Research Paper on:
Comparative Analysis of Juvenile Court and Adult Court

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
juvenile crime rates dramatically increasing while in contrast, adult crime has remained either static or has somewhat declined (Carney, 1997). In fact, according to Carney (1997), "It is now  more likely for a 15-year-old to commit a violent crime than for a 30-year-old" (p. 846). A juvenile in society and within the justice system is a youth under  the age of 18. During the time of widespread changes that swept the United States as a result of the intensive industrialization and urbanization of the late nineteenth and  early twentieth centuries, there was an upsurge in crimes committed by juveniles who had been abandoned, exploited by the lack of child labor laws, or physically/sexually abused (Penn, 2001).  At this time, juvenile offenders were punished alongside their adult counterparts, but did not receive the right to due process or legal representation (Penn, 2001). Before 1900, approximately 10  children had been executed in the United States before reaching their fourteenth birthdays, while others died in during their incarceration in adult prison facilities (Penn, 2001, p. 1).  A burgeoning child welfare movement vigorously campaigned for juvenile courts to be a separate and distinct component of the American justice system. In 1899, the first juvenile court case  was heard in Chicago as authorized by the Illinois Juvenile Court Act (Penn, 2001). The juvenile court was never intended to be a prosecutorial system in which prison sentences  were handed down. It was regarded as a humanitarian way of dealing with "misbehaving and incorrigible youth" that excluded the traditional criminal justice procedures or penalties that characterize the  adult court structure (Penn, 2001, p. 1). The emphasis was on treatment and rehabilitation of troubled juveniles (Penn, 2001). Its scope was quite broad, for it covered all