AustLII Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback

Current Issues in Criminal Justice

Current Issues in Criminal Justice (CICrimJust)
You are here:  AustLII >> Databases >> Current Issues in Criminal Justice >> 2008 >> [2008] CICrimJust 19

Database Search | Name Search | Recent Articles | Noteup | LawCite | Author Info | Download | Help

Maruna, Shadd; King, Anna --- "Giving Up on the Young" [2008] CICrimJust 19; (2008) 20(1) Current Issues in Criminal Justice 129

Giving Up on the Young

Abstract

In this commentary we explore the psychology behind the punitive criminalisation of young offenders that appears to characterise so much criminal justice policy in recent years. We draw from the findings of a mixed-method study of public attitudes in the UK. We highlight two particularly striking findings that emerged in the quantitative aspect of this work, which we illustrate using quotes from the qualitative data collected. When considered together, these two findings may have implications for better understanding the punitive turn in youth justice policy.

Introduction

Penal policy in the United Kingdom has undergone a substantial punitive turn in the past two decades (see Scraton, this issue). Since 1993 the adult prison population has risen from 60,000 to over 81,000 and with the planned building of so-called ‘titan’ super-prisons the prison population is set to expand another 10,000 to 20,000 in coming years. Young people have become special targets in this ‘new punitivism’ (Pratt et al 2005) with the age of criminal responsibility reduced to 10 years of age in the UK. The number of children in custody has more than doubled in the past 15 years. The head of the Youth Justice Board resigned in 2007 in dismay, pointing out that nearly three-quarters of the youth justice budget was spent on imprisonment with little left for more constructive work with young people (Morgan 2008). Likewise, the recently appointed Children’s Commissioner for England, Sir Al Aynsley-Green made the following denunciation of British youth justice policy:

This demonisation and lack of empathy for young people is a major issue for England. It causes anger and alienation … It is driving policy. At the moment we have a youth justice system dominated by a punitive approach. It doesn’t focus on children’s needs … Is there not an urgent need to review our youth justice programme to see why we are locking away so many kids? (in Gaines 2007).

Others in the Government are unapologetic. The British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has argued that police should ‘harass’ badly behaving youths:

I want stronger action to deal with persistent offenders. I want police and local agencies to focus on them by giving them a taste of their own medicine: daily visits, repeated warnings and relentless filming of offenders to create an environment where there is nowhere to hide (in Wintour 2008)
.

Similarly, across the globe, in announcing plans to lengthen criminal sentences for juveniles, the South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson stated ‘This overcomes to some extent the previous welfarist focus of juvenile justice in this state. … It’s an historic shift to punitive measures’ (ABC News 2007). Nowhere has the punitive crackdown against young people been more dramatic, though, than the United States where there are over 2,250 prisoners sentenced to life without parole as adolescents (Stevenson, this issue). They will die behind bars for offences committed before they were 18 years old. In 2007 Rhode Island joined 10 other US States in officially designating all 17-year-olds (not just those involved in serious cases, but all 17-year-olds) as ‘adults’ in the eyes of the criminal law, shifting their cases from the juvenile to the criminal court system (Zezima 2007).

What is the psychology behind this punitive criminalisation of young offenders? This is the question we asked in a recent mixed-method (qualitative/ quantitative) study of public attitudes regarding issues of crime and justice in the UK: the Cambridge University Public Opinion Project[1] or CU-POP (see Maruna & King 2004). In this brief commentary, we highlight two particularly striking findings that emerged in the quantitiative aspect this work (see King & Maruna 2008), then flesh these findings out with an analysis of some of the qualitative findings. We conclude by discussing the implications of the research for thinking about youth justice policy.

