Criminalizing Delinquency: The Deterrent Effects of the New York Juvenile Offender Law

Abstract

New York's Juvenile Offender (JO) Law of 1978 is a significant step away from separate systems of justice for adults and juveniles. The law requires that juveniles accused of violent offenses be tried in criminal court, and it provides penalties comparable to those for adults. This paper evaluates the impact of the JO Law on violent juvenile crime rates in New York City and in upstate New York. Analyzing arrest data through the use of an interrupted time series model, we conclude that the JO Law has not been effective in reducing juvenile crime.

The Effects of the 2006 Russian Alcohol Policy on Alcohol-Related Mortality: An Interrupted Time Series Analysis

“…As ARIMA procedures are well established in the literature on the impact of policy (Chamlin et al, 2008;Loftin et al, 1983;Singer and McDowall, 1988), including alcohol policy (Pridemore and Snowden, 2009), we provide only a brief discussion.…”

Decriminalizing Delinquency: The Effect of Raising the Age of Majority on Juvenile Recidivism

“…The first examines the effect on aggregate offending of legislative enactments that shrank the jurisdiction of the juvenile justice system during the contractionary period that began in the 1970s. Singer and McDowall (1988) use an interrupted-time-series design to examine the effect of a 1978 New York State law that lowered the age of exclusive jurisdiction for the juvenile court to 13 for the most serious charges (namely, murder, kidnapping, rape, burglary, robbery, and aggravated assault). The authors use 13-to 15-year-olds in New York as the treatment group and use 16-to 19-year-olds in New York and 13-to 15-year-olds in Philadelphia as controls.…”

Criminalizing the American Juvenile Court

“…In the first two years following the enactment of the offense exclusion legislation, adult criminal prosecutions of juveniles more than tripled to 170, of which 151 resulted from the automatic transfer provision (Knoohuizen 1986). New York, which has no judicial waiver provisions and where juvenile court jurisdiction ends at age sixteen, adopted legislation in 1978 that excluded juveniles thirteen years or older charged with murder and fourteen years or older charged with kidnapping, arson, or rape (Singer and McDowall 1988).…”