The juvenile court was originally founded on the principle of applying social-service interventions in a legal forum. During the 1990s a push for trying children as adults resulted in thousands of minors being placed in adult jails. Since 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court has limited practices such as the execution of offenders who are under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed and life without parole sentences for crimes committed by juveniles. Some juvenile courts have expanded their problem solving approach to include specialized courts or dockets, such as juvenile drug courts, mental health courts, teen courts, truancy courts, and gun courts.
Links to related online resources are listed below. Non-digitized publications may
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This benchbook is the most recent major revision of the ICJ first published as a model legislation by the Council of State Governments (CSG) in 2004 and now in effect in 46 jurisdictions as a replacement for the 1955 compact. The Revised ICJ contains transition provisions to manage the relationship between states that continue to operate under the 1955 ICJ and those that have adopted the Revised ICJ.
The Maryland Judiciary, Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), sought and received funding from the State Justice Institute to conduct an empirical examination of the contextual factors that influence truancy and school attendance, and to evaluate a number of truancy interventions that are supported currently by the Judiciary.
This package of information summarizes findings and evidence from federal reviews of research studies and program evaluations to help localities address childhood exposure to violence and improve outcomes for children, families, and communities.
This article discusses innovative practices courts can help implement to better serve children that come to their attention through multiple systems, in particular the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. It identifies ways courts and their system partners can reengineer their work to best serve these youth and prevent further system involvement.
Human Rights Watch. (May 2013). This report discusses the harm caused by policies based on inaccurate assumptions. Because youth sex offenders have a very low recidivism rate and 93% of sexually abused children are victims of molestation by a family member, registries do not protect most children from future sexual assault. Sex crimes requiring registration may range from public nudity to serious violent assault and so may subject youth to lifelong consequences for fairly innocuous behavior with little chance of recidivism.
This report on TCP is part of a series of reports evaluating truancy intervention programs in Maryland, including the court-based intervention Truancy Reduction Pilot Program (TRPP) in the First Judicial Circuit and the mediation intervention Baltimore Students: Mediation about Reducing Truancy (B-SMART) in Baltimore City schools.
Baltimore Students: Mediation About Reducing Truancy (BSMART) is an evidence-based early intervention program that targets students in elementary or middle school who have five to ten days of unexcused absences.
This report identifies eight key principles of evidence based practices in juvenile community corrections, and discusses how the Maricopa County Juvenile Probation Department is positioned in relation to each of these principles.
State court dockets are filled with offenders who have been through the system before and are likely to return. Incorporating evidence-based practices into the sentencing process offers the promise of reducing recidivism while protecting public safety and controlling corrections costs.
In October 2008, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) administered the fifth Juvenile Residential Census (JRFC). The 2008 JRFC collected data from 2,860 juvenile facilities, 2,458 of which held a total of 81,015 offenders younger than 21on the census date (October 22, 2008).
This report describes delinquency cases handled between 1985 and 2007 and petitioned status offense cases handled between 1995 and 2007 by more than 2,100 U.S. courts with juvenile jurisdiction. The report profiles the almost 1.7 million juvenile court cases handled each year for 2006 and 2007.