America's juvenile justice system is not broken.

• Author: Backstrom, James C.

I READ WITH CONCERN THE RECENT commentary of Shay Bilchik (December 16, 2007) urging reform of the so-called "get tough" policies of America's juvenile codes, including curtailing of the ability of states to transfer juveniles to adult court for prosecution. Mr. Bilchik's article was based upon some misleading facts and examples and reaches a misguided conclusion. America's juvenile justice system is not broken or in need of reform.

The changes made to most state's juvenile codes in the 1990s were not overly harsh on juvenile offenders. Rather, these laws strike a proper balance between protecting public safety, holding youth appropriately accountable for their crimes and rehabilitating youthful offenders. Contrary to the implications in Mr. Bilchik's article, the vast majority of youthful offenders in America are prosecuted in juvenile court. Few jurisdictions in our country prosecute more than one to two percent of juvenile offenders as adults and in some jurisdictions this statistic is even lower. Also, few prosecutors in America would ever seek to charge as an adult a youth who merely sells marijuana, which was the misleading centerpiece example used by Mr. Bilchik.

Some exceptions exist, like the highly praised program in Jacksonville, Florida, where many youth convicted of lower level felonies are prosecuted in adult court. These youth, however, receive sentences to a segregated youth-only section of the county jail, where the primary focus of their incarceration is on education and rehabilitation. This "adult court prosecution" may well be the best thing that ever happens to these troubled kids. Since this program was implemented, juvenile crime in the Jacksonville area has dropped significantly.

One of the primary fallacies of statistics misused by Mr. Bilchik and other groups like the Justice Policy Project that suggest that too many juveniles are prosecuted as adults in America is that these statistics are based upon using age 18 as the age of criminal majority. This is not the reality in all states in America. In fact, 13 states have a lower age of majority for purposes of criminal prosecution, and yet in computing the statistics as to the number of "juveniles" prosecuted as adults, 16- or 17-year-old youth in these states who are adults under the law are treated as if they were juveniles transferred to the adult system. That is why the statistic claiming that 200,000 or more "juveniles" are prosecuted as adults each year in...