Juvenile Prison In America, demographers predict that one in three children will be arrested by the age of twenty-three (Bernstein 7). The juvenile prison did not exist until the end of the nineteenth century. When first established, the ideal was to rehabilitate, not to punish, troubled youth. “Houses of Refuge” were established, first in New York, to provide youth with education and employment. Now, juvenile containment centers are all over the United States. Juvenile prison is a complex system
efforts of the Federal Justice System to convict those offenders. Mandatory minimum sentencing became popular in the 1980s and 1990s as part of the war on drugs effort. Since then mandatory minimum sentencing has been one of the more prominent measures taken when determining sentencing for drug related crimes. The implementation of mandatory minimum sentencing in general is in efforts to lower the rates of recidivism. Recidivism according to the National Institute of Justice is defined as an offender’s
youth justice system is broken and needs to be fixed. In 2007, there was an average of 60,500 juveniles sent to detention centers every night, either being held for a crime they committed, or awaiting their trial decisions, which could take weeks at a time. Compared to other countries, America has one of the highest number of arrests dealing with violent youth crimes (Mendel 1). Juvenile detention centers do more harm than they do good. Crime rates have not been proven to go down once juveniles have