Youth on Trial

It is often said that a teen "old enough to do the crime is old enough to do the time", but are teens really mature and capable enough to participate fully and fairly in adult criminal court? In this book - the fruit of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice - a wide range of leaders in developmental psychology and law combine their expertise to investigate the current limitations on our youth policy. The first part of the book establishes a developmental perspective on juvenile justice; the second and third parts then apply this perspective to issues of adolescents' capacities as trial defendants and to questions of legal culpability. Underlying the entire work is the assumption that an enlightened juvenile justice system cannot ignore the developmental psychological realities of adolescence. Not only a state-of-the-art assessment of the conceptual and empirical issues in the forensic assessment of youth, "Youth on Trial" is also a call to reintroduce sound, humane public policy into our justice system.