An American Travesty: Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending

by Franklin E. Zimring

• ISBN13: 9780226983578
• ISBN10: 0226983579
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-06-30
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

An American Travestyis the first scholarly book in half a century to analyze the justice system's response to sexual misconduct by children and adolescents in the United States. Writing with a refreshing dose of common sense, Franklin E. Zimring discusses the "American travesty" noted in title--our society's failure to consider the developmental status of adolescent sex offenders. Too often, he argues, the American legal system ignores age and developmental status when adjudicating young sexual offenders, in many cases responding as they would to an adult. This book is a summary of what we know about adolescent sex offenders, and a much-needed indictment of the legal system's ability to make appropriate decisions concerning young sexual offenders, and a call for specific reforms. Zimring shows that current policy toward young sex offenders is rarely based on facts and is often the result of and false judgements. Assumptions about juvenile sex offenders in current legislation and debate are often based only on the motives and inclinations of adult offenders. But seventy-five years' worth of empirical data show that such assumptions are wrong. After surveying the facts and outlining the additional information needed for rational policy, this book proposes a series of reforms in juvenile and criminal courts as well as sex offender registration laws. As such,An American Travesty'scompelling argument will inform policymakers, lawyers, criminologists, psychologist, psychiatrists, social workers, and others trying to address the problem of the young sexual offender.

Author Biography

Franklin E. Zimring is the William G. Simon Professor of Law at the Boalt Hall School of Law at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including most recently, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, and the coeditor of A Century of Juvenile Justice, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	xiii
Part I The Juvenile Sex Offender
Chapter 1 Three Case Studies	3	(13)
Chapter 2 Continuity and Change in American Sex-Crime Policy	16	(22)
Chapter 3 The Juvenile Sex Offender	38	(31)
Chapter 4 The Emergence of Juvenile Sex-Offender Treatment	69	(34)
Part II Principles and Policies
Chapter 5 The Sex Offender in Juvenile Court	103	(14)
Chapter 6 Reform in Juvenile Court	117	(26)
Chapter 7 Registration, Community Notification, and Juvenile Sex Offenders: Resolving Policy Conflicts	143	(18)
Appendix A Statutory Provisions Concerning Indecent Sexual Contact with Minors	161	(9)
Appendix B Topics in Sex-Offender Treatment	170	(3)
Appendix C Research on Sex-Offender Recidivism	173	(10)
References	183	(6)
Index	189