Law Commons^™

Punishment And Juvenile Justice: A Conceptual Framework For Assessing Constitutional Rights Of Youthful Offenders, Martin R. Gardner

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article attempts to provide an analytical framework for identifying the punitive aspects of the juvenile justice system. The Article proposes a framework that is extrapolated from Supreme Court cases which define punishment in contexts outside the juvenile area. Several commentators have criticized the Court's definitional efforts, some because of perceived inadequacies in the developed definitions, others because of the belief that the very enterprise of defining constitutional rights in terms of the presence or absence of punishment is misguided . Although many of these criticisms of the Court's record are understandable, the alleged defects are less detrimental to an …

Criminal Law: The Missing Element In Sentencing Reform, Michael H. Tonry

Vanderbilt Law Review

The thesis of this Article is that the substantive criminal law is the missing element in sentencing reform. If comprehensive sentencing reform strategies are to have lasting effect, legislatures must reintroduce the criminal law to the sentencing process. This step will require a rekindled interest in a moral analysis of the substantive criminal law and the enactment of greatly reduced statutory sentence maximums, along with more conventional institutional changes to structure discretion and increase official accountability.

Objections to American sentencing procedures range from the principled to the practical. Part II of this Article summarizes the basic objections that have influenced …