THE JUVENILE PENALTY: A COMPARISON OF JUVENILE AND YOUNG ADULT SENTENCING OUTCOMES IN CRIMINAL COURT*

This study uses criminal court data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing (PCS) to investigate the sentencing of juvenile offenders processed in adult criminal court by comparing their sentencing outcomes to those of young adult offenders in similar situations. Because the expanded juvenile exclusion and transfer policies of the 1990s have led to an increase in the number of juveniles convicted in adult courts, we argue that it is critical to better understand the judicial decision making processes involved. We introduce competitive hypotheses on the relative leniency or severity of sentencing outcomes for transferred juveniles and interpret our results with the focal concerns theoretical perspective on sentencing. Our findings indicate that juvenile offenders in adult court are sentenced more severely than their young adult counterparts. Moreover, findings suggest that juvenile status interacts with and conditions the effects of other important sentencing factors including offense type, offense severity and prior criminal record. We discuss these results as they relate to immediate outcomes for transferred juveniles, criminal court processes in general and the broader social implications for juvenile justice policy concerning the transfer of juveniles to criminal court.     

PUBLIC OPINION AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE JUVENILE COURT*

Over 100 years ago, juvenile courts emerged out of the belief that juveniles are different from adults—less culpable and more rehabilitatable—and can be "saved" from a life of crime and disadvantage. Today, the juvenile justice system is under attack through increasing calls to eliminate it and enactment of statutes designed to place younger offenders in the adult justice system. However, little evidence exists that policy makers have taken the full range of public views into account. At the same time, scholarly accounts of calls to eliminate the juvenile justice system have neglected the role of public opinion. The current study addresses this situation by examining public views about 1) abolishing juvenile justice and 2) the proper upper age of original juvenile court jurisdiction. Particular attention is given to the notion that child‐saving and "get tough" orientations influence public views about juvenile justice. The analyses suggest support for the lingering appeal of juvenile justice among the public and the idea that youth can be “saved,” as well as arguments about the politicization and criminalization of juvenile justice. They also highlight that the public, like states, holds variable views about the appropriate age of juvenile court jurisdiction. We discuss the implications of the study and avenues for future research. Why is it not just and proper to treat these juvenile offenders, as we deal with the neglected children, as a wise and merciful father handles his own child whose errors are not discovered by the authorities? Why is it not the duty of the state, instead of asking merely whether a boy or a girl has committed a specific offense, to find out what he is, physically, mentally, morally, and then if it learns that he is treading the path that leads to criminality, to take him in charge, not so much to punish as to reform, not to degrade but to uplift, not to crush but to develop, to make him not a criminal but a worthy citizen.     

JUVENILE COURT DISPOSITIONS:

The research question precipitated by the concern for “just sanctions” and effective treatment for future juvenile programs is: What have been the criterion used by juvenile court decision makers in disposition sentencing. Disposition is analyzed for both nonstatus and status offense groups. The method of analysis is a stepwise discriminant function. The findings indicate the importance of legalistic variables and a social class bias in the dispositions of both offense groups. The social class bias is much stronger in the case of status offenders and increases at subsequent court disposition levels. These data support the labeling-conflict contention of class bias in the application of sanctions and suggest a policy directive for future delinquency prevention programs.     

DIFFERENTIATING SERIOUS ADOLESCENT OFFENDERS WHO EXIT THE JUSTICE SYSTEM FROM THOSE WHO DO NOT

Numerous factors have been posited to promote desistance from criminal offending in late adolescence and early adulthood. Research in this area has generally examined these factors for their impact on offending for a period shortly after the occurrence or shifts in possible predictors. The current study takes a slightly different approach. It examines the broad relation of life changes and developmental patterns to wholesale shifts in offending behavior. The current study uses data from the Pathways to Desistance study to compare the developmental patterns of two groups of serious adolescent male offenders: those who are “system successes” with no subsequent criminal justice system involvement and a matched sample for a 7‐year period after court involvement for a felony offense. Findings from growth curve analyses indicate that patterns of change in criminal attitudes, psychosocial development, and legal employment over this extended follow‐up period are related to an absence of offending. These results support further investigation of the synergistic effects of psychological changes and entry into the job market as possible mechanisms promoting desistance during this developmental period. The policy and practice implications of these findings are discussed.     

