The subject of juvenile justice breeds extreme responses. The academic sensibility is extremely lenient, seeing misguided kids who need understanding and help more than punishment. The legal system is mindlessly punitive: juvenile defendants in the US are treated more harshly than adults elsewhere in the Western world. In the midst of this crazy conversation, Scott and Steinberg are voices of sanity. Their wholly novel approach to juvenile crime will make equal sense to judges, juvenile advocates, and urban police forces.
This book is a terrific example of what speaking truth to power, effectively, looks like.
William Stuntz
The subject of juvenile justice breeds extreme responses. The academic sensibility is extremely lenient, seeing misguided kids who need understanding and help more than punishment. The legal system is mindlessly punitive: juvenile defendants in the US are treated more harshly than adults elsewhere in the Western world. In the midst of this crazy conversation, Scott and Steinberg are voices of sanity. Their wholly novel approach to juvenile crime will make equal sense to judges, juvenile advocates, and urban police forces.
This book is a terrific example of what speaking truth to power, effectively, looks like.
William Stuntz, Harvard Law School
John Monahan
Scott and Steinberg, leading figures in juvenile law and adolescent developmental psychology, have joined forces to argue that now is the moment to reconstitute, in a completely original way, how America deals with juvenile crime and juvenile offenders. At once deeply learned and altogether pragmatic, Rethinking Juvenile Justice is one of the most transformative books this field has seen in the past 20 years.
John Monahan, Shannon Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia
Terrie Moffitt
America's justice system has become increasingly punitive toward our teenagers during past 25 years. Terrifying terms like "super predator," "zero tolerance" and "vicious youth gangs" are part of our everyday speech. But as Scott and Steinberg show, new neuroscientific and psychological evidence challenges the punitive approach. The book combines rigorous science and impeccable legal scholarship, with forceful prose, to argue for a wholesale reform of the juvenile justice system.
Terrie Moffitt, Duke University and King's College London