common legal grounds for termination of parental rights, also a
form of child abuse in most states. Sporadic visits, a few phone calls, or birthday cards are not
sufficient to maintain parental rights. Fathers who manifest indifference toward a pregnant mother
are also viewed as abandoning the child when it is born.

ABUSE - Term for acts or omissions by a legal caretaker. Encompasses a broad range of acts,
and usually requires proof of intent.

ADJUDICATION - The phase of a delinquency hearing similar to a "trial" in adult criminal court,
except that juveniles have no right to a jury trial, a public trial, or bail.

ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE - Any of the processes involving enforcement of care, custody,

or support orders by an executive agency rather than by courts or judges.

ADOPTION - A legal relationship between two people not biologically related, usually terminating
the rights of biological parents, and usually with a trial "live-in" period. Once an adoption is
finalized, the records are sealed and only the most compelling interests will enable disclosure of
documents.

ADOPTION AND SAFE FAMILIES ACT of 1997 - Moves children more quickly into permanent,
adoptive placements, rather than letting them languish in foster homes.

BEST INTERESTS OF THE CHILD RULE - Legal doctrine establishing court as determiner of
best environment for raising child. An alternative to the Parens Patriae Doctrine.

BREED v. JONES (1975) - Case allowing second prosecution in adult court for conviction in
juvenile court, based on idea that first conviction was a "civil" matter.

CASE LAW - Law established by the history of judicial decisions in cases decided by judges, as
opposed to common law which is developed from the history of judicial decisions and social
customs.

CHILD PROTECTION ACTION - The filing of legal papers by a child welfare agency when its
investigation has turned up evidence of child abuse. This is a civil, rather than criminal, charge
designed to take preventive action (like appointment of a Guardian ad litem) for at-risk children
before abuse occurs.

CHILD SUPPORT – the act of being responsible for enforcing child support obligations.

CHILD VICTIMS' AND CHILD WITNESS' RIGHTS - A 1990 federal law allowing courts to take
extraordinary steps in protecting the emotional health of any child called to testify in a courtroom.

CHINS (CHild In Need of Supervision) - A term applied to status offenders adjudicated in juvenile
court.

CIVIL PROTECTION ORDER - A form of protective custody in which a child welfare or police
agency order an adult suspected of abuse to leave the home.

CUSTODIAL CONFINEMENT - Court order for placement in a secure facility, separate from
adults, for the rehabilitation of a juvenile delinquent.

DELINQUENCY PROCEEDING - Court action to officially declare someone a juvenile delinquent.

A "delinquent" is defined as under the age of majority who has been convicted in juvenile court of
something that would be classified as a crime in adult court.

DEPENDENT - Anyone under the care of someone else. A child ceases to be a dependent when
they reach the age of emancipation.

DeSHANEY v. WINNEBAGO COUNTY (1989) - Case limiting extent by which government

exercises parens patriae power.

DISPOSITION - Phase of delinquency proceeding similar to "sentencing" phase of adult trial. The
judge must consider alternative, innovative, and individualized sentences rather than imposing
standard sentences.

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DIVERSION - An alternative to trial decided upon at intake to refer the child to counseling or other
social services.

EMANCIPATION - Independence of a minor from his or her parents before reaching age of
majority.

EQUAL PROTECTION – A clause requiring government to treat similarly situated people the
same or have good reason for treating them differently. Compelling reasons are considered to
exist for treating children differently.

FAMILY IMMUNITY DOCTRINE - Legal doctrine preventing unemancipated children from suing
their parents.

FAMILY PURPOSE DOCTRINE - Legal doctrine holding parents liable for injuries caused by a
child's negligent driving or other actions.

FOSTER CARE - Temporary care funded via Federal-State pass-through and arranged by a child
welfare agency in order to allow receipt of adequate food, clothing, shelter, education, and
medical treatment for anyone raising a child that is not their own.
GUARDIAN AD LITEM - Phrase meaning "For the Proceeding" referring to adults who look after
the welfare of a child and represent their legal interests.

