in aggravated assault (214). As the reader can clearly see, crimes committed by juveniles have drastically risen in the past twenty years. Today, with a little over twenty-two million Americans between the ages of thirteen and nineteen (Vieregge n.p.), many criminologists expect a new surge in crime (Butterfield 154).
             Among these new delinquents is an alarmingly large number of young girls. Between the years of 1965 and 1985, the arrest rate of young women involved in serious crimes grew ten times faster than the arrest of males for the same crime. Now, fifteen years after that initial study, girls make up one in every four arrests for serious crimes, as opposed to the one in six such arrests twenty years ago. According to the American Correctional Association, if the trend of females becoming increasingly participant in violent crimes continues, young girls will embody 50 percent of all juvenile arrests before the 21st century is half over (Hurst 2).
             Just as the number of delinquent girls has increased, so has the number of delinquents for the African American race. A 1994 study of National Youth Survey data found that twenty year-old African Americans were five-times more likely to be accused of a violent crime than a Caucasian of the same age. This same study suggests that the statistics are the way they are because young African Americans receive fewer economic opportunities, thus leading to a likelihood that they will fall victim to gang-related activities (Geraghty 38). The number of delinquent African Americans may be related to the recent changes in the court system.
             Due to the changes in crime, the court system has had to change accordingly. As stated earlier, the original juvenile court was created in 1899 (Butterfield 154). Eight hundred years prior to that, in 12th century England, under the reign of Henry II, no distinction was made between adult criminals and juvenile offenders. The were place the in t...