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The “True” Juvenile Offender: Age Effects And Juvenile Court Sanctioning, Daniel P. Mears, Joshua C. Cochran, Brian J. Stults, Sarah J. Greenman, Avinash S. Bhati, Mark A. Greenwald
The “True” Juvenile Offender: Age Effects And Juvenile Court Sanctioning, Daniel P. Mears, Joshua C. Cochran, Brian J. Stults, Sarah J. Greenman, Avinash S. Bhati, Mark A. Greenwald
Sarah Greenman
Age is the only factor used to demarcate the boundary between juvenile and adult justice. However, little research has examined how age guides the juvenile court in determining which youth within the juvenile justice system merit particular dispositions, especially those that reflect the court's emphasis on rehabilitation. Drawing on scholarship on the court's origins, attribution theory, and cognitive heuristics, we hypothesize that the court focuses on youth in the middle of the range of the court's age of jurisdiction—characterized in this article as “true” juveniles—who may be viewed as meriting more specialized intervention. We use data from Florida for court …