Juvenile Justice and Does it Work? Part 2

Juvenile Justice and Does it Work

Unless Juveniles Think They'll Get Caught, It's Not a Deterrent.

Now I am not saying that incarceration or punishment is entirely irrelevant to crime control. Deterrence do work, evidence confirms that people who believe a given behavior will lead to dire consequences are less likely to engage in that kind of behavior.
Can a juvenile possibly know the extent of such consequences. Juvenile Justice and Does it Work....Really?

The enormous majority of research, however, concludes that deterrence is mainly a function of the perceived likelihood of getting caught and receiving some kind of punishment, not the severity of the punishment one will receive if caught. Let me put it this way, you get more deterrence by increasing the certainty, rather than the severity of punishment.

This makes intuitive sense. Juveniles who don't believe they will be apprehended at all are unlikely to be thinking about the punishment they will receive if they are caught. I would venture to say, Juveniles are not sufficiently familiar with the minutiae of sentencing law to have more than the vaguest idea whether their crime could get them six months of probation or ten years in prison. So, are we really sure about the answer to the question. Juvenile Justice and Does it Work?

Now let's look at this and contemplate where are laws are really going and do you really think this is the best direction for our juveniles? The facts are, the U.S. sentencing policy for the last 20 years has focused largely on increasing the severity of punishment. This has gone to absurd and inhumane lengths, such as California's "three strikes law", upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, which resulted in a sentence of 25 years to life for stealing three golf clubs, and a sentence of 50 years to life for shoplifting videotapes.

This "get tough" movement which made mandatory minimum sentences, "three strikes" laws, abolition of parole, has given the United States the highest incarceration rate in the world. More than 2.3 million people behind bars on any given day and 1 in 11 convicted prisoners serving a life sentence. Does our Justice System really work, whether Juvenile or not?

There is very little evidence that this bloated population in our prisons - which is costing us about $60 billion a year to maintain is making us any safer than the far lower incarceration rates that is factually found in Canada, the United Kingdom and other Western democracies. Juvenile Justice Does it Work? With these facts, do you really think it does?