Book Reviews
| DOI | 10.1177/a020309 |
| Published date | 01 December 2001 |
| Date | 01 December 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK REVIEWS
THOMAS GRISSO AND ROBERT G. SCHWARTZ(Eds), Youth on Trial: A Developmental
Perspective on Juvenile Justice. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000,
462 pp., £22.50 (hbk).
BARRY GOLDSON (Ed.), The New Youth Justice. Lyme Regis, Russell House Publish-
ing, 2000, 196 pp., £14.95.
The ‘adultification’ (Youth on Trial, p. 13) of Anglo-American juvenile or youth
justice has been a key feature of criminal justice policy at the close of the 20th century.
In England and Wales, the Criminal Justice Act 1991 created the Youth Court which
claimed simultaneously to take account of the maturity and stage of development of
a young offender and to give ‘flexibility’ to courts by allowing them to treat 16 and
17-year-olds as either juveniles or adults. In practice, this reform reinforced the
process of blurring the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood in the crimi-
nal courts – a process that was confirmed in the public mind by the treatment of James
Bulger’s killers (even though they were dealt with under different and long-standing
child legislation). Net-widening provisions in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 have
ensured earlier intervention in the lives of naughty children and the abolition of doli
incapax (the transitional period between 10 and 14 years when the onus was on the
prosecution to prove that the children understood the seriousness of their action) has
buttressed political determination to ‘responsibilize’ young offenders and their
parents. This belief that adolescents are growing up more quickly than ever and need
the same control and punishment as adults has been reflected even more dramatically
in courts in the USA. Many states passed legislation in the 1990s to minimize the
differences in treatment between juveniles and adults, so that children of 10 years or
younger can be tried in adult courts in some states and, to give an extreme example,
a Texas legislator has apparently proposed that 11-year-olds should be eligible for exe-
cution (Youth on Trial p. 2). Between them, Youth on Trial and The New Youth Justice
provide a remarkably wide range of perspectives on this trend in the USA, England
and Wales respectively. Produced within very different academic discourses and cul-
tures, these two collections nevertheless address very similar concerns and advocate
(in the one case less overtly than in the other) reforms to youth justice which make
the system more responsive to the developmental needs of adolescent offenders.
Youth on Trial has emerged from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on
Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice, a multi-disciplinary group of academics
and practitioners. It addresses two very specific questions: are youths as capable as
adults of participating in legal proceedings in a way that provides protection of their
rights as trial defendants, and are they enough like adults in their cognitive abilities,
decisions and judgements to be held as culpable as adults? The group was concerned
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200112) 10:4 Copyright © 2001
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 10(4), 547–559; 020309
06 Book Reviews (bc/d) 1/11/01 8:51 am Page 547
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