Although research has demonstrated that youthfulness is a risk factor for providing false confessions during criminal interrogations, it is unclear whether interrogation training programs address this issue. The goal was to analyze differences between Reid-trained (RT) and non-Reid-trained (non-RT) police in their sensitivity to the developmental maturity of young suspects. 1,828 police officers, 514 of whom were RT, completed surveys about their perceptions and practices during interrogation with children, adolescents, or adults. Results indicate that, compared with non-RT police, RT police demonstrate less sensitivity to the developmental maturity of adolescents in terms of (1) perceptions of their competencies during interrogation and (2) use of psychologically coercive questioning techniques. These findings have implications for the development of juvenile interrogation training programs.

Obtaining confessions from criminal suspects is a common way in which law enforcement officers incriminate those suspected of committing a crime (Gudjonsson, 2003). The general assumption is that police do not want to obtain confessions from innocent suspects and that most innocent suspects do not purposefully incriminate themselves. However, it is clear that many documented cases of false confessions have led to conviction of innocent suspects (see chaps. 1 and 2, this volume). For example, Drizin and Leo's (2004) review suggests that false confessions were a leading cause in wrongful conviction in 14% to 25% of the cases. In addition, Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer (2000) found that about 23% of individuals in the United States who were exonerated by DNA evidence had provided false confessions before they were wrongfully convicted.Until recently (Kassin et al. 2007;Meyer & Reppucci, 2003, law enforcement officers had not been questioned about their perceptions of the likelihood of false confessions or the types of interrogation strategies they use and what they believe about their effectiveness. Because they are the interviewers and interrogators, it seems obvious that they should be key informants as to what they actually do. But as legal scholar Yale Kamisar (2003) recently wrote, "We know little more about actual police interrogation practices than we did at the time of Miranda [in 1966]."We have tried to remedy this issue over the past several years by surveying police, including patrol officers and detectives, at several departments throughout the United States. Our specific goal, however, was not a general survey about interrogation per se but rather to focus on reported interrogation strategies of police officers and their beliefs about the reliability of these techniques as used with young suspects in comparison with adults. Our pursuit of this more narrow focus has been strengthened by Drizin and Leo's (2004) findings that juveniles may be especially vulnerable to the pressures of interrogation and the potential for falsely confessing. In fact, in studies of wrongful convictions, false convictions are more common among younger exonerees; for example, in a descriptive study of 328 exoneration cases, 44% of the juvenile exonerees falsely confessed, compared with 13% of the adults, and among the youngest juveniles (aged 12 to 15 years), 75% falsely confessed (Gross, Jacoby,

This chapter presents an overview of patterns of juvenile crime and school violence in the United States and then provides brief narrative histories of the development and impact of zero-tolerance policies in our schools, and the conception and establishment of a rehabilitative juvenile justice system that today has become largely adversarial and punitive. These narrative histories are used to illuminate the loss of focus on individualized justice and accountability to the suppression of youth—especially lower socio-economic, ethnic minority youth.