Provides a comparison of criminal justice and juvenile justice systems across the world, looking for points of comparison and policy variance that can lead to positive change in the United States. Contributors discuss important issues such as the relationship between political change and juvenile justice, the common labels used to unify juvenile systems in different regions and in different forms of government, the types of juvenile systems that exist and how they differ, and more. Furthermore, they use data on criminal versus juvenile justice in a wide variety of nations to create a new explanation of why separate juvenile and criminal courts are felt to be necessary. --From publisher description.

Annotation By the year 2000 more than 50% of the world population will be under the age of 15 (9th UN Congress, 1995) Youth crime is increasing around the worl d(9th UN Congress, 1995) In September 1997, Canadian Justice Minister, Anne McLellan, declared youth justice as a top priority. These and similar facts speak to the urgency for society to study youth crime and examine youth justice systems from a comparative perspective. As our world gets smaller, we discover the urgency and importance of sharing and learning at a global level. This collection offers a unique opportunity to examine six different juvenile justice systems and youth crime around the world. All eleven articles are original contributions from a distinguished set of experts on juvenile justice in their respective countries. Each contribution examines a set of common elements: defining delinquency, describing the nature and extent of youth crime, examining the administration of youth justice, and discussing issues confronting youth crime. This groundbreaking book will be of interest to students, criminologists, and criminal justice policy-makers who are interested in improving the intervention, treatment, and prevention of youth crime, and the administration of youth justice.

Thoroughly updated and revised, the Second Edition of Juvenile Justice: A Social, Historical, and Legal Perspective, offers readers a comprehensive volume on how the juvenile justice system works. This book is designed to help readers understand the complexities of the present juvenile justice system by presenting a thorough examination of the social, historical, and legal context within which delinquency and juvenile justice occurs. In addition to gaining valuable knowledge on the juvenile justice process, readers will learn how the different parts of the process are interrelated, how decisions made in one case influence future cases, and the laws that direct juvenile justice policy.

Global Perspectives on Social Issues: Juvenile Justice Systems is an attempt to characterize juvenile offenders in twenty-five nations in North America, South America, Western, and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Each chapter represents a fact sheet and contemporary report on juvenile justice systems in the eight different regions of the world.

In this review, the author considers the collection by U.S.-based juvenile justice scholars on legal and policy frameworks across various international juvenile justice systems. The author analyses the conceptual discussion of the themes of each chapter. These include juvenile justice in Western Europe, “understudied systems,” and the effect of significant political change on jurisdictions. This review examines the valuable features of the collection, such as the level of statistical analysis on crime rates and modes of disposition, whilst offering additional avenues of information related to this collection. The author concludes that the collection is original and will be of interest to practitioners, policy makers, academics and students of juvenile justice, criminal justice, and criminology.

Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.