by Fox Butterfield

About the author: Fox Butterfield, a New York Times correspondent, is the author of All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence.

In the most drastic changes to the juvenile justice system since the founding of the first family court a century ago, almost all 50 states have overhauled their laws between 1994 and 1996, allowing more youths to be tried as adults and scrapping longtime protections like the confidentiality of juvenile court proceedings.

The thrust of the new laws is to get more juveniles into the adult criminal justice system, where they will presumably serve longer sentences under more punitive conditions.

Proponents of the changes say that getting tough with teen-agers is the only way to stop the epidemic of juvenile crime. Over the past decade, for example, arrest...