“Rehabilitation, retribution and restorative justice: Alternative conceptions of juvenile justice.”

Source: (1999) In Restorative juvenile justice: Repairing the harm of youth crime, ed. Gordon Bazemore and Lode Walgrave, 17-44. With an introduction by Gordon Bazemore and Lode Walgrave. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.

Feld claims that juvenile justice in the United States has changed from a social welfare system into a called-down, second class criminal justice system (with the age of the offenders perhaps the chief distinction from the criminal justice system for adults). In this essay, Feld analyzes this transformation. He then analyzes contradictions in attempting to combine treatment and punishment, and social welfare and penal social control, in the juvenile system. Therefore, from a neo-classical deserts perspective, he advocates uncoupling social welfare from criminal social control, and thus eliminating a separate juvenile court system. In this system, youthfulness would be formally reckoned as a mitigating factor in sanctions for young offenders. Thus, he poses significant questions and challenges for advocates of restorative justice in the sphere of juvenile justice.