Two Findings from CU-POP

The CU-POP involved three phases of data collection. The first was the most traditional form of gauging public opinion, a postal survey of 940 adult householders living in south-east England. This survey was designed for two purposes: to test a variety of theories regarding the correlates of public attitudes and to identify two samples of potential interviewees for the second, qualitative phase of the research. The survey contained a newly developed eight-item scale for measuring a general disposition toward the punitive treatment of offenders with items like ‘With most offenders, we need to “condemn more and understand less”’; ‘My general view towards offenders is that they should be treated harshly’ (see King & Maruna 2008 for full scale). In addition, respondents were asked a series of questions related to variables that in the research literature are thought to be predictive of punitiveness. Based on the survey responses to the punitiveness scale, we approached 40 respondents to take part in a face-to-face, qualitative interview. Half the sample scored very highly on the punitiveness measure and the other half scored very low (were non-punitive in their views overall). Our interest in open-ended interviews was to unpack their survey responses and learn more about members of both groups as individuals (aspects of their life history and personal experiences; see King 2008). A third phase involved attempts to manipulate punitive views experimentally in a random-allocation test using two hypotheses about punitive attitudes. In this brief commentary we will focus on only the findings from the first two waves of data collection.

Two findings from the analysis of the initial survey data were particularly striking and offered some guidance to understanding the punitive shift towards young people in criminal justice. These involved the separate, but possibly related concepts of ‘generational anxiety’ and ‘redeemability’. Each will be discussed briefly below.

Generational Anxiety and Punitiveness

Among the best predictors of punitive views toward criminal justice is what we labelled ‘generational anxiety’ represented by a two-item scale (alpha = .76) involving concerns about ‘the young people today’:

• The behaviour of adolescents today is worse than it was in the past.

• Young people don’t seem to have any respect for anything anymore.

Respondents’ scores on this scale were better predictors of punitiveness than were measures of conservative ideology, victimization experiences, fear of crime, economic anxiety, personal financial satisfaction, social class, gender, age or any other variables associated with punitive attitudes in the theoretical literature, confirming a close link between punitive views about criminal justice and worries about the young.

In discussing these views with members of the ‘punitive’ sample during the qualitative interviewing, respondents predictably expressed a sense of nostalgia about their own childhood experiences, protesting that today’s youth behave in ways never before seen (see Scraton, this issue). For instance, a ‘Baby Boomer’ generation (born circa 1950) respondent gave the following account:

In general young people, in the main, have no respect now for their elders whatsoever. It’s been a process that has been slowly going on for the last, well since when I was a boy. I mean when we was children we had total and utter respect for our elders. You never swore in front of your elders. But now the way of the world is that children swear, domineer, dominate their elders. They er have no respect for age whatsoever … Children seem to be wanting to dominate their parents as to opposed the parents dominate the children – or, um, dominate, um, parents dominating their children is a bit harsh. I would say parents guiding the children whereas the children don’t want this guidance. [emphases added]

As in the above comment about the need to ‘dominate’ children, the disrespectfulness of young people leads naturally in these narratives to a need for increased punishments of offenders as in the following interview with a member of the ‘high punitive’ group:

I mean we was in [town] yesterday and the policemen spoke to a gang of children for firing pea-shooters, told them to simmer down. And he’s on his wireless saying, ‘Yeah, they’ve simmered down now.’ And while he’s saying that they’re all firing the pea-shooters at the policeman. So you think to yourself, where do you go from here?
AK When you say that, where do you go from here, how do you mean exactly?
Well, criminals have got to be punished. These children are – a good deal of them – are going to be criminals, aren’t they, because they’ve got no respect now. So the penal system has got to reflect this … And has got to be, not these softer prisons, but they’ve got to be harder. They’ve got to know that they’ve been in prison. They’ve got to know that, ‘Oh dear I don’t want to go to prison again’. But unfortunately they say, ‘Oh dear, I’m in prison again. Never mind, I’ll soon be out. Get my lovely Christmas dinner and choice of menu, etcetera, etcetera’. I just feel that they’re pampered. They shouldn’t get a choice of menu. I’m not saying that you give them hard tack and water. But basic grub, give them that, that’s it. Make them wash up their own things. Make them grow their own stuff. Everything grows out there, they should be self-sufficient. And as regards the question you’ve not asked: murderers should be hung.

