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Thomas Grisso points out that youth with mental disorders make up a significant subgroup of youth who appear in U.S. juvenile courts. And he notes that juvenile justice systems today are struggling to determine how best to respond to those youths' needs, both to safeguard their own welfare and to reduce re-offending and its consequences for the community. In this article, Grisso examines research and clinical evidence that may help in shaping a public policy that addresses that question. Clinical science, says Grisso, offers a perspective that explains why the symptoms of mental disorders in adolescence can increase the risk of impulsive and aggressive behaviors. Research on delinquent populations suggests that youth with mental disorders are, indeed, at increased risk for engaging in behaviors that bring them to the attention of the juvenile justice system. Nevertheless, evidence indicates that most youth arrested for delinquencies do not have serious mental disorders. Grisso explains that a number of social phenomena of the past decade, such as changes in juvenile law and deficiencies in the child mental health system, appear to have been responsible for bringing far more youth with mental disorders into the juvenile justice system. Research shows that almost two-thirds of youth in juvenile justice detention centers and correctional facilities today meet criteria for one or more mental disorders. Calls for a greater emphasis on mental health treatment services in juvenile justice, however, may not be the best answer. Increasing such services in juvenile justice could simply mean that youth would need to be arrested in order to get mental health services. Moreover, many of the most effective treatment methods work best when applied in the community, while youth are with their families rather than removed from them. A more promising approach, argues Grisso, could be to develop community systems of care that create a network of services cutting across public child welfare agency boundaries. This would allow the juvenile justice system to play a more focused and limited treatment role. This role would include emergency mental health services for youth in its custody and more substantial mental health care only for the smaller share of youth who cannot be treated safely in the community.

Replying to the paper by Tippins and Wittmann, this commentary notes that the problems they identify have been recognized for many years, yet this has resulted in little change in the practice of child custody evaluations. Three underlying reasons are offered for the stalemate that frustrates the implementation of standards for an empirically based child custody evaluation practice: (a) the economics of child custody evaluation practice; (b) inconsistencies between proposals to restrict testimony in this area and the lack of similar restrictions in most other areas of forensic practice; and (c) inadequate motivation for researchers who might contribute an empirical base for child custody evaluations. Directions for breaking the stalemate are offered for each of these problems.

The evolution of psychology and law / Thomas Grisso -- Eyewitness testimony : an eyewitness report / Elizabeth F. Loftus -- Applying social psychology to law and the legal process / Michael J. Saks -- Jury research / Shari Seidman Diamond -- Mental health law and the seeds of therapeutic jurisprudence / David B. Wexler -- Mental disability, criminal responsibility and civil commitment / Stephen J. Morse -- Framing, institutionalizing, and nurturing research in psychology and law / Bruce D. Sales -- Forensic mental health services and competence to stand trial / Ronald Roesch -- Predictions of violence / John Monahan -- Juveniles : psycholegal capacities / Thomas Grisso -- Correctional psychology / Stanley L. Brodsky -- The founding and early years of the American Board of Forensic Psychology / Florence W. Kaslow -- Community psychology, policy, and children / N. Dickon Reppucci -- Psychology and law at AP-LS' fiftieth anniversary / Thomas Grisso and Stanley L. Brodsky

In 2003, the Florida District Court of Appeal reversed the murder conviction and life sentence imposed on Lionel Tate, who was twelve years old when he killed his six-year-old neighbor. Since Lionel was reported to be the youngest person in modern times to be sent to prison for life, the case had generated considerable debate, and the decision was appealed on several grounds. What persuaded the appellate court that the conviction could not stand, however, was the trial court's rejection of a petition by Lionel's attorney for an evaluation of his client's competence to assist counsel and to make a decision about the state's plea offer. This case highlights an issue that has hovered almost unnoticed in the background of the recent punitive juvenile justice reforms that have resulted in criminal prosecutions of young teens and. adult-like sentences in juvenile court. This legal trend has been the subject of intense political and academic debates, focusing on whether the reforms fulfill the criminal law goals of public protection, individual accountability, and proportionate punishment – and generally, whether imposing harsh punishment on young offenders ultimately serves the public interest. By comparison, whether youths who face serious legal jeopardy have the developmental capacities to function adequately as criminal defendants has received little attention. And yet, even a cursory examination of constitutional doctrine in this area and its application to the recent reforms make clear that this issue cannot be ignored. It is well established in American law that a defendant cannot be subject to criminal adjudication if he is incompetent to stand trial because he is unable to understand the charges against him or the nature of the proceedings, or to assist his attorney in his defense. The Supreme Court has emphasized that these requirements are essential for fundamental fairness and are mandated by the Due Process Clause because they protect the accuracy and integrity of criminal proceedings. The conventional standard by which competence is evaluated focuses on adults' cognitive deficiencies caused by mental illness or mental retardation. Beginning in the 1970s, courts and legislatures have extended this protection to mentally impaired youths adjudicated in juvenile proceedings. However, few lawmakers have addressed the impact of developmental immaturity on competence.

The legal response to juvenile crime is undergoing revolutionary change, and its ultimate shape is uncertain. The traditional juvenile court, grounded in optimism about the potential for rehabilitation of young offenders, has long been the target of criticism, and even its defenders have been forced to acknowledge that it has failed to meet its objectives. Beginning in the late 1960s, when the Supreme Court introduced procedural regularity to delinquency proceedings in In re Gault, courts and legislatures began to slowly chip away at the foundations of the juvenile justice system. Recent developments have accelerated and intensified that process, as policy-makers at both the state and federal level respond to public fear and anger at what is perceived to be an epidemic of youth violence, including an alarming increase in juvenile homicide. Increasingly, critics of the traditional juvenile justice system argue that young offenders should be subject to the same punishment as adults for the harms they cause. The next step, which many are quite ready to take, is to abolish the separate juvenile justice system. One way to think about the evolution of legal policies responding to youthful crime is in terms of the empirical account of adolescence that is expressed through these policies. From this perspective, the traditional (pre-Gault) juvenile court was shaped in important ways by a conception of errant youth as childlike, psychologically troubled, and malleable. On this view, the job of the court was not to punish, but to rehabilitate and protect its charges. With the reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s, a less idealized view of adolescence emerged, together with a growing skepticism about the potential for rehabilitation. Immature youth were seen as less culpable than adults, but not as blameless children. Lacking experience and judgment, young offenders needed lessons in accountability. A perusal of the current landscape of juvenile justice reform suggests a view of delinquent youth as appropriately subject to adult punishment and procedures and thus as indistinguishable in any important way from their adult counterparts. Our aim in this essay is to examine these changing accounts through a developmental lens, with a purpose of bringing into the policy debate on juvenile justice reform the insights of development psychology. This perspective is useful in providing a scientific measure of the empirical assumptions, intuitions, and predictions about adolescence that have always played a large role in policy formation in this context. The framework challenges two assumptions underlying the contemporary punitivist reforms. The first is what might be called the "competence assumption:" that no important differences distinguish adolescents and adults charged with crimes. Modem developmental psychology provides substantial, if indirect, evidence that adolescent choices about involvement in crime and their decisions as defendants in the legal process reflect cognitive and psychosocial immaturity. This evidence challenges contemporary juvenile justice policies which discount the importance of conventional notions of criminal responsibility and constitutional requirements for fair proceedings (neither of which the critics challenge directly).