Looking at juvenile justice in a worldly way

Recenlty posted to SSNR are these two chapters from a recenly published book of essays titled "Juvenile Justice in Global Perspective":

One Theme or Many? The Search for a Deep Structure in Global Juvenile Justice by Franklin Zimring and Maximo Langer

Myths and Realities of Juvenile Justice in Latin America by Maximo Langer and Mary Beloff

Here is the abstract for the first of these chapters which serves as an introduction to the book:

This chapter uses the global portrait of juvenile justice found in the rest of this volume — that includes chapters on juvenile justice in China, Europe, India, Latin America, Muslim-majority states, Poland, Scandinavia, South Africa, and South Korea and Japan — to discuss possible explanations for the almost ubiquitous existence of separate juvenile courts around the world.  After briefly analyzing the role that power, emulation, and structural factors have played in the global diffusion of the juvenile court, we discuss what theory of juvenile courts may underlie their actual practices.  We argue that the main function that juvenile courts have performed has been letting juvenile offenders grow up out of crime and that such a function also provides the best justification for the continuing existence of these courts.