Overview
The juvenile court of today, often referred to as a quasi-criminal court, is seen primarily as a slightly less severe version of the adult criminal court. It exists to hold youth accountable for offenses committed while still offering some semblance of rehabilitation or treatment. Like adults, we speak of these juveniles as being arrested and sentenced. However, their sentences are typically less onerous than those imposed on more mature and culpable adult offenders by the criminal court. In reality, however, there are many more differences between the two systems of justice than a mere mitigation of punishment, not the least of which are their underlying purposes and origins. Indeed the seeds of the juvenile court were sown in social welfare and not the criminal justice system. The catalyst of its creation was not to merely modify the adult court, but rather to provide an entirely separate system of justice for juveniles that was not based on punishment at all, but rather...
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Kurlychek, M.C. (2014). History of Juvenile Courts. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_84
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