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Handbook of Juvenile Forensic Psychology and Psychiatry pp 105–125Cite as

Transfer to Adult Court: Enhancing Clinical Forensic Evaluations and Informing Policy

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Abstract

Transfer to adult court is a complex issue that has not yet received sufficient research attention. Transfer raises many salient questions for mental health professionals working within the juvenile justice system such as what risk a youth may pose to the community, how (im)mature the youth’s decision making is, as well as the chief question of whether youth can be reformed. These questions encapsulate the essence of all juvenile justice youth evaluations, but are at a heightened level of importance in transfer cases. Despite meager numbers of research articles on this topic, in the past decade, significant strides have been made toward better understanding the transfer of juveniles to adult court. For instance, Melton et al. (2007) produced an informative chapter to address the issue of transfer to adult court where they focused on amenability to treatment assessments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

     For the purposes of this chapter, the term youthful offenders will be used interchangeably with the term juvenile offenders and refers to offenders aged 17 years and younger.

  2. 2.

     The prediction of future dangerousness can be either used to describe broad offending (general offending) or to describe prediction of future violence (Kruh and Brodsky 1997); clinicians would have to specific what estimates they were examining when providing estimates for dangerousness.

  3. 3.

     Clinicians may consider referring to a growing line of research examining fMRI research; efforts have been made to demonstrate that brain functioning in adolescents is different from that of adults. However, conclusions in this field often refer to culpability in areas where the science is not adequately designed to address culpability (see Aronson 2007). Therefore, we would argue that that best way for psychologists to assist the courts is to examine developmental maturity in the context of the other variables they believe to be pertinent.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Alabama, 407 Gordon Palmer Hall, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487-0348, USA

    Debra R. Chen MA & Randall T. Salekin PhD

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  1. Debra R. Chen MA
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  2. Randall T. Salekin PhD
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Correspondence to Debra R. Chen MA .

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  1. Yale University, S. Frontage Road 230, New Haven, 06519, Connecticut, USA

    Elena L. Grigorenko

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Chen, D.R., Salekin, R.T. (2012). Transfer to Adult Court: Enhancing Clinical Forensic Evaluations and Informing Policy. In: Grigorenko, E. (eds) Handbook of Juvenile Forensic Psychology and Psychiatry. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0905-2_8

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