ABSTRACT
Under Act 33, juveniles between ages fifteen and seventeen accused of any of eight additional violent offenses were also automatically transferred to adult criminal court. Social welfare and criminal justice analysts have also argued that recent changes such as Pennsylvania’s Act 33 constitute a fundamental reversal of the historical principles underlying juvenile justice. Histories of juvenile justice tend to assume that children and youth regularly ended up in state prisons prior to the creation of juvenile courts, but probably not afterward. Incarceration in state prison rather than in a reformatory or a juvenile reform school certainly constituted the harshest punishment available to punish boys in their mid-teens. But how often did courts actually commit juveniles to adult prison in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In Pennsylvania, only Philadelphia and Allegheny counties assigned judges to work full-time with juveniles. In Pennsylvania, juvenile courts could not hear the cases of children over age 15.