GUARDIANSHIP - Court order giving an individual or organization legal authority over a child. A
guardian of the person is usually an individual and the child is called a ward. A guardian of the
estate is usually an organization, like a bank, which manages the property and assets of a child's
inheritance. Guardians are usually compensated for their services.

ILLEGITIMACY - Being born to unmarried parents. The law assumes legitimacy via a married
mother's husband, whether or not this is the true father. Illegitimacy status limits inheritance
rights.

IN LOCO PARENTIS - Teachers, administrators, and babysitters who are viewed as having some
temporary parental rights & obligations.

IN RE GAULT (1967) – (US) - Case that determined the Constitution requires a separate juvenile
justice system with certain standard procedures and protections, but still not as many as in adult
systems.

INTAKE - Procedure prior to preliminary hearing in which a group of people (intake officer, police,
probation, social worker, parent and child) talk and decide whether to handle the case formally or
informally.

JUDGMENT - Any official decision or finding of a judge or administrative agency hearing officer
upon the respective rights and claims of parties to an action; also known as a decree or order.

KENT v. U.S. (1966) - Case requiring a special hearing before any transfers to adult court.

MATERNAL PREFERENCE RULE - Legal doctrine granting mothers custodial preference after a
divorce.

NEGLECT - Parental failure to provide a child with basic necessities when able to do so.
Encompasses a variety of forms of abuse that do not require the element of intent.

PARENS PATRIAE - Legal doctrine establishing "parental" role of state over welfare of its
citizens, especially its children. A 19th century idea first articulated in Prince v. Massachusetts
(1944).

PAROLE - Release of a juvenile delinquent from custodial confinement prior to expiration of

sentence; sometimes called aftercare.

PATERNITY - Result of lawsuit forcing a reluctant man to assume obligations of fatherhood.

Blood and DNA tests showing a 98 or 99 percent likelihood are the standard. Laws vary widely in
terms of statutes of limitations and when paternity actions will not be allowed (estoppels).

PLEADING - In juvenile court, a plea of "not guilty" will move the case to adjudication, and a plea
of "guilty" or "nolo contendere" will result in waiver of the right to trial. State procedures vary
widely in how intelligent and voluntary pleas are accepted.

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 Some Compiled Review Materials in Juvenile Delinquency
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PRELIMINARY HEARING - The bringing of a juvenile before a magistrate or judge in which

charges are formally presented. Similar to an arraignment in adult court, and also called "advisory
hearings" or "initial appearances" in some state juvenile justice systems.

PREVENTIVE DETENTION - Keeping a juvenile in custody or under a different living

arrangement until the time when an adjudication can take place. Upheld in Schall v. Martin
(1984), but the right to speedy trial requires the dropping of charges if an unreasonable amount of
time is spent in preventive detention.

PROTECTIVE CUSTODY - Emergency, temporary custody by a child welfare agency, police

agency, or hospital for reasons of immanent danger to the child. A hearing must be held for the
benefit of the parents within a few days.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PARENT DOCTRINE - Legal doctrine granting custody to the parent whom
the child feels the greatest emotional attachment to.

RESTITUTION - A disposition requiring a defendant to pay damages to a victim. The law prohibits
making restitution a condition of receiving probation. Poor families cannot be deprived of
probation simply because they are too poor to afford restitution. Some states do not allow families
to pay restitution.

RULE OF SIXTEEN – (US) - Federal and state laws that prohibit anyone under age 16 from
employment.

STANFORD v. KENTUCKY (1989) - Case in which it was determined constitutional to execute

juveniles between the ages of 16-18, but unconstitutional if they committed crimes while under
age 16. Won by a narrow majority, as in the 1988 case of Thompson v. Oklahoma which relied
upon "standards of decency".

