Teen Court Offenders, Their Experience, and Re-Offending: Processing the Soft End of Juvenile Justice
Rasmussen, Andrew Edward
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/82056
Description
Title
Teen Court Offenders, Their Experience, and Re-Offending: Processing the Soft End of Juvenile Justice
Author(s)
Rasmussen, Andrew Edward
Issue Date
2004
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Aber, Mark S.
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Sociology, Criminology and Penology
Language
eng
Abstract
Teen courts, in which youths sentence other youths for low-level, first-time offenses, are becoming a popular alternative to traditional court processing for juvenile offenders. Despite this recent rapid proliferation, there has been little scholarly research on teen courts' effect on youths' behavior or attitudes. This study used a sample of 38 youths and their parents/guardians to describe offenders and their experiences of a teen court in an Illinois county, and model completing sentences and re-offending based on these factors. These youths reflected the population of area youths and were normative teenagers with respect to self- and parent-reported problem behavior. They reported that teen court processes were fair and that they were satisfied with their sentences, but girls were less positive than boys. Girls also reported less delinquency than boys, and therefore saw themselves as less deserving of the type of public sanctions imposed by teen court than boys did. There was no support for the claim that many advocates have made that the teen court experience positively affects most of the target population's behavior: while reported short-term delinquency among those offenders with significant problem behavior did decrease, teen court experiences were not associated with sentence completion or police contact after teen court.
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