IS THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN ALCOHOL USE AND DELINQUENCY CAUSAL OR SPURIOUS?*

We attempt to isolate the effects of alcohol on different types of delinquent behavior by identifying the spurious portion of the relationship. Using data on adolescents from Finland, we compare the relationship between drinking and delinquent behavior while sober to the total relationship between drinking and delinquent behavior (sober or not). For each type of offense, we find a substantial relationship between drinking and sober delinquency, which suggests a good deal of spuriousness. For crimes of petty theft (shoplifting and stealing from home), the relationship between drinking and sober delinquency is just as strong as the total relationship, which suggests the relationship is almost completely spurious. For violence, vandalism, car theft, and graffiti writing, the alcohol‐sober delinquency relationship is weaker, which suggests that alcohol has a causal effect on these offenses.     

TESTING A BAYESIAN LEARNING THEORY OF DETERRENCE AMONG SERIOUS JUVENILE OFFENDERS*

The effect of criminal experience on risk perceptions is of central importance to deterrence theory but has been vastly understudied. This article develops a realistic Bayesian learning model of how individuals will update their risk perceptions over time in response to the signals they receive during their offending experiences. This model implies a simple function that we estimate to determine the deterrent effect of an arrest. We find that an individual who commits one crime and is arrested will increase his or her perceived probability of being caught by 6.3 percent compared with if he or she had not been arrested. We also find evidence that the more informative the signal received by an individual is, the more he or she will respond to it, which is consistent with more experienced offenders responding less to an arrest than less experienced offenders do. Parsing our results out by type of crime indicates that an individual who is arrested for an aggressive crime will increase both his or her aggressive crime risk perception as well as his or her income‐generating crime risk perception, although the magnitude of the former may be slightly larger. This implies that risk perception updating, and thus potentially deterrence, may be partially, although not completely, crime specific.     

JUVENILITY AND PUNISHMENT: SENTENCING JUVENILES IN ADULT CRIMINAL COURT*

The study outlined in this article addressed a key limitation of prior research on the punishment of juveniles transferred to adult court by employing propensity score matching techniques to create more comparable samples of juvenile and young adult offenders. Using recent data from the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, it tested competing theoretical propositions about the salience of juvenile status in adult court. Findings indicate that even after rigorous statistical matching procedures, juvenile offenders are punished more severely than their young adult counterparts. We found no evidence that this “juvenile penalty” is exacerbated by an offender's race or gender, but it does vary starkly across offense type and mode of transfer, being driven primarily by drug crimes and discretionary waivers. The import of these findings is discussed as they relate to the future of juvenile justice policy regarding the continued use of juvenile transfer to adult court.     

JUVENILE COURT INTAKE An Analysis of Discretionary Decision-Making

An increasing amount of pressure has been directed toward juvenile court operations, much of which has focused on the hypothesized abuse of the broad discretionary decision-making power that has traditionally been vested in the court. In this paper, we attempt to examine the extent to which factors not directly associated with the nature of the alleged offense may alter the probability that a juvenile w.11 be referred for a formal hearing in the juvenile court, a step which many analysts feel may have the unintended function of promoting rather than inhibiting subsequent involvement in delinquent behavior. Based on an analysis of 346 cases, our findings show that a number of variables that are not of direct legal relevance do exert a significant influence on the dispositional process, but the magnitude of this influence is not as great as many have been led to expect given the orientation of some explanatory models, particularly those based on the propositions of the labeling school.     

ESTIMATING A DOSE‐RESPONSE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LENGTH OF STAY AND FUTURE RECIDIVISM IN SERIOUS JUVENILE OFFENDERS*

The effect of sanctions on subsequent criminal activity is of central theoretical importance in criminology. A key question for juvenile justice policy is the degree to which serious juvenile offenders respond to sanctions and/or treatment administered by the juvenile court. The policy question germane to this debate is finding the level of confinement within the juvenile justice system that maximizes the public safety and therapeutic benefits of institutional confinement. Unfortunately, research on this issue has been limited with regard to serious juvenile offenders. We use longitudinal data from a large sample of serious juvenile offenders from two large cities to 1) estimate a causal treatment effect of institutional placement, as opposed to probation, on future rate of rearrest and 2) investigate the existence of a marginal effect (i.e., benefit) for longer length of stay once the institutional placement decision had been made. We accomplish the latter by determining a dose‐response relationship between the length of stay and future rates of rearrest and self‐reported offending. The results suggest that an overall null effect of placement exists on future rates of rearrest or self‐reported offending for serious juvenile offenders. We also find that, for the group placed out of the community, it is apparent that little or no marginal benefit exists for longer lengths of stay. Theoretical, empirical, and policy issues are outlined.     

