Do Transfer Laws Deter Juvenile Crime?
One assumption made by legislators in passing harsher laws, making it easier to try juveniles as adults, has been that juveniles would be less likely to become involved in criminal behavior if there were tough laws on the books that would send a message to would be offenders that crime would not be tolerated. An early study by Glassner, Ksander, Berg & Johnson (1983) provided support to this hypothesis. In the study, the authors interviewed youth about the criminal behavior they had engaged in as adolescents. What they found was that many of the youth interviewed made a conscious decision to stop engaging in criminal behavior once they turned 16, specifically because the laws on the books treated criminal offenders as adults starting at the age of 16. A more recent study by Levitt (1998) provided additional support for the deterrence hypothesis. In the study, the juvenile crime rates between 1978 and 1993 were examined in relation to the punitiveness of the states juvenile court system
