Investigation of the Efficiency of Varying Juvenile Justice System in Handling and Preventing Juvenile Crimes among the States of the United States of America
The ultimate purpose of the Criminal Justice System, according to the Office of Criminal Justice Reform (2014), is “to deliver an efficient, effective, accountable and fair justice process for the public. From this statement of the criminal justice system’s aim, it is implied that justice should not be relative, that is, in ideality a rule set for one person should be the same rule which must be applied to all in order to achieve fairness. In the United States of America, while it is true that the federal government provides guidance for each of its states through the Federal Juvenile Delinquency Act, each state still has the ultimate authority over how it will prosecute or handle perpetrators of criminal acts particularly those committed by juveniles. What this means is that a juvenile may be treated differently, persecuted variably, or given unique services per state. In other words, there is no uniformity on how juvenile crimes are prevented ad are handled among the states. For example, the United States government provides authority to each of its state to determine there are boundaries in juvenile crimes. This is the reason why some states use the age bracket 17 years old and below while others use 18 years old below (Slowikowski, 2011, p. 2).
Such criminal justice system can therefore be inferred as lacking fairness due to the said differences. So the question is if the entire US nation will apply the same criminal justice system for juveniles which system is it? In order to answer this question, it is important that a research be conducted fist as to the effectiveness of each of the justice systems implemented on each state and determine which one is the most effective. Hence, the aim of this research will be: to determine which state in the US is the most effective in reducing and preventing juvenile crimes through its justice system.
This research will use true experimental design. Accordingly, this research will use survey interviews among the populations of identified states. The survey interviews will contain the following research questions:
- Is current criminal justice system in each identified state efficient in preventing and handling juvenile crimes?
- Should there be improvements in handling and preventing juvenile crimes? If yes, what are these improvements?
2.1 What boundaries, such as age boundary, should be set by the state in order to prevent and prosecute juvenile offenders?
2.2 Should all states use uniform juvenile justice system?
Apart from the survey interviews, this research will also look-up at some quantitative information related to the proliferation of juvenile crimes of some of the identified states and performs simple statistical analysis on these data.
This research will use probability sampling with regards to identifying which state should be included in the study. This sampling technique will be used due to two reasons. The first is that it may be impossible to gather information and conduct survey from all the states of the US. The probability sampling to be used is random sampling. This will be done by allocating numbers on each of the state and then a random number will be generated in a calculator. Sufficient number state will be determined in consideration to the duration of time and resource available to conduct the preliminary research (the quantitative information aforementioned), and to conduct the survey interviews.
References:
Maxfield, M. G., & Babbie, E. R. (2011). Crime, Criminal Justice, and Scientific Inquiry. Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology. California: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. (Original work published 2008)
Office of Criminal Justice Reform (2014). Juvenile Justice. Cornell University Law School. Retrieved from: <http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/juvenile_justice>.
Slowikowski, J. (2011). Trying Juveniles as Adults: An Analysis of State Transfer Laws and Reporting. Retrieved from: <https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/232434.pdf>.
