National Profile of the Organization of State Juvenile Corrections Systems

Abstract

State juvenile correctional agencies are not identical in terms of their structure and policies, making interpretation of national custody data difficult. Without a detailed understanding of these nuances and the ability to categorize states into analogous groups, differences among state custody statistics are difficult to interpret. To address the challenges inherent in compiling national data, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency surveyed each state with regard to policies, decision-making processes, and details about the various components of the justice system, including courts, detention, commitment facilities, and aftercare, all of which have a profound effect on admission rates, offense profiles, and average lengths of stay.

Incarcerated and Court‐Involved Adolescents: Counseling an At‐Risk Population

“…In 1974, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act was passed, and it established (through the U.S. Department of Justice) the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). OJJDP supplied aggregate data on the numbers and characteristics of the juveniles taken into custody (Dedel, 1998). The most current data on juvenile justice system are available in the 1999 OJJDP publication, Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 1999 National Report (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999).…”

“…In still other states, the juvenile justice system is an independent state agency. An article by Dedel (1998) provides a comprehensive review of how each state organizes its juvenile justice system and is available in The Journal of Crime and Delinquency.…”

Assessing the Effectiveness of Juvenile Justice Reforms: A Closer Look at the Criteria and the Impacts on Diverse Stakeholders

“…Emphasis is increasingly less on a polarized view of the juvenile court as serving the goals of rehabilitation or retribution, and more on a balanced view of juvenile justice, with varying degrees of support given to``offender accountability, competency development, and public protection'' (Torbet & Szymanski 1998:9) as well as to involvement of victims in the justice process (ibid.:14). Even so, recent state-level reforms reveal considerable complexity and diversity in the goals of juvenile justice and the organizational means by which these goals are to be achieved (Dedel 1998;Guarino-Ghezzi & Loughran 1996;Snyder & Sickmund 1999;National Criminal Justice Association (NCJA) 1997;Torbet et al 1996;. For example, among states, varying degrees of emphasis have been given to traditional juvenile court goals (e.g., rehabilitation and the``best interests'' of the child), as well as to public safety (e.g., through specific and general deterrence, education, and incapacitation), retribution (e.g., through longer sentences or transfer to adult court), and restorative justice (e.g., through extension of certain rights to victims).…”

“…OVERALL ASSESSMENTS AND INTENDED VERSUS UNINTENDED EFFECTS A central issue confronting researchers is the specific manner in which various effects of a policy or statute are to be``summed'' in arriving at an overall assessment. The increasingly complex nature of sentencing renders simple, unidimensional assessments difficult (Dedel 1998;Fagan 1996;Gibbs 1975;Guarino-Ghezzi & Loughran 1996;Singer 1996a;von Hirsch & Ashworth 1992). As Reitz (1998:545) has stated about research on criminal justice sanctioning:…”

“…In the 1990s,``get tough'' juvenile justice sentencing reforms emerged in nearly every state (Bernard 1992;Torbet et al 1996), yet few have been evaluated systematically or comprehensively (Dedel 1998;. Instead, considerable attention has been given to particular issues ± most prominently, debates about whether to merge the juvenile and criminal justice systems (Feld 1998(Feld , 1999Hirschi & Gottfredson 1993;Moore & Wakeling 1997) and research on types and determinants of waiver (DeFrances & Strom 1997;Griffin, Torbet & Szymanski 1998;Howell 1996;Snyder & Sickmund 1999:102-7;U.S.…”