Use of parens patriae in modern juvenile court providing two examples

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Some areas of the country do not have courts actually called juvenile courts. Law violations by young people may be handled by probate courts, juvenile divisions of a circuit court, or even comprehensive family courts.

In every community, however, some form of court is charged with responding to cases in which a person under the age of adulthood a juvenile is suspected of breaking the law. Since these courts have jurisdiction over juveniles and they follow the same general principles of juvenile law, it is conventional to refer to them simply as juvenile courts.

Many juvenile courts handle other types of cases. They often handle dependency cases or matters involving abused and neglected children and youth charged with noncriminal acts or status offenses such as curfew violations, running away from home, and truancy.

Other juvenile courts especially those known as family courts may handle domestic violence and child custody matters. Law violations usually account for about half of this workload. Origins Young people who violate the law before reaching the legal age of adulthood are referred to as juveniles in order to indicate that they are under the jurisdiction of the juvenile court rather than the criminal or adult court.

Technically, juveniles cannot be arrested for committing crimes because the criminal code does not apply to young people under a certain age usually age seventeen or eighteen. Rather than charging them with a crime, juveniles are usually arrested for committing acts of delinquency. A twenty-five year old who steals a car is arrested for the crime of auto theft.

A fifteen year old who does the same thing is taken into custody for an act of delinquency that would have been considered auto theft if that youth had been an adult. Ideally, the juvenile court is more responsive than an adult court would be to the social and developmental characteristics of children and youth.

The services and sanctions imposed by juvenile courts should be designed to do more than punish wrongdoing. Some contemporary critics doubt whether this mission is achievable or even desirable in all cases.

Juvenile courts emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the period in American history known as the Progressive era. Some characterize the founding of the first juvenile court as the culmination of many years of effort to guard the safety and well-being of youth in the justice system.

Juvenile Justice History — Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice

In this view, the invention of the juvenile court was sparked by social reformers and activists who understood that children are different from adults and should be held less culpable for their unlawful behavior. Reformers worked to create a separate juvenile court, both to protect youth from harm and to provide earlier and more rehabilitative interventions for young offenders.

There is another, entirely different explanation for the emergence of the juvenile court. Historians and sociologists have noted that despite the rhetoric of social reformers, many early proponents of the juvenile court were interested in crime control.

Before the development of juvenile courts, young offenders appeared in criminal court alongside adult defendants.

Parens Patriae - Definition, Examples, Cases

Judges and jurors found many youth innocent or simply dismissed the charges against them. Acquittal was preferable to sending a young defendant to a nineteenth-century prison, especially when the defendant appeared socially and physically immature. They welcomed the idea of a separate juvenile court system.

Such a court, they argued, would be more capable of responding to juveniles on their own terms and more likely to intervene, even in cases of relatively minor offenses and very young defendants. Bytwenty states had established juvenile courts and all but a few had done so by the end of the s.

Although each jurisdiction established its juvenile court system with its own procedures and structure, juvenile courts across the United States were generally designed to focus on early intervention and rehabilitation and to emphasize an individualized approach to youth crime.

Juvenile court judges based their decisions on the unique circumstances of each offender rather than simply the severity of the offense. The goal of criminal adult courts was to determine guilt and dispense the right punishment for each crime.

Juvenile courts were asked to investigate the causes of bad behavior and then devise a package of sanctions and services to put juveniles back on the right track. To give juvenile courts the flexibility they would need to fulfill this mission, lawmakers allowed the juvenile court process to meet a significantly lower standard of evidence and due process.

Juvenile law was codified entirely separately from criminal law. The facts of a case were not used to establish guilt but to document the occurrence of delinquency.

Judges were not required to follow detailed procedures or to adhere to complex legal rules. There were fewer legal formalities in order to free the juvenile court to intervene quickly and comprehensively with each youth accused of violating the law.

Even when a juvenile was merely suspected of criminal involvement, a juvenile court judge could take jurisdiction over the matter, place the youth on probation, or even hold the youth in secure custody. The most important of these was parens patriae, or roughly "the nation as parent.

Use of Parens Patriae in U.S. Law

In the mids, American courts had used parens patriae as a justification for placing recalcitrant children in "houses of refuge," an early type of reformatory. This arrangement gave the juvenile court an unprecedented degree of power and discretion.

Public criticism of the juvenile court intensified.There is another, entirely different explanation for the emergence of the juvenile court. Historians and sociologists have noted that despite the rhetoric of social reformers, many early proponents of the juvenile court were interested in crime control.

Chapter 1 – The Inquiry and the Issues. 1. Dansys Consultants, “Aboriginal People in Manitoba: Population Estimates for and ,” research paper prepared for the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, Ottawa, November, One example of Parens Patriae in modern juvenile court are custody being temporarily being taken from the parents and the children placed in the care of social services until a determination can be made as to what is in the best interest of the child where the child is still allowed supervised visitation with the parents so that the courts can %(6).

The cornerstone of juvenile justice philosophy in America has been the principle of parens patriae; under this principle, the State is to act as a substitute parent to a child whose parents, for one reason or another, cannot properly raise the child.

Definition. Parens patriae is Latin for 'parent of his or her country.' In the juvenile justice legal system, parens patriae is a doctrine that allows the state to .

This paper assesses the parens patriae orientation, which is often considered to be at the core of the operation of juvenile courts, and discovers that existing ideas concerning its role must be revised.