Insane Sex Offenders: Psychiatric and Legal Characteristics of Sexual Offenders Found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity

There is little known about sexual offenders hospitalized under forensic commitment statutes such as not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI). We conducted a chart review to delineate the demographic, clinical, and legal characteristics of NGRI sexual offenders (n = 68) committed to the California Department of State Hospitals—Napa, including 41 found NGRI for a sexual offense and 27 found NGRI for a nonsexual offense. The two groups did not differ significantly in their demographics, psychiatric diagnoses, victim characteristics, or recidivism risk as measured by the Static‐99R. Those found NGRI for a sexual offense were older at the time of their first criminal and first violent offense, younger at the time of their committing offense, and had fewer prior total convictions and sexual offense convictions. These findings may indicate that sexual offenders found NGRI for a sexual offense are less antisocial than those found NGRI for a nonsexual offense.     

The effect of transfer mechanism from juvenile court on conviction on a target offense in criminal court

The question of whether juvenile offenders should be handled in criminal court has been addressed by a number of studies. However, few have examined the effectiveness of the type of transfer mechanism and how it relates to protecting the public. Whether the mechanism used to transfer juvenile offenders to criminal court has any effect on the likelihood of being convicted of a target offense criminal court is examined here. It was found that the juveniles sampled in this study had a greater chance of being convicted on their target offense in criminal court if they were sent there via judicial waiver than if they were excluded from juvenile court jurisdiction by statute.     

When is defendant status a shield or a liability? Clarification and extension

Previous research has documented that an offender's status may be a protective shield or a harmful liability. One model (Rosoff, 1989) contends that status effects are moderated by offense magnitude, with status providing a shield for minor offenses, but acting as a liability for major offenses. Another model (Skolnick & Shaw, 1994) asserts that the professional relatedness of an offense moderates status effects, with status acting as a shield for professionally unrelated offenses and as a liability for professionally related offenses. A study is presented to determine the moderator of these status effects. Clarifying and extending prior research of the investigators, 120 participants read one of 12 hypothetical civil case summaries and rated defendant liability, monetary damages, and other evaluative judgments. A 3×2×2 factorial design varied offense severity, defendant status, and the professional relatedness of the offense. Results strongly supported professional relatedness as the moderator of status effects, extending previous findings from criminal to civil proceedings and eliminating alternative hypotheses suggested by the earlier work.     

JUVENILE CRIME AND WHY WAIVER IS NOT THE ANSWER

Many states deal with the issue of juvenile crime by charging juveniles as adults. This is done by a method of waiver. Waiver allows adult criminal courts to have the power to exercise jurisdiction over juveniles.¹ In effect, a juvenile is tried and sentenced as an adult when his or her case is waived (removed) from the juvenile court to the adult court. Waiver in juvenile (youths seventeen and younger) cases should never be allowed because juvenile offenders are too immature and incompetent to appreciate the nature of their crimes and because the juvenile justice system is a more appropriate place to rehabilitate juvenile offenders.     

REVISITING JUVENILE WAIVER: INTEGRATING THE INCAPACITATION EXPERIENCE*

More than 20 years after an expansion of juvenile transfer policies, questions remain regarding the specific deterrent effect of juvenile waiver given the singular focus on the court of jurisdiction and neglect of other critical aspects of the provision, such as the incapacitation experience. Prior research has also not been focused on identifying the mediating mechanisms that produce criminogenic, null, or deterrent effects. We use data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, propensity score methodology, and mediational analyses to examine how and why the waiver‐incapacitation experience is related to recidivism rates during emerging adulthood. We find that the prior focus on a binary “waiver effect” is potentially misleading as it masks meaningful variation. Furthermore, we find that the path to increased recidivism in emerging adulthood is indirect and we identify stymied educational attainment as a mediator. Our discussion is focused on the criminogenic effects of incapacitation for juveniles and its implications for juvenile transfer research. The discussion also calls for future research to explore treatment heterogeneity further.     

