Addressing Juvenile Crime

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12362
• Date: 01 May 2018
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Author: Jodi Lane

RESEARCH ARTICLE

PRESIDENT’S CRIME COMMISSION:

PAST AND FUTURE

Addressing Juvenile Crime

What Have We Learned, and How Should We Proceed?

Jodi Lane

University of Florida

Abstract

At-risk and offending juveniles remain the most promising target group for crime

reduction efforts. Many of the problems these youths faced in the 1960s remain or

have intensified, and policies to address them have shifted. Yet, research on the causes,

consequences, and best responses to juvenile crime has advanced considerably and

provides important lessons for policy makers and practitioners moving forward. These

include (a) help don’t hurt; (b) provide better procedural protections; (c) continue

to build, implement, and refine evidence-based programming; (d) tailor services; (e)

tackle community-level problems; (f) really listen and work together; (g) build better

data systems; and (h) invest resources in children and teens. Providing a retrospective

on the 1967 U.S. President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration

of Justice report, I briefly summarize and update the Commission’s findings on factors

related to juvenile delinquency, outline the Commission’s policy recommendations,

review the research on policy and practice changes since the report,and consider current

implications for policy and practice.

Keywords

juveniles, juvenile justice system, evidence-based interventions, procedural protections

Fifty years ago, the U.S. President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Admin-

istration of Justice (commonly known as the President’s Crime Commission or

just “the Commission”) argued that “America’s best hope for reducing crime is to

reduce juvenile delinquency and youth crime” (1967: 55), noting that prevention was the

Direct correspondence to Jodi Lane, Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida,

3332 Turlington Hall, P.O. Box 117330, Gainesville, FL 32611-7330 (e-mail: jlane@ufl.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12362 C2018 American Society of Criminology 283

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 17 rIssue 2

Research Article President’s Crime Commission: Past and Future

most promising approach. As we still know, it is easier to mold children into responsible

law-abiding citizens than it is to repair them after they are broken. Moreover, it is cheaper

to prevent crime among juveniles than it is to spend billions imprisoning them as adults

after they have continued to fail (Greenwood, 2008).

The Commission (1967) argued that prevention efforts should be focused on the

problems in youths’ neighborhoods, families, peers, schools, and employment opportunities

and, as a result, made several specific recommendations aimed at improving these particular

areas of children’slives. The Commission also made several recommendations about how to

improve the administration of juvenile justice. Partly as a result, overthe past 50 years, there

have been many national, state, and local policy and program efforts aimed at bettering

our responses to kids at risk or in trouble. In this article, I briefly summarize and update

the Commission’s findings on factors related to juvenile delinquency, outline their policy

recommendations, review the research on effective policy and practice changes since the

report, and consider current implications for policy and practice

Then and Now: Understanding Delinquency

The Commission noted in 1967 that almost all youth had engaged in behaviors against

the law and naturally made some bad choices as a result of their age. We now know this is

because adolescent brains are biologically different than those of adults, making it harder for

them to regulate their emotions, resist peer influences, and consider consequences (National

Research Council, 2013). Yet, youths with certain experiences are morelikely to come into

contact with the juvenile justice system. In response, the Commission’s report focused on

five areas of youths’ lives that specifically contributed to delinquency and system contact,

leading the Commission to recommend specific strategies to tackle each of these correlates

of delinquency. In this section, I first summarize the information at the time and update

what we know now about the impact of these factors on children. For brevity, I generally

summarize the findings of meta-analyses and other reviews, encouraging interested readers

toexploretheliteraturemoredeeply.

Neighborhoods

The overarching tie among the factors discussed by the Commission (1967) was the neigh-

borhood because, like today, a disproportionate amount of juvenile crime was occurring

in poorer, inner-city, primarily minority neighborhoods; areas that we now consider char-

acterized by concentrated disadvantage (Sampson, 2011). Economists call these primarily

inner cities, “poverty traps,” because people living thereoften have trouble overcoming their

circumstances (see Durlauf, 2011). Even 50 years ago, the Commission noted that the cycle

of poverty continues despite many residents having similar goals and work ethic of residents

in wealthier areas. Children there lived in overcrowded, substandard housing. They were

often unsupervised and navigated outside environments where they encountered trash (in-

cluding dangerous items), adults hanging out, violence, and inadequate play areas, much

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