Law Commons^™

Aggressive Policing And The Educational Performance Of Minority Youth, Joscha Legewie, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

An increasing number of minority youth are confronted with the criminal justice system. But how does the expansion of police presence in poor urban communities affect educational outcomes? Previous research points at multiple mechanisms with opposing effects. This article presents the first causal evidence of the impact of aggressive policing on the educational performance of minority youth. Under Operation Impact, the New York Police Department (NYPD) saturated high crime areas with additional police officers with the mission to engage in aggressive, order maintenance policing. To estimate the effect, we use administrative data from about 250,000 adolescents aged 9 to 15 …

Young Adulthood As A Transitional Legal Category: Science, Social Change, And Justice Policy, Elizabeth S. Scott, Richard J. Bonnie, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, much attention has focused on developmental brain research and its implications for the regulation of crime. Public and policy interest has been directed primarily toward juveniles. In light of recent research, courts and legislatures increasingly have rejected the punitive response of the 1990s and embraced a developmental approach to young offenders. Of particular importance in propelling this trend has been the framework offered by the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of Eighth Amendment opinions that have rejected harsh adult sentences for juveniles. These decisions, supported by adolescent brain research, rested on two empirically based principles: …

Introduction: The Challenge Of Lionel Tate, Elizabeth S. Scott, Laurence Steinberg

Faculty Scholarship

Legal reforms over the past generation have transformed juvenile crime regulation from a system that viewed most youth crime as the product of immaturity into one that is ready to hold many youths to the standard of accountability imposed on adults. Supporters of these reforms argue that they are simply a response to the inability of the traditional juvenile court to deal adequately with violent youth crime, but the legal changes that have transformed the system have often been undertaken in an atmosphere of moral panic, with little deliberation about consequences and costs.

In this book we argue that a …

Privacy Versus Parens Patriae The Role Of Police Records In The Sentencing And Surveillance Of Juveniles, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to examine juvenile record systems maintained by police authorities. A primary thesis is that current procedures governing the creation and dissemination of such records are so severely misguided by underlying parens patriae concepts that they often result in the purposeless stigmatization of a far greater range of youths than the juvenile justice system has any justification in attempting to deal with. Indeed, increasing evidence suggests that the net effect of such record keeping is to ensure that many of the subject juveniles will mature into confirmed delinquents.