This book examines how attorneys enable a meaningful opportunity for release for individuals sentenced to life as juveniles. The work provides a detailed overview of how legal representation facilitates opportunities for release for juveniles sentenced to life: “juvenile lifers”. It contributes to the broader literature on the importance of legal representation in the criminal legal system by investigating the role of an attorney in the parole process. Drawing on interviews with lawyers and qualitative content analyses of attorney participation in parole recordings from one state, the study illustrates how attorney assistance provides an important due process protection in the highly discretionary context of parole. The analysis of attorney representation is situated in the history of how they became prominent in the criminal legal system, and how their assistance has been viewed as vital in the parole process. Prior criminological and legal research relates the impact a lawyer can have by preparing a juvenile lifer candidate to present a suitable narrative for release, one that relates their diminished criminal culpability and rehabilitative efforts to prepare for life beyond prison. The work will be relevant to students, academics, and policy makers, particularly for state parole boards, public defender agencies, and legislatures. While the analysis is based on the experience of one state, the findings are generalizable to other states and countries that similarly conduct parole board hearings for not just their juvenile populations but also adults.

"I can think of no authors more qualified to research the complex impact of life sentences than Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis. They have the expertise to track down the information that all citizens need to know and the skills to translate that research into accessible and powerful prose." —Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blood in the Water From the author of the classic Race to Incarcerate, a forceful and necessary argument for eliminating life sentences, including profiles of six people directly impacted by life sentences by formerly incarcerated author Kerry Myers Most Western democracies have few or no people serving life sentences, yet here in the United States more than 200,000 people are sentenced to such prison terms. Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis of The Sentencing Project argue that there is no practical or moral justification for a sentence longer than twenty years. Harsher sentences have been shown to have little effect on crime rates, since people "age out" of crime—meaning that we're spending a fortune on geriatric care for older prisoners who pose little threat to public safety. Extreme punishment for serious crime also has an inflationary effect on sentences across the spectrum, helping to account for severe mandatory minimums and other harsh punishments. A thoughtful and stirring call to action, The Meaning of Life also features moving profiles of a half dozen people affected by life sentences, written by former "lifer" and award-winning writer Kerry Myers. The book will tie in to a campaign spearheaded by The Sentencing Project and offers a much-needed road map to a more humane criminal justice system.

In this book, Slobogin and Fondacaro present their vision for a new juvenile justice system, founded on the evidence at hand and promoting the principles of rehabilitation and reintegration into society. The authors develop their juvenile justice policy proposals effectively by carefully addressing the problems with past policy approches and recent theoretical contributions.

Even though youth crime rates have fallen since the mid-1990s, public fear and political rhetoric over the issue have heightened. The Columbine shootings and other sensational incidents add to the furor. Often overlooked are the underlying problems of child poverty, social disadvantage, and the pitfalls inherent to adolescent decisionmaking that contribute to youth crime. From a policy standpoint, adolescent offenders are caught in the crossfire between nurturance of youth and punishment of criminals, between rehabilitation and "get tough" pronouncements. In the midst of this emotional debate, the National Research Council's Panel on Juvenile Crime steps forward with an authoritative review of the best available data and analysis. Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents recommendations for addressing the many aspects of America's youth crime problem. This timely release discusses patterns and trends in crimes by children and adolescentsâ€"trends revealed by arrest data, victim reports, and other sources; youth crime within general crime; and race and sex disparities. The book explores desistanceâ€"the probability that delinquency or criminal activities decrease with ageâ€"and evaluates different approaches to predicting future crime rates. Why do young people turn to delinquency? Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents what we know and what we urgently need to find out about contributing factors, ranging from prenatal care, differences in temperament, and family influences to the role of peer relationships, the impact of the school policies toward delinquency, and the broader influences of the neighborhood and community. Equally important, this book examines a range of solutions: Prevention and intervention efforts directed to individuals, peer groups, and families, as well as day care-, school- and community-based initiatives. Intervention within the juvenile justice system. Role of the police. Processing and detention of youth offenders. Transferring youths to the adult judicial system. Residential placement of juveniles. The book includes background on the American juvenile court system, useful comparisons with the juvenile justice systems of other nations, and other important information for assessing this problem.

Despite inventing the juvenile court a little more than a century ago, the United States has become an international outlier in its juvenile sentencing practices. The War on Kids explains how that happened and how policymakers can correct the course of juvenile justice today.

A compassionate yet shattering exploration of the dark world of parricide. Attorney Paul Mones comes to the defense of abused children who kill their parents in this gripping, soul-wrenching, and detailed look at who these children are and why they kill. "Disturbing . . . but highly recommended".--ALA Booklist.

Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.

Methodology -- Recommendations -- To the Governor of California -- To the California State Legislature -- To state and county officials -- To state judges -- To California District Attorneys -- To defense attorneys -- Teenagers sentenced to die in California prisons -- Why youth are serving life without parole in California -- Crimes that result in a life without parole sentence -- Unjust results -- Many youth sentenced to life without parole did not actually kill -- The worst racial disparity in the nation -- County sentencing practices differ -- Influence of peers -- Adult codefendants -- Legal representation that compromises justice -- The late teens and early twenties : a dramatic period for personal growth -- Teens' unique potential for change -- Personal experience of change -- Life inside prison -- Fear and violence -- Barriers to rehabilitative opportunities -- The financial cost of sentencing youth to life without parole in California -- The perspectives of victims -- What those serving life without parole want to say to the families of their victims.

Now updated with a new introduction and afterword, this award-winning examination of the nation’s largest juvenile criminal justice system in Los Angeles by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist is “an important book with a message of great urgency, especially to all concerned with the future of America’s children” (Booklist). In an age when violence and crime by young people is again on the rise, No Matter How Loud I Shout offers a rare look inside the juvenile court system that deals with these children and the impact decisions made in the courts had on the rest of their lives. Granted unprecedented access to the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, including the judges, the probation officers, and the children themselves, Edward Humes creates an unforgettable portrait of a chaotic system that is neither saving our children in danger nor protecting us from adolescent violence. Yet he shows us there is also hope in the handful of courageous individuals working tirelessly to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds. Weaving together a poignant, compelling narrative with razor-sharp investigative reporting, No Matter How Loud I Shout is a convincingly reported, profoundly disturbing discussion of the Los Angeles juvenile court’s failings, providing terrifying evidence of the system’s inability to slow juvenile crime or to make even a reasonable stab at rehabilitating troubled young offenders. Humes draws an alarming portrait of a judicial system in disarray.

Four leading sentencing scholars have produced the first and only text with enough up-to-date material to support a full course or seminar on sentencing. Other texts offer only partial coverage or out-of-date examples. The chapters in Sentencing Law and Policy: Cases, Statutes, and Guidelines present examples from three distinct types of sentencing guideline-determinate, and capital. The materials draw on the full spectrum of legal institutions, from the U.S. Supreme Court To The state court level, with close consideration of the role of legislatures and sentencing commissions. The only current, full-course text on sentencing, this new title offers: an 'intuitive', conceptually-based organization that looks at the essential substantative components and procedural steps following the sequence of decisions that typically occurs in every criminal sentencing examples covering three distinct areas of sentencing, with chapter materials based on guideline-determinate, indeterminate, and capital sentencing materials from a range of institutions, including decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, state high courts, federal appellate courts, and some foreign jurisdictions - along with statutes and guideline provisions, and reports from various sentencing commissions and agencies in-text notes on sentencing policies that explain common practices in U.S. jurisdictions, then ask students to compare different institutional practices and consider the relationship between sentencing rules, politics, And The broader aims of criminal justice