The JJDP Act was created to protect juveniles, however, each state has the right to establish the age limit that they considered an adult. Essentially, each state can have their own legal defined age limit for when an individual is no longer considered a juvenile. Most states in the U.S has seventeen as the age when a person is considered an adult under the law. However, Georgia, Texas and few other states have the juvenile cut off age at sixteen and in past times, other states had it as low as fifteen (Tiegen, 2017). Inherently, this means that a young man or woman can’t be taken from family or juvenile court to adult court and taken through the same due process as an adult at the tender age of fifteen. Experts have argued that a fifteen or sixteen-year-old young boy or girl is not as developed in their thinking or actions as an adult. An individual at the age of adolescents will not behave or think in the same way that someone in the middle adulthood stage of life will think. Defining who is a juvenile based on age has its …show more content…
The four concepts of the reauthorized version of the JJDPA, includes the reduction disproportionate number of minority groups that come in contact with the juvenile justice system, separation of adult inmates from juveniles, removal of juveniles from adult prisons and the deinstitutionalization of juveniles who are status offenders, that is who have committed crimes that would be criminal if committed by an adult (Chapin, 2017). A status offense is usually committed by juveniles ages 14-16 and includes truancy, skipping school, possession of alcohol, and violating curfew (Blitzman 2015). These offenses are not considered criminal by an adult offender, and juveniles are not to be detained in detention centers or confinement, however, due to some exceptions in the rule, some juveniles may be held for up to 24