Juvenile Rehabilitation Research Paper

For many years and throughout the United States children have been disobeying rules as well as the law. Children are usually taught right from wrong but there are some that still choose to do what they want to do and go against their parent’s rules and the laws that are set within the states that they reside. So, once a child has made the decision to break a law and commit a crime, they are considered to be a juvenile delinquent. Most juveniles are either given rehabilitation or they are placed in a juvenile detention center, but it only depends on the type of charge they are receiving from the crime they have committed. Throughout this research I will be discussing a case of a juvenile who was waived to adult status. Explaining the mechanisms

A juvenile judge decides to waive juvenile to adult court under judicial waiver provisions, a prosecutor decides under prosecutorial waiver, and a legislature decides under legislative waiver. The offender’s age and the offense committed have usually been the criteria to determine who is eligible to be waived to adult court. These restrictions depend on state law. Some states allow only older juvenile offenders (14, 15, 16; 17 years old) to be waived to adult court, while some allow any juvenile regardless of age to be waived. Some states allow only offenders who have committed violet offenses to be waived to adult court, while other states allow juveniles who have committed property and drug offenses to be eligible for such waiver. The three basic reasons juveniles are waived to adult court are: 1. To remove juvenile offenders charged with heinous violent offenses that frequently generate media and community. 2. To remove chronic offenders who have exhausted the resources and the patience of the juvenile justice system. 3. To impose longer potential sentences than are available within the juvenile justice system. (Taylor & Fritsch,

On March 20, 2012, during the oral argument in Miller v. Alabama, Associate Justice Samuel Alito pressed the petitioner's counsel Bryan Stevenson to explain his contention that state legislators did not understand the sentencing consequences of the juvenile transfer laws that they had passed during the 1990s.1These laws facilitated the transfer of children's cases from juvenile court into an adult criminal justice system that required mandatory sentences, such as life without the possibility of parole, for many offenses.2The Supreme Court had consolidated the cases of Kuntrell Jackson, an African American teenager, who had been convicted of capital murder in Arkansas, and Evan Miller, a white teenager who had been convicted of murder in an arson case in Alabama. Kuntrell and Evan had both been 14 years old at the time of their crimes, and in both cases, the minimum and maximum sentences were exactly the same: life without the possibility of parole (LWOP). The prosecutor in Miller's case had argued that the teenager deserved to die for his crime but that the Supreme Court had abolished the juvenile death penalty in 2005. Five years later, the high court banned LWOP sentences for juveniles convicted of nonhomicidal offenses. Now Stevenson, the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, urged the justices to use the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments to eliminate all mandatory