The Issue Of Juvenile Internment - 1606 Words

offenders and toward the kids teetering on the edge, the ones for whom violence and arrest, addiction or death, are clearly in the cards, but still-perhaps-avoidable, (Humes 232). How can a child’s right to liberty, her parent’s right to act as guardian and the states interest to prevent crime be balanced with regard to status offenses. Although the original parens patriae stressed individual rehabilitation, primitive psychological knowledge combined with a concern of external scrutiny left most forms of juvenile internment seeming retributive. The court, however, operated on a pretense of rehabilitation that rationalized its lack of due process. This gulf between rhetoric and reality was addressed in the Gault decision. Feld writes, the†¦show more content†¦This movement seems to have evolved from an increasingly polarized economy that yielded great inequalities in wealth based on education levels and race. Inequalities such as these contributed to racial segr egation whereby blacks were and continue to be relegated to urban ghettos where crime, unstable family structures, social disorganization, drugs and the proliferation of handguns contributed to an image of black gang members as violent and dangerous. The intersection of race, guns, and homicide fanned the public and political panic that, in turn, led to the recent get-tough reformulation, (Feld 203). In order to mollify public fears of older, more dangerous juveniles and to appear to be tough on crime, policy makers brought retributive, adult punishment more and more into the purview of the juvenile court. Mandatory sentencing laws are one such manifestation. The issues with stricter sentencing guidelines are numerous. First, too much judicial discretion based solely on the crime and the juveniles past history lends itself to extensive racial and class-based discrimination. It is difficult to judge the efficacy of rehabilitation based on only a few objective factors without taking i nto account the structural condition of a juvenile’s situation. Also arising from the get tough movement, juvenile justice waiver laws were changed to decrease judge’s discretion and pull more youth into the adult criminal system a system based on