Since the time that the Act was signed there have been many changes to the philosophy and policy that governs the Juvenile Justice system. The article asserts that .

             "The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act called for a "deinstitutionalization" of juvenile delinquents. It required that states holding youth within adult prisons for status offenses remove them within a span of two years (this time frame was adjusted over time). The act also provided program grants to states, based on their youth populations, and created the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) ("The Juvenile Justice System").

             There have been many changes in the juvenile justice system in the years since the passing of the aforementioned Act. One of the primary changes is a system known as criminological triage (Feld). As it relates to status offenders this triage entails diversion of status offenders, waiver of serious young offenders to the adult system, and more severe punishment of delinquents (Feld). .

             The author asserts that these policies create both practical and theoretical differences between the juvenile and the criminal justice systems. In addition this type of triage manipulates the alternative conceptions of juveniles as vulnerable and dependent or as responsible and independent to remove many of the White middle class and female status offenders from the juvenile system and placing them is social service systems; while at the same time consigning persistent, violent, and disproportionally minority juvenile to the criminal court as adults; and to enforce greater punishment on those middle-range juvenile delinquents who stay in the juvenile court system (Feld). The book asserts that by removing the "soft" and "hard" ends of its client spectrum, the juvenile court system has been transformed into a second-class criminal court (Feld). The author asserts that the macro-structural changes in urban America and both the public and political connections between race and serious youth crime coincide with these changes toward increased punishment within the juvenile justice system (Feld).