Book Review

• Date: 01 March 2002
• Published date: 01 March 2002
• Author: Gerard Rainville
• DOI: 10.1177/0887403402131006
• Subject Matter: Reviews

CRIMINALJUSTICEPOLICYREVIEW/March 2002BOOKREVIEW

Book Review

Excluding Violent Youths From Juvenile Court: The Effectiveness of

Legislative Waiver, by David L. Myers. LFB Scholarly Publishing,

2001. 229 pages (hardback).

David L. Myers’s new book, Excluding Violent Youths From Juvenile

Court: The Effectiveness of Legislative Waiver,presents an aggressive body

of research assessing a timely, often controversial issue related to the

increasingly punitive approaches that local governments take in handling

juvenile offenders. Myers assesses the likely outcomes of juvenile waiver,

which is the practice of hearing a juvenile’scase in the criminal courts rather

than processing such cases in the juvenile system.

Interest in this research and book may be generated due to the author’s

fortuitous choice of a hotly debated topic. The major contribution of this

book, however,is not one of polemics. Rather, Myers shies away from prov-

ocation and sticks to the knitting of attempting to assess, through replicable

methods, the efficacyof a legislative waiver policy(as applied in Pennsylva-

nia). Myers meets this objective by applying a rich toolbox of quantitative

methods (using least squares and maximum likelihood estimation as well as

survival analysis) and triangulating his quantitative findings with in-depth

interviews of key juvenile justice actors in Pennsylvania. In the course of

doing so, Myers convincingly addresses several methodological problems

endemic to assessments of juvenile waiver policies.

This review focuses initially on the choices that Myers has made in his

research so that we may regard his findings with some confidence.Next, the

nature of one of Myers’s key findings is related. Finally, a few suggestions

of mine of a (apologies in advance) methodological nature and a brief dis-

cussion of future research directions conclude the review.

COMPARING GROUP DIFFERENCES IN

THE ABSENCE OF RANDOMIZED ASSIGNMENT

The challenge that researchers such as Myers face in assessing juvenile

waiver policies is one of selection. In other words, researchers may not ran-

domly assign juveniles to two separate treatments (i.e., waiverto adult court

78

Criminal Justice PolicyReview, Volume13, Number 1, March 2002 78-82

© 2002 Sage Publications

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