Modernity In Criminology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Modernity In Criminology - Essay Example These substantive and procedural reforms have converted the historical ideal of the juvenile court as a welfare agency into a quasi-penal system that provides young offenders with neither therapy nor justice. The positivists who created the juvenile court conceived of it as an informal welfare system in which judges made dispositions in the "best interests" of the child. In 1967 the Supreme Court in In re Gault granted juveniles some constitutional procedural rights in delinquency hearings and provided the impetus to modify juvenile courts' procedures, jurisdiction, and purposes. (Feld, 1999, 24-25) The ensuing procedural and substantive convergence between juvenile and criminal courts eliminated virtually all the conceptual and operational differences in strategies of social control for youths and adults. Even proponents reluctantly acknowledge that juvenile courts often fail either to save children or to reduce youth crime. In short, the contemporary juvenile court constitutes a conceptually and administratively bankrupt institution with neither a rationale nor a justification. According to Paul (2002, 69-70) social structural and cultural changes fostered both the initial creation and contemporary transformation of the juvenile court. Ideological changes in cultural conceptions of children and in strategies of social control during the nineteenth century led positivists to create the juvenile court in 1899. ... s combined new theories of criminality, such as positivism, with new ideas about childhood and adolescence to construct a social welfare alternative to criminal courts. They designed juvenile courts to respond flexibly to youths' criminal and non-criminal misconduct, to assimilate and integrate poor and immigrant children, and to expand control and supervision of young people and their families. (Tanenhaus, 2004, 111-112) The juvenile court positivists removed children from the criminal justice and corrections systems, provided them with individualized treatment in a separate system, and substituted a scientific and preventive alternative to the criminal law's punitive policies. By separating children from adults and providing a rehabilitative alternative to punishment, juvenile courts also rejected criminal law's jurisprudence and its procedural safeguards, such as juries and lawyers. Juvenile courts' flexible and discretionary strategies enabled its personnel to differentiate and discriminate between their own children and "other people's children," those of the poor and immigrants. (Duffy, 2004, 39) A century later, social structural changes have modified the cultural conceptions of young people and the strategies of social control that juvenile courts employ. These changes leave the juvenile court, as an institution, searching for a new policy foundation and legal rationale. (Kittrie, 2000, 156-157) Since Gault, social structural, demographic, and legal changes have altered dramatically juvenile courts' structure and functions, the characteristics of their clientele, and the crime and social welfare issues that they confront. The social construction of adolescence as a developmental stage distinct from adulthood and new sensibilities about children began to pose

Academic Inflation Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Academic Inflation - Research Paper Example The educational authorities have raised the minimum education level requirements in the educational institutions and organizations which have created a significant problem in the business world. It has been reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that the graduates completing their education lack the skills and qualifications required for filling a job as they have not been given proper training in their institutions (Lan & Winters, 2011). The cost of education has risen at an accelerating rate as compared to the increase in the financial aids that are provided by the federal agencies. According to SHEEO (2011), as people have insufficient funds available for covering the costs of college education, the number of graduates completing it has declined in the last few years. All of these factors have raised questions regarding the academic inflation that how lack of federal aids, increase in college/tuition fees, decline in wage increments and rising inflation rate are impacting the quality of college education. Academic Inflation is described as the process by which the higher education degrees’ value gets inflated; it is the point at which the minimum level of education is required when the level of employment rises. In fact, there is no real need for highly skilled or trained employees for various jobs in the firms (Odland, 2012). As a result of the academic inflation process, the bachelor’s degree value has reached a level where the graduates face difficulty in finding a suitable position in the professional world and they have to acquire degrees of much higher level such as Master’s degrees and PhDs. The primary reason for such a robust growth in the academic field for higher level degrees is an accelerating rate of competition among the peers (Singell & Stone, 2007). Along with increase in the demand of higher level degrees, the cost of acquiring them has