Violent Justice: Adult system fails young offenders
By Bruce Bower
State laws that send some individuals under age 18 to trial and prison as adults have achieved the opposite of what the policy’s proponents intended, a new research review concludes. Transferring young people into adult systems yields substantially higher rates of later serious crimes compared with youths handled by juvenile-justice systems.
Moreover, there’s no evidence that shifting some young offenders to the adult-justice system prevents or reduces violence in the general population of children and teenagers.