ABSTRACT
Mental health professionals in the early twentieth century served newly-developed juvenile courts by offering holistic and multidisciplinary evaluations of youths that were consistent with the era's broad and exclusive focus on rehabilitation. Models including risk, and needs that are relevant to both criminality and behavioral health, have been usefully applied to the core questions in disposition and transfer. This chapter focuses on the aspects of juvenile justice history providing the most important context for juvenile disposition and transfer evaluations. It then shows how the juvenile system developed as a separate entity from the criminal justice system and how its major goals have shifted over time, and where the system now stands on disposition, transfer, and reverse transfer. Youth are considered differently than adults in many areas of the law. The problem of continuing racial and ethnic bias in the juvenile justice system is troubling.
