Critical Diversion

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12243
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• Author: Jeffrey Butts
• Date: 01 August 2016

POLICY ESSAY

JUVENILE COURT AND DIVERSION

Critical Diversion

Jerey Butts

John Jay College (CUNY)

Daniel Mears, Joshua Kuch, Andrea Lindsey, Sonja Siennick, George Pesta, Mark

Greenwald, and Thomas Blomberg (2016: 953–981) review the complications

of policy,practice, and research that prevent juvenile justice systems from making

more effective use of diversion or the policy that encourages the use of less formal and less

severe responses to youthful offending. Juvenile diversion may be implemented by a police

officer who escorts a young person home rather than making an arrest. It could be deployed

by a prosecutor who encourages a youth to comply with informal sanctions in lieu of court

proceedings, or it could be carried out by a juvenile court or juvenile probation agency when

it provides a less serious response for an offense simply to give a deserving young person a

second chance to learn from his or her mistake and avoid future legal troubles. Diversion

provides a legal response of less severity than would otherwise be justified, but it requires the

youth to participate in some form of alternative. Outright dismissal of possible delinquency

charges is not diversion. As Mears et al. point out, however, this definition has not been

followed consistently in the research literature, which only adds to confusion in the field.

Mears et al. (2016) examine the historical roots of diversion and note the dearth of

rigorous research that would be needed to guide the implementation of core concepts.

The article misses several important issues, however, and these limitations derive from a

common source—a failure to incorporate a critical, sociological understanding of juvenile

law and juvenile justice. The article accepts the conventional, conservative understanding

of juvenile justice. Namely, that American juvenile justice was invented and continues to

exist primarily to “help children” and “save them from a life of crime.”

Of course, this is the dominant interpretation among mainstream writers and scholars

(e.g., Bernard, 1992; Scott and Steinberg, 2008; Tanenhaus, 2004), but to understand the

true foundations of juvenile justice as well as contemporary obstacles to effective diversion,

a critical reader must look beyond the public statements of advocates. We understand the

behavior of social institutions only when we identify the full array of social forces that lead to

Direct correspondence to Jeffrey Butts, John Jay College (CUNY), 524 W. 59th Street, Suite BMW605, New York,

NY 10019 (e-mail: jbutts@jjay.cuny.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12243 C2016 American Society of Criminology 983

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 3