Do Juvenile Offenders in Adult Criminal Court Really Do "Adult Time?": An Interjurisdictional Investigation of State Juvenile Transfer Laws & Sentencing Outcomes

成年刑事法庭的少年犯真的有“成人时间吗？”：对各州少年移管法的跨司法管辖区调查

• 批准号: 1126274
• 负责人: Megan Kurlychek
• 金额: $ 5.96万
• 依托单位: SUNY at Albany
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-10-01 至 2013-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1126274&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Do; Juvenile; Offenders; Adult; Criminal

The get tough policies of the 1990s resulted in an unprecedented number of juveniles being transferred and sentenced in adult courts. To date there has been a great deal of research devoted to describing the population of youth transferred to adult court; however, significantly less attention has been devoted to understanding the adult court outcomes of this population. The current research is designed to further understanding in this area. More specifically, this research constructs an inter-jurisdictional dataset comprised of administrative data from six states which maintain different definitions of adulthood for criminal justice processing. These six states were selected to be representative of the pathways in which juveniles reach adult court in the United States. Using this dataset, this research will test theories of adult court decision-making to predict how juvenile status may act as an aggravating or mitigating factor at sentencing. The study is framed within the larger debate concerning the role of discretion in criminal justice outcomes, taking into consideration the various mechanisms of juvenile transfer and the discretion permitted to different system actors, including the juvenile court judge, the prosecutor, and the state legislature. This research also addresses the relative importance of various legal, extra-legal, and contextual factors in the application of discretion in sentencing outcomes. Because all 50 states maintain mechanisms to process youth as adults, the results of this study will be of national interest. The study also represents the first inter-jurisdictional analysis of this issue, and will therefore demonstrate greater generalizability than any available research in the field. Moreover, as the research encompasses all major pathways through which juveniles reach adult courts, this study will be the first to allow for a direct comparison of the mechanisms associated with juvenile adjudication in this context.

20世纪90年代的坚韧政策导致了前所未有数量的青少年被转移到成人法庭并被判刑。 到目前为止，已经有大量的研究致力于描述人口的青年转移到成人法院，但是，很少注意到一直致力于了解成人法院的结果，这一人口。 目前的研究旨在进一步了解这一领域。 更具体地说，本研究构建了一个跨司法管辖区的数据集，包括来自六个州的行政数据，这些州对刑事司法处理中的成年人有不同的定义。 这六个州被选为美国青少年进入成人法院途径的代表。 使用这个数据集，本研究将测试成人法庭决策的理论，以预测青少年的地位如何可能作为加重或减轻量刑的因素。 这项研究是在更大的辩论框架内的自由裁量权在刑事司法结果的作用，考虑到各种机制的青少年转移和自由裁量权允许不同的系统行为者，包括少年法院法官，检察官，和州立法机构。 本研究还讨论了各种法律的，额外的法律的，并在量刑结果的自由裁量权的应用背景因素的相对重要性。 由于所有50个州都有将青年作为成年人处理的机制，这项研究的结果将关系到国家利益。 这项研究也是对这一问题的第一次司法管辖区间分析，因此将比该领域的任何现有研究更具普遍性。 此外，由于这项研究涵盖了少年诉诸成人法院的所有主要途径，因此，这项研究将是第一次对这方面与少年审判有关的机制进行直接比较。