ON 4 AUGUST 1992, THE QUEENSLAND PARLIAMENT PASSED THE Juvenile Justice Act 1992 and the Children's Court Act 1992. The legislation, which it is anticipated will be proclaimed in early 1993, repeals the juvenile justice provisions of the Children's Services Act 1965. It provides the legislative framework for the administration of juvenile justice in Queensland, and thus the ethos of this legisl...

Restorative justice is a framework for juvenile justice reform that seeks to engage victims, offenders and their families, other citizens, and community groups both as clients of juvenile justice services and as resources in an effective response to youth crime. Traditionally, when a crime is committed, juvenile justice systems have been primarily concerned with three questions: Who did it? Wha...

...................................................................................................................... vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................. viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................. x INTRODUCTION ..........................

The focus on court-referred youth within this study necessitates a brief description of the modern juvenile justice system. Children and adolescents under the age of 18 are described as juvenile delinquents if they engage in activities prohibited by local, state, or federal legal codes (Granville, 2007). When juveniles violate the law, their cases are typically processed through the juvenile ju...

A sizable literature examines the effect of transferring the most serious and persistent juvenile arrestees from the juvenile justice system to the adult justice system. Few studies, however, have tested whether processing juveniles in the adult system has a similar effect on those who are not eligible for transfer. Recent legislative changes to the exclusive jurisdiction of the juvenile justic...

Little is known about the youth who are deeply entrenched in our juvenile justice system. Why do some violent juvenile offenders alter their lives in a more positive direction after committing serious crimes? Why do some violent juvenile offenders continue to commit crimes? If research finds that there are different pathways that violent juvenile offenders take, then perhaps interventions used ...

Victims of child abuse and neglect are at an increased risk of involvement with the juvenile justice and adult correctional systems. Yet, little is known about the continuation and trajectories of offending beyond initial contact with law enforcement. Neglect likely plays a critical role in continued offending as parental monitoring, parental rejection and family relationships are instrumental ...

Youth in the juvenile justice system have diverse needs and problems. Several potentially effective behavioral, rehabilitative interventions have been developed, and evaluations of those programs have been conducted. Little is known, however, about how those programs might be integrated into a juvenile justice system, and a range of system-level questions remain unanswered. Using the tools of o...

Systematic assessment of the substantial research evidence on ‘what works’ has shown that flagship programmes have a modest effect, on average, in changing the future behaviour of young offenders. Yet actual juvenile justice systems do not typically deliver the modest benefits provided by programmes selected for evaluation, and probably they never will. Comparative research shows that a passive...

Over the past twenty years juvenile violent crime rates have increased tremendously. In light of this disturbing trend, this paper examines whether variation in punishment levels has any impact on juvenile violent crime. To examine this relationship I first establish a behavioral model of juvenile crime, from which point I introduce an empirical model and use available data to estimate this mod...