Law Commons^™

Miller V. Alabama And The (Past And) Future Of Juvenile Crime Regulation, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This essay was the keynote address for a symposium on Miller v Alabama, the 2012 Supreme Court opinion holding unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment a statute imposing a mandatory sentence of life without parole for juveniles convicted of homicide. The essay argues that Miller embodies a way of thinking about juvenile crime that has taken hold in the early 21st century – an approach that emphasizes the importance for legal policy of developmental differences between juveniles and adults. This emerging trend contrasts sharply with the regulatory approach of the 1990s when moral panics over juvenile crime fueled punitive law reforms …

"Children Are Different": Constitutional Values And Justice Policy, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the importance for Eighth Amendment jurisprudence and for juvenile crime regulation of Miller v. Alabama (2012) and two earlier Supreme Court opinions rejecting harsh sentences for juveniles. It argues that the Court has broken new ground in defining juveniles as a category of offenders who are subject to special Eighth Amendment protections. In Miller and in Graham v. Florida (2010) particularly, the Court has applied to juveniles' non-capital sentences the rigorous proportionality review that, for adults, has been reserved for death sentences. The essay then turns to the implications of the opinions for juvenile crime policy, arguing …

Social Welfare And Fairness In Juvenile Crime Regulation, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

The question of how lawmakers should respond to developmental differences between adolescents and adults in formulating juvenile crime policy has been the subject of debate for a generation. A theme of the punitive law reforms that dismantled the traditional juvenile justice system in the 1980s and 1990s was that adolescents were not different from adults in any way that was relevant to criminal punishment – or at least that any differences were trumped by the demands of public safety. But this view has been challenged in recent years; scholars and courts have recognized that adolescents, due to their developmental immaturity, …

Juvenile Crime And Criminal Justice: Resolving Border Disputes, Jeffrey Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Rising juvenile crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s spurred state legislatures across the country to exclude or transfer a significant share of offenders under the age of eighteen to the jurisdiction of the criminal court, essentially redrawing the boundary between the juvenile and adult justice systems. Jeffrey Fagan examines the legal architecture of the new boundary-drawing regime and how effective it has been in reducing crime.

The juvenile court, Fagan emphasizes, has always had the power to transfer juveniles to the criminal court. Transfer decisions were made individually by judges who weighed the compet­ing interests of public safety and …

Building Criminal Capital Behind Bars: Peer Effects In Juvenile Corrections, Patrick J. Bayer, Randi Hjalmarsson, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. These data provide a complete record of past crimes, facility assignments, and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual. To control for the non-random assignment to facilities, we include facility and facility-by-prior offense fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer …

Foreword, Elizabeth S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

In November 1998, the interdisciplinary Center for Children, families and the Law at the University of Virginia sponsored a conference on Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice Reform. The conference brought together an extraordinary group of experts from the academic disciplines of law, criminology and psychology. Before an audience made up of researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners in the field of juvenile justice, these experts analyzed legal policy toward juvenile crime from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The articles in this important symposium issue of the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law are based on the papers …

The Evolution Of Adolescence: A Developmental Perspective On Juvenile Justice Reform, Elizabeth S. Scott, Thomas Grisso

Faculty Scholarship

The legal response to juvenile crime is undergoing revolutionary change, and its ultimate shape is uncertain. The traditional juvenile court, grounded in optimism about the potential for rehabilitation of young offenders, has long been the target of criticism, and even its defenders have been forced to acknowledge that it has failed to meet its objectives. Beginning in the late 1960s, when the Supreme Court introduced procedural regularity to delinquency proceedings in In re Gault, courts and legislatures began to slowly chip away at the foundations of the juvenile justice system. Recent developments have accelerated and intensified that process, as …

Determinants Of Judicial Waiver Decisions For Violent Juvenile Offenders, Jeffrey Fagan, Elizabeth Piper Deschens

Faculty Scholarship

The selection of jurisdiction for adjudicating juvenile crime today is one of the most controversial debates in crime control policy, reflecting differences in assumptions about the causes of crime and philosophies of jurisprudence and punishment. For adolescent offenders, especially violent youth whose behaviors may pose particular social danger, critics view the traditional goals of the juvenile court and the "best interests of the child" standard as being at odds with public concerns for retribution and incapacitation of criminals. The choice between jurisdictions is a choice between the nominally rehabilitative dispositions of the juvenile court and the explicitly punitive dispositions of …