The Washington State Juvenile Justice System Reform: A Review of Findings

Abstract

Although many states have altered their juvenile justice systems during the past decade, none has undertaken a reform as far-reaching or complex as that implemented by the state of Washington in 1978. The intent of the Washington system is to hold juveniles accountable for their crimes and, simultaneously, to hold the system accountable for what it does to juveniles. Rehabilitation has been replaced as the fundamental philosophy of the court by a "justice" or "just deserts" model which emphasizes fairness, uniformity and proportionality in the court's response to juvenile offenses.

This article summarizes the results of a federally-funded assessment of the reform.

The legislation, which included intake and sentencing guidelines based on seriousness of offense, prior offenses and age of the youth, produced many changes in decision-making. The practice of informally adjusting cases at intake, for example, was completely eliminated, and sentences were considerably more uniform and more proportionate in the post-reform era. The overall level of sentence severity, however, was actually reduced at least during the first two years after the law went into effect. Status offenses were removed from court jurisdiction without any noticeable net-widening effect but with considerable relabeling. The effect of these changes on recidivism of offenders or status offenders was almost impossible to determine because of the confounding between changes in system processing and changes in actual behavior of the youths.