STATUS OFFENSE - An activity illegal when engaged in by a minor, but not when done by an
adult. Examples include truancy, curfew, running away, or habitually disobeying parents.

STEPPARENT - A spouse of a biological parent who has no legal rights or duties to the child
other than those which have been voluntarily accepted.

SURROGATE PARENT - A parent who provided an egg, sperm, or uterus with an intent of giving
the child up for adoption to specific parties.

TENDER YEARS DOCTRINE - Legal doctrine that unless the mother is "unfit", very young
children should be placed in custody with their mother following a divorce.

TERMINATION HEARINGS - Process for legally severing the parent-child relationship. Initiated
by the filing of a petition in family court, and almost always brought forth by a child welfare
agency. Requires a finding of "unfitness" and a determination of the best interests of the child.

UNFIT PARENT - A temporary or permanent termination of parental rights in the best interest of
the child usually for reasons of abandonment, abuse, or neglect, but also including mental illness,
addiction, or criminal record. Poverty alone and character flaws are prohibited by law from being
indicators of "unfitness".

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 Some Compiled Review Materials in Juvenile Delinquency
Compiled by: JBDAVID/2009

What causal factors contribute to juvenile problem behavior?

Over the years, criminologists have put forth a wide variety of motives for what causes
crime. People who deal with young people cite the following root conditions: poverty, family
factors, the environment, media influence, and declining social morality. These will be taken up in
order:

Poverty

Although it is considered passé to say poverty causes crime, the fact is that nearly 22
percent of children under the age of eighteen live in poverty. Poverty, in absolute terms, is more
common for children than for any other group in society. Ageism, they say, is the last frontier in
the quest for economic equality. Adolescents from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families
regularly commit more violence than youth from higher SES levels. Social isolation and economic
stress are two main products of poverty, which has long been associated with a number of D-
words like disorganization, dilapidation, deterioration, and despair. Pervasive poverty undermines
the relevance of school and traditional routes of upward mobility. The way police patrol poverty
areas like an occupying army only reinforces the idea that society is the enemy whom they should
hate. Poverty breeds conditions that are conducive to crime.

Family Factors

One of the most reliable indicators of juvenile crime is the proportion of fatherless
children. The primary role of fathers in our society is to provide economic stability, act as role
models, and alleviate the stress of mothers. Marriage has historically been the great civilizer of
male populations, channeling predatory instincts into provider/protector impulses. Economically,
marriage has always been the best way to multiply capital, with the assumption being that girls
from poorer families better themselves by marrying upward. Then, of course, there are all those
values of love, honor, cherish, and obey encapsulated in the marriage tradition. Probably the
most important thing that families impart to children is the emphasis upon individual accountability
and responsibility in the forms of honesty, commitment, loyalty, respect and work ethic.

Most of the broken home literature, for example, shows only weak or trivial effects, like
skipping school or home delinquency. Another area, the desistance literature, shows only that
children from two-parent families age-out of crime earlier. In fact, there is more evidence
supportive of the hypothesis that a stepparent in the home increases delinquency, or that abuse
and neglect in fully-intact families lead to a cycle of violence. To complicate matters, there are
significant gender, race, and SES interaction effects. Females from broken homes commit certain
offenses while males from broken homes commit other kinds of offenses. Few conclusions can be
reached about African American males, but tentative evidence suggests stepparenting can be of
benefit to them. SES differences actually show that the broken home is less important in
producing delinquency among lower-class youth than youth from higher social classes. Most
research results are mixed, and no clear causal family factors have emerged to explain the
correlation between fatherlessness and crime, but it is certainly unfair to blame single mothers,
their parenting skills, or their economic condition for what are obviously more complex social
problems.

