Juvenile justice policy has moved to the center of public attention and political debate in recent years. Increases in youth crime, stories of frustrated parents seeking help for their troubled children, and criticisms of juvenile justice programs have led to demands for change in the way young offenders are charged, punished, and treated. Public concern about violent juvenile crime is at an unprecedented high. The increasingly violent nature of contemporary youth crime and the escalating number of young people involved with the juvenile justice system have challenged established beliefs guiding policy and practice with offenders. Traditionally, the juvenile court has striven to maintain a balance between rehabilitating and punishing offenders. The extent to which policy with young offenders has emphasized rehabilitation versus punishment has changed intermittently over the past 30 years. Influenced by principles of deinstitutionalization, practice in the 1970s and 1980s was based on an individual treatment model encouraging placement of offenders in nonsecure, community-based programs. Since 1990 these practice strategies have been de-emphasized in favor of strict sanctions and incarceration (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention [OJJDP], 1996).
Renewed interest in juvenile justice policy generally and in highly punitive interventive measures specifically has occurred despite evidence indicating that prevalence rates for most types of juvenile offending have remained relatively stable over the past two decades. Most crimes committed by adolescents are property offenses such as theft and vandalism. Rates of property offenses decreased between 1974 and 1984 and rose slowly between 1985 and 1991, but did not attain 1974 levels. Property crime arrest rates have been constant since 1992 (Snyder, 1997). Juveniles were responsible for 20 percent to 25 percent of all property offenses committed in the United States annually between 1981 and 1995 (U.S. Department of Justice, 1996).
The stability of property crime rates in recent.......
