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Two Decades of Research Suggests Sending Kids to Adult Courts Doesn’t Prevent Crime [PSMag.com]

 

After two decades of trying tens of thousands of minors as adults every year, there’s little evidence the practice deters kids from committing crimes again, according to a newmeta-analysis of previous studies.

Instead, when researchers pooled data from different papers, they found young people who are transferred to adult courts have higher recidivism rates. Still, because the results of each of the studies varied so much, it’s hard to pin down what’s going on, write the authors of the analysis, a team of criminologists from Northeastern and Florida State universities. Maybe trying kids as adults works some of the time — perhaps for older teenagers, or repeat offenders. We simply don’t know for sure.

Juvenile courts are set up to be less punitive than adult courts, and to send defendants to therapy and rehabilitation programs instead of prison. The idea is that folks younger than 17 or 18 are less culpable for their crimes because they haven’t fully matured — a notion neuroscience supports—and are more amenable to learning and reform.



[For more of this story, written by Francie Diep, go to https://psmag.com/two-decades-...c58028795#.g8kma85h2]

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