What Do Juvenile Offenders Know About Being Tried as Adults? Implications for Deterrence

An underlying assumption in the nationwide policy shift toward transferring more juveniles to criminal court has been the belief that stricter, adult sentences will act as either a specific or general deterrent to juvenile crime. With respect to general deterrence—whether transfer laws deter would‐be offenders from committing crimes—it is important to examine whether juveniles know about transfer laws, whether this knowledge deters criminal behavior, and whether juveniles believe the laws will be enforced against them. The current study is one of the first to examine juveniles' knowledge and perceptions of transfer laws and criminal sanctions. We interviewed 37 juveniles who had been transferred to criminal court in Georgia, obtaining quantitative as well as qualitative data based on structured interviewed questions. Four key findings emerged. First, juveniles were unaware of the transfer law. Second, juveniles felt that awareness of the law may have deterred them from committing the crime or may deter other juveniles from committing crimes, and they suggested practical ways to enhance juveniles' awareness of transfer laws. Third, the juveniles generally felt that it was unfair to try and sentence them as adults. Finally, the consequences of committing their crime were worse than most had imagined, and the harsh consequences of their incarceration in adult facilities may have had a brutalizing effect on some juveniles. The implications for general and specific deterrence are discussed.     

A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT TESTING INMATE CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS*

Research Summary: In California, incarceration in the state prison system is in part organized by security level. The higher the security level, the more restrictive the setting. Upon arrival at a reception center, new inmates are scored within a classification system that is used to determine the appropriate level of security. In this paper, we report on the development and testing of a new inmate classification scoring system. Over 20,000 inmates took part in a randomized experiment in which half were assigned to their housing using the existing scoring system and half were assigned to their housing using the new scoring system. There were two key outcomes: (1) potential mismatches between the number of inmates assigned to different security levels and the available beds and (2) reports of inmate misconduct. Policy Implications: We conclude there to be some potential crowding problems, but that the new scoring system is much better than the old scoring system in sorting inmates by the likelihood of misconduct. We also conclude that some predictors popular in the past are no longer effective (e.g., marital status), while some new predictors are extremely powerful (e.g., gang activity), and that one can build in a number of mandatory housing placements (e.g., for sex offenders) and not degrade the overall effectiveness of the new classification system. Finally, the new classification system is shown to be more user‐friendly than the existing classification system and well received by the staff responsible for implementing it.     

PLANNING: LESSONS FROM THE PORTS

The National Ports Council, created in 1964 and abolished in 1982, was engaged in one of the rare sustained attempts at planning in Britain. This article explains the Council's decision not to carry out full-scale planning because of the difficulties of collecting information, assessing technological and economic changes, and reconciling rational economic planning with short term political pressures.     

NARCOTIC ADDICTION AND CRIME

Arrest rates and self-reported criminal behavior are examined as a function of frequency of narcatic use during the addiction careers first daily narcatic use to last daily use) of a sample of 690 admissions to the California Civil Addict Program. Thirty-five percent of the addiction career non-incarcerated time involved less-than-daily or no narcatic use. During these periods. arrest rates for property crimes and self-reported criminal behavior were substantially lower than for periods of daily use. This approach to examining the relationship between crime and narcatic addiction avoids several of the methodological problems encountered in pre- and pastaddiction and pre- and pasttreatment studies.