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Juvenile Court

The juvenile court crystallized the main features of corrections after the Civil War: individualized treatment, indeterminacy, and expanded discretionary decision making.

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Providing juveniles with their own court system was an extension of discretionary commitment practices long associated with houses of refuge. In this light, the nation's first juvenile court, established in Chicago under an Illinois law of 1899, was further evidence of the way in which succeeding generations built upon rather than discarded earlier practices.

As was so often the case, private civic groups initiated reform. The Chicago Women's Club had taken an active interest in the Cook County jail during the 1890s, pressing for changes in the treatment of juveniles. An 1898 grand jury investigation of youthful offenders added credibility to the club's accusations of mismanagement, corruption, and maltreatment. Armed with this evidence, the club persuaded lawmakers in Springfield to establish a separate juvenile court for Chicago.

The act was further evidence of judicial regulation of child welfare under the concept of parens patriae. The court was a "child-saving" institution. 33 It extracted children from unsavory home environments while sparing them the stigma of a criminal record. The juvenile court was purposefully designed to circumvent the traditional procedural protections accorded the accused, substituting in their place the beneficent discretion of judges, who theoretically tailored justice to the needs of each child. The juvenile court was not a place to punish but to help children who, with proper assistance, could achieve useful, middle-class lives.

 

Plea Bargaining

The growing discretion of an increasingly bureaucratic criminal justice system also surfaced in plea bargaining, a practice that further undermined the community's most important voice in the system--the jury. Plea bargaining involves a prosecutor and a defense attorney reaching agreement about the plea to be entered to a crime and the sentence to be meted out in return. The origins of this practice remain obscure, but it seems certain that it was functioning by the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1860s the district attorney for New York City encouraged defendants to plead guilty to lesser offenses and that such bargains were "always under the table." 34 The rise of probation seems to have stimulated additional plea bargaining. Studies of individuals granted probation in the late nineteenth century indicate that they often changed their plea from innocent to guilty of a lesser charge.

The pressure of heavy caseloads and crowded prisons are often cited as a primary factor in encouraging plea bargains. Yet bargained pleas were as frequent in busy urban courts as in rural areas. Plea bargaining seems rather to have been an instance of the increasingly specialized and bureaucratic treatment of offenders. It had the advantage of conveniently settling cases where guilt was obvious. In other instances, the plea bargain was useful if the prosecutor could not prove fully all the elements of the crime that was charged, such as first-degree murder, but could satisfy the requirements for a lesser charge, such as manslaughter.



Plea bargaining also made sense from the defendant's point of view, if he or she was guilty. Nineteenth-century criminal trials were freewheeling, cursory affairs that invariably ended in conviction. During the 1890s, for example, trials for serious crimes in Leon County, Florida took about one hour, and in the overwhelming number of cases the defendants were found guilty. In late nineteenth-century Georgia, eight of ten blacks were found guilty and six of ten whites. 35 Going to trial offered guilty defen

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dants little hope of success, whereas pleading to a lesser charge let them charter their own fates.

By all available evidence, the incidence of plea bargaining has grown significantly since the late nineteenth century. Between 1880 and 1910 in Alameda County, for example, about 8 percent of all pleas were bargained; today, that percentage has nearly tripled.

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 724


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