Last Wednesday, in his State of the City address, New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an imminent and significant change to the city’s juvenile justice system: the Department of Juvenile Justice will combine with the Administration for Children’s Services.

Some media outlets, including The New York Times, have interpreted this move as a signal that the city intends to send fewer of its teenagers to jail, opting for a more therapeutic, community-oriented approach. Recent reports have painted a bleak picture of the juvenile justice system in the state of New York, citing recidivism rates well above the national average. Within the state’s youth prisons thrives a “culture of violence”, one report said, with frequent broken bones and sexual assaults. The Bloomberg administration’s new approach, effective immediately, will attempt to deal with some of these shortcomings.

Rather than being sent to prison, some offenders will now remain in their neighborhoods under the supervision of child welfare. For some, this means New York City is “going soft on crime,” but Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs refuted these claims. Essentially, Gibbs said that the new approach to juvenile crime in the city of New York could not be worse than the previous one; combining the Department of Juvenile Justice and the Administration of Children’s Services will place more emphasis on improvements in home life and education, simultaneously saving the city a substantial amount of money. An offender who might otherwise spend the rest of her life in the penal system has a chance, under the new structure, to return to society better equipped to avoid criminal activity as an adult because she committed a crime as a juvenile.

On Monday, November 9, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether life without parole (LWOP) constitutes cruel and unusual punishment when applied to juveniles. Two cases, Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida, hope to build on the Court’s 2004 decision in the pivotal case Roper v. Simmons. In Roper, the Court held that the Eighth Amendment forbids the imposition of the death penalty on juvenile offenders. The Court’s decision affirmed a lower court’s ruling to set aside the death sentence for the respondent, who had committed a murder at 17.

In the majority decision, the Court reviewed the enactments of state legislatures to piece together “America’s perspective” on the death penalty as applied to juveniles. In 2004, thirty states had prohibited the juvenile death penalty (twelve of which prohibited the death penalty altogether). In the remaining states, furthermore, the Court found the practice sufficiently infrequent to consider juveniles “categorically less culpable”. It reasoned that juveniles are less mature and more susceptible to peer pressure than their adult counterparts – and that juveniles generally have underdeveloped senses of both responsibility and character.

Last year, the Court denied cert to Pittman v. South Carolina, the first post-Roper case dealing with long-term sentencing for juveniles. In Pittman, the crime’s victim had been killed. Some analyses of the denial speculate that the Court was unprepared to apply Roper to a case in which the juvenile’s long-term sentence was for homicide.

In Graham and Sullivan, however, both minors have been given life sentences for non-homicides. (Sullivan committed sexual battery at the age of thirteen, and, at seventeen, Graham violated his probation after an earlier guilty plea on an armed robbery charge.) The interpretation of the Eighth Amendment on which Roper relied holds not only that individuals have the right not to be subjected to “excessive sanctions” generally, but that evolving social standards of decency guide us in categorizing some punishments as so “disproportionate” as to be “cruel and unusual”.

The Court commonly consolidates cases treating similar issues for the purpose of joint rulings, but Sullivan’s attorneys have fashioned his argument very specifically: it deals with life without parole for youths 13 or younger. Another issue unique to Sullivan is whether the petitioner may raise an Eighth Amendment challenge twenty years after his conviction. On Monday, the Court will refine its position on these issues as well as the central issue of whether or not juveniles are so fundamentally different from adults that adult crimes cannot always be punished with adult time, if justice is to be served.

Vietnam’s National Assembly struggles to answer a familiar but labyrinthine question: how do you create an international adoption framework that doesn’t allow for abuse?

Last month, an adoption fraud trial opened in Vietnam, naming sixteen charity and medical workers as defendants. All of the individuals were found guilty of fraud in over 266 adoptions, generating fake documents for adoption agencies to facilitate foreign adoptions. (The official charge was “abuse of official position”, and six of the defendants were sentenced to jail time.) In some cases, the infants’ parents had not actually given their consent.

The widespread nature of the fraud has persuaded many countries (including the United States) to halt Vietnamese adoptions without exception. Ireland has said that an adoption of a Vietnamese baby under the current law “might not be recognized” by the state. The international attention has granted a renewed sense of urgency to the National Assembly’s pending revisions of its adoption law.

The significance of foreign adoptions in Vietnam can be put into context by sheer numbers: of the 20,000 infants adopted in the last five years, 7,000 were adopted by international petitioners. To ensure the legitimacy of future foreign adoptions, changes are being considered for both the structure and oversight of the process. Under new law (Draft Article 15), a child will first be eligible for adoption within Vietnam. After a 30-day period, if the child has not found a placement, foreign families may pursue adoption of the child. The only children for whom this regulation would not apply are those suffering from specific disabilities, HIV/AIDS, or another serious illness. The new law would also increase the involvement of the Ministry of Justice and other state agencies; the former would be inserted in the process as a liaison between foreign parents and domestic, eligible infants. Some disagreement remains, particularly as to whether or not the Ministry of Justice is well-suited for this proposed role.

Following a polemic debate, the Parliament in Uruguay passed a new law earlier this month legalizing same-sex couple adoption. Like most of the continent, Uruguay has a strong Roman Catholic culture and history; no other Latin American country has passed similar law. Church leaders quickly renounced the decision, claiming that children placed in gay homes would be blasphemously “conditioned”. The bill also encountered opposition from the country’s central-right Nationalist Party.

This new law is one in a string of laws directed at broadening rights within Uruguay’s gay community. In 2007, the country allowed homosexuals to have civil unions (although not “marriages”) and earlier this year, Parliament voted to relax some of the restrictions on gays in the military.

Nonetheless, the decision may have more to do with the needs of Uruguayan children than the rights of gay adults. Both sides of the debate claim to have the “higher interest” of the child in focus, with the undisputed need to find homes for displaced children in conflict with what the Bishop’s Conference of Uruguay claims is the child’s interest in having a traditional mother-father family structure.

Even for those in support of the law, there are two outstanding concerns. First, the bill still requires President Vazquez’s signature. More significantly, the bill may not actually make adoption as accessible to same-sex couples as initial media coverage purported. The law’s text says nothing about same-sex couple adoptions – it simply does not prohibit them. The stipulation that the adopted child take the surname of the father and the mother might, depending on interpretation, complicate the adoption process for homosexuals such that it is effectively illegal.

The legalization of homosexual couple adoption may seem ‘settled’ in the United States, but three states continue to prohibit same-sex couple foster care or adoption. Only twelve states have made it illegal to deny a couple the right to adopt on the basis of sexual orientation. Opinion polls suggest that the American public remains divided on the issue. What do you think: is it in the best interest of the child to find a happy, healthy home, or does a displaced child have a protectable interest in a traditional family paradigm?