Juvenile Justice + Infotrac + Access Code

by Kären Matison Hess

This book offers a highly accessible, comprehensive look at the juvenile justice system. With pedagogy fully integrated throughout the text, readers will easily make the connections between theory and practice. The text explores the various programs and processes that exist in the juvenile justice system, including prevention efforts through school and community-based programs, and provides an understanding of the history, current state, and future of juvenile justice.

480 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2003

Reviews

[Melinda Christensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an informative textbook about juvenile justice. I took this class when I was performing mediations for the Dispute Mediation Center, and found it to be extremely interesting. There are many professionals in the system as they relate to delinquency and it is good to familiarize ourselves with each one. The police must protect the safety of children and the public and investigate the behavioral facts; welfare and probation services must investigate the social facts and provide inpatient and outpatient counseling and supervision of children and their parents; schools must educate children academically and, to a great extent, socially and must ensure peace within their walls; lawyers must stand for their clients, advocating the views of each, whatever they may be; service providers must have treatments that can reunite families and prevent a recurrence of the misconduct that initiated the public's intervention; and the court must arbitrate and insist on rehabilitative and protective dispositions, and must use force and power within the confines of statutes and the Constitution to ensure due execution of these dispositions. Each should perform its function with the knowledge of what the others may do and the impact each may have on the others. The system cannot focus only on the child; it must look at the family for its influence on both the causes and the rehabilitation of misconduct. The juvenile justice system is basically a civil system which has evolved into the adversarial system similar to our adult criminal system.