Revised: March 8, 2014
Controlling other People’s Children
The juvenile justice system was founded and developed in the nineteenth century by reformers whose general belief was that juveniles were less likely to commit crimes than adults, and if they did commit crimes, they were more amenable than adult criminals to corrective, rehabilitating treatment. However, they attributed these qualities of greater innocence and higher potential rehabilitation to relatively affluent white youth. They denied the existence of these same qualities in the economically disadvantaged and non-White and immigrant segments of the population. Those nineteenth-century racial attitudes still affect our juvenile justice system.
Over the past four decades, in the post-Civil Rights “law-and-order” era, there has been a steady movement to enact punitive policies that treat juvenile delinquents as adult criminals. A broad consensus of criminology scholars believe that the punitive shift is driven by a widespread public perception among Whites that Blacks and other non-White races and groups are innately criminal, and that Whites are victimized by violent Black and other non-White male youth (681). The scholarly community consensus also holds that politicians and the media exploit and reinforce these racial attitudes (676).
The scholarly consensus relies on hypothoses whose validity has not been empirically tested (678). Criminology scholars Justin T. Pickett and Ted Chiricos chose to address that research gap using a rigorously constructed national random telephone survey of 961 adult US residents. They reported their methodology and findings in their 2012 study, “Controlling Other People’s Children: Radicalized Delinquency and Whites’ Punitive Attitudes Toward Juvenile Offenders.” Pickett and Chiricos tested “the extent to which Whites’ perceptions of the racial makeup of both delinquents and violent crime victims, and racial resentments can explain their support for punitive juvenile justice policies in general” (p. 677).
Their findings indicated that the majority of respondents only moderately support getting tough with youthful offenders (5.96 on the Punitive Index Scale of 1 (least supportive) to ten (most supportive) (690, 691). They found furthermore that an overwhelming majority of respondents (81%) believe it is generally possible to rehabilitate violent youthful offenders (690). The data clearly showed that those Whites who consider Blacks to be racially predisposed to violent crime, and who also consider Whites to be the primary victims of violent crime perpetrated by Blacks, were most likely to endorse punitive treatment of juvenile offenders (692). The data also showed that Whites are more racially resentful than Blacks (690, 696), and that the more strongly the Whites’ racial resentments are, the more they support punitive juvenile justice, as they perceive that this punitive justice will be applied to Black juveniles (“other people’s children”), and not to White juveniles (697-8).
The researchers presented their study as a first of its kind, and called for more research and hard data on this important issue. Further scholarly research and hard data are necessary to empirically determine the sources, extent and nature of the “racial typification” (698) that continues to affect the juvenile justice system and its policies.
Work Cited:
Pickett, Justin T. and Ted Chiricos. “Controlling Other People’s Children: Radicalized
Views of Delinquency and Whites’ Punitive Attitudes Toward Juvenile Offenders.”
Criminology 50.3 (2012): 673-710. Print.
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