Promoting Public Safety and Positive Youth Development: Judicial Decision-Making in Judicial Transfer, Blended Sentencing, and Reconsideration Hearings
This technical assistance bulletin was created by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) focuses on the practices of judicial transfer, blended sentence and reconsideration hearings and underscores the impact of adolescent development and other factors that courts should consider when making transfer or certification decisions.
From the bulletin:
“As is evident in Roper, Miller, and related Supreme Court decisions, the field of juvenile jurisprudence has been markedly influenced by knowledge about adolescent development, adolescent neuroscience, and psychosocial maturation processes and the research that
establishes that adolescents are different from adults and less culpable for their criminal acts. It is incumbent on judges handling youth cases where legal statutes permit judicial transfer, the imposition of blended sentencing and reconsideration hearings to be aware of the legal recognition of, and scientific research on, adolescent development.
. . .
Research indicates that youth transfer to criminal court does not improve community safety. It has not led to reduced juvenile crime and rarely reduces recidivism. Rather, the bulk of evidence indicates that transfer has no effect or even negative effects on these
desired outcomes. There is also evidence that transfer is disproportionately used as a sanction against racial and ethnic minorities, worsening pre-existing disparities in the justice system. Finally, transfer appears to have serious deleterious effects on youthful
offenders.
Therefore, juvenile and criminal justice scholars and stakeholders are effectively unanimous in their conclusion that youth should be transferred to adult court only in very rare circumstances (Bishop, 2000; Feld, 2017; Myers, 2016; Zimring & Tanenhaus, 2014)—
or, ideally, not at all (Arya, 2018; Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators & Campaign for Youth Justice, 2022; Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 2018; Ryan, 2018).”