The Environment

Unless we are willing to believe that testosterone (a male stimulation-seeking hormone)

causes crime, the only feasible explanations left are environmental ones. The heredity-
environment debate in explaining juvenile crime is shaped by divided opinions about what factors
are really important: genetic tendencies, birth complications, and brain chemicals, on one side;
and being a victim of abuse, witnessing domestic battering, and learned behaviors, on the other
side. The idea that all behavior is learned behavior is associated with environmental explanations.
Sure, everyone has a potential for violence, but we learn how to do it (in all its different forms)
from observing others do it. In fact, most of us are suckers for observing violence, glamorizing it
to the point where we like more and different forms of it everyday, in the news, on TV shows, in
action movies. So when you're talking about reducing the need to see violence on TV, you're
really talking biology or psychology. The study of environmental factors, on the other hand, is
concerned primarily with social considerations. While violence may be part of everyone's
behavioral repertoire, the temptations (triggers, cues) to do it are embedded (lodged, locked,
firmly put in place) with social networks (relationships and situations) that more or less make this
kind of behavior seem acceptable at the moment.

The unfortunate truth is that, in many places, there are a growing number of irresistible
temptations and opportunities for juveniles to use violence. Brute, coercive force has become an

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acceptable substitute, even a preferred substitute, for ways to resolve conflicts and satisfy needs.
Think of it as the schoolyard bully who says "Meet me in the parking lot at 4:30". Under
circumstances like these, the peer pressure and reward systems are so arranged that fighting
seems like the only way out.

Now think for a moment about the crucial importance of peer groups: whether there are
people who would respect you for standing up to fight, or whether there are people important to
you that would definitely not approve of your fighting. What environmental learning theorists are
saying is that there are fewer and fewer friends available to help you see the error of your ways in
deciding to fight.

Most of the recent research in this area revolves around "neighborhood" factors, such as
the presence of gangs, illicit drug networks, high levels of transiency, lack of informal supports,
etc. Gang-infested neighborhoods, in particular, have no effective means of providing informal
supports that would help in resisting the temptations to commit crime. Such neighborhoods would
more likely have an informal encouragement policy, with five or more places where you could buy
a gun and drugs available to give you the courage to use the gun. Firearms- and drug-related
homicides have increased over 150% in recent years, and the clearest drug-violence connection
is for selling drugs because illicit drug distribution networks are extremely violent.

In such neighborhoods, families, school authorities, and even community organizations

are often incapable of providing any protection for children. There are no peer-level social
supports to reinforce the conventional lifestyles that these agencies want their children to
emulate. The reality of street life, its illicit economy, and quick and easy pathways to success and
prestige through violence and crime all offer rewards that offset the risks associated with these
activities. And, even if a child experiences the risks of street life firsthand, like by getting shot or
stabbed, this only reinforces the child's desire for more exposure to the learning of street life, to
do better next time by listening more closely to delinquent peers and not to the advice of
legitimate authorities. Victimization and perpetration go hand in hand. This is what is meant when
criminologists say that the best predictor of future delinquency is past behavior, or age of onset.
The strongest (primacy) effect is when violence is modeled, encouraged, and rewarded for the
first time. It determines the type of friends one chooses, which in turn, determines what behaviors
will be subsequently modeled, established, and reinforced.

Media Influence

Popular explanations of juvenile crime often rest on ideas about the corrupting influence
of television, movies, music videos, video games, rap/hip hop music, or the latest scapegoat du
jour, computer games like Doom or Quake. The fact is that TV is much more pervasive, and has
become the de facto babysitter in many homes, with little or no parental monitoring. Where there
is strong parental supervision in other areas, including the teaching of moral values and norms,
the effect of prolonged exposure to violence on TV is probably quite minimal. When TV becomes
the sole source of moral norms and values, this causes problems. Our nation's children watch an
astonishing 19,000 hours of TV by the time they finish high school, much more time than all their
classroom hours put together since first grade. By eighteen, they will have seen 200,000 acts of
violence, including 40,000 murders. Every hour of prime time television carries 6-8 acts of
violence. Most surveys show that around 80% of American parents think there is too much
violence on television.

