"The purpose of the juvenile justice system is starkly different from that of the adult criminal justice system. Built on the philosophy of rehabilitation and treatment rather than retribution and punishment, the juvenile justice system works to deter delinquency before troubled adolescents make their way into the harsher adult system. The purpose of this book is to provide an in-depth exploration of the history of the juvenile system, as well as to explain how the past has influenced the operation of the system today. In addition, this text addresses contemporary issues plaguing justice-involved juveniles. The text is broken into four comprehensive parts. Part I, composed of three chapters, explores the history of the juvenile justice system, the current state of justice-involved juvenile activity, and the theoretical predictors of juvenile delinquency. Part II examines the three main stakeholders who handle justice-involved juveniles (police, courts, and corrections), including the legal rights afforded to juveniles as they maneuver the system. Part III explores specific juvenile behaviors, such as drug use, gang activity, and unlawful online behaviors.

Last, Part IV evaluates multiple proactive and reactive juvenile programs that target at-risk or current justice-involved juveniles. This text is written in a practical tone, discussing the key concepts of each topic in a way that should be easily understood by the student reader. It provides statistics and material from empirical sources to demonstrate the frequency of unlawful juvenile behavior. In addition, a variety of active learning exercises, some individual and some group, are provided to help instructors engage students in the material. All of the active learning assignments included in this text were developed by the authors to engage students within their own classrooms (whether ground or electronic) and have proven to be very effective in fostering long-term knowledge about various topics related to juvenile justice. Key words and definitions, discussion questions, and other suggested activities are also provided to enhance student learning. We are extremely excited about this book. There are multiple juvenile justice and delinquency textbooks in the field, all of which are valuable and informative; however, we believe this book will make its own unique contribution, not only because of the way in which it presents material but also because of the way that it encourages students to engage with the material on a personal level"--.