Junior: Hopefully, Your Only Contact Article

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The nature of the juvenile justice system may be adversarial at times, but unlike the adult criminal system it is not necessarily so. Agreement is the goal. In fact, depending on the nature of the offense, a juvenile case may be dismissed or dealt with in an informal hearing, rather than subject to formal proceedings at all.

The purpose of the juvenile system is almost always to rehabilitate the offender, rather than to enact social retribution. Given that our society believes that a child usually does not have the moral or cognitive capacity to judge the wrongfulness or rightness of his or her own actions like an adult, there seems to be a need for two systems of justice. For example, a child who burns down a building because he is playing with matches is unlikely to deserve the same type of sentence or treatment as an adult who commits arson. This is why, unlike adult courts, juvenile courts are usually closed to the public, so not as to taint the reputation of the child if he or she wishes to move on from the initial crime, into a socially responsible adulthood.

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However, an upsurge in chronic juvenile delinquency has caused a shift from a rehabilitative or community 'healing' model, focused on psychologically changing the offender or making restitution to the aggrieved party, to a more punishment-based "just desserts model" (Champion 2006, p. 24). And the degree to which a child is blamed for a crime depends upon a number of subjective factors that often wildly differs from state to state: the juvenile justice system is ambiguous as the line between childhood and adulthood. Very often, you probably note that some of your peers are quite immature while others are very mature. The law similarly has difficulty defining legally who is an adult or a child, at a specific movement in an individual's life (Champion 2006, p. 195). A child's age, past record, and mental capacity will all affect the child's treatment within the system. Very violent juveniles nearing the age of adulthood may be tried as adults -- while a juvenile of the same age with no criminal record, who seems to have fallen in with the 'wrong crowd' may be tried as a minor.

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Champion, Dean J......

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