Achieving Meaningful Youth Participation in Juvenile Court
| Published date | 01 December 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14732254241300396 |
| Author | Emily Buss |
| Date | 01 December 2024 |
| Subject Matter | International News |
https://doi.org/10.1177/14732254241300396
Youth Justice
2024, Vol. 24(3) 345 –350
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/14732254241300396
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Achieving Meaningful Youth
Participation in Juvenile Court
Emily Buss
Although the United States has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it has
taken important strides in recent years to enhance youth rights in the Juvenile Justice con-
text. Most significantly, U.S. law has highlighted the role that adolescents’ psychosocial
immaturity plays in their offending, and based a shift from punitive sanctions to a more
rehabilitative approach on these distinctions. This article considers the implication of this
embrace of the developmental approach for youth participation rights in their Juvenile
Justice proceedings. It describes a pilot project I designed and implemented in collabora-
tion with a Juvenile Court judge to achieve developmentally supportive youth engagement
and reports our findings. The article ends with a suggestion of next steps that could further
enhance our understanding of how meaningful youth engagement can be achieved, whether
under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) or American law.
Law and Theory
In a series of cases beginning with Roper v. Simmons (2005), the U.S. Supreme Court
concluded that the imposition of the death penalty and, in most cases, sentences of life
without parole, for offenses committed by minors violated the U.S. Constitution’s prohi-
bition against cruel and unusual punishment. The court highlighted three developmental
differences between adolescents and adults – their impulsivity, their vulnerability to peer
pressure and their less fixed character – that lessened adolescents’ culpability for their
crimes. Over the course of several cases, the court relied on both developmental psychol-
ogy and neuroscience to support its conclusion that youths’ psycho-social immaturity
rendered them less culpable, and more amenable to reform, than adult offenders (Steinberg
and Scott, 2003). A growing understanding of adolescent development, bolstered by this
Supreme Court reasoning, has also led to significant changes in states’ response to juve-
nile crime, including increased diversion of youth from the criminal justice system alto-
gether, and a shift in court-imposed dispositions from harsh punitive sanctions such as
Corresponding author:
Emily Buss, The University of Chicago Law School, 1111 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Email: ebussdos@uchicago.edu
1300396YJJ0010.1177/14732254241300396Youth JusticeBuss
research-article2024
International News
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