Lower-class youth delinquency, incarceration, United States, American justice system, juvenile offenders, criminal behaviour, punishment of offenders, policy, collateral effetcs, rehabilitation, risk assessment
In 2016 in the United States, 11,745 youths were sentenced either to life with/without parole, or virtual life imprisonment (Sentencing Project, 2019). Thankfully, the Supreme Court barred the death sentence of youth offenders (Roper v. Simmons, 2005) even though life without parole and virtual life sentences are in a way death sentences too. The United States is one of the few countries that sentence juveniles to life in prison. None of its peer countries do. In comparison to those same countries, the United States has a much higher youth incarceration rate. This raises many questions about the way juveniles are treated in the American Criminal Justice system and more specifically lower-class youths.
[...] The taxpayers finance the detention centers. When these centers close and the money is reinvested in programs, they pay fewer taxes because the programs are cheaper. Still, on the theme of money, detention centers are very bad investments: they are the most expensive means of preventing offenders from committing crimes, and on top of that they do not deter crime and increase recidivism rates. Research on the subject has shown that reform is necessary because the current system is broken. [...]
[...] Whatever the age of the offender is the sentence given has to take into account rehabilitation so that once the offender has completed his punishment he can reintegrate society in the easiest way possible. With juvenile offenders, rehabilitation is even more important. Indeed they are young and by taking them out of society, putting them in prison with adults, the system is cutting them off of the only ways they have to grow up normally. While incarcerated with adults they will bond with more dangerous criminals, they will behave according to the prison subculture (Social Learning). [...]
[...] More than adult delinquents, juveniles act on their impulses and this behavior has a scientific explanation. After taking this into account, sentencing juveniles in adult courts is not a solution because later in their life they will grow up and will understand what they did wrong. The Criminal Justice system should even help them understand instead of punishing them too strongly. We also know that incarceration affects adults mentally. It leads to PTSD symptoms and other trauma (Quandt and Jones, 2021). These effects have been observed in adults. [...]
[...] Youth delinquents are not always sent to adult incarceration facilities. Juvenile detention centers also exist. In these facilities, young offenders are, as in adult prisons, cut off from society, from their community. This is just as bad as in adult prisons: removing a young person from the environment in which he or she must grow and learn, forge ties, greatly affects his or her future. If his environment was not appropriate to this then a more correct solution would be to place the delinquent in another family for example or to make him participate in programs. [...]
[...] So an appropriate policy response is the one explained above that has been implemented in 7 States as of 2018. The two key elements of this policy are risk assessment, to define the best way the delinquent can face consequences for his actions and be rehabilitated, and closing juvenile detention centers, to reinvest the money in in-community programs designed to rehabilitate delinquents. The Criminal Justice System must also address the case of juveniles incarcerated for extended periods. Indeed the likelihood of someone committing a crime drop at the end of their twenties (DeLisi, 2015). [...]
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