Choosing the Future for American Juvenile Justice

The U.S. juvenile justice system is in the midst of massive reform that began about 15 years ago. The reform aims to modify the system’s policies and practices to better match the developmental needs of adolescents. After describing how the reform began, Choosing the Future for American Juvenile Justice offers snapshots of selected components of the reform: for example, ways of handling juvenile sexual offenders, closing down the “school-to-prisons pipeline,” and reducing minority overrepresentation. This edited volume ends with essays on the values and limits of the “adolescent brain” rhetoric that has been a driving force in the reform and with a helpful summary of the essential developmentally based foundation for further reform.

Editors Zimring and Tanenhaus have been among our leading scholars for several decades in legal and criminological discourse related to policy and law in juvenile justice. They wrote four of the ten chapters in this book and selected excellent writers and thinkers for the remaining contributions. All are written with a clarity and depth of analysis that provide insights, whether new or reworked in ways that enlighten. Zimring’s chapters reflect his genius for framing problems in ways that turn complex issues into manageable concepts for better understanding. Two of the chapters are on topics not so often found among current juvenile justice treatises: our broken immigration system and its impact on young people and a model for formal education in juvenile corrections.

Readers of Psychiatric Services who have a specialized interest in juvenile justice itself will find this volume very rewarding. Those who read about juvenile justice specifically because of their interests in mental health and delinquency may find the book less satisfying. Differences between adolescents’ and adults’ psychopathology, improvement of mental health services in juvenile justice, and diversion of young people to community-based services have been important driving forces of the new developmental reform in juvenile justice. But none of the authors are clinicians, and the book offers no discussions of mental health problems of juveniles, mental health services in juvenile justice settings, or the relation of mental disorders to delinquency.