Page 43 - 6206

tried by both a federal court and state court for the identical offense if statutes of both the federal and the
state government were violated by the specific crime.

Task 2. Read and translate the text. Answer the following questions.
Compose your own plan to retell the text.

Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice System
Then in the early industrial years of American society, primarily the decades immediately after the
Civil War, there started a movement to set up a separate juvenile justice system aimed more at rehabilitating
young offenders than punishing them. This was part of a larger series of efforts collectively known as the
child-savers' movement, in which prominent American citizens — often women — set about improving the
general living conditions of poor urban youngsters. Among other issues such as child labor and the treatment
of orphans, these «child savers» felt that trying young offenders in adult criminal courts and imprisoning
them in adult jails, workhouses, and penitentiaries was unnecessary and even counterproductive. Young
offenders, they felt, were not yet hardened in their criminality - there was some hope that, if treated with a
helping hand rather than a brutalizing one, they might reform and escape a life of crime.
The result of these efforts was the creation and establishment of the juvenile criminal justice system as
we know it today, which began with the first juvenile court in Illinois in 1899 and spread from there to all
the states.
No system of state intervention ever built had higher hope or more noble purposes. In contrast to the
adult criminal justice system, which is punitive in its intent and stern and somber in its operations, the
juvenile justice system was intended from the start to be «beneficent» to help youthful offenders, not punish
them. Treatment, education, rehabilitation were its battle cries.
But the creation of a new system of justice is fraught with such problems as defining what crimes and
what individuals are to be covered by it, what procedures to be used, and what outcomes from it arc to be
hoped for versus the outcomes actually realized. Moreover, in our society it involves the creation of a set of
laws and procedures that ultimately must meet the various tests of Constitutionality under our system of
government. It is necessary also to examine issues such as the cutoff point between juvenile and adult, to
note an important evolution of the sys- tern into two processes: one for dealing with children who commit
acts that would be criminal if performed by adults, and one for dealing with children simply in need of slate
supervision or intervention.
Whether the high hopes of the early child savers have been realized is still being debated. Today, we
preserve the philosophy of separate norms for juvenile justice but we must deal realistically with serious
violent crimes committed by young people where juvenile processing seems too lenient on the one hand and
too little able to protect the rest of us on the other. There arc conflicting views as to whether juvenile
delinquency should be dealt with separately from adult criminality, and if so, to what extent juvenile
criminals should be handled more or less harshly than adult criminals.

Notes
1. penitentiary – виправний заклад, в'язниця (тюрма)
2. intervention – втручання
3. punitive – каральний
4. stern – суворий
5. somber – безрадісний, похмурий
6. beneficent – милосердий
7. fraught – повний
8. ultimately – максимально
9. constitutionality – конституційність.

1.When was a movement to set up a separate juvenile justice system started?
2.What was the aim of this movement?
3.What do you know about the child-savers' movement?
39