Youths Tried As Adults Reoffend More Quickly, UF Study Finds

April 4, 1996

GAINESVILLE—Popular “get tough” measures fail in dealing with juvenile crime, suggests a University of Florida study, which finds that youths tried as adults commit new crimes at higher rates than their counterparts who stay in juvenile courts.

A group of 2,738 Florida youths transferred to adult criminal court reoffended more quickly and committed more serious crimes than did a matched sample of youths sentenced in the juvenile system, the study found.

“These results are probably pretty bad news for advocates of the ‘get tough’ policy,” said Charles Frazier, a UF sociologist and co- author of the study. “One basis in the underlying logic behind sending juveniles to adult courts is that, as a harsher, more punitive response, it is expected that juvenile crime will be reduced.

“But this punishment for some juveniles could have the opposite effect,” he said. “Instead of sending a message that the game is over and it’s time to grow up and stop misbehaving, it may send the message that society has given up on you and you’re a lost cause — it’s too late to reform.”

The study appears in the April 1996 issue of the journal Crime and Delinquency. The paper is jointly authored by University of Central Florida criminologist Donna Bishop, UF sociologist Lonn Lanza-Kaduce and UF statistician Lawrence Winner.

Using 1987 records from the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, the researchers matched pairs of youths for age, gender, race, present offense and prior record, with the primary difference between groups being that one was treated in the adult courts and the other in the juvenile justice system. Using older data allowed researchers to do long-term studies of the youths after finishing the short-term follow-up study.

Researchers found that 30 percent of youths tried as adults were rearrested during the year after their release compared to 19 percent of the youths retained in the juvenile system. Ninety-three percent of the rearrests involving the youths tried as adults were for felony offenses, compared to 85 percent of their counterparts handled as juveniles.

Since the late 1970s a majority of states have changed their laws to make it easier to try juveniles in adult criminal courts. Florida has been a leader in these efforts by pioneering an approach allowing prosecutors to decide, without a hearing, whether or not a youth is tried in juvenile or criminal court, Frazier said.

Florida’s relatively unique system, called the “prosecutorial waiver” approach, has been less than fully successful, said Frazier, who has done other studies of this issue.

Ideally, the most violent and serious juvenile offenders are singled out for transfer to adult court, but because the decision is left largely to the discretion of each prosecutor, there is variation across jurisdictions in the characteristics of youths chosen, Frazier said. In fact, sometimes less serious offenders are transferred to adult court, he said.

The juvenile justice system originated with the idea that children and young teenagers are less culpable than adults for their offenses and that any treatment they receive should help them to understand why their behavior was wrong and how they can become law-abiding citizens, Frazier said.

“This rehabilitative philosophy underpinning our juvenile justice system has been under serious attack for a couple of decades to the point that it’s hard to find people who have any faith that it is ultimately going to be effective,” he said. “One reason it has fallen out of favor is there has never been any clear indication that it’s worked. It is somewhat ironic that dependence has shifted to the adult criminal justice system because there is clear evidence that it has been no more successful.”

Using a short prison term to change behavior that has developed over years of a person’s life is extremely difficult, especially if the offender is released from prison into the same unimproved environment that generated and supported the delinquent behavior in the first place, he said.

Just as the American public no longer expects medical science to perform miracles on patients with unhealthy lifestyles, it is unreasonable to expect the criminal justice system to singlehandedly eliminate crime without trying to address some of the social problems that cause it in the first place, Frazier said. “Almost every generation of crime wave mania comes with some new quick fix solutions,” he said. “In reality, when it comes to responding to juvenile or adult crime, there are no silver bullets.”