Question

What are the major shocks a juvenile faces upon release to the community?

Answer 1

A Juvenile offender is not accepted easily by the fellow people in the community. They are not  

Many Juvenile re-entry programs and integrated services are carried on by the US government to stop recidivism. Boot camps and many corrective facilities are opened for the juvenile offenders to correct their behavior and lead an honest life in the community.

As the juvenile transition into the community happens, they are constantly under the supervision till they are integrated into the community successfully.

Answer 2

Marc insisted he was going straight. After serving two years for homicide, the maximum for juveniles in Washington, D.C., the 18-year- old said he was giving up the fast life.

He was already a veteran criminal. He had received his first gun at age 13 from a neighborhood drug dealer, who had recruited him to enforce drug deals. Even before his arrest for homicide three years later, he said that he had shot at dozens of people. But now that was behind him, he proudly told Claire Johnson, then-director of the District of Columbia Criminal Justice Research Center.

So Johnson was understandably startled when the young man mentioned casually over a meal later that he had enlisted another boy to shoot someone with whom he was having an argument. For him, that was staying out of trouble, Johnson recalls incredulously. That's how he saw it. He wasn't actually [shooting people] anymore: He was paying someone else to do it. 1

Youths like Marc -- their value systems shaky at best -- make the public scared about young offenders and dubious of the nation's juvenile justice system. Rather than rehabilitating juveniles who have gone astray, the system often seems to release hardened criminals only to enable them to claim new victims.

Across the country, lawmakers are scrambling to respond to Americans who see crime as their prime worry, and juvenile punishment as too short and too soft. Topping the agenda for many state legislatures are proposals to give youths adult sentences for violent crimes, outlaw gun possession by minors and build more boot camps for young offenders. Indeed, 73 percent of the respondents to a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey said juveniles who commit violent crimes should be punished the same as adults. 2

In a special session on youth crime called last September by Gov. Roy Romer, D-Colo., the Colorado General Assembly lowered from 16 to 14 the age at which juveniles charged with violent crimes are tried as adults. Public concern in the state was galvanized by a string of shootings over the spring and summer in which several children were critically injured in crossfire from gang fights. In one instance, a 10-month-old at the Denver zoo was grazed in the forehead by a bullet apparently fired two blocks away. 3

These are kids committing very adult crimes, says Colorado Republican state Rep. Jeanne Adkins. One of the first juveniles held under the new law was charged with shooting a 4-year-old boy who has been paralyzed for life. This [legislation] says there is a consequence for your actions, regardless of your age, Adkins says. 

Adkins, chair of the Colorado House Judiciary Committee, introduced a ban on juvenile gun possession after two youths, one white and one Hispanic, from a relatively upscale neighborhood in her suburban Denver district were convicted in the shooting death of a highway patrol officer. In Colorado, this is an across-the-board problem from a racial and economic standpoint, she says. We have continued to see in our 15-to-19-year-old male population an escalation from the kinds of petty offenses they were committing a decade ago to serious violent offenses that today's [outdated] children's code cannot address in any way.