Punishment and Juvenile Justice: A Conceptual Framework for Assessing Constitutional Rights of Youthful Offenders

This Article attempts to provide an analytical framework for identifying the punitive aspects of the juvenile justice system. The Article proposes a framework that is extrapolated from Supreme Court cases which define punishment in contexts outside the juvenile area. Several commentators have criticized the Court's definitional efforts, some because of perceived inadequacies in the developed definitions, others because of the belief that the very enterprise of defining constitutional rights in terms of the presence or absence of punishment is misguided . Although many of these criticisms of the Court's record are understandable, the alleged defects are less detrimental to an effective analysis of certain juvenile rights cases than they might be in other areas.

Indeed, this Article argues that the Court's definitional framework is especially useful in the juvenile justice context.