Preferential Treatments in Juvenile Justice System.

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Chapter 15 in the textbook focuses mainly on juvenile justice. There are many subtopics under this chapter however, there was one topic in particular that attracted my interests. This topic was also touched on several times in the discussions board and it is the Preferential Treatments in Juvenile. These controversial treatments were specifically created and developed with a child’s best interests as a primary objective. The concept of this was introduce from the philosophy “parens patriae” which allowed the states to step in and take control of the problematic child. This philosophy was later developed and addressed by the Supreme Court around 1960’s and become today’s juvenile justice system. In this paper, I will discuss about the issues and the major key points related to the Preferential Treatments in juvenile justice system.
First, we need to understand some of the characteristics and the purposes of the preferential treatments. Preferential treatments were created in order to specifically help juvenile with the due processes of the justice system. According to the “Criminal Justice Today”, Schmalleger (2010) “The Illinois Juvenile Court Act created a juvenile court, separate in form and function from adult criminal courts. To avoid the lasting stigma of criminality, the law applied the term delinquent rather than criminal to young adjudicated offenders.” (p.552). Because juveniles are children who are younger than 18 year old, they are considered to be immature due to their ages and their level of judgment hence, it would be unfair to treat them with the same treatments as adults. Children are given special status under this preferential treatments that allows their cases to be handle differently than they would in adults ...

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...information and examples. The six categories of children given in the textbook provided the definitions and details of the six common types of children in the juvenile justice system including, delinquent child, undisciplined child, dependent child, neglected child, abused child and status offender. Knowing the categories can help me identify the children who need help and prepare in preventing an issue from happening as well.
In conclusion, I think adults need to focus and pay closer attentions to their children and in my opinion, this would be the most effective way possible to deal with juvenile delinquency. I believe preferential treatments in juvenile is the right things to do, I also feel that we are heading into a right direction in term of juvenile treatments as long as we continue to improve the programs in order to keep up with today’s ever changing world.

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