The current research, using qualitative methodology and grounded theory analysis for model building, examines if and how juvenile court judges draw from developmental and life course criminology (DLC) in discretionary judicial waivers. This study develops three progressive models, emerging from interviews with juvenile court judges from two large Southern states (N = 30), that demonstrate how principles related to the three developmental stages of offending (activation, escalation, and desistance) from DLC theories shape judges’ considerations of each of the three Kent factors (dangerousness, treatment amenability, sophistication-maturity) used to weigh juvenile transfer via discretionary judicial waivers. This work suggests that judges think about juvenile transfer cautiously and as a strategy that should only affect individual juveniles identified by judges as “persisters” and that drawing from DLC principles appears to foster a generally rehabilitative jurisprudential philosophy for judges in the juvenile court system.

当前的研究使用定性方法和扎实的理论分析进行模型构建，研究了少年法院法官是否以及如何从自由裁量性司法豁免中借鉴了发展和生活过程犯罪学（DLC）。这项研究开发了三个渐进模型，这些模型来自对来自南部两个大州（N  = 30）的少年法院法官的采访，这些模型证明了DLC理论中与犯罪的三个发展阶段（激活，升级和抵制）相关的原则如何塑造法官对三个肯特郡的考虑权衡通过酌情司法豁免权进行的少年移徙权重的因素（危险性，治疗适应性，成熟度）。这项工作表明，法官审慎地考虑少年移徙，并将其作为只影响法官认定为“姐妹”的个别少年的战略，而借鉴DLC原则，似乎在少年法院系统中为法官树立了一般性的法学哲学。