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9 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 31 (2002-2003)
Girls in the Juvenile Justice System

handle is hein.journals/wmjwl9 and id is 39 raw text is: GIRLS IN THE JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM ROBERT E. SHEPHERD, JR.* INTRODUCTION Over the last few years, America has witnessed a rather remarkable and unexpected reduction in crime generally, and an even more significant dip in serious and violent crimes committed by young offenders.' However, while these general and substantial decreases were taking place across the board, the number of young women arrested for delinquent offenses was increasing rather dramatically. These increases have led to a great deal more attention being paid to the involvement of girls in delinquency, and in the development of gender-specific and effective programs for those young women.2 General Statistics: Involvement of Girls in Delinquent Behavior In the year 2000 girls constituted twenty-eight percent of all juvenile arrests, as opposed to twenty-four percent just four years earlier in 1993 and only twenty-one percent in 1983.8 More than * Emeritus Professor of Law, T.C. Williams School of Law, University of Richmond. B.A., 1959, and LL.B., 1961, Washington and Lee University. 1. JEFFREY Burrs & JEREMY TRAVIS, THE URBAN INSTITUTE, THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICAN YOUTH VIOLENCE: 1980 TO 2000 4 (2002), available at http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/410437.pdf. The authors report that between 1994 and 2000 arrests of persons ages 18-24 for violent index offenses dropped by eighteen percent and arrests for those over age 24 fell sixteen percent while arrests of persons under the age of 18 dropped by thirty-four percent. Similarly, arrests of juveniles for murder fell by sixty-eight percent during the same period while arrests of those 18-24 and over 24 dropped by thirty- nine and thirty-one percent respectively. The same document reported that juvenile arrests overall declined by 13 percent over the same period. Id. at 9. See also Alfred Blumstein, Why Is Crime Falling - Or Is It?, in PERSPECTIVES ON CRIME AND JUSTICE: 2000-2001 LECTURE SERIES 1 (Nat'l Inst. of Just., U.S. Dep't of Just.), available at http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/187100.pdf; Howard N. Snyder, Juvenile Arrests 1999, OJJDP JuV. JUST. BULL. (U.S. Dep't of Just., Off. Of Juv. Just. & Delinq. Prevention), Dec. 2000, at 3, available at http'J/www.ncjrs.org/pdffilesl/oijdp/185236.pdf. 2. See generally Meda Chesney-Lind, Are Girls Closing the Gender Gap in Violence?, CRIM. JUST. MAG., Spring 2001, at 18-19, available at http'I/www.abanet.org/crimjust/chesneylind.html. 3. EILEEN POE-YAMAGATA & JEFFREY A. Burrs, FEMALE OFFENDERS IN THE JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM: STATISTICS SUMMARY 1 (1996), available at http'J/www.ncjrs.org/pdfiles/femof.pdf; Snyder, supra note 1, at 4; Melissa Sickmund, Profile of Females in the Juvenile Justice System 2 (Paper presented at the American Society of Criminology Conference, Nov. 7, 2001).

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