RATE OF OFFENDING IN JUVENILE CAREERS: FINDINGS OF CONSTANCY AND CHANGE IN LAMBDA *

This study examines changes in the rate of offending in a sample of 8,834 males whose official juvenile law-violating careers included 26,650 offense episodes between ages 8 and 17 The rate of offending of active offenders (i.e., lambda) varied substantially as a function of age, increasing monotonically with age. Lambda, however, was not related to the age at first offense. In fact, the average lambda was amazingly constant at each individual age level regardless of the age at which offending began or desisted. Results are discussed in the light of age-crime curves known from other data sets and from the perspective of developmental changes in the rate of offending as youths grow older.     

Evangelizing Congress: The Emergence of Evangelical Republicans and Party Polarization in Congress

The realignment of evangelical voters is well‐documented, but religion's impact within Congress is less clear. New data on home churches of members of Congress shows that the realignment of congressional evangelicals, combined with their growth and distinctly conservative legislative behavior, has significantly contributed to party polarization in Congress. Controlling for other factors, evangelicals are significantly more conservative than members of other religious traditions. This conservatism also has second‐order effects on the polarization of the House, where their more partisan proposals comprise a larger share of the roll‐call agenda when Republicans are in the majority. Moreover, evangelical Republicans in Congress differ significantly from evangelical Democrats in terms their geography, denominations, and experiences prior to Congress.     

DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR,OFFICIAL DELINQUENCY,AND GENDER: CONSEQUENCES FOR ADULTHOOD FUNCTIONING AND WELL‐BEING*

The general aim of this article is to evaluate the consequences of both delinquent behavior and institutionalization as a juvenile delinquent on the quality of adult functioning and well‐being, with a specific focus on gender differences. Data were gathered from two related data sources: a sample of previously institutionalized offenders (n=210) and a sample of individuals living in private households (n=721). Males and females in both samples were interviewed initially in 1982 when they were adolescents and re‐interviewed in their late twenties. Results showed that having been institutionalized as an adolescent seriously compromises multiple life domains in adulthood, especially for females. The data also show that an official delinquent status and a high level of involvement in delinquency during adolescence each has independent consequences for male and female adult functioning and well‐being. Institutionalization is strongly predictive of precarious, premature, unstable, and unsatisfied conditions in multiple life domains but much less predictive of behavioral outcomes. On the other hand, a high level of delinquency involvement in adolescence is predictive of antisocial behavior in adulthood, but it tends to have no direct effects on adversity in other life domains. These results are mostly invariant across gender.     

THE “TRUE” JUVENILE OFFENDER: AGE EFFECTS AND JUVENILE COURT SANCTIONING

Age is the only factor used to demarcate the boundary between juvenile and adult justice. However, little research has examined how age guides the juvenile court in determining which youth within the juvenile justice system merit particular dispositions, especially those that reflect the court's emphasis on rehabilitation. Drawing on scholarship on the court's origins, attribution theory, and cognitive heuristics, we hypothesize that the court focuses on youth in the middle of the range of the court's age of jurisdiction—characterized in this article as “true” juveniles—who may be viewed as meriting more specialized intervention. We use data from Florida for court referrals in 2008 (N = 71,388) to examine the decision to proceed formally or informally and, in turn, to examine formally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, probation, commitment, and transfer) and informally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, and probation). The analyses provide partial support for the hypothesis. The very young were more likely to be informally processed; however, among the informally processed youth, the youngest, not “true” juveniles, were most likely to be diverted or placed on probation. By contrast, among formally processed youth, “true” juveniles were most likely to receive traditional juvenile court responses, such as diversion or probation.     

票据犯罪若干问题研究

票据犯罪主体因罪而异 ,有的票据犯罪一般个人主体、一般单位主体不能实施 ,只有特殊个人主体、特殊单位主体才能实施。有的票据犯罪主体必须具有票据当事人身份 ,非票据当事人不能成为该项犯罪主体。票据犯罪罪过形式是故意和过失 ,模糊罪过和混合罪过的观点并不适用刑法所要求的票据犯罪。银行结算凭证虽然不是票据 ,但是应该归属票据犯罪对象范畴。我国刑法应当承认票据无形伪造。