Juvenile Delinquency Is Rehabilitative Rather Than Punitive

Video Transcribed: My name is Brian L. Jackson, and I’m an Oklahoma Father’s Rights attorney with Dads.Law, we protect fathers’ rights in Oklahoma. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about juvenile delinquency and how it can affect your custodial rights.

Any time a child commits a crime, generally speaking, with some exceptions, it would be dealt with in delinquent court. What delinquent court basically is, is its type of children’s court designed to deal with juveniles who have violated the criminal law. The major goal is rehabilitative rather than punitive as an adult criminal court.

One of the first things to know about juvenile court is that once a child is brought into juvenile court, the entire family or I should say the entire household of that child, becomes under the jurisdiction of the court. The juvenile court does have the power to take a child out of your home and they have the power to dictate to you what you can and can’t do in your home.

For example, if you have a juvenile delinquent in your home, you are no longer allowed to keep and possess firearms in the home, as for instance. That’s a common order and there are some state statutes that they’re adjudicated. The court can order searchers of your home. The court can order you to participate in other programming designed to help that child. So there are a number of ways in which delinquency court can actually affect you.

The other thing to be aware of is if your child is engaged in delinquent acts with your knowledge and at least tacit approval, in other words, if you know your kid’s doing something they shouldn’t be doing and don’t stop it and a good example of this is the use of tobacco, the use of alcohol, the use of marijuana.

That can also affect your custodial rights and in an extreme case, it could actually lead to a deprived case. If you’re knowingly letting your child commit crimes, that can be grounds for the child to be found, to be deprived.

So you may not think it’s a big deal if your child gets in tobacco or gets into doing… Or has a beer every now and then, or smokes a joint every now and then, but if you tolerate that knowingly it can come back and haunt you in the form of either if you are…

You could lose custody to the other parent if y’all aren’t together or in an extreme case, you may end up in deprive court over that. So it is a big deal to make sure that you are not allowing your child to engage in this kind of behavior without taking action against them because if you fail to stop it, it can affect your rights.

Now, the other thing to be aware of that is also primed to do that. If you are known to have participated in that activity, it’s called contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and that is a crime.

So there’s that issue as well. It could actually get you into criminal trouble, but as far as custody goes, it can cost you if there’s a custody fight with the child’s mother and in an extreme case, it could lead to a deprive case.

So the long and short of it is delinquency court’s a big deal. You should take it seriously and delinquent acts by your child are a big deal and should be taken seriously.

You should not be looking the other way on that or you may lose your rights to your child and not in a sense of getting terminated necessarily, although in an extreme case, that could happen at the end of that deprive proceeding.

But it could certainly mean you no longer have custodial rights. It could mean that you would get supervised visitation with your child and it’s not a very good situation to find oneself in. So the long and short of it is you shouldn’t be tolerating that.

If you do have questions about this issue or have any other legal problems that you need assistance with, please go to dads.law and we’ll be happy to help you out. My name is Brian L. Jackson and I’m an Oklahoma father’s rights attorney.