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An examination of the development of the juvenile justice systems in the United States and in Canada demonstrates a parallel history. The shared belief that juveniles were more capable of rehabilitation than, and just plain "different" from adults led to the creation of separate court systems in both countries around the turn of the 19th century. In both countries, the initial juvenile court was in essence, a welfare system, concerned more with the best interest of the child and treatment issues as opposed to legal issues such as due process rights. Eventually, both countries extended due process rights to juveniles years after the juvenile court system were created. And, finally, during the 1980s and 1990s, both the United States and Canada went through a "get-tough" approach to juvenile crime, which resulted in significant changes to the process of juvenile justice.
This paper examines the current reaction to juvenile crime on both sides of the US/ Canadian border. First, this paper will present an examination and comparison of the major events in juvenile justice development in both the United States and Canada. Second, the paper will examine the juvenile crime trends and patterns in both countries. Third, the paper will compare and contrast the approach to juvenile crime by Canada and several United States border states. Lastly, the paper will draw some conclusions about youth justice in the two countries.
I. A Brief History of Important Events in Juvenile Justice in the United States
In the early United States, adolescents over the age of seven could be regarded the same as adults with no different criminal sanctions than those experienced by adults. Social reformers of the early 180Os were concerned about this, and began to work to develop some different practices for youth who committed crime. In 1825, the first separate juvenile institution in the United States was opened - the New York House of Refuge (Krisberg & Austin, 1993). Within twenty-two years, this concept of an institutional approach to juvenile misbehaving was expanded, with government intervention, into the reform school model (Krisberg, 2005). However, persistent problems with this model led reformers to call for the creation of the first juvenile court (del Carmen, Parker, & Reddington, 1998).
In 1899, in Chicago, Illinois, the first...