Do youthful offenders reject adult punishment norms?

• Author: Sprott, Jane B.

Legislative changes to youth justice laws in Canada and the U.S. in the past decade have typically included the theme of "getting tough." The getting-tough approach is sometimes justified by the belief that young offenders are a small group of youths who are not like "normal" adolescents (Zimring 1998). While research suggests that most adolescents do something that could be considered a criminal offence, there is a view, among some, that young offenders are a distinctly malevolent group, and thus terms like superpredators have been used to describe them. Zimring (1998: 7), for example, has suggested that there has been a tendency throughout the 1990s "to present an image [of a young offender] to the audience that is far from that of a normal adolescent. The easiest way to make a case for more punitive responses to young offenders is to completely disassociate the offenders from other youths."

Clearly, the idea that offenders, as a group, are different from others in society is not new. In the 1950s Albert Cohen advanced the idea that youths who commit crimes are part of a subculture that espouses norms opposite from those accepted in broader society (Cohen 1955). Research, however, failed to find strong evidence for this. Figlio (1975), for example, examined the ratings of the seriousness of various offences by youth in a juvenile detention centre, adult prison inmates, and university students. All three groups of people gave relatively similar ratings of the seriousness of various offences. Other studies have also found that officially recognized delinquents (e.g., youths on probation or incarcerated) and non-delinquents value similar conventional ideals, such as education, and give similar ratings of approval or disapproval to various forms of misconduct (Carmichael 1990; Regoli and Poole 1978; Siegel, Rathus, and Ruppert 1973). These findings suggest that young offenders may not reject the norms accepted in broader society.

Regardless, however, there may still be a perception among members of the public that young offenders are a distinct group of youths who are different from "normal" adolescents. Others, for example, have noted that the public tends to believe that crime is committed by a relatively small proportion of individuals (Roberts and Stalans 1997). In addition, there is some evidence that these types of views are so pervasive that even adult inmates believe that "criminals" are an identifiable group of people who reject societal values. For example, Benaquisto and Freed (1996) examined the views of adult inmates on appropriate punishments for criminal behaviour, hypothesizing that if inmates rejected the norms of broader society, they might reject sanctions for particular criminal behaviours. Specifically, they suggested that if inmates did in fact reject society, they might also reject "the societally imposed system of sanctions that conventional opinion supports" (Benaquisto and Freed 1996: 485). What they found was that the inmates believed that they themselves would sentence in a manner similar to that of judges. This was, therefore, taken as evidence that these offenders were not an identifiably different group of people whose values were opposed to those of the rest of society. Perhaps more fascinating, however, was that Benaquisto and Freed (1996) found that the inmates examined believed that other inmates would reject the sanctions. The researchers interpreted these results as an indication that inmates believed that they personally did not belong to a subculture that rejected society's sanctioning of particular criminal behaviours; however, they also believed that other inmates did, in fact, belong to such a subculture.

This current study aims to extend Benaquisto and Freed's (1996) study to young offenders and members of the public. Specifically, young offenders and members of the public were asked for their views on appropriate punishments in three hypothetical cases. These two groups of people were also asked for their views on each other's punishment preferences and for their views on the punishment preferences of children who had not committed any crimes. Asking for these views allowed for multiple comparisons between young offenders and members of the public. Specifically, young offenders' punishment preferences for the three cases could be compared to those of the public, to explore whether or not young offenders, as a group, prefer different types of punishments. For example, if young offenders would prefer more lenient punishments than the public, this might be evidence that young offenders are a distinct group of youths who have rejected the sanctions that conventional opinion supports.

Another comparison that could be made was between what young offenders perceive the punishment preferences of the public to be and what the public perceives the punishment preferences of young offenders to be. This comparison tapped into possible misconceptions of one another by the two groups.

A final comparison explored whether, as in the findings for adults of Benaquisto and Freed (1996), young offenders see other young offenders as a group that rejects society's sanctioning of particular behaviours. Specifically, both young offenders and members of the public were asked what type of punishments they thought young offenders and "average youth who [had] not committed any crimes" (average youths) would choose in the three cases. If young offenders believed they would choose similar punishments to those chosen by average youths and slightly different punishments than those chosen by other young offenders, this might be evidence, similar to that in Benaquisto and Freed's (1996) study, that while young offenders believe that there is a deviant subculture that rejects society's norms, they do not believe that they themselves belong to such a subculture.

Additionally, the public's view of young offenders could be compared to their view of average youths, to explore whether or not they believed that young offenders would choose more lenient punishments than would average youths. If members of the public believed that young offenders would choose different, more lenient punishments than would average youths, this might be seen as evidence that the public does in fact see young offenders as an identifiable group of youths who reject society's system of sanctions. As Zimring (1998) has suggested, there may be a tendency to present young offenders as a group of youths who are very different from normal adolescents. If this is true, then we might find that...