Modernity In Criminology - Essay Example

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 positivists 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. In 1967 the Supreme Court in In re Gault granted juveniles some constitutional procedural rights in delinquency hearings and provided the impetus to modify juvenile courts' procedures, jurisdiction, and purposes.

(Feld, 1999, 24-25) The ensuing procedural and substantive convergence between juvenile and criminal courts eliminated virtually all the conceptual and operational differences in strategies of social control for youths and adults. Even proponents reluctantly acknowledge that juvenile courts often fail either to save children or to reduce youth crime. In short, the contemporary juvenile court constitutes a conceptually and administratively bankrupt institution with neither a rationale nor a justification.

According to Paul (2002, 69-70) social structural and cultural changes fostered both the initial creation and contemporary transformation of the juvenile court. Ideological changes in cultural conceptions of children and in strategies of social control during the nineteenth century led positivists to create the juvenile court in 1899. . s combined new theories of criminality, such as positivism, with new ideas about childhood and adolescence to construct a social welfare alternative to criminal courts.

They designed juvenile courts to respond flexibly to youths' criminal and non-criminal misconduct, to assimilate and integrate poor and immigrant children, and to expand control and supervision of young people and their families. (Tanenhaus, 2004, 111-112)The juvenile court positivists removed children from the criminal justice and corrections systems, provided them with individualized treatment in a separate system, and substituted a scientific and preventive alternative to the criminal law's punitive policies.

By separating children from adults and providing a rehabilitative alternative to punishment, juvenile courts also rejected criminal law's jurisprudence and its procedural safeguards, such as juries and lawyers. Juvenile courts' flexible and discretionary strategies enabled its personnel to differentiate and discriminate between their own children and "other people's children," those of the poor and immigrants. (Duffy, 2004, 39)A century later, social structural changes have modified the cultural conceptions of young people and the strategies of social control that juvenile courts employ.

These changes leave the juvenile court, as an institution, searching for a new policy foundation and legal rationale. (Kittrie, 2000, 156-157) Since Gault, social structural, demographic, and legal changes have altered dramatically juvenile courts' structure and functions, the characteristics of their clientele, and the crime and social welfare issues that they confront. The social construction of adolescence as a developmental stage distinct from adulthood and new sensibilities about children began to pose