Most of the scientific research in this area revolves around tests of two hypotheses: the
catharsis effect, and the brutalization effect; but I am giving this area of research more credit than
it deserves because it is not that neatly organized into two hypotheses. Catharsis means that
society gets it out of their system by watching violence on TV, and brutalization means we
become so desensitized it doesn't bother us anymore, but there are also "imitation" hypotheses,
"sleeper" effects, and lagged-time correlations. The results of research in this area are too mixed
to give any adequate guidance, and it may well be that social science is incapable of providing us
with any good causal analysis in this area. Only anecdotal evidence of a few cases of direct
influence exist.

Since the early 1990s, a number of films, music videos, and rap music lyrics have come
out depicting gang life, drugs, sex, and violence. Watching or listening to these items gives you
the feeling that the filmmakers or musicians really know what they're talking about and tell it like it
is, but there have been unfortunate criminogenic effects. In 1992, for example, 144 law
enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty. That year, four juveniles wounded Las Vegas
police officers and the rap song, Cop Killer, was implicated. At trial, the killers admitted that
listening to the song gave them a sense of duty and purpose. During apprehension, the killers
sung the lyrics at the police station. Another case involved a Texas trooper killed in cold blood
while approaching the driver of a vehicle with a defective headlight. The driver attempted a

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temporary insanity defense based on the claim he felt hypnotized by songs on a 2 Pac album,
that the anti-police lyrics "took control, devouring [him] like an animal, compelling his
subconscious mind to kill the approaching trooper". Two of the nation's leading psychiatrists were
called as expert witnesses in support of this failed defense.

Social Morality

It has become prevalent, especially among the slacker generations, GenX and Gen13, to
join the old WWII generation in self-righteous, totally gratuitous Sixties-bashing, as if all our social
problems, especially our declining social morality, started with the free-for-all, "any thing goes"
hippie movement of the 1960s. This time period is often blamed for giving birth to rising
hedonism, the questioning of authority, unbridled pursuit of pleasure, the abandonment of family
responsibility, demand for illicit drugs, and a number of other social ills. Sometimes, even the
AIDS epidemic is blamed on the 1960s, although such accusers are off by about two decades.

To sixties-bashers, today's juvenile "super predators" are nothing but a long line of
troubled youngsters who have grown up in more extreme conditions of declining social morality
than the generation before them. Their thinking is that each generation since the sixties has tried
hard to outdo one another in expressing the attitude that "nothing really matters", culminating in
the present teenage regard for angst and irony so common in contemporary culture.

How should juveniles-in-trouble be handled?

Approaches to the problem generally fall into two camps: the public health solution, and
the law enforcement solution. Advocates of the public health approach tend to see juveniles today
as victims of an anti-youth culture. The problem is not just parents failing children, but a whole
attitude among adult society that is increasingly hostile, angry, and punishing toward youth. It's
also not just poverty, per se, among children, but the relative deprivation of living in a society of
affluence in which self-esteem is tied to achieving affluence. People are only hosts, not causes, of
social problems, according to the public health model. The real enemies (if there need to be
enemies at all) are the environment (broad social forces that shape their way through culture) and
the agent (the means of violence, firearms and access to weapons). Intervene, and then trace the
pathology back to its source. The source often turns out to be low SES families and
neighborhoods where there have been few prevention programs, poor economic and educational
opportunities, and no way to reintegrate released offenders back into the community.

The law enforcement solution looks at the problem in terms of what needs to be done to improve
investigation, arrest, prosecution, and conviction. Advocates of this approach perceive that a
nationwide crackdown, "get tough on juvenile crime" program is what this country needs, but they
are also just as likely to want the delivery of real rehabilitation programs in juvenile prisons, at
least when we are better able to separate the minor offenders from super predators. For the most
part, however, the belief is that it is society's duty to punish, not rehabilitate, and boot camps, life
terms, and even executions are in order for juveniles if they deserve it. They should serve time as
adults, and face the ultimate punishment, no matter what the age.