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Support for Balanced Juvenile Justice: Assessing Views About Youth, Rehabilitation, and Punishment

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Abstract

Objectives

The juvenile court was envisioned as a system of justice that would rehabilitate and punish young offenders. However, studies have not directly measured or examined support for “balanced” juvenile justice—that is, support for simultaneously employing juvenile rehabilitation and punishment to sanction youth—or how beliefs central to the creation of the court influence support for balanced justice. Drawing on scholarship on juvenile justice and theoretical accounts of views about sanctioning, the study tests hypotheses about such support.

Methods

The study employs multinomial logistic regression, using data from 866 college students enrolled in criminology and criminal justice classes, to examine support for different approaches to sanctioning violent juvenile offenders.

Results

Analyses indicate that a majority of respondents supported balanced justice for violent delinquents, approximately one-third supported a primarily rehabilitation-focused approach to sanctioning, and the remainder supported a primarily punishment-oriented approach. Individuals who believed that youth could be reformed and deserved treatment were more likely to support balanced justice or a primarily rehabilitation-oriented approach to sanctioning youth.

Conclusions

The findings underscore the nuanced nature of public views about sanctioning youth, the salience of philosophical beliefs to support different sanctioning approaches, and the importance of research that accounts for beliefs central to the juvenile court’s mission.

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Notes

  1. The “offenders willing to reform” effect in model 3 was eliminated by the “successful reform is possible” and the “offenders deserve treatment” measures in model 6. In ancillary analyses, when the latter two variables were included separately or both were included, the “willingness to reform” effect was eliminated. Thus, the “offenders willing to reform” effect may be mediated by views about the possibility of successful reform or treatment deservingness.

  2. Ancillary predictive analyses of views about serious property offenders, available upon request, painted a similar picture of the salience of these different dimensions and tenets for predicting public support for the three different approaches to sanctioning juveniles.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Editor and anonymous reviewers for providing guidance and helpful suggestions for improving the study.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mark C. Stafford Professor of Criminology, College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, 634 West Call Street, Tallahassee, FL, 32306-1127, USA

    Daniel P. Mears

  2. School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany, 135 Western Avenue, Albany, NY, 12222, USA

    Justin T. Pickett

  3. L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University, 923 West Franklin Street, Richmond, VA, 23284-2028, USA

    Christina Mancini

Authors
  1. Daniel P. Mears
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  2. Justin T. Pickett
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  3. Christina Mancini
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel P. Mears.

Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Distribution of respondents’ preferences for each of three approaches to sanctioning youth, by type of offense

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Mears, D.P., Pickett, J.T. & Mancini, C. Support for Balanced Juvenile Justice: Assessing Views About Youth, Rehabilitation, and Punishment. J Quant Criminol 31, 459–479 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-014-9234-5

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