Christopher J. Sullivan: Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously: Developmental Insights and System Challenges
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BOOK REVIEW
Christopher J. Sullivan: Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously: Developmental Insights and System Challenges Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 2019, 224 pp, ISBN: 9781439915783 Reese Sobol
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Received: 25 October 2020 / Accepted: 26 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Taking Juvenile Justice Seriously: Developmental Insights and System Challenges is a book focused on analyzing science and empirical evidence relating to the juvenile justice system and the youths who encounter it. Christopher Sullivan attempts to balance the valuable insight and idealistic solutions offered in response to this evidence with the practical difficulties of implementing them in the juvenile justice system. The book proceeds in two parts, with Part I providing much of the evidentiary basis that underlies developmental justice reform and Part II discussing the actual reform measures and the challenges involved in putting them into practice. Sullivan starts Part I of this book off in Chapter 1, “Characterizing Contemporary Delinquency” by detailing the young people that enter the system, what they did to get there, and why they committed the delinquent act that got them there. The chapter grounds itself in the beginning by replicating hard data points in the form of a statistical breakdown of the number of arrests of delinquents from 2012, per an Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention report by Julie Furdella and Charles Puzzanchera. The report brought many points of interest to light, such as the fact that youths are arrested at a lower rate (39.7 per 1000 population) than those ages eighteen and over (45.3 per 1000 population). Additionally, the report broke the arrests into four categories—Property offenses, Person offenses, Drug law violations, public order violations—with the most common offense committed by minors being property crimes. The chapter went on to shed some light behind the circumstances surrounding many delinquents who are brought into the justice system. Sullivan broke down the various situations, places and social constructs
* Reese Sobol [email protected] 1
Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, IN, USA
that often lead to criminal conduct by minors. Of these different focus points, co-offending and gangs were both highlighted as very common underlying circumstances for delinquent acts. Gang related activity does not come as a surprise, but the strong link between delinquency and cooffending was something I did not expect, although Sullivan’s explanation of the correlation (and common-sense reflection on teenage boys) cleared up my initial surprise. Additionally, research Sullivan illustrated the importance of race in understanding the landscape of juvenile delinquency. Notably, the same study by Furdella and Puzzanchera revealed that African Americans accounted for a much higher rate of delinquents (35%) than their actual representation in general population (18%). Even more disturbing, a 2016
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