Challenges Posed by Very Young Offenders
More than 30 years ago, a Presidential Commission Report (Lemert, 1967) criticized the Nation's juvenile courts for what it labeled the "1-minute hour." According to the report, a heavy volume of cases allowed courts to spend only approximately 1 minute on juvenile cases and prevented them from taking the time needed to carefully assess cases and link juveniles with necessary services (as the juvenile courts were intended to do). Since that time, the volume of juvenile cases has increased dramatically without a corresponding increase in resources. The rising tide of juvenile arrests that began in the mid-1980s and continued until 1994 (Snyder and Sickmund, 1999) has forced courts into what Lawrence Sherman describes as a "triage" system of conserving scarce resources for the most serious cases.3 Minor juvenile offenders are often given several "bites of the apple," meaning that juvenile cases may be dismissed or juveniles may be placed on probation supervision with overworked probation officers until the offenders have accumulated a long history of arrests or have committed a particularly heinous offense (Bernard, 1992). Advocates of both system reform and youth warn that the current system fails to hold youth accountable for offenses and sends the message that offenses are "no big deal."
Additional challenges facing the system are the largely passive roles that offenders and their parents often play and the fact that victims are typically excluded from the process. An individual's reasons for committing an offense are regarded as unimportant, and restitution to victims and the community affected by the crime is not typically a primary concern (Van Ness, 1996). Offenders are sometimes required to perform community service as reparation, but often the service is performed for someone not directly affected by the offense (Van Ness, 1996).
Restorative justice conferences attempt to address these shortcomings in the current system. As part of a balanced and restorative justice model (Bazemore and Umbreit, 1994; Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 1998), restorative justice conferences are designed to hold youth accountable, involve and meet the needs of victims, and build a community of support around the offending youth.
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Conferences as an Early Response to Young Offenders |
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