Redeemability and Punitiveness

The second finding of interest emerged in a separate analysis and involved a measure we labelled the ‘Redeemability Scale’. George Vold (1958:258) writes: ‘There is an obvious and logical interdependence between what is done about crime and what is assumed to be the reason for or explanation of criminality’. We sought to determine whether public attributions about the causes of crime were systematically related to views about criminal justice policy (Maruna & King 2004). A considerable body of previous research has drawn on attribution theory and, in particular, on Heider’s (1958) differentiation between dispositional attributions (acts attributed to the person’s character or nature) and situational attributions (attributed to the actor’s wider context). This research (Cullen et al 1985; Grasmick & McGill 1994) has typically found support for the idea that punitive attitudes correlate with dispositional attributions, whereas those who hold more situational attributions tend to be less punitive. Cullen and his colleagues (1985) describe these attributional beliefs as either ‘classical’ (dispositional) or ‘positivist’ (situational) lay theories of criminal etiology. One implication of this finding is that the more the public is exposed to, and educated into, a positivist understanding of social science, the less punitive they become in their views.

In our analysis we complicated this further by adding an additional (post-Heider) dimension of attribution theory: the stability of attributions. In particular, we designed a four-item scale to measure individual beliefs in the redeemability of offenders (alpha= .64) involving the following four statements:

1. Most offenders can go on to lead productive lives with help and hard work.

2. Even the worst young offenders can grow out of criminal behaviour.

3. (R) Most offenders really have little hope of changing for the better.

4. (R) Some offenders are so damaged that they can never lead productive lives.

Again, this measure was strongly related to punitiveness even when controlling for a wide variety of social, demographic and psychological measures linked to punitive attitudes in the extant theoretical and empirical literature. In fact, this measure explained more of the variance in punitive scores than did the measure of dispositional/ situational attributions. Essentially, we found that it was possible for individuals to hold positivist views about the nature of criminality and also to be highly punitive in their beliefs, so long as they also believed that the circumstances leading to crime were non-malleable. In other words, positivism may only be non-punitive, so long as individuals still believe that those pushed into criminality by whatever forces can change.

Again, the logic of this belief is apparent from the qualitative interviews with members of the ‘punitive’ group. For instance, a 46-year-old female interviewee gave the following assessment of the ideal criminal penalty:

What I would like to see is the old type prison where there was bread and water, I just think that [today’s prison] is like a holiday camp to them. I don’t see it as a deterrent even if they go to prison … I think these people really need to have everything taken away from them. Bring back boot camp.

When asked about her views on the aetiology of offending behaviour, however, the respondent clearly articulated a positivist position linking criminality to early childhood disadvantage:

R: We’ve got so many young, unmarried mothers who have children and they swear and you see them walking down the streets … they don’t have [children] for the right reasons … [There are a group of children who live around here] known as the ‘evil six’. They just like get into everything. Into every shop, they plague everyone; they’re rude to everybody. They’ll go straight thru a shop and use a toilet or take a handbag or whatever. They constantly plague the town and you know they all come from broken homes or one parent families.

When asked to think of any young people she knew personally who were involved in crime she provided a perfect image of the irredeemability story:

SM: Can you think of any [young people in trouble] you know personally?
R: Yeah, he’s a young boy who is in my son’s class. He had a habit of stealing cars before he could drive with his friends and he nearly killed his self in an accident … But, it don’t seem to teach him anything. I don’t know if he’s out of hospital. His leg was broke, he was in no danger, but he comes from a broken home, he doesn’t seem to learn by it.

SM: What would help in his particular situation?
R: When he was a little boy, I think he just wanted his parents to be there for him and they were doing their own thing. He didn’t want it to be the way it was like he’d go on holiday with us and he’d end up banging all the food machines. He would from the age of 4 or 5 he would just cry and say he didn’t want to be like that, but his brothers are like that and he’s just fell into that.
SM: Is he trapped do you think? Does he have a chance?
R: I don’t think he’s got a chance, no. He don’t know any different because he’s the youngest one of, I think he’s got 2 or 3 brothers all by different fathers like and I don’t think he stands a chance now … I don’t think there’s any hope for him.
SM: What’s the best the system can do in his case?
R: I don’t know. I spoke to the ambulance driver that picked him up [after his wreck] and he just wanted to take him in a field and smack him because he’s angry with him because we know him. But, I don’t know what the system can do for him to be quite honest. I think he is beyond that. He hasn’t done – as far as I know he hasn’t stole from shops, he just has this fascination with cars. He just wants speed.

