Children: As Defendants

Abstract

Abstract In response to an increase in juvenile violent crime in the late 1980s, most jurisdictions in the United States adopted a more punitive stance toward juvenile offenders. As a result, juveniles faced increasing sanctions in juvenile court and were transferred to adult criminal court in greater numbers, where they faced serious penalties. Unfortunately, policymakers of that era often failed to consider that certain characteristics of juveniles (e.g., psychosocial/developmental immaturity) may affect their adjudicative competence and culpability. In addition, minors who are likely to become involved in the juvenile justice system have additional characteristics (e.g., higher rates of mental illness and substance abuse, lower IQs ) that might further compromise or affect these domains. Over the past decade, legislators and judicial officers, informed by recent research in adolescent development, began to question the appropriateness of increasingly punitive policies aimed at juvenile offenders. Recent research has helped provide evidence that juveniles with particular characteristics, such as young age and low IQ , may be at increased risk of having their legal rights violated at numerous points in the adjudicative process, thereby undermining the fundamental fairness of the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. Other research has shown that adolescents' psychosocial immaturity significantly affects their criminal decision‐making. Neuroimaging has proved a powerful tool in helping elucidate a potential neuroanatomical basis for poor decision‐making in adolescents. Because adolescents are likely somewhat less culpable than adults for similar criminal acts and because most individuals limit their antisocial behavior to adolescence, the wisdom of indiscriminately giving minors (or even young adults) long prison sentences is questionable.