Like other interviewees, the respondent was genuinely concerned with the behaviour of young people she knew, but felt she did not have solutions for how to deal with this young man. She felt that, even though his criminality has deep roots in his early upbringing, at this point he may be lost to the world, and the only recourse the interviewee could imagine was punitive (taking him into a field and smacking him).

Conclusions and Implications

Concerns about the moral behaviour of young people are anything but new (see Pearson 1983). Shakespeare, for instance, has a character say, ‘I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting’ (Winter’s Tale Act 3 Scene 3). What might be different with contemporary punitiveness toward youth, then, is the combination of these worries with our second finding: the fear that this generation will not ‘grow out of it’ – a loss of belief in the redeemability of the young and wild.

If this loss of belief in hope for the young is widespread, it may go some way to explaining public acquiescence (indeed, support in some cases) for the highly punitive policies directed at the young described in the introduction. Fortunately, the ‘logic’ of redeemability beliefs is also compelling and deeply rooted in most cultural worldviews. One respondent from the CU-POP research, a 42-year-old female interviewed because her scores placed her among the least punitive respondents to the survey, colourfully articulates this well-known story of the possibility of personal change and growth in the following quote:

Well you do see kids that are a bit rude hanging around street corners and, you know, breaking in cars, and no respect, the whole, general, it’s there. But, to an extent, that always has been … It’s just a bit of peer pressure, I’m assuming. I think, actually that they do grow out of it. I think of my brothers, as teenagers, just hideous, vile kids … they grew out of it. I also had a nasty cousin … horrible, horrible little boy. Lovely now! So, in the last five years, he’s suddenly got a job and he’s fantastic. I really thought he was an absolute no-hoper.

Stories of individuals who may appear to be ‘no-hopers’ at one point making good in later life may be a necessary counterweight to messages – positivist or classical – of individuals who are permanently ‘bad’ or fated to criminality.

Shadd Maruna

Professor of Justice and Human Development, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, School of Law, Queen’s University, Belfast

Anna King

Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Center for Mental Health Services and Criminal Justice Research, Rutgers University, USA

References

ABC News 2007 ‘Longer Jail Plan for Young SA Offenders’ ABC.net.au 16 October

www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/16/2061195.htm

Cullen FT Gregory A Clark JB Cullen J & Mathers RA 1985 ‘Attribution, salience, and attitudes toward criminal sanctioning’ Criminal Justice and Behavior vol 12 pp 305-331

Gaines S 2007 ‘Children's Tsar Attacks Youth Justice Policy’ The Guardian 15 October

www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/oct/15/youthjustice.law

Grasmick HG & McGill AL 1994 ‘Religion, attribution style, and punitiveness toward juvenile offenders’ Criminology vol 32 pp 23-47

Heider FT 1958 The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations Wiley New York

King A 2008 ‘Keeping a Safe Distance: Individualism and the Less Punitive Public’ British Journal of Criminology vol 48 pp 190-208

King A & Maruna S 2008 ‘Is a Conservative Just a Liberal Who Has Been Mugged? Exploring the Origins of Punitive Views’ Punishment and Society (forthcoming)

Maruna S & King A 2004 ‘Public Opinion and Community Penalties’ in T Bottom S Rex & G Robinson (eds) Alternatives to Prison: Options for an Insecure Society Willan Cullompton

Morgan R 2008 ‘New Laws in the Making Won’t Keep Children Out of Jail’ The Guardian Society 30 January p 4

www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/30/youthjustice. rodmorgancomment

Pearson G 1983 Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears Macmillan London

Pratt J Brown D Brown M Hallsworth S & Morrison W 2005 The New Punitiveness: Trends, Theories, Perspectives Willan Cullompton

Vold G 1958 Theoretical Criminology Oxford University Press New York

Wintour P 2008 ‘Police Should Harass Young Thugs – Smith’ The Guardian 8 May p 1

<www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/may/08/police.ukcrime>

Zezima, K 2007 ‘Law on Young Offenders Causes Rhode Island Furor’ New York Times 30 October

www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/30juvenile.html?scp=2&sq=%22young +offenders%22&st=nyt


[1]At the time of the research both authors were affiliated to the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.


AustLII: Copyright Policy | Disclaimers | Privacy Policy | Feedback
URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/CICrimJust/2008/19.html